The original title of my first novel "Taken" was "Pirate's Child." I was pleased with the title. The name, I felt, made reference to the Pittsburgh Pirates (who figure in the story), to the baby trafficking crime that triggers and underlies the plot and also to the many instances of emotional piracy in the book.

I was surprised when the publishers told me I had to change the title. "People will think it's an adventure book. Ships! Pirates!" said my editor.

"But what about if it has a noir-ish cover?" I asked.

"No," she said, gently. "Marketing says readers still won't make the connection."

So, I was disappointed, but I began the work of re-hinking the title.

In a conversation with my agent, who said she liked verbs, I blurted, " 'Taken?' Something with 'taken?' "

"Taken," she said thoughtfully. "Taken. Yes. I love it."

And so the book was re-titled.

But a funny thing happened... one that makes me wonder at the power of words.

Quite simply, "Taken" was taken. The manuscript was stolen.

One day I got a call from my editor that the copy-edited manuscript was to arrive by mail which meant we were well on the way through the production process. The publishers pay someone, usually a freelancer trained as a copy editor, to mark up a typescript of the author's work with multiple notes and queries about usage, spelling consistencies, fact-checking, all kinds of things. Basically most authors want to kill themselves when the copy-edited manuscript arrives.

Not only does it amount to a ton of notes you'd rather not get when you're in the middle of writing something else, but sometimes, often, the copy editor, to be doing her job, questions many of your most considered decisions. You have a character say something unusual, colloquial, real -- oh, for instance, "It was mother's milk to my father." (Bad line, but you get the point.) The copy editor will write in tiny tiny script on a series of Post-its stuck to your pages an explanation that that is not how the expression is used. And you get to write back explaining the dependent relationship you were making a joke about, etc.

So, there's a lot of detail work, it's exhausting, and after you've answered a hundred questions, you start to doubt yourself. But there are worse things than getting the copy-edited manuscript. And in this particular case, the worse thing was not getting it.

I had a class to teach at 4. I worked at home all that morning and early afternoon waiting for the package to be delivered. I knew I needed to sign for it. But it didn't arrive and didn't arrive and I was itching to get to the office. I called my editor. She told me the package had definitely gone out for delivery and that she would run a check on it. An hour later she called back to tell me it had been delivered.

"Uh, no. Nothing has arrived."

The word from Airborne Express, she said, was that it had been delivered in the early afternoon to a red house with green doors.

"That's not our house," I told her. "Ours doesn't look like that at all."

She was flummoxed and so was I. I tried to contact Airborne Express myself but I couldn't get a person. All could do was punch in the tracking number my editor had given me and learn that driver for the company had logged my package as having been delivered.

I called my editor back. The editor for this book had always been kind, sympathetic, and nurturing. She tried for that tone, but she had frantic day running up and down through her voice. To think, I was probably only one of the things happening to her that day. She said as calmly as possible, "If it can't be found, it will have to be copy-edited all over again."

"Well," I said, "I mean, isn't there a copy?"

"We never copy the copy-edit."

"Oh."

"So I have to tell you, the truth is, they're telling me here it could mean a year's delay in the publication"

I was roused by that dire pronouncement to become ... a detective.

I went outside and did a quick survey of the front stoops on my street -- no evidence of a package. Then I walked one street over and found in the street paralleling ours a red house with green doors. And the house number was exactly the same as ours. I knocked on the door. I rang all the bells. I peered into the small foyer. Nothing.

I ran home and called Airborne Express. Again all I could get was a cheery message thanking me for choosing them. I left a long query and called my editor again. "I know where it was delivered, but I don't know who signed for it. Or why." I explained about the wrong street and the green-doored building that appeared to house a couple of apartments. "Do you have anybody who knows how to do an end run around voice mail to find out who signed?"

Her voice was leaden when she called me back. Further inquiry had produced these simple results: Left package at door.

"Oh, man," she said.

My husband, Hilary, arrived home from his teaching day while I was starting out to do mine. I told him my story of woe. "I'll do something," he said.

"What?"

"I don't know." With that, he darted down the street looking left and right.

I got into my car and went to the university, managed to park, got myself up the impossible elevators and into a room where I faced a late afternoon class of students no doubt thinking about dinner.

I didn't have my full concentration either. A year's delay, I kept telling myself, a whole year. It felt like death. I poured extra energy into the class session to keep myself going.

The phone in my office rang as soon as class ended. "Oh, have I got a story for you," my husband said.

"You found it?"

"I think it found me."

"You have it?"

"I will by the time you get home -- I think I will. I have to run."

Did I mention he's a very dramatic fellow? I drove home attempting to think positive thoughts. When I arrived, he wasn't there yet. But he got home soon after holding out an envelope that had been ripped open -- all the fuzz that makes up a mailing bag all through my manuscript. I examined the package like the parents buying a baby examine the baby in my novel and I found it was all there. All it's fingers and toes.

Here is what happened:

Hilary had darted down the street without his house keys. I didn't know. Nor did I guess he was going to be some time away from the house or that we had left the back door open.

While I drove to Pitt, he opened people's garbage cans, looked behind buildings, checked out the address where the package had been misdelivered, and finally went to West Park where he continued to examine the many trash cans. He distinctly remembered seeing an old geezer in the park practicing his golf swings. The old guy sort of waved at him and Hilary sort of waved back, then went on searching.

In despair, no manuscript found, my husband came home, discovered he had no keys, remembered the back door, and went around back where he looked with dismay at the gate for which he also did not have a key.

He somehow summoned youthful athletic detective energy and climbed over the gate, risking, as he told me later, the proverbial jewels. As he lurched toward the back door, he heard the phone ring -- my line. We don't usually answer each other's phone calls, but in this instance, he decided to do so.

"I'm looking for Kathleen George." It was an old man's voice.

"She's not here. Who's calling?"

"Well, I was practicing my golf swings in the park and I saw a ripped open package. It seemed important. Her name was on it, so I looked it up in the phone book. Do I have the right number?"

"Oh, yes. Where are you now? The park?"

"No, I came home."

"Where's that?"

The man named a residence hotel Downtown, the Roosevelt.

"What room number? I need to get that package."

"No, I can be on the street corner. How will I know you?"

"I'll pull up in front of the hotel. Black Volvo. What can I give you?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Are you a drinking man?"

"Sure."

"I'll bring you a bottle of wine."

And Downtown at a street corner, the exchange was made -- wine for package.

Who knows whether the old geezer who got the reward was also the original thief or if he had really rescued my manuscript from the park bench where he said he found it -- after some hopeful drug addict no doubt wailed his disappointment ("This is all? Pieces of paper? Sheesh").

Thus I had a happy reunion with my manuscript and all its copy-editing marks. "Taken" came out on time -- in 2001. All efforts of the literary sort seemed clearly small when planes flew into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

I learned subsequently that the word taken has its own story. Poets and Writers Magazine posted this notice: "Scholars at the U. of Michigan have completed the Middle English Dictionary, a 15,000 page lexicon of the English language during the period1100 to 1500. According to editor in chief R. E. Lewis, the tome took approximately 125 people working a total of 71 years to compile. The dictionary's longest entry, which runs 50 pages, is for the word TAKEN."

It has many meanings still, though it isn't the longest entry in the OED. (That honor goes to set or make.) "Taken. It's a lovely romantic and sexual word," Hilma Wolitzer writes in her novel, "In the Palomar Arms."

I came to love the word for its many reverberations. The new title replaced the old title in my heart.

My book was released. And so was another one with the same title. It was the book made from Steven Spielberg's TV series "Taken." I was bewildered the first time someone said to me, "Oh, I saw your book as a movie on TV the other night." I thought, "Am I the last to know?" But titles can't be stolen. They are like the air and the sky -- there for all of us.

I can't help wondering, though, about the magical power of words.

The newest one is called "Afterimage."