In the night room Page 0,109

liked reading me when you were depressed, remember?”

She made a dismissive mmph sound.

“Do you want to know what I really do like?”

“Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar, Lily Kalendar.”

“I like the space between,” I said. “The space between dreaming and wakefulness. Between imagination and reality. Between no and yes. Between is and is not. That’s where the interesting stuff is. That’s where you are. You are completely a product of the space between.”

“Between is and is not?”

“Where they both hold true, where they become one thing.”

Evidently, this struck her. She faced forward and she kept her eyes on the windshield. She wasn’t going to look at me, but at least she had stopped looking away.

“That’s so stupid it might actually mean something. Still, I thought I was a real person, and it turns out all along I was only a bad Xerox.”

“That’s completely wrong,” I said. “You’re not even close to being a copy. You’re unique. Willy—”

“Holy shit,” she said, looking ahead.

I snapped my head forward again and, as we drifted through a turn, saw what Mercedes Romola had meant by “an interesting part of town.” The road we were on, and the houses that sprouted up on either side of it, went down into a huge, long, descending spiral that resembled the interior of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue. The top of the spiral must have been about two hundred yards across, and down at its bottom lay a grocery store, a movie theater, a bar, a library, a Gap, and a Starbucks around the edges of a little square with a bandstand. It brought to mind a Hobbit world; it was also very pretty. At night, it would have looked extraordinary, with the lights shining around the great swooping curves of the spiral. From the top, the scene suggested a terraced landscape with houses instead of vineyards. That the name of this area was Sundown I had always attributed to its location in the city’s far western reaches. Now I thought that if you lived even a little bit down on the curve, the sun would vanish early every evening.

The Huntress house, about a third of the way down, could have been in any older section of Millhaven. Three stories, dark wood, cement steps leading up to a small porch with a peaked roof: it was no more than a modestly upscale version of the houses on North Superior Street, but the setting gave it a slightly Brothers Grimm aspect.

I parked in front of the house and walked around to Willy’s door. “Admit you’re interested.”

Instead of responding, Willy rammed a Three Musketeers bar into her mouth. I hadn’t seen her pull it out of her pocket, which she must have filled when I was walking around the front of the car. A bright wrapper fluttered to the ground.

“Oh, Willy,” I said, and picked it up. “That’s beneath you.”

Around a mouthful of Three Musketeers, Willy said, “Do you think this lady is going to like you? This lady is not going to like you.”

I hauled her up onto the porch and pushed the bell. A minute later, a stocky woman with a purple cloud of hair and sharp eyes in a big, foursquare face that gave full justice to the mingled pains and joys of seventy-odd years opened the door and released the ghosts of a thousand cigarettes. She reminded me of the Pigtown women of my childhood who had worked on the line in one factory or another, down in the Valley.

We said hello to each other and spoke our names, and I introduced Willy as my assistant. Diane Huntress said something nice about Mercedes Romola’s approval and invited us into her house. It was not what I had expected, nor was she. What that woman said—for the ninety minutes she spoke of Lily Kalendar, it felt like she stopped time. Like Joseph Kalendar, Diane Huntress froze the cars on the street and the kids playing ball and the mailman puttering along in his cart, and anybody else who was in the reach of that smoker’s voice and the things it said. She certainly froze me. Willy never moved, either.

Tim Underhill walked amazed into a setting that declared its inhabitant a dedicated traveler of great taste and curiosity. Treasures adorned the walls and gleamed from the depths of cabinets: African masks and tribal figures; Chinese vases and Greek amphoras; Japanese scrolls; small, ornate rugs; a thousand little things that had been lovingly accumulated over decades. Part of the effect