As with everything else that had happened, there were both too many clues and not enough. But eventually I found out what I needed to know, the way I had found out where Willie had been, the way I had found out what was causing Annie’s dreams. After all, that was what I was good at, wasn’t it, looking up obscure facts? Traveller had lived two years. He had picked up a nail and gotten lockjaw. They had had to shoot him.

I met Annie two years ago, the night of Broun’s press reception. The reception was supposed to be an advance publication party for Broun’s twelfth novel, The Duty Bound , with bound galleys passed out to the press, but there weren’t any galleys. There wasn’t even a finished book.

The press reception had been scheduled for the last week in March, but at the end of February Broun was still fiddling with the copyedited manuscript, making changes and then changing the changes, and a week before the reception I was back in West Virginia, trying to find out exactly when Lee had bought Traveller.

It was a detail that didn’t matter one way or the other to the book, since Lee had definitely been riding Traveller at Antietam in September of 1862, but it was the kind of thing Broun had been fussing over the entire book, and it worried me.

He was having all kinds of trouble with The Duty Bound . He usually turned out his Civil War novels like clockwork: proposal to outline to manuscript to corrected galleys, which was why his publisher, McLaws and Herndon, had gone ahead and scheduled this reception before they had the copyedited manuscript back.

I might have done the same thing. In the four years I’d been doing research for Broun, he’d never missed a deadline. But with The Duty Bound , he hadn’t made a deadline yet, and when I called him from West Virginia he was still making major changes.