The Land of Laughs Read Online Free

was so excited today.”
    She was in the midst of pulling the hood off her head when I said that. She stopped and smiled up at me. It was the first time I realized how short she was. Against the black, rain-shiny poncho, her face glowed wet white. A kind of strange pink-white, but nice and sort of babylike at the same time. I hung up the dripping coat and pointed her toward the living room. At the last moment I remembered her puppets and that she hadn’t seen my masks yet. I thought about the last woman who’d come to see them.
    Saxony took a couple of steps into the room and stopped. I was behind her, so I didn’t get to see the first expression on her face. I wish I had. After several seconds she moved toward them. I stood in the doorway wondering what she would say, wondering which ones she’d want to touch or take down off the wall.
    None of them. She spent a long time looking, and at one point reached out to touch the red Mexican devil with the great blue snake winding down his nose and into his mouth, but her hand stopped halfway and fell to her side.
    Still with her back to me, she said, “I know who you are.”
    I leveled one of my best smirks at her lower back. “You know who I am? You mean you know who my father is. It’s no big secret. Turn on the television any night to The Late Show .”
    She turned around and slid her hands into the little patch pockets of the same blue denim dress she’d worn in the bookstore that day. “Your father? No, I mean you. I know who you are. I called the school the other day and asked about you. I told them I was from a newspaper and was doing a story about your family. Then I went to an old Who’s Who and some other books and looked up things about you and your family.” She two-fingered a little square of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. “You’re thirty and you had a brother, Max, and a sister, Nicolle, who were both older than you. They were killed in the same plane crash with your father. Your mother lives in Litchfield, Connecticut.”
    I was stunned both by the facts and by her chutzpah in so calmly admitting what she’d been doing.
    “The school secretary said that you went to Franklin and Marshall College and graduated in 1971. You’ve taught here for four years, and one of the kids in your American literature class that I talked to said that you’re ‘all right’ quote-unquote as a teacher.” She folded the paper up again and slid it back into her pocket.
    “So what’s with the investigation? Am I under suspicion?”
    She kept her hand in her pocket. “I like to know about people.”
    “Yeah? And?”
    “And nothing. When you were willing to pay all that money for a book on Marshall France, I wanted to know more about you, that’s all.”
    “I’m not used to people getting up dossiers on me, you know.”
    “Why are you quitting your job?”
    “I’m not quitting. It’s called a leave of absence, J. Edgar. What’s it to you, anyway?”
    “Look at what I brought to show you.” She reached behind her and pulled something out from beneath her gray pullover sweater. Her voice was very excited as she handed it to me, “I knew it existed but I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find a copy. I think only a thousand of them were printed. I found it at the Gotham in New York. I had been hunting for it all over for years.”
    It was a small, very thin book printed on beautifully thick, rough-textured paper. From the illustration on the cover (a Van Walt, as always), I knew that it was something by France, but I had no idea what. It was titled The Night Races into Anna , and what first surprised me was that unlike all of his other books, the only illustration was the one on the cover. A simple black-and-white pen-and-ink of a little girl in farmer’s overalls walking toward a railroad station at sunset.
    “I’ve never even heard of this. What … when was it done?”
    “You didn’t? Really? You’ve never … ?” She gently pulled it