I also made up the fairy tale of the ghost bone, because, oddly, the Portuguese do not have a lot of ghost stories. I really needed a creepy tale to support the little magical detail upon which so much hinges, and I drew on the Baba Yaga stories to come up with one. Coca, however, is the real deal. There is an annual festival in Monção, Portugal, where a papier-mâché dragon, operated by several people inside, battles a knight on horseback. Coco/Coca is also a legendary “boogeyman” throughout Portugal, described as an evil ghost sporting a pumpkin head. It’s that creature that was the subject of the seventeenth-century rhyme Sam says she sings to Martim. It’s also the origin of the word “coconut.”
My friend Jane Haddam sent me a lot of information about her tour of the Capela dos Ossos in Évora that didn’t make it into the book, but her thoughts on the medieval nature of the cult of bones and her notes on the form of Catholicism in Portugal, as well as the practice of crawling to the shrine of Fátima, the angle of the roads in Lisbon, and the insanity of the city’s drivers, did. I also got some excellent help from Reverend Richenda Fairhurst about the memorial day of Saint Jerome and saints’ days in general, as well as the difference between a “feast” and a “memorial,” which was very helpful. The doll hospital in Lisbon I found for myself. And I found the information about shipping bodies on the National Funeral Directors Association’s Web site—who knew there was a special box?
I had to fake it with a lot of information, since I was writing as fast as I could and quite a few things got cut from the initial draft—like the history of Lisbon during the Second World War, references to the film Casablanca, the writers and publishers of Crimespree as incidental characters, and the revelation of Quinton’s favorite superhero. I didn’t remember to ask my mother-in-law about field amputations while she was visiting for Christmas, and ended up relying on the story my dad had told me about accidentally cutting off his own fingertip when he was a young man working in a factory in Oklahoma City for the instance of Harper losing hers. Gruesome, but survivable. And I relied heavily on Google Translate and some other online references for my initial translations of the Portuguese, since I dropped out of Portuguese language class to look after my mom and a dog. The translations were cleaned up later by a friendly expert to whom I owe anonymous thanks.
Carlos makes two Mark Twain references in this book—his quote to Maggie Griffin is from The Mysterious Stranger, and Twain was incorrectly reported to have said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” I couldn’t resist, since Samuel Clemens was my great, great uncle and I’m a huge book geek. I’m also very glad my friends at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop recommended A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson, The Lisbon Crossing by Tom Gabbay, and Five Passengers from Lisbon by Mignon G. Eberhart for local color and top-notch writing. Wilson’s book in particular was a great help in getting a better idea of the terrain and weather in Alentejo. Neil Lochery’s nonfiction book Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–1945 was also of help with political and social reference, and Lonely Planet Portugal had a lot of useful details about getting around and where to stay and what each area was like. I also read many online pages about Portugal from the CIA’s The World Factbook as well as terrible translations of city information guides for Carcavelos, Monforte, Campo Maior, Évora, Lisbon, and Vila Viçosa. And I spent a ridiculous amount of time culling the Internet for the worst possible news stories to come out of Europe from 2012 through early 2014 as background for the activities of the Ghost Division. Ugh. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; it’s more depressing.
Casa Ribeira and the Vale de Oliveiras are fictitious, but there are real turihabs in that part of Alentejo, facing tiny rivers that feed into the headwaters of the Tagus near the Spanish border. By all accounts it’s a hot, dry area of rolling hills covered in cork oaks, olives, vineyards, wheat fields, and marble quarries that, to my California-girl brain, sounded a lot like the high chaparral and high desert on the extreme eastern edge of my home state. I hope I got that right.
I apologize to the residents of Monforte and its surrounding area for fictionally setting their town on fire.
On a different note, my friend Maggie Griffin asked to be in the book and after reading the first draft she said, “I love it, but people will think you hate me!” So let me reassure anyone who thinks otherwise that I am very fond of Maggie and deeply in her debt for letting me turn her into the most evil mage in history. Yes, Maggie, Carlos has your heart, but you have a little piece of mine.
I’ve tried to catch all the mistakes and clean up the messes, but I’m sure I didn’t catch them all. Any errors remaining are all mine and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is unintentional (except where they said, “Sure, why not?”).
And now we’re done. This is the last Greywalker novel, at least for a while. It’s been a hell of a ride and I hope I haven’t left you too upset. Sorry about the leg, but I leave it up to you and your imagination to fill in the blanks as to what Harper and Quinton got up to next (until I can come back to this bit of my writerverse). Thanks for coming along on these adventures with me. I hope I’ll see all of you on whatever creative journey I take next.
If you would like photo links or more information about the locations and research I did for this book, I’ll be posting some on my Web site: katrichardson.com.