In the night room Page 0,10

book come out. That’s the one you wanted to write when you started out, with everything perfect, no mistakes, nothing dumb, and all the dialogue and the details exactly right. People like me, that’s what we’re looking for. Investment? Don’t make me laugh. It’s the reverse of an investment. Once you find a real book, sell it to someone? Give me a break.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Tim said.

Kohle raised his hands chest-high in exasperation. “You guys are all the same. Ninety percent of the time, you’re just making things up. You act like a bunch of lazy, irresponsible gods. It wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t basically deaf and blind, too. You don’t listen.”

“What are you talking about?” Tim asked, unsettled by the sudden reappearance on his mental screen of his sister, April.

“If you paid more attention, your real books wouldn’t be all that different from the ones you wrote.”

Kohle seemed wetter than he had been earlier. Greasy moisture covered his sunken cheeks. His filthy sweatshirt was on the verge of disintegration.

“Jasper, I signed your books, and now I’m just about through with this conversation. But if these ‘real’ books exist, how come no one ever showed me one?”

“Authors can’t see them,” Kohle said. “I can’t imagine what the sight of a real book would do to one of you people—total meltdown, I suppose. Most people never get so much as a glimpse at a real book. The collectors manage to scoop ’em up almost as soon as they come out. Once in a blue moon, a reviewer gets a copy. That can be pretty funny. The reviewer flips out over some book that’s a piece of crap, and everyone wonders if he lost his mind. Come to think of it, that happened to one of your books.”

“One of my books was an overpraised piece of crap?”

“Yeah, imagine that.”

Smiling, Jasper Dan Kohle turned his head and watched rain bounce off the roofs of the cars inching down West Broadway.

“You didn’t happen to look through that window and see me eating breakfast in here. You didn’t just want me to sign a couple of books. Are you even a real collector?”

“I collect a lot of things,” Kohle said, amused.

“Why are you here, Jasper? If that’s your name.”

“Don’t worry about my name, Mr. Big-Time Author. Mr. Fifty-five Grand Street.” In his dark, greasy face, the yellow teeth crowded his mouth. “I yam what I yam, and that’s what I yam.” He pushed the books into the bag, pulled the wet hood over his head, and rushed through the door. Tim watched him vanish into the gray street. This hostile being was walking away with samples of his handwriting. Tim felt a flicker of disquiet, as if his signature bore his DNA.

8

The author of In the Night Room was grateful for the medal it had won and the money it had earned, but she had written her third book as an act of rescue, not a means of achieving recognition. Thanks to James’s various life insurance policies, plus the fortune the Baltic Group had paid him in income and bonuses during his lifetime, money, very much a concern during the writing of Fairy Ring and The Golden Mountain, had ceased to be an issue. Her husband’s death payments had underwritten the months she had spent in western Massachusetts under the care of Dr. Bollis and the quiet attendants never less than determined to give their charges what they needed: a comforting book, a comforting hug, or a comforting jab in the upper arm with a needle. Back then, nothing but bloody shreds seemed to remain of the once-familiar Willy. The bloody shreds were usually too limp and wounded to think about reassembling themselves. Her conscious life, the life of her spirit, had been murdered along with her family. For her first two months at the Institute, Willy had groped in darkness at the bottom of a well, grateful for the absence of light, too depleted to commit suicide. She was not wounded, she was a wound.

In Massachusetts, she had no visitors but visiting phantoms.

One day she walked into the dayroom, saw a familiar shape occupying a folding chair, looked more closely as fear moved toward her empty heart, and froze in shock at the reappearance in her life of Tee Tee Rowley, a flinty, sharp-fisted girl who, as ever, held her ground, scowling at Willy.

She had come from the Millhaven Foundlings’ Shelter, established in 1918 and everywhere referred to as either