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all written over the past five years,” Hyland said. “They stopped about a year ago. I’m not sure why. Maybe Caledonia got tired of being rejected.”
    “What were the letters about?” I asked. “What could this man possibly want with Dad that he would keep writing him for so long – without a single response?”
    Hyland took his time answering. He seemed to be considering me. The clipping from Lou Caledonia’s desk, the one with Dad’s name and the word Stranger written on it, sat on my nightstand upstairs. My heart started to beat irrationally. If the detective decided to snoop around the house, he would find it. And he’d know I lied to him at the scene of the crime when I said there was nothing else to know.
    Hell, maybe he already knew about it and was just toying with me and making me sweat.
    Finally, he said, “Apparently, your father had a book Mr. Caledonia wanted.”
    “Which book?” I asked. “Hell, if he’d told me the title I would have brought it to him last night.”
    “If he’d have told me the title,” Mom said, “I’d have given him all the books.”
    Hyland was shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Caledonia didn’t want one of the books your father owned . He wanted a copy of the book your father wrote .”
    Mom laughed. I would have laughed, but the idea of my father writing a book was so bizarre that I couldn’t say anything.
    “No,” Mom said. “That’s not true.” She laughed again. “My husband never wrote a book. He couldn’t write a grocery list. He once went away fishing for the weekend, and he didn’t even bother to write me a note. He didn’t write anything.”
    “My dad read a lot. But he was a salesman. He didn’t write any books.”
    Hyland shifted around on the couch. He reached into his back pants pocket and brought out a small notebook. He flipped through it to the page he wanted.
    “Well,” Hyland said, “you may not think your father wrote a book, but Lou Caledonia most certainly did.”
    “He did?” I asked. “Is that why he came to the viewing?”
    “That’s a good guess,” Hyland said.
    “Well, what book?” I asked. “Are we talking about a novel? Or what?”
    “There’s no book, Donnie,” Mom said.
    Hyland ignored her. “We’re talking about a novel,” he said. “According to the information in the letters and files in Mr. Caledonia’s office, he thinks your father wrote the novel, Rides a Stranger , under the pseudonym Herbert Henry.”
    “Henry,” I said. “That’s Dad’s middle name.”
    Hyland said, “Believe me, Lou Caledonia was aware of that.” He looked at the notebook. Apparently, he thought your father wrote this novel, which was published in 1972 by Woodworth Books as part of their Monarch Series.” Hyland looked over at us. “The Monarch Series was dedicated to novels about the American west. They published twenty books in the series, and Rides a Stranger is number nineteen.”
    Rides a Stranger? The obituary I took from Caledonia’s desk. Stranger .
    Hyland looked at his notebook again. “But even though the books were meant to be mass produced and widely distributed to be sold in grocery stores, drug stores, airports etc., something went wrong with number nineteen. There was a printer’s strike at the plant that manufactured the book. The first batch was printed by replacement workers.” Hyland looked over again. “Scabs for lack of a better word.”
    “I see,” I said.
    “They printing went horribly wrong. Blurred cover. Pages cut wrong. A disaster. So they had to pulp that whole batch. Throw them out. They were worthless. The strike ended a few weeks after that, and the regular workers came back. They did a test run of about one hundred books in order to make sure the problems from the last batch—the scab batch—were corrected. And the problems were fixed. But by that point book number nineteen was so far off-schedule that they went ahead and decided to print number