“She’s a curious soul, our piece of heaven,” he said. “Can be a patch of hell, depending on her mood.”

Pleasantries dispensed with, sure, he’d seen Sean Pruitt at the construction site and camp, exchanged perhaps a dozen words. Of course, the Pruitt boy’s death weighed on him. He didn’t wish an untimely meeting with the Reaper on anybody. The family had his sympathies.

How sympathetic? I asked. My friends and I needed to have a peek at Sean’s old quarters and he was the man with the keys.

Herzog said he could see his way clear to providing the information we sought. There was a price, which he enjoyed enumerating, then haggling over. He received a quarterly stipend from Diogenes Security to inspect Jeffers Colony, perform minor maintenance tasks, and report trespassers, be they vandals, thieves, or mere looky-loos. We had to make the admittedly small danger of losing that trickle of revenue worth his while. He figured four bills would square us away. Oh, and a case of Blue Light, a pound of tobacco he favored, and dog snacks. I could fetch his list at a general store on the main road near the junction. He suggested I take my sweet-ass time since digging up the records would be a lengthy, tedious chore. On second thought, since suppertime would come along before he finished, I was welcome to wrangle barbecue fixings—white hots and pop—and he’d do the ceremonial honors.

I agreed to the request. Even Hercules bowed to the inevitable and ran an occasional errand or spit-shined a stable.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Obtaining the list of goodies wasn’t an onerous quest. The store appeared rustic until we went inside and it was mirrored floor tiles, modern coolers, and fluorescent strips, overseen by a college-age girl who didn’t bother unplugging her earphones to ring me up.

Since we had time to kill, we visited the Jeffers Project site and admired the double fence and deserted gatehouse. In the course of the forty-five minutes we spent kicking rocks and shooting the breeze, neither security personnel nor caretakers materialized to shoo us away. We drove a circuitous route back to Herzog’s cabin.

Herzog unhurriedly performed several routine tasks (pumping water into jerry cans, fueling his portable generator, and gathering armloads of firewood, as the weatherman said it would drop below freezing that night). The day had grown long in the tooth before he lugged several cartons of records from somewhere in the bowels of his shack and got serious. As twilight deepened into full darkness, Lionel made a fire in the barbecue pit and roasted hot dogs, or white hots, as our host called them. Herzog lit a kerosene lantern and hung it from a hook on the eave of the porch. He squinted at the cramped font of what struck me as a jillion and one identical papers, and arranged them in piles on the rickety steps. He refused our offers to assist combing through the stacks.

Upon glimpsing the documents, Bellow asked how he happened to be in custody of sensitive personal information: addresses, social security numbers, and references to medical histories.