He stopped, hoping he’d said enough to convince Helen Guerneyser that he was sincere. He’d had a great deal of time to come up with a plausible explanation for his research. Waiting for her response, though, he wondered with no small amount of worry whether he had done enough. Even to him the story sounded weak.

The archivist sat back in her chair. “As I’m sure you know, Steinbeck’s papers are scattered all across the country. Stanford, of course, has the largest collection. But Steinbeck himself didn’t seem to care too much about preserving such things, and certainly he never made provisions for his papers to be gathered in one place.” A manicured hand fluttered in the air as she talked, the light sparkling off a diamond ring that Hudson found himself staring at to keep from looking at her face.

“We, however, have the majority of his journals,” Helen continued. “As well as a great number of files of articles he found of interest. Steinbeck clipped and saved everything that he thought might be useful to his writing, which for a man with such a broad range of interests amounted to a considerable pile of paper.” She shook her head. “No wonder his wives were always complaining about his being absent; they probably just couldn’t find him beneath all the junk.”

Hudson realized that he was shaking his leg nervously. He clapped a hand over his ankle and pinned it to his knee, forcing himself to remain quiet. He wasn’t sure what the archivist was getting at, but he expected her at any moment to tell him that it was time for him to leave and never come back.

“It’s always puzzled me why more people aren’t interested in Steinbeck’s journals,” she said. “I myself have only looked through maybe a dozen of them. There’s simply too much there to absorb easily. Every page, it seems, could yield a book.”

Hudson held his breath, sensing that they were arriving at the moment he’d been waiting for—and dreading—since his first e-mail to Helen Guerneyser.

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” she said. “Although I think you might have bitten off more than you can chew. You might want to focus on one or two books or, even better, a specific period of Steinbeck’s life.”

Hudson nodded enthusiastically, agreeing with everything, resisting the urge to cheer or throw himself at the archivist’s feet. He felt as if the gates of heaven itself had been opened to him. “Thank you,” he managed.