Inspiration isn’t always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was shaving and thinking about nothing more than remembering the beer for the party. And like the best inspirations, it came out of nowhere at all. I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the %ugh Stuff crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I’d gone first in an effort to decipher “go down nineteen” and “go down ninety-two.” Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did %ugh Stuff have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I’d completed, I’d done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand-I snatched it off the dining-room table. Although it covered the whole southern part of Castle County-Motton, Harlow, and Kash-wakamak as well as the TR—it was pretty thin. The first thing I did was check the white pages to see if there were at least ninety-two. There were. The Y’s and Z’s finished up on page ninety-seven. This was the answer. Had to be. “I got it, didn’t I?” I asked Bunter. “This is it.”

Nothing. Not even a tinkle from the bell. “Fuck you—what does a stuffed moosehead know about a telephone book?” Go down nineteen. I turned to page nineteen of the telephone book, where the letter IF was prominently showcased. I began to slip my finger down the first column and as it went, my excitement faded. The nineteenth name on page nineteen was Harold Failles. It meant nothing to me. There were also Feltons and Fenners, a Filkersham and several Finneys, half a dozen Flahertys and more Fosses than you could shake a stick at. The last name on page nineteen was Framingham. It also meant nothing to me, but-Framingham, Kenneth P. I stared at that for a moment. A realization began to dawn.

It had nothing to do with the refrigerator messages. You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, I thought. This is like when you buy a blue Buick-“You see blue Buicks everywhere,” I said. “Practically got to kick em out of your way. Yeah, that’s it.” But my hands were shaking as I turned to page ninety-two. Here were the T’s of southern Castle County, along with a few U’s like Alton Ubeck and Catherine Udell just to round things out. I didn’t bother checking the ninety-second entry on the page; the phone book wasn’t the key to the magnetic crosspatches after all. It did, however, suggest something enormous. I closed the book, just held it in my hands for a moment (happy folks with blueberry rakes on the front cover), then opened it at random, this time to the M’s. And once you knew what you were looking for, it jumped right out at you. All those K’s. Oh, there were Stevens and Johns and Marthas; there was Meserve, G… and Messier, V… and Jayhouse, T. And yet, again and again, I saw the initial K where people had exercised their right not to list their first name in the book. There were at least twenty K-initials on page fifty alone, and another dozen C-initials. As for the actual names themselves…

There were twelve Kenneths on this random page in the M-section, including three Kenneth Moores and two Kenneth Munters. There were four Catherines and two Katherines. There were a Casey, a Kiana, and a Kiefer. “Holy Christ, it’s like fallout,” I whispered. I thumbed through the book, not able to believe what I was seeing and seeing it anyway.

Kenneths, Katherines, and Keiths were everywhere. I also saw Kimberly, Kim, and Kym. There were Cammie, Kia (yes, and we had thought ourselves so original), Kiah, Kendra, Kaela, Keil, and Kyle. Kirby and Kirk. There was a woman named Kissy Bowden, and a man named Kito Rennie—Kito, the same name as one of Kyra’s fridgeafator people. And everywhere, outnumbering such usually common initials as S and T and E, were those K’s. My eyes danced with them. I turned to look at the clock-didn’t want to stand John Storrow up at the airport, Christ no—and there was no clock there. Of course not. Old Krazy Kat had popped his peepers during a psychic event. I gave a loud, braying laugh that scared me a little—it wasn’t particularly sane. “Get hold of yourself, Mike,” I said. “Take a deep breath, son.” I took the breath. Held it. Let it out.

Checked the digital readout on the microwave. Quarter past eight. Plenty of time for John. I turned back to the telephone book and began to riffle rapidly through it. I’d had a second inspiration—not a megawatt blast like the first one, but a lot more accurate, it turned out.

Western Maine is a relatively isolated area—it’s a little like the hill country of the border South—but there has always been at least some inflow of folks from away (“fiatlanders” is the term the locals use when they are feeling contemptuous), and in the last quarter of the century it has become a popular area for active seniors who want to fish and ski their way through retirement. The phone book goes a long way toward separating the newbies from the long-time residents. Babickis, Parettis, O’Quindlans, Donahues, Smolnacks, Dvoraks, Blindermeyers—all from away.

All fiatlanders. Jalberts, Meserves, Pillsburys, Spruces, Ther-riaults, Perraults, Stanchfields, Starbirds, Dubays—all from Castle County. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? When you see a whole column of Bowies on page twelve, you know that those folks have been around long enough to relax and really spread those Bowie genes.

There were a few K-initials and K-names among the Parettis and the Smolnacks, but only a few. The heavy concentrations were all attached to families that had been here long enough to absorb the atmosphere. To breathe the fallout. Except it wasn’t radiation, exactly, it l suddenly imagined a black headstone taller than the tallest tree on the lake, a monolith which cast its shadow over half of Castle County. This picture was so clear and so terrible that I covered my eyes, dropping the phone book on the table. I backed away from it, shuddering. Hiding my eyes actually seemed to enhance the image further: a grave-marker so enormous it blotted out the sun; TR-90 lay at its foot like a funeral bouquet.

Sara Tidwell’s son had drowned in Dark Score Lake. . or been drowned in it. But she had marked his passing. Memorialized it. I wondered if anyone else in town had ever noticed what I just had. I didn’t suppose it was all that likely; when you open a telephone book you’re looking for a specific name in most cases, not reading whole pages line by line.

I wondered if Jo had noticed—if she’d known that almost every longtime family in this part of the world had, in one way or another, named at least one child after Sara Tidwell’s dead son.

Jo wasn’t stupid. I thought she probably had. I returned to the bathroom, relathered, started again from scratch. When I finished, I went back to the phone and picked it up. I poked in three numbers, then stopped, looking out at the lake. Mattie and Ki were up and in the kitchen, both of them wearing aprons, both of them in a fine froth of excitement. There was going to be a party! They would wear pretty new summer clothes, and there would be music from Mat-tie’s boombox CD player! Ki was helping Mattie make biscuits for strewberry snortcake, and while the biscuits were baking they would make salads. If I called Mattie up and said Pack a couple of bags, you and Ki are going to spend a week at Disney World, Mattie would assume I was joking, then tell me to hurry up and finish getting dressed so I’d be at the airport when John’s plane landed. If I pressed, she’d remind me that Lindy had offered her her old job back, but the offer would close in a hurry if Mattie didn’t show up promptly at two P.M. on Friday. If I continued to press, she would just say no.