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second footstep sent Sara looking for another egress through the tangled brush, but with no luck. Only one path led to this remote aerie overlooking the river, and only lovers knew it. Lovers and the occasional dreamy schoolgirl. Sara stood, her back pressed against a slender birch, waiting for the intruder to appear
.

3
    T he Labor Day party was at the home of Greg and Irena Samoorian. A multi-level contemporary on a couple of semiwooded acres, it was my favorite house in Enfield for kicking back and relaxing. Smoke poured from a restaurant-size gas grill where chicken and ribs sizzled, kids squealed and splashed in the pool, friends and colleagues clustered wherever they could find a puddle of shade on this hot early-September afternoon.
    With a baby back rib for a pointer and barbeque sauce instead of chalk smeared on his chin, Professor George Gilman was treating me to an extemporaneous lecture on his favorite topic, the history of the book in America. “A number of social and economic factors caused the publication of popular fiction to escalate rapidly during the postwar years, and led in the 1950s to the rise of the blockbuster bestselling novel.…”
    I’d asked George about
Oblivion Falls
, because he was the only person I knew who had the expertise to speak knowledgeably about the background for the novel’s original popularity. All the sudden hoopla about the book had intrigued me. Throughout the long humid final week of August, every time my phone rang I’d had to field yet another request from the media for information about Mildred Deakin and her sensational novel. Inquiring minds from Regis and Kathy Lee to the cultural reporters for NPR were suddenly agog to knowthe story of the novel’s composition and salacious details of Deakin’s life and loves.
    Fortunately, since I knew virtually nothing about her, I remembered Sean Small. “Professor Small,” I’d told someone from the
Charlie Rose
show, “is a professor at Skidmore College who delivered a paper on Deakin at the last MLA. The MLA? That’s the Modern Language Association convention. The major annual conference for scholars of language and literature. That’s where I learned just about everything I know about Deakin, from Professor Small’s paper. You might as well go directly to him. Yes, Skidmore. Hello? Hello?” I gave Sean Small’s name to the next three interviewers who called. After that, the culture vultures left me alone with my ignorance. But now George was giving me an impromptu quick-and-dirty graduate seminar on twentieth-century popular fiction.
    “The sudden freeing-up of paper for peacetime purposes after World War Two,” he continued, waggling the baby back rib, “as well as increased leisure time for women, who had been nudged none-too-gently back into the domestic sphere from their wartime factory jobs; the rise of the paperback book and the Book-of-the-Month Club; postwar prosperity; and a hunger on the part of the public for a return to normalcy—all these extraliterary factors contributed to sharply increased production and distribution in the popular-print market.”
    “In other words,” I said, glugging down the last of my pale ale, “a lot more books were published.”
    “That’s what I just said,” George replied.
    George and I had perched on a cast-iron park bench in a small grove toward the back of the yard. George Gilman was one of my favorite colleagues, an historian whose prodigious knowledge, strong intellectual passions, andtotal absence of intellectual pretense all endeared him to me—but he did tend to get carried away. With a sauce-covered finger, George resettled his half-glasses on the bridge of his nose, smearing his cheek in the process. I resisted an impulse to reach out and daub sauce on the other cheek for balance.
    “In the case of
Oblivion Falls
in particular,” he said, “a younger generation of writers and readers had come to adulthood, a generation without the wartime