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loud from the inscription: it sounded a lot like what I remembered my friend writing. But where did it go?”
    â€œYou know, I remember what she said, and the first words didn’t make much sense to me. ‘Look sharp!’?”
    â€œActually, that’s what convinced me it was the real thing,” Margie said. “See, it was all a joke. We’d made up these outlandish pen names for ourselves. I was Lucretia Sharpe, and she was Twilla Curtayne. And then wrote these two gothics, like what Ace was starting to produce, or like Rebecca , Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which we both loved passionately—and sent them off as individual submissions. Hers was called Castle Dred —the editor later added the fore-title. Mine was Teufelshaus or something like that.”
    â€œ Devil’s Manor ,” I said.
    â€œWe thought we were very clever, very witty girls playing at being writers.”
    â€œSo, what happened to your book?”
    â€œI, uh, I don’t remember,” she said.
    I looked right at her, and I thought to myself, Aha!—you’ve just out-and-out lied to me, Margie, and I would really like to know why.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    â€œTHE AUTHORITY FILE”
    Saturday, March 26
    â€œIf you really want to know anythin’ about me, probably the first thing would be where I was born and all that s***, and how I f***ed up my worthless parents’ lives by being born, and where I was edicated and what I lerned, etc., etc.; but if you really, really want to find that crap, you can look it up jus’ like any other rube, if you jus’ want to know the truth, in the Who’s Who or The Authority File . Jus’ don’t come askin’ me, ’cause I don’t know nothin’—and I don’t care neither.”
    â€”The Catcher in the Outfield ,
    by Anonymous (1950)
    Margie soon pleaded fatigue, and went next door to her room, while I decided to do some digging. I powered up my laptop computer, and did some on-line searches I should have tried earlier.
    The first name I typed in was “Twilla Curtayne”—and there, of course, was The Secret of Castle Dred , which was mentioned on several websites, including one that tracked all the covers and stock numbers of the Ace paperback line. I found nothing else—and no other publications—listed under that name on the Net.
    I also checked the Catalog of Copyright Entries , which was published by the U.S. Copyright Office. The Office itself only maintained an online database beginning in 1978, when the copyright law changed; but the old printed Catalog , which was in the public domain, had been scanned by Google, and was listed in alphabetical order in half-year segments.
    Sure enough, I quickly found Ms. Curtayne, listed as a pseudonym of Wilhelmina Lamberth, with Castle Dred being copyrighted by Ace. I searched and searched and searched, but there was nothing else listed under the Curtayne name. Then I had an idea: I tried “Lamberth” instead.
    In 1965 I found one entry for a W. Mina Lamberth, author of a gothic called Devilton published by Lancer Books under the pen name Lucrezia [sic] Sharpe. How very strange! Had Lamberth borrowed her friend’s pseudonym to use on books issued by another publisher? There was nothing else in the Catalog under Lamberth that seemed to fit this author.
    So I tried searching “Sharpe,” and in 1966 found a reference from that name to Mina Maltese, author of the Lancer gothic, Terror at Scarborough House . I kept searching through the Catalog for at least another decade, until I was sure I’d located everything. She’d used the Sharpe name for the half-dozen gothics she wrote for Lancer, and also had penned a few other books in the same genre for Paperback Library as “Bettina Bosley.” Altogether, she’d published at least a dozen of these novels.
    I continued my research by plugging the name Maltese into the database, but