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palms out. Is there no private life in this town?
    “Okay, okay! Well, anyhow, Karen—looks like you’re into another literary mystery here.”
    George Gilman from the History Department passed by in his usual disorganized rush. Loaded down with a briefcase and a large coffee, our short, pudgy, bespectacled colleague wagged fingers at us around the paper coffee cup. I wagged back. George pushed the door open with his shoulder and vanished through it.
    “You mean Mildred Deakin? Pu-leez,” I responded, and snagged the last morsel of Greg’s muffin. “Really, I have no interest in what happened to Mildred Deakin—where she went, or why.” I licked crumbs off my fingertips. Then I thought about it for a minute. “Wouldn’t it be terrific, though, if the Northbury Center could acquire Deakin’s papers? I wonder where they are?
Oblivion Falls
was hot stuff, and the correspondence about it must be fascinating. Not too many erotic novels circulating in the fifties.”
    “Peyton Place, Forever Amber, Naked Came the Stranger.”
Greg tallied them on his fingers.
    “How do you know this stuff?” Greg is an anthropologist, not an English professor, but the breadth of his literary knowledge is mind boggling.
    He gave me a good-natured leer. “Sweetheart, when it comes to smut—”
    “Give me a break, Greg! You’re the most smut-free guy I know! So …” I waved the subject away. Mildred Deakin wasn’t in my period of literary specialization, the American nineteenth century. With any luck this short newspaper article on a Monday morning would be overlooked by my friends and colleagues in the academic world, and I wouldn’t hear any more about it. “I’m on vacation; I don’t want to talk about literature. How are the babies? And Irena, of course.”
    “Everyone’s great.” Greg’s brown eyes gleamed with paternal pride. “Did I tell you Sally says
Da-Da
now? It’s the cutest thing! Irena says she’s just babbling … you know,
ga ga ga …
but I swear …” And he was off on his favorite topic, Jane and Sally, the twin daughters who had turned this cynical postmodernist scholar into a squidgy ball of marshmallow fluff.
    I had no luck at all , as it turned out. Some producer on the
Oprah
show read the
Times
article, and located a reprint copy of
Oblivion Falls
. By mid-August,Mildred Deakin’s years-out-of-print novel had made it into Oprah’s Book Club, then onto
The New York Times
Best-seller List, into the Amazon.com top ten, and onto the paperback racks of Starbucks’ coffee houses across the nation. Usherwood Imprints, the feminist small-press publishing house that had dutifully reprinted the book earlier that year, rushed to print and distribute the multitude of copies necessary to meet the clamor for this “lost woman’s masterpiece.” And I—Professor Karen Pelletier of the Enfield College English Department—for a few brief unwilling days, became the world’s reigning expert in the work of the “lost” Mildred Deakin.

W hen she heard
the footstep, Sara jumped up from the ledge and let her full cotton skirt fall over her knees and shapely calves. Quickly she pulled back her heavy hair and clasped it again in its wide barrette. She had taken to wearing the skirt instead of her one pair of shorts after Percy Simpson at the lumberyard had corralled her in the back room last week when she’d gone to pick up some nails for her father. “Nice ass,” Percy had said, grabbing her buttocks. She’d twisted from his grasp and thrown coins on the counter as she passed through the store. As she stalked away up the hill Percy had made a comment to the men on the sidewalk bench. Sara had heard the men laugh. She knew her father would be furious when she got home. Not about Percy. Not about the men. She wouldn’t tell him about that. She had learned early that the only safety lay in silence. Her father would be furious because she had come home without his seventeen cents in change
.
    The