The papers were copies, made for him by Helen Guerneyser from the materials he’d looked at the previous afternoon. Hudson had feared at first that the number of pages would be excessive, but the archivist had made no objection, sending him away from his first day of research with a thick stack of paper and an open invitation to come back whenever he liked.

He pulled his knees up and leaned the papers against them. Mostly he had requested copies of Steinbeck’s journals. Seated in the reading room, he had been afraid to really look at them, as if he were being watched by some invisible monitor ready to revoke his privileges for any breach of scholarly protocol. Alone in his room, however, he read them with the same excitement with which he’d once read his sister’s diary, purloined from its not-so-secret hiding place beneath the sweaters in her dresser drawer and spirited to his own room for leisurely perusal.

While his sister’s journal had been filled with adolescent despair over parents who didn’t understand her and boys who didn’t love her, Steinbeck’s were most notable for his observations of those around him. It was easy to get lost in the descriptions of characters who entered and exited his life like players in film. At some point, though, Hudson had begun to wonder how much of the writing—fine as it was—was meant as distraction. Almost as if Steinbeck had fully expected that one day his words would be pored over by those looking for insight into his work, the entries were engaging yet almost uniformly without reference to his personal feelings, at least apart from those having to do with his writing.

However, there were moments of seemingly dull revelation hidden among the glittering stones, tiny chunks of unpolished ore that were easily overlooked. They were tucked into a paragraph here and there, almost as if they were afterthoughts to something more important and not worth the effort of elaboration. Noticing one, Hudson had begun to find others, in the same way that the sandy expanse of a beach could hide a multitude of beautiful shells, if only one could train the eye to see the bits of purple, or blue, or green beneath.

Small, neat starbursts penned in red in the margins indicated potential lines of interest. Many pages—sometimes five, six, seven, or more in succession—bore no such indicators; most had only one or two. It was these that Hudson looked at now, recalling why he had found them worthy of notice.