In the night room Page 0,110

was the implied knowledge that, for all their worth, these objects had been obtained at the lowest possible price by travelers who’d never had a lot of money to draw out of their purse.

On the way to the sofa where Mrs. Huntress wished them to sit, Willy set aside her unhappiness long enough to admire a small tapestry panel shining with silken threads.

Tim wandered past a group of photographs depicting Diane Huntress and a large man with a genial face dominated by a slablike chin standing in jungles, in deserts, before great monuments, beside canals and rivers, at the feet of snowy mountains, in hookah cafés, in crowded bazaars.

He turned to Mrs. Huntress. “Did you ever take Lily Kalendar with you on your trips?”

“As often as possible,” she said. “Here. Take a look.” She brought him to the far end of the group and indicated a photograph that must have been taken by Guy Huntress, for he was not in it. His wife, perhaps thirty years younger than the woman beside Tim now, stood planted in a meadow rimmed with hills that might have been in Africa. A little blond girl of ten or eleven peeked out from behind her legs with an expression of mingled fear and pleasure on her intense, radiant face that flew straight to the center of Underhill’s heart. To him, the child looked like an exposed nerve—the sensitivity he saw in her dark gray-blue eyes, the planes of her face, the tilt of her head, in even her sunburned skin, moved him nearly to tears.

“Lily hated to have her picture taken,” said her foster mother. “She simply refused, she wouldn’t do it. Maybe she inherited that from her father, because he was the same way.”

“I know,” said Tim, thinking of the black-coated figure silhouetted against the sky at the top of North Superior Street. “I hope that’s all she did inherit from him.”

Something shifted in the way she took him in: it was as if she were imitating the forthright stance in the photograph. “You really want to write a book about Lily, do you?”

Willy wandered up on the other side of Tim. She craned her neck forward and scanned the photo. When she spoke, her voice contained a slightly defeated tone. “She was amazing. I should have known.”

Mrs. Huntress gave her a bemused smile. “Well, you’re very lovely, too, you must know that. In fact, you’re so pretty, it almost hurts to look at you.” She turned again to Tim. “Sit yourselves down, I’ll get you some tea or coffee, and you can tell me about your book.”

In the end, seated on the firm Huntress sofa with a cup of excellent coffee before him, unhappy Willy steadily sipping from a glass of Coke, he could never be sure what Diane Huntress made of his confused description of the book he claimed to be researching. The word “tactful” turned up, as did “respectful.” As he blathered, he began to think that this was a book he could actually write, forgetting that he had no patience for the kind of detailed research it would involve. If he tried to write such a book, it would consist mainly of leaps into the dark, a number of them noticeably ungainly.

“I’m sure it’ll come into better focus when you’ve worked on it awhile,” Mrs. Huntress said. “I have to be completely honest with you and tell you that I don’t think you or anyone else should write a book about Lily.”

“Then you’re being very generous, letting me talk to you.”

“Lily isn’t going to do anything to stop you, so I think it’s my duty to see that you understand her as well as possible. If you want to talk to her in person, which she is willing to do under certain conditions, you’ll get an idea of the life she has now, but that idea won’t be good enough—it won’t be enough, period. She asked me to tell you that she’s willing to meet with you for an hour, but that nothing she says to you can be quoted in your book.”

“You don’t want me to meet her, do you?”

“Let me tell you about Lily Kalendar.”

Hearing those words at last, Tim sensed a movement on the other side of the room and glanced past Mrs. Huntress to see what it was. His heart stopped. In her Alice dress, April lay on a vibrant rug no larger than herself, her cheek resting on a hand, looking intently at him. Having