In the Night Room (19 page)

“What happened to Tom’s blood? It was right there!” She spread her neat little hand over the front of the shirt. “Where’d it go?”

“Good question.”

“Tom’s blood,” she said, and shock and fear rose to the surface of her face again. “I want it back. This isn’t fair.” She struggled with her emotions. “No. At least, this way I won’t be so conspicuous to the police. They’re after me, too.” She threw me a look of challenge, asking,
Are you up for this, pal?
“I don’t get it,” she said, staring back down at the brilliant white of her shirt. “I guess now I’m in Timothy Underhill’s world.”

I had to turn my head to keep her from seeing the tears in my eyes. “We’d better be sure your pursuers aren’t lurking outside when we get into the car.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Mine is in a garage on Canal Street. The one that’s going to take us there is parked right out in front.” She looked a little confused. “My publishers arranged for a car to pick me up and drive me home afterward. Brian’s very good about things like that.”

Willy gave me an odd, dark look. “You didn’t ask me why the police are looking for me. You didn’t even blink.”

Of course I could not tell her that I already knew about the falsified criminal charge. “Things have moved so fast, it never occurred to me.”

“I was accused of something. Bank robbery. It’s ridiculous, but the police are looking for me. I mean, I might as well go to Millhaven—I can hide out there until the charge is dismissed.” She sighed. “The evidence is a Photoshopped picture of me holding a gun on the bank president. It’s all a setup, but I do have a lot of money in that bag between your legs. If we’re caught, that won’t look too good, will it?”

I began to lead her out of the narrow passage into which I had drawn her and toward the door. “It might be misinterpreted. Let’s go up to the doors, and I’ll take a good look around. If everything seems safe, I’ll wave to you.”

She gripped my arm, nodded, and released me. “Make it fast. I don’t want to let go of you.”

Willy moved to the front of the store next to a case full of computer games, and I carried the long white bag through the tables and past the lounging guard. After I had pushed through two sets of doors and got outside, the air felt as though it had been washed, and the street and the pavement sent up that clean, stony fragrance that is one of the delights of city life. The black-suited driver of the Town Car leaned over the wheel and questioned me with a look.
In a minute,
I gestured. Something had occurred to me.

In its abruptness and violence, the storm had been far too much like the downpour over SoHo the afternoon I’d chased Jasper Kohle down Grand Street. The barrage of rain, all that noise and rampaging electricity, had expressed Kohle’s rage.

I believed, I
knew,
that he was hiding somewhere among the pedestrians across the street, in the entry of a Thai restaurant, behind a shop window, keeping his eye on me. I could feel his presence, the concentration of his gaze. I had a duty to perform, and if he could keep himself from killing me, he would insist on satisfaction. Kohle was the world’s most focused sasha. Probably his whole life had been a violation of the borders, an electrical storm, a thing of damps and shocks and visions.

Although I could
feel
Kohle, I could not see him; nor could I spot the terrible, displaced men in search of Willy. She was still posted by the window. I made a come-to-me gesture with my right hand, and in a second she was outside the store and moving quickly beside me, her hand in my hand, toward the Town Car. The driver scrambled out of his seat and around the back of the car.

“Can I take your bag, sir?” he asked.

“We’re going to keep this one,” I told him, “but please put the lady’s bag in the trunk.”

Willy and I sat in the roomy back seat of the Town Car with the white bag between us like a big dog. At least, I thought, we wouldn’t have to worry about leaving a credit card trail. The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror and said, “Are we going directly back to Grand Street, Mr. Underhill?”
For a little roll in the hay with your attractive female admirer?
he meant.

“No, we are going directly to the Golden Mountain Parking Garage on Canal Street,” I said. “Please tell me if you have the feeling that we’re being followed by . . .” I caught myself just in time, and questioned Willy with a sideways look.

“A silver-gray Mercedes sedan,” she said. “With two men in it.” Her two-second pause radiated hesitancy. “It sort of
shivers
when it moves, it sort of
glides.
”

“I’ve seen cars like that,” said the driver. “I always figured athletes were driving ’em.”

As we drove south through the city, Willy kept alternating between making comments to me and turning to look through the rear window. “I can’t
believe
you knew who I was as soon as I came up to you.”

Nor should you,
I thought.

She looked back at the endless, shining traffic writhing down Broadway. “I guess Tom called you when he went out to find us a cab. And he never told me he knew you!”

He didn’t know he knew me.

“And the first thing I see after I get blown through the tunnel is a poster with your name on it! Don’t you find that kind of staggering?”

More than you can imagine.

“We’ll stay together when we get to Millhaven, won’t we?”

I nodded, thinking,
Just like you and Tom at the Milford.

“I want to tell you something else.” She gave me a look full of worry about my reaction to what she was about to say. “In the past couple of days, a really disturbing thing has been happening to me. Whole hours, usually transitions of some kind, are sort of deleted from my life. They just don’t happen. I get in a car and drive out onto the street, boom, instantly I’m at my destination. Sometimes I don’t even get
out
of my car, I’m already in a building, talking to someone.” She placed her hand on my wrist. “Listen, I’m probably falling apart.”

“This started happening a couple of days ago?”

Another prolonged backward look. “I think so. But you know? Maybe it’s been going on for a long time, and I just became aware of it. It’s like having whole parts of my life
skipped over
—it’s not like they were deleted, but like they never happened.”

“We could take you to a doctor, have you examined.”

“It’s not happening now, though, and this is just a transition, isn’t it? We’re going to pick up your car, that’s all. Maybe you cured me!”

If a bloodstain fades away in about an hour, how long does it take a human being to disappear?

“Oh my God, I have to tell you about how I really got this money—and the picture of Jim Patrick’s body—and how I escaped from the house on Guilderland Road—and my poor baby—and the Baltic Group—and . . .” She fell back against the seat and leaned her head on my arm. Her mouth was open, as if she had been struck dumb by the immensity of all she had to tell me.

“In time, Willy. I already know some of it.”

“That’s so, so strange,” she said. “Of all the writers in all the bookstores in all the world . . .” Willy held out her hand, and I took it. “And I had this terrible feeling of being manipulated, of being shoved around like a marionette and forced to do all these things I wouldn’t really do. Can you imagine?”

She turned around again, pulling her hand from mine, looked out at the traffic, and gasped. Her head went down, and she slid to the edge of the seat to peer out. “I think I saw them! Tim! They’re back there!”

“Did you see anything?” I asked the driver.

“Not a thing,” he said. “But I can’t be lookin’ in my rearview mirror all the time.”

Willy moaned. “Ooooh, I can’t be sure. How could a car like that be blown through a wind tunnel, anyhow?” She slipped to the floor and kneeled in the seat well, with her arms resting on the cushions. “Tim, I know this isn’t fair, but what we’re doing now makes me feels like a puppet, too. I mean, why am I here, in the back of this limousine—with
you
? I never met you before tonight, and the second I lay eyes on you, it’s like you’re the most important person in my world. It makes a lot more sense that Giles and Roman Richard should be looking for me than for you to be helping me get away from them. But here I am, and there you are, and we’re about to drive to Millhaven!”

“Doesn’t that seem the right thing to do?”

“That’s what’s so screwed up!”

“That it seems right?”

“That it seems right because
you
said it was what we were going to do. It’d be the same thing if you said we were going to, I don’t know, anywhere. Charleston. Kraków. Chicago. My sense of agency seems a lot more doubtful than it should be. And you? You seem to take all this for granted!”

My sense of agency?
I wondered. This is not the sort of expression I ever use.

“Willy, I have never taken anything, at any time, less for granted. The whole world seems like one vast confusion, and everything is out of place.”

“Mr. Underhill,” said the driver. “I’m pretty sure that Mercedes you asked me to look for just cut in, about four cars back.”

“Oh, crap.” Willy grabbed my hand and tried to shrink down into invisibility.

“Get rid of them,” I said, and the driver squeaked through the last of a yellow traffic light at the next corner and for ten minutes zigzagged from street to street until he came to Ninth Avenue, where he turned south again. He drove with the bravado of a getaway man, shouldering his big car through gaps that did not exist until he created them and shooting through red lights at clear intersections. Every now and then Willy peeked out at our wake, and I kept a steady lookout. The Mercedes ducked into view a couple of times, always in the midst of an awkward spot—caught in gridlock, blocked from a turn by a huge double-jointed bus, stalled by a wave of people moving across the street.

When we got to Canal Street, the driver said, “I think we’re winning, Mr. Underhill. I haven’t seen them for ten, twelve blocks.”

Willy thanked her god, and I thanked mine. When we pulled up in front of the Golden Mountain garage, I tipped the driver fifty bucks. A car just like the one we had left came down the ramp, and we got in, and with Willy Bryce Patrick beside me I drove across the Hudson River in a night suddenly glittering with a thousand points of distant illumination.

I
might
have seen Mitchell Faber’s sharklike vehicle emerging from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it is possible that just before she fell asleep, Willy spotted it coming over a hill about half a mile behind us. That’s why I made a quick tour of the parking lot before going back to our room.

We are in Room 119 of the Lost Echoes Lodge, located nine or ten miles from the freeway in Restitution, Ohio. We’re a long, long way from New York. It would be a miracle if they found us here, and I don’t think they will. There has already been a kind of miracle in the Lost Echoes Lodge, and one is enough.

I had been going to take two adjoining rooms, but Willy told me there was no sense in throwing money away, and besides, she had no intention of sleeping alone this night. “I want a warm body beside me, and since Tom is dead and we don’t have a golden retriever, you’re elected,” she told me.

We were still standing outside the lodge, taking in the astonishing structure before us. It looked like an infinitely ramifying Bavarian hunting lodge built in the 1920s for a timber millionaire. Gewgaws and rickrack ornamented the facade, which included complicated turrets and window embrasures. Every inch of the building seemed to be decorated with something, giant ivy sprigs carved from a dark wood, wooden ducks in flight and owls on branches, big clamshells half-embedded in cement. Once every sixty minutes, a giant cuckoo should have popped out of the heavy, cross-braced front door. Warm light shone through most of the windows. Dense trees edged in from the near side of the parking lot and crowded the back and sides of the building.

When we checked in, the desk clerk (a sweet little man named Roulon Davy, who turned out to be the owner of the Lost Echoes Lodge) nodded at our request for a room overlooking the parking lot, signed us in under the first name that came into my head, accepted a cash payment for one night, and led us up to Room 119.

“Most of our folks want a forest view,” he said, marching past the enormous bed to reach the set of windows at the far end of the room, “but if you fancy a prospect of the parking lot, here it is.” He pulled aside the heavy brocade curtains and let us look out. Over the tops of the trees, we could see the back half of the lot. Beyond it, thousands of trees blanketed the side of a steep hill.

Willy yawned. “Sorry. I can’t stay awake much longer.”

The little man twinkled to the middle of the room—there is no other way to describe his retreat. It looked like tap dancing, but his feet barely touched the floor. “Then, Mr. and Mrs. Halleden, I beg you to enjoy the perfection of your bed, the pleasures of your dreams, and the company of one another.”

He saluted us and was gone before I could offer him a tip.

“Methinks our gracious host is of the fairy folk,” Willy said.

“No,” I said, “I’m of the fairy folk.”

“Then let’s get in bed and be brother and sister.” She yawned again, and stretched her back. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever seen. “You want to go in the bathroom first? You can use my toothbrush, if you like.”

I went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush; then she went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush. There was no top sheet on the bed, only a soft, daisy-patterned comforter that seemed to tuck itself around my shoulders. The bed felt cool, slightly yielding, unconnected to anything as solid as the floor.

Willy’s head poked out of the bathroom door, and she laughed at the sight of me. “You look pretty good, for an old dude. Or shouldn’t I say that?”

“Keep talking. Everything you say surprises me.”

“Lights out.”

The switch for the overhead light was between the bathroom and the door, and I saw a bare arm and a bare leg emerge into the room as she reached out. Her hand found the switch, and the room filled with purple shadows and silver moonlight. A small, pale body with white strips across its chest and beneath its smooth belly slid through the bright darkness and slipped into the bed.