“If they’re wrong,” Larry went on, “then you have the pleasure of basking in the glow of superiority.”

Pete grinned and nodded. “Hey, you oughta put that in one of your books.”

“It wasin one of his books,” Barbara said. “If I’m not mistaken, a redneck cop spoke pretty much those very words in Dead of Night.”

“Yeah?”

“No kidding?” Larry asked, amazed that she had remembered such a thing.

“Don’t you remember?”

He’d quoted one of his own characters without even realizing it? Odd, he thought. And a little disturbing. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “If you say so, I guess it’s there.”

“The philosophy at work,” Pete said.

“No, I mean it. I write so much... That book was a long time ago.”

“I have the advantage,” Barbara said. “I just read it last month.”

“Hey, maybe you’re becoming that guy. Turning into your redneck cop. There’s an idea for a story, huh? A writer starts turning into this character he made up.”

“Has possibilities.”

“Well, if you use it, remember where you got the idea.”

“Ah-ha!” Barbara said. “Over on the left.”

Looking across the road, Larry saw the ruins of an old structure. It no longer had a roof. The door and window-panes, if it ever had them, were gone. The upper portions of the walls had crumbled away, and some of the rocks that might once have formed the square enclosure now lay in rubble around it — returning to the desert from which they’d been taken.

“Well,” Pete said, “I guess this isthe right road.”

“Prince Henry.”

“Doesn’t look like much of a ghost town,” Jean remarked.

“That isn’t it,” Barbara told her. “But we stopped and had a look around before we got to Sagebrush Flat.”

“Nothing much there,” Pete said. “Wanta take a quick look?”

“I’d rather get on to the main attraction.”

In spite of Jean’s earlier comments about her difficulties in getting him out of the house, they’d taken several day trips during the past year to explore the region. Sometimes with Pete and Barbara, a few times by themselves or with Lane — when they could drag their seventeen-year-old daughter away from home. On those outings, Larry had seen plenty of ruins similar to the one they were leaving behind. But not a real ghost town.