and what indisputably had been Broadway was no more. Like a cork in rapid water, Willy shot forward, accelerating with every heartbeat. Borne along by a great force, she seemed to cover great distances in her skidding flight down the canyon made of darkness, wind, and rain. An incandescent vibration took hold of her and rattled her until she felt battered and limp. The world darkened and contracted, then expanded into a brief, brilliant burst of light and threw her forward like a rag.
Then again she was in the world of big buildings with lighted windows, and her feet skidded across solid pavement. She realized she was upright again, her legs beneath her. Momentum staggered her forward through the monsoon downpour toward the brightest window in sight, one of a row on the ground floor of a supersized Barnes & Noble. A great many books hung in the window, as did a modest placard featuring a photograph of an author who was scheduled to read from his work.
Beneath the photograph was printed:
The author she read when depressed seemed almost ridiculously appropriate for her circumstances. She needed to get out of the rain. She needed to sit down and recover, to the extent recovery was possible, from Tom’s murder and her extraordinary flight through the darkness and the wind. Her head felt as though it was literally spinning, and the center of her body seemed still to be traveling at great speed through a kind of cosmic rabbit hole. It was the only time in her life that Willy Bryce Patrick had ever felt she had anything in common with Alice in Wonderland.
She wobbled to the door, barely able to see through the curtain of water, and realized that she did not know if Coverley and Roman Richard had followed her through that violent passageway. Her final, most comforting thought before getting out of the rain was that a bookstore reading was the last place Mitchell’s henchmen would think to look for her.
On the other side of the revolving door, a security guard in a blue blazer looked her up and down. Water streamed down her legs and pooled on the carpeted floor.
Willy said, “The Underhill reading?”
“Second floor, top of the escalators, turn right. First, though, you might want to go through the children’s section and dry off in the ladies’ room.”
“Thank you.” Willy smiled at him and stepped backward out of her puddle. Water continued to slide off her hair, her clothes, her legs.
“Please tell me that’s not blood on your shirt, ma’am.”
“Just stage blood,” Willy said, forcing a brighter smile, and moved smartly toward the escalator.
In the bathroom, she peeled off her blouse and rubbed little paper towels over her arms, neck, and torso. Her jeans were so wet that to remove them, she had to yank down and wriggle at the same time. She swabbed her legs with paper towels that turned dark and useless. When she had done as much as she could, she still looked like a drowning victim, but a more recent one. Willy pulled another handful of sheets from the dispenser, gave her face a last blotting, and left the bathroom.
A winding path through the bookshelves brought her to the reading area, where she collapsed onto an empty chair and peered at Timothy Underhill through the space between the heads of an emaciated hippie boy and a roly- poly hippie girl. Underhill was leaning on the podium and calling for questions. The sight of this middle-aged man at the other end of the reading space had a startling effect on her. Immediately, she felt as though everything that had happened to her during this terrible day had been designed to lead her precisely to this point, and she had somehow come out at the place where she was all along intended now to be. That place—and the utter weirdness of this circumstance can hardly be expressed—was in the proximity of Timothy Underhill, a novelist she liked, pretty much, but whose concerns seemed to speak to her most clearly when she wasn’t feeling all that great. Timothy Underhill, it came to her, had something to give her; he had something to tell her; he would draw a map that she alone could read. What gripped Willy as she peered at Tim Underhill through the gap created by the heads and bodies of the people in front of her was the loony conviction that without this man she would be lost.
He looked at her—their eyes met without any particular urgency—looked away, and said, “You, sir,” to a bearded man who asked a boring question about getting published. While Timothy Underhill answered the man’s question with a series of anodyne banalities, he glanced back at Willy, this time with real interest and something like recognition in his eyes. A lot of questions followed, and as Underhill answered them, now and then moving his hands through the air, sometimes laughing at himself, he kept glancing back at Willy, as if to reassure himself that she was still there.
After the question period, a knot of people surrounded Underhill and the podium. Willy stayed pinned to her seat. She did not know what she would say when her time came, but she did know that what she would say had to be private.
He reminded her of Tom Hartland, she realized. Fifteen to twenty years older than Tom, a little heavier, shaggy hair going gray, Timothy Underhill did not so much look like her friend as suggest him. Much more than Tom, Underhill had the air of having
Underhill shot her another look, and she thought, No, there’s more to it than being reminded of Tom. It’s
Underhill whispered to the young woman who seemed to be in charge of the event, who then approached her with tactful concern, sat down beside her, and asked if she needed any help.
“I’ll get you a towel from the back of the store,” the woman said, and went off. When she returned with a big red towel printed with GREAT BEACH READING FROM GLADSTONE BOOKS!, Willy threw it over her head and rubbed her head until both her hair and her scalp felt as though they might at last be dry, mostly. She pulled the towel off her head and ran it over her arms. Her shirt no longer stuck so conspicuously to her body. Like watercolor on wet paper, the blood spatter had softened and fuzzed out, and now had an almost Manet-like quality.
When the last person in the line had reached the desk, Willy stood up and carried her bags down the row of empty chairs. The woman in charge sauntered up to her and asked if she wanted to have a book signed.
“Not really,” Willy said. “It’s just that . . . I want to meet that man.”
A look of concern marred the perfect face. “You’re not going to cause any trouble here, are you?”
“None at all,” Willy said.
The wonder held out a small, smooth hand with sparkling nails. “I’m Katherine Hyndman, by the way. Community relations. I’m the person who invited Mr. Underhill here tonight.”
“Willy Bryce Patrick,” Willy said, expecting to see a spark of surprised recognition. None came. “I write YA novels. One of them won the Newbery Medal.
“In the what?”
“
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I know it. But, I gather you want to speak to Mr. Underhill author to author.”
“Pretty much.”
“It looks as though you’ll have your chance fairly soon.” They both looked at the signing table and the disheveled old man standing before it. While stuffing a good many Timothy Underhill books back into an old suitcase that resembled a battered clamshell, he was ranting.
“Book collectors,” said Katherine Hyndman. “When they come out of the woodwork, you never know what to expect. We’ve seen some of the strangest people, I mean really the
She smiled at Willy. “I’m surprised that I don’t know your name. We do a great YA business in this store, and I do my best to keep up with all the authors. You know what? If you won the Newbery, we have multiple copies of your books. Would you mind signing some of them? I’ll just run over to the children’s section and bring you a nice little stack, all right?”
Willy had been fearing that her new friend Katherine would intrude herself into the conversation she had to have with Tim Underhill, and she embraced the opportunity of sending her off to another part of the store.
