The first group of pages came from entries written in the weeks following the death of Ed Ricketts. Here Steinbeck had written with unusual candor about the loss of his friend. But even within such emotion Hudson detected a note of deception, not of fact, but of something deeper. Steinbeck’s grief seemed, if anything, too commonplace. It was the grief of someone unable to see the true extent of his loss, uncharacteristic of Steinbeck’s usually unflinching exploration of human feeling, whether his own or that of another.

One line, though, buried amidst many others, had glimmered with a peculiar fluorescence of meaning. “With Ed’s death,” Steinbeck wrote, “the tides have changed. I feel myself retreating, becoming smaller, like a patch of beach that is swallowed up by the rising water.”

He read the line again. “The tides have changed,” he said aloud. It was an unremarkable analogy, perfectly apt in its description of grief. But for Hudson it had another connection. He fumbled with the papers in his hands, looking for the copies he had brought with him from home.

He found what he was looking for on page seventy-two of the typescript.

The tide was retreating, pulling away from the shore like the cover being lifted from a bed and revealing the naked sleeping forms beneath it. Charlie thought again of that morning, of the still air of the room and the motes of dust floating in the sun like insects trapped forever in amber. He thought, too, of his hand on the quilt, his fingers tracing the lines of the squares and diamonds pieced together by unknown hands. And then of the other hand, the one beneath, the one tracing the same patterns on his naked flesh. Thinking of this, he grew smaller, his body shrinking even as the memory loomed larger and larger, until its great black mouth opened and he was swallowed up.

“It’s a common metaphor,” Hudson said, speaking as if to someone else. “It doesn’t prove anything.”

No, he thought, it didn’t. At least not on its own. But with more, with something definite, he could argue a strong case. Even then, he supposed, there would be those who disbelieved. Probably someone would even accuse him of manufacturing the manuscript himself. It had been done before, he remembered. That woman at Wellesley had claimed to have found a poem by Christina Rossetti, supposedly a long-sought-after companion to “Goblin Market.” She had even gone so far as to write the fraudulent poem on paper from the correct era, although where she got it was anyone’s guess.