I went all ice water inside.

“You can’t send him his own books,” I told her. “The ones he hasn’t written yet.”

“Maybe if I don’t,” she said, “he won’t write them. Have you ever thought that?”

“No. No. If he just copies the books I send back in time with you, then who wrote them in the first place?”

“My son. He wrote them before, and he’ll write them again. So I can read them and then pass them on to him.”

I’d had three glasses of bourbon that night with Terry Gallagher, Loren Hayes, and Ralph Tanner, but I felt more woozy standing there cold sober in the library car with the dead woman.

“I don’t think that’s how time is supposed to work,” I said.

She said, “It works however you say it works. His books exist. They exist now, whether I get to read them or I don’t. So that’s all you have to decide, mister. Do I get to have this last good thing in my life or not? Do I get to have another marvelous thing, or are you going to—”

“What?” I said. “What did you say?” I was suddenly as sweaty as she was and felt maybe half as sick.

“Do I get to go out on a good note?” she said patiently. “Or not? Because you decide, mister. I can have the last days of my life the way I want them, with my son at my side, in his stories if not in the flesh. Are you going to be the guy who says no?”

I wasn’t going to be the guy who said no. I turned away, reached up onto the shelf, and lifted the whole stack down.

BRAD DOLAN DEDICATED HIS LAST BOOK to his mother, too. The dedication reads:

One more for my mother, without whom I would not ever have written a word

You could go crazy trying to figure out what that means. But I don’t have to. Because in June, five months after the last time I saw Lynn Dolan, I received a letter from a dead man, a letter from the past.

It had been mailed care of the Kingsward Public Library and addressed to “The Current Driver Of The Bookmobile.” A law firm that represented the estate of Brad Dolan had been sitting on it ever since Dolan’s suicide by handgun in 1997, shortly after the publication of his final book. His will had specified the date on which to place it in the post.

Dear Sir,

I have wondered about you for most of my adult life: who you are, how you managed to slip through time in the Kingsward Public Library’s Bookmobile, what your life has been like. I know nothing about you for certain except that you are kind. Maybe nothing else matters.