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cellular phone. It didn't really matter now if Bolt heard him or not. Rowena and Mrs. Tyler and half the witches in the world could be listening in on all his conversations and he'd never know it.

The salutations over, Quentin got to the point. "If you don't have the address for the so-called Duncans yet, I have more information. The wife was born Rowena Tyler. And their address is probably in the file of Mrs. Anna Laurent Tyler at the Willoughby Retirement Home." He gave him the address.

"We're still checking out other leads too," said Wayne. "If you were just there, why didn't you get the address yourself?"

"I didn't part on good terms with the management."

"So how is our investigator going to get the information?"

"It doesn't have to be admissible in court, Wayne."

"You've been reading too much detective fiction, Quentin. Most private investigators have no burglary skills whatsoever."

"Most burglars have no burglary skills. Just walk in during business hours, take the file, Xerox the sheet with the address, and walk out. They're shorthanded right now."

"Quentin, you live in a fantasy world."

"We all do, Wayne. I just found out I was married to a succubus who was created by a witch. It's year-round Halloween now."

"We'll find a sane way of getting the address."

"Thanks."

"By the way, Quentin, you asked me how to go about divorcing a woman who doesn't exist?"

"I thought it might be a problem."

"No problem at all. No divorce needed. There wasn't a marriage."

"What do you mean?"

"All the documents - license, certificate - she never signed them."

"I watched her." But of course that meant nothing; Quentin knew it as he said it.

"It's your signature on both lines of every document. You're married to yourself, Quentin."

"At least I know I'll be faithful."

"Good-bye, dear lunatic. Try to stay uncommitted for a little longer - at least until you've paid my bill."

"I'll do my best."

Bolt laughed when Quentin hung up the phone. "Listen, if Rowena doesn't want you to find out where she is, nobody's going to get a true address."

"So I guess we'll have to hope she does want me to find her."

"I don't imagine you'll take me with you."

"Believe me, Bolt, if she wanted you to go to her, I wouldn't be able to stop you."

"Damn straight," said Bolt, pretending to be joking.

Rowena existed in the real world somewhere. Sooner or later, Wayne Read's investigators would find her; if she still had a use for Quentin, she would let them find her. The creator of the succubus that Quentin had loved and lost - yes, he would have something to say to her when they met.

Chapter 15. Snow

It usually wasn't hard for Quentin to wait for other people to do their work. His career for many years had consisted of giving people the money and support to make a go of something. He would get periodic reports about how things were going; he would meet with them now and then; but by and large he let them do what they loved to do, what they had dreamed of doing, and waited until it was fairly clear how things were going to turn out.

In a way this was the same thing. Caught up in other people's dreams, waiting to find things out. The trouble was that he wasn't sure what the dream was, or who was the dreamer, or whose nightmare it would be when all was done.

He toyed with the idea of waiting in Mixinack for Wayne's report - Bolt even offered to let him stay on the couch in the study of his big old Victorian house. But Mixinack was the place where the treasure box was, and it wasn't the treasure box Quentin wanted to get into at the moment.

What did he want? After dropping off Bolt at his office to pick up his car, Quentin drove south on a road denuded of traffic by the storm. The advisories on the radio begged people to stay off the highways during what they were already calling the "Blizzard of '96." The airports were closed. Quentin wouldn't be catching a flight tonight. He should have looked for a motel and holed up to wait out the storm. Instead he kept driving south. Not because the weather would be better there - word was that the storm would do a better job of shutting down Washington than the budget impasse. The people that the grande dame had known as the Duncans, who were almost certainly Rowena Tyler and her husband and