At the University of Maine he’d read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and developed an instant obsession for the Southern writers. For the next year he’d kept company with Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner, until a professor, tired of reading papers delving into the dreamy minds of authors bred below the Mason–Dixon line, suggested that he try exploring other areas of the American literary landscape. Reluctantly, he’d traveled north, where he’d been relieved to find that the writing, while perhaps not as weirdly intoxicating, was equally invigorating. This had led to journeys west, and by the end of his four years at the university, Hudson found himself making the pilgrimage to Yale in search of advanced degrees.

Now, having obtained his master’s, he was two years into the doctoral program. And if the papers in his hands turned out to be what he thought they were, he had stumbled on a major find, one that would make his career and practically guarantee him a position of his choosing.

If they are what I think they are, he reminded himself. There was no guarantee. In fact, if anything, there was nothing but questions. Questions he hoped to find the answers to in Monterey.

He forced himself to put the papers back into his briefcase. He’d been obsessing over them the whole flight. Well, for much longer than that, of course. But the flight had only heightened his anxiety about them. After all, he was soon to find out whether they were the treasure he believed them to be or simply a dream he would have to exchange for something else.

He shut his eyes and rubbed them hard, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He recognized it as one of his father’s gestures and pulled his hand away. Lincoln Jones had not been a kind man, and Hudson had not mourned when, the winter of his second year at Yale, his father had been felled by a heart attack while shoveling snow in the driveway. Nor, as far as he could tell, had his mother been terribly upset by the passing of her husband. Taken care of thanks to a surprisingly good insurance policy, Martha Jones now occupied the small, red house on Spruce Lane all by herself, her only companion a fat, orange cat called, predictably, Ginger. Hudson saw her as little as possible, an arrangement that appeared as agreeable to his mother as it was to him.

The fact that he was manifesting his father’s traits was unsettling. The first time he’d recognized it in himself, he’d spoken to a therapist and had been assured that it was probably just mimicked behavior, unconscious memories burned into his mind in childhood, surfacing now that he was growing older. Still, it was disquieting. His physical resemblance to his father at his age was already too much reminder of their shared genetics; he’d hoped to jettison the more internal similarities by leaving them behind in the bedroom on Spruce Lane along with the other refuse of his childhood.