writer-in-residence is now vacant. I’ll go retrieve it.”
“And what about me?” asked Pickover.
I smiled my most reassuring smile. “Go home and clean some fossils. I’m going to swing by my office, then head out to get the diary. This shouldn’t take long.”
TWENTY-TWO
There was a sign outside Shopatsky House that I hadn’t seen the last time, because I’d approached it then from the opposite direction. It was a white rectangle with dark green lettering, and it talked about who Stavros Shopatsky had been and explained that although some might view this site as a tourist attraction—as if Mars got many tourists—it was actually a private home with a hardworking author within, and people should be quiet and respect the writer’s privacy.
But the sign, like so much in New Klondike, had been vandalized. Someone had carved “Books Suck” into it. Everybody’s a critic.
Most homes had their front doors well secured—and some other potential entrance that was easy to break in through. I went around back. The grounds were covered with ferns that did well in the dim sunlight we got here.
It used to be people left a spare key under a rock—and Mars had plenty of rocks. But unless you were a transfer, you probably used a biometric lock these days, and few people stored a spare finger somewhere in their backyard. I did a cursory search anyway but didn’t find anything. Still, there was a big window in the back—writers, I hear, like to stare out into space, which must be good work if you can get it. The window was probably alloquartz or shatterproof glass, but the molding around the window might, I thought, be made of less-stern stuff, and indeed that turned out to be the case.
Fortunately, Shopatsky House was on the outer rim, with a backyard that no one could see unless they happened to be right on the other side of the dome, looking in. I used the switchblade I’d gotten from Dirk to cut through the molding on all four sides of the window. Pressing in at the bottom made the heavy pane angle out at the top, and I managed to get it to fall toward me. I jockeyed it the half meter down to the ground.
There was no way short of wearing a full surface suit to avoid leaving DNA and other identifying things behind, and so I didn’t even bother to try to cover my tracks. After all, I’d been in the house earlier with Lakshmi’s permission; if Mac’s people ever did investigate this break-in, that fact would exonerate me.
I looked around the small home and quickly found the writing station. Lakshmi apparently wrote with a keyboard; there was one sitting on a little table next to a recliner chair, opposite a monitor wall. I understood that those who were serious about words and how punctuation was wielded preferred keyboards to voice-recognition.
I looked everywhere in this room that might conceal a paper diary, but it clearly wasn’t here. I moved into the living room, which had the roll-top desk, and started looking through its cubbyholes and drawers but, again, bupkes.
I went to the wall that had the bookcase leaning against it, and looked at each of the spines in turn. As I’d noted before, they weren’t alphabetical but chronological, with Lakshmi’s own books at the end. There were about eighty books in all, and—yes, yes, there it was: a short hardcover volume, with no printing on the spine, inserted at the far right of the second shelf from the top.
The thick front cover was blank, too, but the title page said, “Journal of Denny T. O’Reilly.” The pages were filled with text in a nice font—a proper little book.
I heard a sound, wheeled around, and saw the front door sliding open. There was no way for me to make it out the same way I’d come in without crossing the line of sight of whoever was coming in. I ducked farther into the room with the bookcase, then peered around the jamb of that room’s open doorway to see who was entering.
My heart jumped. It was as if I were seeing a ghost.
A beautiful, brown-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned ghost.
It was Lakshmi Chatterjee, back from the dead.
I moved deeper into the room. The entryway wasn’t carpeted, and I could hear what sounded like hard-soled shoes being dropped. I didn’t hear anything else for a bit, which might have meant she was just standing there, but more likely meant she was now walking barefoot. I didn’t