She felt a strange embarrassment at the very thought of asking Uncle Lestan whether or not he’d read these books. It would be insulting and demeaning to do this, she thought, rather like Gardner insulting her when he threw the book at her face, and went on with his accusations.

But the entire problem began to obsess Rose. Meanwhile she read every last word of every book she could find with these characters.

And the stories in truth amazed her, not only by their complexity and depth, but by the peculiar dark turns they took, and the chronology they laid out for the main character’s moral development. She realized that she was now thinking of Uncle Lestan as that main character. He’d been wounded, shocked, the victim of a series of disasters and adventures. He’d become a wanderer in these books. And his skin was tanned because he kept letting himself suffer the effects of sunlight in a painful attempt to mask his preternatural identity.

No, this is impossible.

She barely noticed when Marge told her that Gardner had gotten hold of their home number and she had had to change it. Rose keyed the new number into her cell and forgot about it. She didn’t use the landline much, but of course it was the principal way to reach Marge. So she had to have that number.

“Do you want to tell me what’s the matter?” Marge asked. “I know something happened.”

Rose shook her head. “Just reading, thinking,” she said. “I’m better now. I’m going back Monday. I have a lot of catching up to do.”

In class, she could barely keep her mind on the lecture. She kept drifting off, thinking about that long-ago night when Uncle Lestan had caught her in his arms and carried her up and up from that island. She saw him in that dim, shadowy little lawyer’s office in Athens, Texas, saying, “Make it happen!”

Well, there had to be some explanation. And then it struck her. Of course. Her uncle knew the author of these books. Her uncle had perhaps inspired them. It was so simple she almost laughed out loud. That had to be it. He and his friend Louis had inspired this fiction. And when she’d tell him she’d found the books, of course, he would laugh and explain how they’d come to be written! He’d probably say he’d been honored to be the inspiration of such bizarre and romantic ramblings.