In the night room Page 0,104

place. Some of them take souvenirs, can you believe that? Souvenirs! Well, the taxes aren’t being paid anymore, and the neighbors stopped cutting the lawn, and now you get these disaster ghouls wandering around. Because of all that, there was a petition to raze the place, and it went through.”

“How do you feel about that?” Tim asked.

The grim satisfaction visible in Philip a moment earlier hardened into a darker, flintier emotion that had nothing to do with pleasure. His face tightened; his eyes fired darts. Every bit of grief and rage he had been holding down leaped upward within him, and Philip became a little frightening. “You know how I feel about that? I’d like them to demolish that place, turn it into splinters, set the splinters on fire, and shoot the ashes into outer space.”

He glared at Tim as if awaiting a challenge.

“After that, I’d like guys with shovels and nets to dig up every inch of ground over there and sift through it, just in case they might have missed anything. They’d dig right down to the subsoil, six feet, eight feet, and sample everything. Then you’d have this big rectangular hole in the ground. It would look like a mass grave, which is exactly what it would be. I’d fill it with gasoline and set fire to it, that’s what I’d do. I’d have a big, purifying fire, a tremendous blaze. When it burned out, I wouldn’t care anymore—they could bulldoze all the earth back into the scorched hole and turn it into a gerbil farm.”

Philip stood extremely still for a moment, contending with the emotions he had just unleashed. A little stiffly, he turned to Willy. “Excuse me, young lady. My son’s body was never found. It might have been buried over there. It probably wasn’t, but it might have been. God is helping me through this time, but every now and then the situation gets the better of me.”

“I’m so sorry about your son,” Willy said. “I thought I lost a child, too, so I have some idea of what you have been going through.”

“Your child was returned to you?” Philip asked, his interest engaged. “Unharmed?”

“Yes,” Tim quickly said. “Willy was very lucky.”

“My god wasn’t very helpful,” she said. “My god seemed to make things worse.” She patted the pocket where she had stuffed the candy bars. “Is there a bathroom on this floor?”

Philip told her how to get to the bathroom next to the kitchen. When she had left the room, he turned to Tim with an expression that seemed poised between appreciation and accusation. “Tim, how old is that girl, really?”

“Thirty-eight,” Tim said.

“That can’t be true. She’s somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five.”

“That’s how she looks. She’s still thirty-eight.”

Philip appeared ready to dispute this assertion, but he let it go. “You met at a reading? And you volunteered to drive her here? You don’t do things like that. What did she say to you?”

“It wasn’t anything she said, Philip. Call it a whim.” Tim regretted bringing Willy to Superior Street. He had known introducing her to his brother was a terrible idea, yet he had done exactly that, and now he had to deal with the results.

“I can’t ignore the evidence of my senses. You show up here with this stunning young woman who acts like a kitten around you, and with whom you, supposedly a middle-aged gay man, obviously have some kind of erotic connection, and I’m supposed to ignore that?”

Tim improvised. “Okay. Willy is Joseph Kalendar’s niece—she was his brother’s daughter. That’s why she went to my reading. And I thought I should bring her here for a lot of reasons. Something happened, and we clicked. Right away, there was this great attraction between us.”

“You’re actually sleeping with her?”

Tim could not tell if Philip was aghast or thrilled. “Philip, in all honesty, this is none of your business.”

Philip was not to be deflected. “I work with teenagers. I can tell when people have been going to bed together. You’re having sex with Joseph Kalendar’s niece. You and Willy, you remind me of teenagers.”

“We’re very fond of each other.”

“I’ll say,” said Philip.

Both of them heard the closing of the bathroom door. “Have you any idea of what you intend to do with this relationship?”

“I wish I did.”

Entering the room, Willy sensed a measure of the intensity that had just flared. “Hey, guys, what’s going on?”

“I was just telling my brother that he’d better take good care of you,” Philip said. “If he doesn’t,