“Except for Tom Hartland,” I said. The building around me, the miles of books in that building, the cars and streetlamps on Broadway quietly held their breath.
Willy dropped her hands and gave me a look so overflowing with mingled relief and sorrow that it was all I could do not to take her in my arms.
“Did you know him?”
The walls of the building had not collapsed, the floor was still beneath my feet, and the traffic continued to move up and down Broadway. Everything and everybody breathed on, and so, with a breath of my own, I stepped deeper into the fiction I would eventually have to unmake.
“I knew Tom Hartland,” I told her. “And I know he was close to you.” For the moment, that was as far as I could go. “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”
She turned her head at the arrival within our charged perimeter of Katherine Hyndman, who broke in with an aggressive mimicry of harmless confusion that was clearly nothing of the kind.
“There seems to be some kind of problem,” she told Willy. “I can’t find your books. Nor can I find your name in our database. Where it ought to be, don’t you think?”
“I don’t understand,” Willy said. “Maybe you’re not spelling my name right.”
“B-R-Y-C-E P-A-T-R-I-C-K? Willy, W-I-L-L-Y?”
“That’s right, but—”
“And the title was In the Night Room? Which supposedly won the Newbery Medal?”
The expression on her face summoned Willy’s strength. “This is absurd. I have written three books. They’re all in print. The last one won the Newbery. If you don’t have my books on your shelves, you’re not doing your business very well, and if they’re not in your database, your computer needs to be brought up to date.”
Katherine turned to me. “I looked both in Books in Print and at the Newbery website—”
“I’m on the Newbery website!” Willy said. “What are you trying to say?”
“Ms. Hyndman looked in the wrong books,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
I grabbed the bag full of money with one hand and Willy Bryce Patrick’s elbow with the other.
When we reached the escalator, Willy a foot or two before me, she said, “I have to ask: how did you know Tom was dead? You said you knew him.”
I gestured for her to get on the escalator. When she did, she looked up at me and, both giving information and asking it, said, “You should know that the men who killed him are out there looking for me.”
“I know all about them,” I said. “You can pretty much take for granted that I understand what’s going on.”
“Tom called you on his cell phone, didn’t he? It’s so strange that he never told me he knew you so well.”
Instead of responding to that, I pulled out my cell phone, dialed 411, and asked for my publicist’s home telephone number.
“Who’s Brian Jeckyll?”
I shushed her. At home in Larchmont, Jeckyll answered. He was not entirely pleased to hear from me. Authors who call publicists, especially authors who call publicists who are at home in Larchmont, almost always want to complain about some fresh insult to their egos. Authors tend to be demanding, selfish, and easily wounded—just ask anyone in publishing. Brian Jeckyll became even less pleased with me when he heard what I had to say.
“You want to skip the reading in Boston and reschedule all those radio interviews? Are you out of your mind?”
“Probably,” I said. “And if I told you what is going on, you’d certainly think so. But what you have to know is that I’m going to drive to Millhaven, and I’m leaving tonight.”
In unison, Willy and Brian Jeckyll said, “Millhaven?” I was as surprised as they by what I’d said.
“I have that reading at New Leaf Books, remember, on Wednesday the tenth? My brother is getting married on Friday the twelfth, and I’ll stay over for that. Everything after the thirteenth can stay the way it is. And that’s about ninety percent of the tour you set up.”
In the end I agreed to do the most important of the radio interviews, scheduled for the morning of Thursday the eleventh, by phone from the Pforzheimer Hotel, which was where I always stayed when I was in my hometown.
Willy was staring at me the way a new immigrant stares at the Statue of Liberty. I opened my arms, let her step into me, and closed them around her. Nestled against me, her head resting on my breastbone, her arms embracing me light as foam, hair fluffed by the towel, shirt still damp enough to print dark stains on my own, was a person to whom I had given life. No matter how impossible the situation, here she was, as predicted by Cyrax, and I had to deal with her.
So I have these questions: can fictional characters live out ordinary human lives, or does their existence have a term of some kind? What happens when they die? Does their entry into our world mean that their histories are now part of our history? (What happened in the bookstore indicates that it doesn’t. Willy’s name isn’t in Books in Print, and her only Newbery Medal is the one I gave her.) And according to Cyrax, I have to take her back to Millhaven, but what am I supposed to do with her when I get there? Cyrax also said something about a great sacrifice—I don’t like this. It seems obvious, but I can’t stand the conclusion Cyrax seems to be leading me toward.
And my God, do I introduce Willy to Philip?
What else did Cyrax tell me? From what I remember, that I had created a second Dark Man and merged him with Kalendar—true enough, since I thought of Mitchell Faber as a sort of more presentable, less psychotic Kalendar.
My biggest question, though, was how I was to let Willy know exactly what she was. If she’d understood our relationship, her appearance in my life would have been even scarier and more unsettling than it was. As things are, I have to take care of her while slowly letting her figure things out.
“It’s uncanny, how much you remind me of Tom,” she said as we stood wrapped together to the right of the escalator on the ground floor.
“We had a lot in common,” I said.
“Look, Mr. Underhill, you have to tell me how you knew he was dead. You have to. It’s scary—can’t you understand that?”
“I sort of figured it out when I saw you.”
And she stepped in and abetted the lie I had just told her. “Oh, you were expecting him. No wonder you looked so dumbfounded. If you recognized me right away, he must have talked about me a lot.” A tremendous range of expressions crossed her face. “I’m still in such shock. I saw these two men who work for my fiancé, his name is Mitchell Faber—I saw these men, Giles Coverley and Roman Richard Spilka, running down the street, and Roman Richard had a gun, and right after I got into the taxi, he shot Tom. Tom’s blood got on my shirt. The cab took off, took off, it took off like a rocket . . .” She started to sob.
“I bet it did,” I said, and held her more tightly. My heart hurt for her; I felt like weeping, too.
“It just feels like I can trust you with everything . . . with anything. . . . You make me feel so much safer.”
“Good,” I said. “I want you to feel safe with me.” At that moment, I would have run into a burning building to rescue Willy Patrick.
“My fiancé killed my husband,” she said. “And he killed my little girl, too. How’s that for a nasty surprise? Mitchell Faber. Did Tom ever mention him to you?”
“Once or twice. But please tell me this, Willy: how did you get from . . .” I realized that I could not say 103rd Street, not now. “From wherever you were with your cab driver to here? It happened during that storm, didn’t it?”
“What happened doesn’t make any sense. They were chasing me, Giles and Roman Richard—they got out of Mitchell’s car and started running down the street—I got blown over, and I flew through the wind—and my feet hit the sidewalk right in front of your poster.”
That was the best answer I was likely to get: she was blown out of one world and into another. It must have happened when that gigantic thunderclap sounded—right after I did my dumb stunt and had everyone click their heels together. It occur
red to me that April had somehow opened a space for Willy, and that she had done it for my sake. In some sense, April had given Willy to me. Then I saw the hand, or at least the style, of Cyrax in all this, and wished I hadn’t.
“I felt like a leaf being shot through a tunnel.” Her body went extraordinarily still, as a bird’s does when it is cupped in your hand. “I was crazy for a while, you know. Maybe I’m going crazy all over again.”
Willy leaned back without losing contact. Her short, scrappy blond hair looked as though a Madison Avenue hairdresser had devoted hours to it, and her face filled with emotion. Early in my book, I had written that she looked like a gorgeous lost child, but I had not understood how beautiful she actually was. What could have been superficial prettiness had been deepened by sorrow, fear, intelligence, effort, imagination, and steadfast, steady application of her capacity for response and engagement. I knew that kind of work; I also knew that I had not done right by her. She was a more considerable being than I had taken her for. When I looked down at her face and into her eyes, I also understood part of the reason why I had to take her with me—this lost girl was supposed to be lost in Millhaven. Once I took her there, she was not supposed to come out again.
So I can never pretend, can never say, that I didn’t understand that from the beginning.
“I feel as though I’ve known you for the longest time,” she said. “Is that true for you?”
“Yes, like I’ve been living with you for months.”
Her shaggy head dropped to the center of my chest again, and she tightened her embrace around me. I could feel the tremble in her arms.
Then she released me and backed away. “You want to hear another weird thing? You’re the author I read when I’m—”
“Depressed?”
I had surprised her again. “How did you know that?”
“I hear that a lot. I’m literary Zoloft, I guess.”
She shook her head. “I don’t read you because you’re going to cheer me up. It’s another condition altogether.”
While I was speculating about what that might be, which included wondering why I did not already know, I noticed something related to the most important question I’d asked earlier, about the term of her existence.
“Willy,” I said. “Look at your shirt.”
She looked down. Her shirt had dried to the extent that her bra was no longer visible beneath it, and its color was the bright, unbroken white of a movie star’s smile.
“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.”