"As a matter of fact," Cal began.

"Now, now." Quinn patted Cal's chest to ease him back. "Mommy and Daddy were just saying hello," she told Fox. "Why don't we eat in the dining room like the civilized. Layla's coming right down."

"How come I can't say hello to Mommy?" Fox complained as Quinn sailed off with the plates.

"Because then I'd have to beat you unconscious."

"As if." Amused, Fox grabbed the pizza boxes and started after Quinn. "Beverages on you, bro."

Shortly after they were seated, drinks, plates, napkins, pizza passed around, Layla came in with a large bowl and a stack of smaller ones. "I put this together earlier. I wasn't sure what you might bring," she said to Cal.

"You made salad?" Quinn asked.

"My specialty. Chop, shred, mix. No cooking."

"Now, I'm forced to be good." Quinn gave up the dream of two slices of pizza, settled on one and a bowl of Layla's salad. "We made progress," she began as she forked up the first bite.

"Yeah, ask the ladies here how to make tallow candles or black raspberry preserves," Fox suggested. "They've got it down."

"So, some of the information contained in the books we're going through may not currently apply to our situation." Quinn raised her eyebrows at Fox. "But one day I may be called on in some blackout emergency to make a tallow candle. By progress, however, I mean that there's a lot of interesting information in Ann's journals."

"We've read them," Cal pointed out. "Multiple times."

"You're not women." She held up a finger. "And, yes, Essie is. But Essie's a woman who's a descendent, who's part of this town and its history. And however objective she might try to be, she may have missed some nuances. First question, where are the others?"

"There aren't any others."

"I disagree. There aren't any others that were found. Essie said these books were passed to her by her father, because she loved books. I called her to be sure, but he never said if there were more."

"If there'd been more," Cal insisted, "he'd have given them to her."

"If he had them. There's a long span between the sixteen hundreds and the nineteen hundreds," Quinn pointed out. "Things get misplaced, lost, tossed out. According to the records and your own family's oral history, Ann Hawkins lived most of her life in what's now the community center on Main Street, which was previously the library. Books, library. Interesting."

"A library Gran knew inside and out," Cal returned. "There couldn't have been a book in there she didn't know about. And something like this?" He shook his head. "She'd have it if it was to be had."

"Unless she never saw it. Maybe it was hidden, or maybe, for the sake of argument, she wasn'tmeant to find it. It wasn't meant to be found, not by her, not then."

"Debatable," Fox commented.

"And something to look into. Meanwhile, she didn't date her journals, so Layla and I are dating them, more or less, by how she writes about her sons. In what we're judging to be the first, her sons are about two to three. In the next they're five because she writes about their fifth birthday very specifically, and about seven, we think, when that one ends. The third it seems that they're young men. We think about sixteen."

"A lot of years between," Layla said.

"Maybe she didn't have anything worth writing about during those years."

"Could be," Quinn said to Cal. "But I'm betting she did, even if it was just about blackberry jam and a trio of active sons. More important now, at least I think so, is where is the journal or journals that cover her time with Dent, to the birth of her sons through to the first two years of their lives? Because you can just bet your ass those were interesting times."

"She writes of him," Layla said quietly. "Of Giles Dent. Again and again, in all the journals we have. She writes about him, of her feelings for him, her dreams about him."

"And always in the present tense," Quinn added.

"It's hard to lose someone you love." Fox turned his beer bottle in his hand.

"It is, but she writes of him, consistently, as if he were alive." Quinn looked at Cal. "It is not death. We talked about this, how Dent found the way to exist, with this thing. To hold it down or through or inside. Whatever the term. Obviously he couldn't-or didn't-kill or destroy it, but neither could it kill or destroy him. He found a way to keep it under, and to continue to exist. Maybe only for that single purpose. She knew it. Ann knew what he did, and I'm betting she knew how he did it."

"You're not taking into account love and grief," Cal pointed out.

"I'm not discounting them, but when I read her journals, I get the sense of a strong-minded woman. And one who shared a very deep love with a strong-minded man. She defied convention for him, risked shunning and censure. Shared his bed, but I believe, shared his obligations, too. Whatever he planned to do, attempted to do, felt bound to do, he would have shared it with her. They were a unit. Isn't that what you felt, what we both felt, when we were in the clearing?"

"Yeah." He couldn't deny it, Cal thought. "That's what I felt."

"Going off that, Ann knew, and while she may have told her sons when they were old enough, that part of the Hawkins's oral history could have been lost or bastardized. It happens. I think she would have written it out, too. And put the record somewhere she believed would be safe and protected, until it was needed."

"It's been needed for twenty-one years."

"Cal, that's your responsibility talking, not logic. At least not the line of logic that follows this route. She told you this was the time. That it was always to be this time. Nothing you had, nothing you could have done would have stopped it before this time."

"We let it out," Fox said. "Nothing would have been needed if we hadn't let it out."

"I don't think that's true." Layla shifted toward him, just a little. "And maybe, if we find the other journals, we'll understand. But, we noticed something else."

"Layla caught it right off the bat," Quinn put in.

"Because it was in front of me first. But in any case, it's the names. The names of Ann's sons. Caleb, Fletcher, and Gideon."

"Pretty common for back then." Cal gave a shrug as he pushed his plate away. "Caleb stuck in the Hawkins line more than the other two did. But I've got a cousin Fletch and an uncle Gideon."

"No, first initials," Quinn said impatiently. "I told you they'd missed it," she added to Layla. "C, F, G. Caleb, Fox, Gage."

"Reaching," Fox decided. "Especially when you consider I'm Fox because my mother saw a pack of red foxes running across the field and into the woods about the time she was going into labor with me. My sister Sage? Mom smelled the sage from her herb garden right after Sage was born. It was like that with all four of us."

"You were named after an actual fox? Like a...release-the-hounds fox?" Layla wanted to know.

"Well, not a specific one. It was more a...You have to meet my mother."

"However Fox got his famous name, I don't think we discount coincidences." Quinn studied Cal's face, saw he was considering it. "And I think there's more than one of Ann Hawkins's descendents at this table."

"Quinn, my father's people came over from Ireland, four generations back," Fox told her. "They weren't here in Ann Hawkins's time because they were plowing fields in Kerry."

"What about your mother's?" Layla asked.

"Wider mix. English, Irish. I think some French. Nobody ever bothered with a genealogy, but I've never heard of any Hawkins on the family tree."

"You may want to take a closer look. How about Gage?" Quinn wondered.

"No idea." And Cal was more than considering it now. "I doubt he does either. I can ask Bill, Gage's father. If it's true, if we're direct descendents, it could explain one of the things we've never understood."

"Why it was you," Quinn said quietly. "You three, the mix of blood from you, Fox, and Gage that opened the door."