All the same, she suddenly wanted to talk to Jim Gardener – needed to talk to him. She went in to call his place up the road in Unity. She had dialed four numbers when she remembered he was off doing readings – those and the poetry workshops were the way he supported himself. For itinerant artists summer was prime time. All those stupid menopausal matrons have to do something with their summers, she could hear Jim saying ironically, and I have to eat in the winter. One hand washes the other. You ought to thank God you're saved the reading circuit, anyway, Bobbi.

Yes, she was saved that – although she thought Jim liked it more than he let on. Certainly did get laid enough.

Anderson put the phone back in the cradle and looked at the bookcase to the left of the stove. It wasn't a handsome bookcase – she was no one's carpenter, nor ever would be – but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up by the Time-Life series of volumes on the old west. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Brian Garfield's early westerns jostled for place with Hubert Hampton's massive Western Territories Examined. Louis L'Amour's Sackett saga lay cheek by jowl with Richard Marius's wonderful two novels, The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land. Jay R. Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen and Richard F. K. Mudgett's Westward Expansion bracketed a riot of paperback westerns by Ray Hogan, Archie Joceylen, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and, of course, Zane Grey – Anderson's copy of Riders of the Purple Sage had been read nearly to tatters.

On the top shelf were her own books, thirteen of them. Twelve were westerns, beginning with Hangtown, published in 1975, and ending with The Long Ride Back, published in '87. Massacre Canyon, the new one, would be published in September, as all of her westerns had been since the beginning. It occurred to her now that she had been here, in Haven, when she had received her first copy of Hangtown, although she'd begun the novel in the room of a scuzzy Cleaves Mills apartment, on a thirties-vintage Underwood dying of old age. Still, she'd finished here, and it was here that she'd held the first actual copy of the book in her hands.