In the Night Room (21 page)

“Mr.
Davy
?”

“Listen to me, now,” said Mr. Davy. “For Mrs. Halleden’s sake, I am going to act against type. That lady not only never robbed a bank, she never did a wrong thing in her life. And that man in the parking lot is a scoundrel. When you hear a loud noise, or you see that blond-haired creature start to run out of the lot, leave your room. Three doors to your right, you’ll find a maid’s staircase that will take you down to the back of the hotel. Get in your car as quickly as possible and take off. Pay no attention to the fracas when you drive by.”

“The fracas?”

“Don’t worry about me.” He hung up before Tim could reply.

“Now what?” Willy asked.

Coverley was pacing beside Tim’s car, growing more impatient with every second. He pulled a yellow pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one with a match, and exhaled a plume of smoke.

“Giles
smokes
?” Willy sounded almost shocked. Every bit as startled as his beloved by this display of character treachery, Tim once again felt that loosening of the ground beneath his feet that occurred whenever Willy acted independently of the template he had made for her. An elegant character like Giles Coverley wouldn’t smoke, but here he was, puffing away anyhow, acting like a human being instead of a character in a novel.

Below, Coverley spotted something hidden from the occupants of Room 119 by the trees on the near side of the lot. He threw away his cigarette, gesticulated, pointed at the hotel, raised his arms in an angry query.

“Uh-oh.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

“Our friend Mr. Davy was counting on Roman Richard staying in the Mercedes. He was going to create a diversion, and I think this one-armed creep was supposed to play some kind of role in it.”

On cue, Roman Richard Spilka strolled into view, suit jacket slung over his left shoulder, right arm encased in a plaster cast supported by a broad white sling. He was making conciliatory gestures to Coverley, half-turning to nod at the hotel. Again, there was a slight disconnect between the way Tim’s characters actually looked and the way he had imagined them when depicting them on the page. Where Giles Coverley was slimmer, taller, and more decadent-looking than the man bearing his name in
In the Night Room,
Roman Richard was heavier, more solid, more obviously a thug. From the back, his close-cropped head resembled a bowling ball.

“You know he had a broken arm? Tom told you?”

“I guess,” said Tim, wishing he hadn’t mentioned it.

“That’s incredibly interesting.” Willy turned her head to look over her shoulder. A hint of suspicion darkened her eyes. “Tom knew that I knocked him down with my car, but he didn’t know about the cast until a minute or two before he was killed.”

“Then I knew about it some other way.”

“There is no way at all you could know about it,” Willy said. She turned her head back to the window.

Tim and Willy watched Roman Richard moving across the lot toward Coverley. Both of the men indulged in a good deal of pointing and arm waving. Whatever camaraderie they might once have enjoyed had shredded under their multiplying frustrations, and now they were just two guys trying to make the best of a bad deal.

Then two things happened at once: a good-sized explosion at the front of the hotel rattled their window and shook the pictures in their frames, and Roman Richard and Coverley looked at each other and sprinted off across the parking lot with the reflexes of former soldiers. Roman Richard had worked out a more efficient way to wear his pistol, which was in his hand before he disappeared beneath the trees.

Tim took Willy by the elbow, spun her around, picked up the bags, and pushed her into the hallway. Three doors down to the right, he opened a door marked
FOR STAFF ONLY
and clattered down the dark, narrow set of stairs with Willy close behind. A door opened by pressing on a metal bar swung out onto a little paved area with uncapped garbage cans lined up on both sides of a dumpster.

“What’d he
do
?” Willy shouted behind him.

The sunlight drenching the parking lot shimmered on the tops of the cars. Underhill pounded toward the Lincoln. He was only ten feet away when the button on his key ring unlocked the door, honked the horn, and made the lights flash.

“Get in and duck down,” he called, and heard her footsteps coming along behind him instead of separating off to the other side of the car, as he had expected. He grasped the door handle and asked, “What the hell are you doing?” But he was asking the air, and already understood that she was going to get into the back seat. She opened her door a fraction of a second after he opened his, and as he threw the bags inside and slid behind the wheel, he heard her climb onto the back seat and close the door behind her. The ovenlike heat made him pant; his skin instantly felt sandblasted. Blurry features and a flash of blond hair swam across his rearview mirror as Willy Patrick sank out of sight.

He turned the key and hit the accelerator. After a moment’s rumination, the big car shot across the lot and into the narrow, tree-lined drive that led to the front of the hotel. On the left-hand side, the drive widened into the entry court; on its right, it continued on to the street. Tim clicked his seat belt into place, and felt Willy pulling herself up on the back of his headrest.

They came around the side of the hotel into expanding chaos. On the lawn between the edge of the forecourt and the sidewalk, a ruined silver-gray car sent up six-foot flames from its shredded rear end. Uniformed hotel staff milled around the burning Mercedes. Most of them looked like college students. Tim glimpsed a familiar-looking boy in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and black hair staring at him in inexplicable annoyance. People from the neighborhood walked or trotted toward the front of the hotel. In the middle of the street, two boys on bicycles stared at the car in shared fascination.

Roulon Davy stood alone on the sidewalk, watching a pair of police cars race toward the hotel. Roman Richard and Giles Coverley had posted themselves on the lawn between Mr. Davy and their boss’s former vehicle, keeping an eye on the hotel while they watched the conflagration. Roman Richard’s back looked stony with fury, and Coverley’s slouch expressed an elegant despair.

“Is your head down?” Tim asked.

“Just drive,” Willy said, meaning that it was not, entirely.

At the moment the Town Car zipped past the short lawn and was a second or two from shooting into the street, Coverley’s blond head snapped sideways, and his spoiled face hardened in concentration. He followed the car’s progress as it sailed over the sidewalk and raced away down the block. In his rearview mirror, Tim saw Coverley step out in front of the police cars and watch them go. Behind him, the boy in the black T-shirt walked away from the scene: he had taken two long steps before Tim realized who he was, and why Roulon Davy’s “diversion” had been so successful. His forearms prickled; his scalp tingled.

“He’s talking to the cops, all right,” Willy said, kneeling on the back seat. “He isn’t even letting them go up to the car. I wonder what good old Roulon actually
did
?”

Thinking of WCHWLLDN throwing off his clothes, unfurling his great wings, and leaping into the vastness of the sky, Tim turned toward the middle of Restitution. Beyond its white houses and thick green hedges lay the long, long unspooling of the highway. Quick tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away before Willy could turn around.

“Pull over so I can get into the front seat.”

He drew up at the side of the street, and she got out of the rear door and advanced toward the side mirror and the passenger door. Just before her right hand moved out of the mirror’s range, Tim realized that from midpalm to the tips of her fingers, it was a gauzy haze outlined by the grass and sky behind it. Then the hand slipped from view, and the passenger door opened.

Willy threw herself into the seat. As she closed the door, he tilted his head to look at her right hand, which was small, intact, and solid.

“What are you looking at?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, and took a breath, remembering Mr. Davy’s double take.

25

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Good old 224 took us across the state of Ohio. Ohio is a big state, and we saw mile after mile of farmland. I didn’t see any suspicious-looking cars following us, but neither was I watching with any real degree of care. The police were my main concern, but the state troopers and local cops who had the chance to pull us over blew right on by.

“I still can’t figure out how Mr. Davy managed to create so much damage in so short a time,” Willy said. “You must have a guardian angel, or something.”

Then she started to complain about being ravenous again, and I said I would stop at the nearest thing that looked like a grocery store. “How can you have a grocery store when you don’t have a town? I’ve seen so many fields, I’m sick of the color green. But really, what did that man
do
?”

“Mr. Davy must have hidden talents,” I said.

“He’s not the only one. How did you know Roman Richard’s arm was in a cast? Tom didn’t tell you, so don’t lie to me about that.”

“Do you think I lie to you, Willy?”

“You’re not perfect, you know. You snore. You refuse to explain things to me. Sometimes you act like you’re my father or something. . . . Explain about the cast.”

I told her I couldn’t, and she went into a sulk. For the next fifteen miles of dead-ahead driving, Willy simply crossed her arms in front of her and stared out the window. It was like being with a grumpy twelve-year-old. I don’t think she paid any attention to the landscape. Of course, the landscape was nothing special. Once, a man on a tractor waved at us. Willy growled. She would rather have put a bullet in his heart than wave back.

“You could explain,” she finally said, “but you won’t.”

“Have it your way.”

“You’re the kind of person who likes secrets,” she said. “I hate secrets. Mitchell Faber
loved
secrets, so you’re like him.”

“Not really.”

“Okay, have it
your
way,” she said, and slumped back into angry silence.

Fives miles on, she said, “I can’t believe how hungry I am.” She placed her hands on her stomach. “I’m so hungry, it hurts.” For the first time in about half an hour, she turned her head to look at me. “By the way, although I am talking to you, we are not having a conversation. I am telling you something, and that’s different from having a conversation.”

A gas station appeared in the distance, and she pointed at it and said, “Pull in there. Pull in there. Pull in there.”

“You want me to stop at that gas station?”

Now her eyes were bright with fury. “If you so much as
try
to drive past that gas station, I’ll murder you, dump your corpse onto the road, and drive over it on my way in.”

I asked her what she thought she was going to get at the gas station.

“Candy bars,” she said. “Oh, God. Just the thought of them . . .”

When we approached the station, she gave me a dead-level look of warning.

“I could use some gas,” I told her, and turned in.

She had her hand on the door handle before I pulled up to the self-serve tanks. By the time I stopped, she already had a leg out the door. I watched her moving toward the low, white, cement-block building, where the attendant sat behind his counter. Willy was walking as fast as she could. As I looked on, she stopped moving so abruptly she almost lost her balance. She appeared to be staring at her right hand, which her body blocked me from seeing. Then she bent over to get a closer look.

This is going to shake things up,
I thought.

With the violence of a released force, Willy whirled around, held out her arm, and yelled, “Look!” For a second or two, the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand were transparent, and the last two fingers looked hazy and opaque. Then, without transition, her hand became solid again. Willy lowered it slowly, glancing from it to me—she had seen something in my response, and I would have to account for it—before she turned around again and walked, at nothing like her earlier velocity, into the station.

Gasoline pumped into the Town Car, and the numbers on the dial rolled upward.

In a couple of minutes, Willy popped out of the station empty-handed and came trotting toward me. Panic shone in her eyes. “Can you give me some money, Tim? Like twenty bucks? Please?”

I fished a twenty out of my pants pocket. She took it from me, then leaned forward and in a low, urgent voice said, “We’re going to talk about what happened to my hand. We both saw that, so it wasn’t some kind of optical illusion.
Right
?” This last word meant:
You know something, and you are going to let me know, too.

“Right,” I said.

She sprinted off, no longer able to concern herself with an abstraction like dignity, and I went back to pumping gas. When the tank was full, I moved toward the little white box of the station, expecting to see Willy come through the door carrying a bag containing twenty dollars’ worth of candy bars. She still had not emerged by the time I reached the entrance, and I didn’t see her at the counter when I walked in. The boy at the cash register had H. R. Giger tattoos on his arms and short, dyed-blond hair that he wanted to look artificially colored. Willy was puttering around in the aisles at the back of the store. The boy took his eyes off her to register my entrance.

“Hey, dude,” he said. “Is that girl with you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to the counter to hand over a credit card.

“Planning on a long trip?”

At the back of the store, Willy ducked out of sight. I heard the rustle of bags. Her head popped up above the top shelf, and my heart thumped in my chest at this sudden vision—Willy’s floating head. In spite of everything, all my love for her, which had been a bit subsumed under both concern and a kind of mild irritation, returned to me. She said, “I need more money. Come back here, Tim.” At least I had a name again.

She was trying to keep a grip on about a dozen loose candy bars, individual Reese’s Pieces, a container of Fiddle Faddle, bags of peanut M&M’s, and larger bags of potato chips. My arrival in her aisle caused a lot of Hershey’s bars to slither out of her grasp and land on the floor. Her hands seemed reassuringly solid, but her temperament was sizzling toward hysteria. “Shit!” she whispered to me, once again ducking out of sight of the attendant. “I’m so hungry I can’t hang on to this stuff.”

“Eat one now,” I said. “Save the wrapper, and we’ll pay for it later.” As I spoke, I started unwrapping one of the Hershey’s bars that had fallen to the floor. Before I finished, she tore it from my hands. The end of the bar disappeared into her mouth, and she bit off about three inches of almonds and milk chocolate.

“Oh, boy,” she said. She chewed with her eyes closed, and I could see some of the hysteria leave her. It was like watching her pulse slow down. “Dark chocolate would be better, but this is really, really okay.”

“I’ll get a basket,” I said, and in a moment was back beside her, tossing candy and junk food into a plastic supermarket basket. Willy squatted on her haunches, taking giant, irregular bites out of the Hershey bar almost faster than she could chew.

“Get me two more Score bars,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Those little deals are wicked, wicked good.”

“We should get some real food in you,” I said.

“Yeah, I need a meal. But for some reason, this crap is what I need most right now. That
lightness
is beginning to go away.”

“Do you guys need any help?” the boy called out.

Up at the counter, I unloaded the basket under the increasingly skeptical eyes of the tattooed boy. He dug one hand into his bleached hair and shook his head, half-smiling. I signed a MasterCard slip for $73.37, a nice palindromic number.

Willy was looking at me with a stony intensity that promised a serious interrogation as soon as we got back in the car, and I asked the boy about the nearest town that had both a decent restaurant and a library.

“A library?” Willy interrupted the boy’s response.

“Before we can talk, I have to show you something.” I folded the credit card slip into my wallet and picked up our bag.

“In a book?”

“In an atlas.”

“You still want to know about the library?” the boy asked. “Just stay on 224 out there all the way to Willard. Like the rat movie. It has a library, and you could eat at Chicago Station. They’re famous for their pies.”

“Ahh, pies,” Willy said.

Off we go to Willard, which turned out to be a lot nicer than I’d expected. Willard is the sort of place people would retire to, if they had any sense. Like all small cities, it’s on a human scale, and there is more to it than you at first imagine. The streets are spotless, the shop windows shine, and the people say hello to strangers. The only problem in Willard, by which I also mean the drive to Willard, was Willy Patrick. She gobbled down three candy bars in a row—another Hershey’s bar, a Mounds bar, and an Oh Henry!—while all but holding up a finger to let me know I wasn’t getting off the hook this time. Then she tossed the wrappers into the seat well, took out a packet of M&M’s, and while peeling it open said, “Now talk to me, lover boy. No games and no kidding around.”

“I thought that Hershey’s bar at the gas station made you feel better,” I said.

“It did, but it wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Don’t worry about me getting sick, or anything. I
need
this gunk, and as soon as I finish these M&M’s, I’ll have had enough. For a while. And then I’ll start feeling light again, and after that, well, I guess, after that . . .”

Her eyes narrowed; she aimed a finger at my chest. “And after that I guess I’LL START TO DISAPPEAR! I GUESS PIECES OF ME WILL SUDDENLY BE TRANSPARENT!”

She rammed four or five M&M’s into her mouth and chewed them furiously. A trickle of chocolate drool slipped down the left side of her chin. She smeared it away while keeping her eyes fixed on mine. She swallowed. “I looked at you, and you
knew
about it. It shocked the hell out of me, but you weren’t even all that surprised. You’d seen it before. So I guess this BIG SECRET of yours turns out to be that I am DISAPPEARING, and now I need an explanation!”

I took a deep breath and hoped we would soon be driving into Willard. “I did see it once before. Back in Restitution, when you were shifting into the front seat. All of a sudden, I could see through the top part of your right hand. I’m pretty sure Mr. Davy saw the same thing a little bit earlier.”

“And you didn’t
tell
me? You decided you needed another
secret
?”

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” I said.

She shook her head in disgust. “I just realized something—you’re weak. That’s why you didn’t tell me. You were afraid.”

“It kind of took me by surprise,” I said.

“Me, too! Don’t you think I would have
appreciated
being told about something like that? ‘Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you’re turning into a
window,
because I just saw right through the top of your right hand’?”

Willy balled up the empty M&M’s packet and threw it into the back seat. “And do you know something? I still want lunch. This isn’t about hunger, it’s about staving off the
lightness.
It’s like putting gas in the car, that’s what it’s like. Except when I run out of gas, I won’t be there anymore.”

She stared into my eyes with a complicated mixture of fear, bravado, desperation, anger, and trust that filled me with the impossible desire to hold her forever and keep her safe from harm. “How did this happen to me?”

That was her real cry from the heart. Although she was by no means ready for the truth, I had no choice but to answer in a way faithful to her trust.

“Do you remember the bloodstains you had on your shirt when you showed up at my reading?”

“Of course.” Because the blood had been Tom Hartland’s, the question irritated her.

“And you remember what happened to them.”

“They disappeared.”

“Bloodstains don’t just disappear, Willy. Not even bloodstains that go through a downpour.”

“So first the bloodstains, then me? Is that it?” She gazed at me for a moment, thinking. “Are you saying that Giles and Roman Richard are going to start to disappear, too?”

That, at last, gave me an opening I could use. I could have kissed her hand. “Think about this, Willy: why did you ask about
them
?”

She frowned. “They followed me.”

“Through what?
From
what,
to
what?”

Her frown deepened, and her eyes burrowed into mine. She leaned toward me, trying to remember every detail of that strange passage. “Through that thunderstorm. I thought I . . . It sounds crazy. I thought I was flying through a tunnel. Because they were chasing me, they came through the tunnel, too. I guess that’s what happened.”

“And on this side of the tunnel, Willy, do things look the same as they did on the other?”

We passed a little airport on our left, where prop planes sat outside hangars in the sun. I paused at a stop sign, then turned right on Euclid Avenue, waiting for her answer.