In the Night Room

Willy kneeling on the bed, rummaging in smiling concentration through her bag and offering various items of clothing for his contemplation: she had crammed a lot of stuff into that bag. Blouses, shirts, sweaters, underwear, dresses, skirts, and jeans were displayed to him for comment, then placed beside the suitcase on the bed. “I should wear something comfortable,” she said. “Especially since we’re going to spend all day in the car. How about this sweater and a pair of shorts?” She held up for his approval a little cream-colored cotton-and-silk sweater with long sleeves and a boat neck. It probably weighed as much as a packet of stamps.

“I’d love to see you wear that,” he said, and offered her a fragment of the mosaic she would eventually have to assemble. “Where’s it from?”

“Hmmm.” She held out the sweater, glanced puzzled at Tim, then checked the back of the collar for a label. “I don’t remember where I got it. The label says ‘Grand Street,’ but that must be the brand name. I don’t know of any shop called Grand Street.”

She could not remember where she bought the sweater because it had come into existence only at the moment she had opened her closet and pulled it from a shelf.

“I don’t either,” he said, “and I live on Grand Street.”

“In a loft?”

He nodded.

“That’s nice. I always wanted to live in a loft. If Mitchell Faber hadn’t scooped me up, I think I would probably have left the apartment I had on East Seventy-seventh and looked for a nice loft space downtown.” She began putting her clothes back into her case.

“Would you?” In a way that was quickly becoming familiar, she had surprised him. The woman who had appeared in his life exhibited certain subtle differences from her representation on the page. His Willy would never have thought to leave her Upper East Side apartment, but only because he had not understood her well enough. As he had seen in the bookstore, he had underrated his heroine.

“Sure, as long as I felt stable enough to move,” Willy said. “But I was feeling pretty well put together before Mitchell relocated me to Hendersonia. I mean, on the night I met him, I wasn’t all that secure, but in general I was recovering pretty well. Once I got to Hendersonia, though, wow, it was like I was in some weird slow-motion dream. I thought I needed Mitchell to protect me, and look how that turned out.”

“We’re going to have to keep an eye out for Mitchell,” Tim said, remembering again that Cyrax had written of a 2ble peril created by Kalendar’s merging with a 2nd Dark Man, a dark dark villain almost instantly to b in pursuit of yr lovely gamine.

“How much do you know about all that?” Willy asked him. “Mitchell, and Hendersonia, and Roman Richard and Giles, and the Baltic Group.”

“A surprising amount, considering that we’d never met until last night. Tom kept me pretty well filled in.”

“Boy, I never realized what a gossip he was,” Willy said.

“He knew I was getting very fond of you.”

“You were? Just from hearing about me?” She smiled at him, then closed her repacked suitcase and swung her legs down on his side of the bed. “How nice. What do you think, do I come up to your expectations?”

“You surpass my expectations,” he said.

“I do?” She slid off the bed, moved quickly across the gleaming dark floorboards, and slipped into his lap. Her body felt as if she were made of balsa wood and foam. She kissed him. “I don’t know about you, but what happened between us last night was extraordinary. People talk about out-of-body experiences, but I think my body left me. Talk about surpassing expectations! It was like some kind of religious experience.”

“Maybe it was a religious experience.”

“My whole body feels so light—really, I’ve never felt anything like it.”

For a time, he held her with the fierce protectiveness that came from the knowledge that he was going to lose her—as if in her lightness she would float away from him on the spot.

“You must have had thousands of women,” she said.

“Not really.” He smiled, although she could not see it. “Tom Hartland and I have a number of things in common. I haven’t had thousands of anything, but the people I have gone to bed with tended to be men.”

She was already looking up at him with a mixture of disbelief and astonishment. “You? But you—you’re not kidding, are you? You’re actually gay? You can’t be that gay, though. If you weren’t incredibly turned on, I have no idea of what’s going on, anywhere. You were like, I don’t know, like Zeus coming down in a shower of gold.”

She slid around on his lap, straddled him, and moved her head close to his and looked deep into his eyes.

“I thought so, too,” he said. “It was exactly like that. I’m astoundingly attached to you.” He spoke with all the frankness the moment would allow. “There’s a reason for all this, Willy, and you’re going to find out what it is.”

“I certainly hope so.”

She had taken his remark as an attempt at general encouragement. He said, “I’m not speaking loosely, Willy. You do have something to find out, and it’s extremely important.”

She pulled her head back. “Is this whatever Tom kept saying he had to tell me, only the time was never right?”

“No. They’re related, but what Tom was talking about is something else.”

“And you know what that was, that secret, or whatever.”

He nodded.

“So he told you, but he didn’t tell me?”

“Not exactly.”

She cocked her head. “What does that mean? Either he told you, or he didn’t. Which one was it?”

“He didn’t, Willy. It’s just something I know.”

“So this is like general knowledge? If I put in the right terms, I could look it up on Google?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“But now there are two big secrets. I don’t like this. It’s skeevy.”

Skeevy? Tim thought. Like agency, it was a word he would never use.

“What makes Timothy Underhill willing to risk injury, death, and imprisonment on behalf of a woman he just met? Why would he even consider driving her halfway across the country?”

“Timothy doesn’t feel he has much choice.”

He put his arms around her, and the moment of tension passed. They clung to each other as if they were stranded on a rock. Tim kissed her forehead, and she sighed and tightened her grip.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked.

“I guess.” She nestled into him, pressed the side of her head to his chest, drew in her legs. She weighed nothing, and her bones seemed made of water. “Will we get to Millhaven today?”

“I think so, yes. We’ll get to Indiana, then drive north. I want to get there in time to do a couple of things before the reading.” Also, Tim could feel Cyrax as though he were present in the room, and he was saying, Get to Millhaven, buttsecks, and do yr job! You caused this mess, now you SOLVE it! It was time for another fragment of the mosaic: Willy had to understand everything before they got to Millhaven.

“What was the name of your second-grade teacher?”

“Who cares?” She unhooked the bra she was wearing and tossed it toward her suitcase. “I don’t even think I remember.”

“Mine was named Mrs. Gross. I remember that, and I’m a lot older than you are. You should be able to remember her name, Willy.”

Willy closed her eyes and put her hands on the sides of her head. Her face tightened into a grimace. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think my second-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Gross, too. Maybe we had the same one. Did you go to . . .” Again, she squinched up her face and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. “Ahhh . . . Freeman? Lawrence Freeman Elementary School?”