“Yeah. Once for my birthday. Like ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ In a kid’s notebook. It’s around here someplace.”

She climbed off the newspapers, bouncing the flashlight along the book spines in search of her only birthday present. She gave up and turned to me. “So what I do, I take an armful of books to the Salvation Army in Pikesville.” She slid a random book off a shelf and dropped it at her feet. “They’re good for a few bucks,” she said.

“Next time I’ll help you, if you like.” The enormity of my overture struck me immediately. But of course I’d steal for her. Hell, I’d kill for her.

“We do it in the car. Carry the books, I mean. Abby’s car.”

“The Chevy? I thought it was Derek’s.”

“No,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something.”

I waited breathlessly.

“Now what was it…” Her sun-kissed brow creased a little as if thinking caused her pain… “Oh yeah.” Her eyes reflected the light and a starburst of violet diamonds fell on me.

“Who,” she asked, “was Elba?”

“It’s an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The palindrome refers to Napoleon’s exile.”

She sat on the throne of newspapers, facing me. “You ever hear of Stanislavski, some ginzo in show business, Russian or Polish maybe?”

“Konstantin Stanislavski?”

“That’s the one. Yeah.”

“Russian. Born in the 1860s, died in the 1930s, I think. A director, teacher, and actor. He created the so-called Method technique. But perhaps,” I was just getting warmed up, “his greatest achievement was an ability to flourish under both the Czars and the Soviets. His real name was…”

“Derek’s all the time talking about him.”

“Derek’s an actor?”

“Kind of. He wants to be, you know?”

It was sheer witchery, the way she talked, the constructs that rolled off her tongue. Stanislavski, “some ginzo in show business…”

Outside the wind howled over the frozen earth, but here by her side (well, across the width of the attic) all was aglow with the radiance she generated. I felt splendid for the first time since I had entered Chatterton’s turvy world. After all, I was batting a cool 1.000 in our game of Twenty Questions, and she was impressed, I think. It was hard to tell. On the one hand she upheld her end of our fragmented duet; on the other she relayed a distinct impression of indomitable torpor. There was about her the aura of a mild trance. I thought of opiates—perhaps she was still in recovery from an overdose of beer, sunshine, and porno comics consumed in Lauderdale, as Grady had augured. Or was it an habitual disenchantment with everything, the rooted sluggishness of a cow? Another thought struck me; I was quick to dismiss it, but… could it be possible that my pedantry was boring the bejesus out of her?