In the night room Page 0,112

and lie down on the ground with her and hold her until she stopped screeching. I had to toilet train her, the way you do a three-year-old. We had messes I won’t describe, but they were awful. And, of course, she’d never been to school a day in her life, but when she came to see that I was going to stick with her no matter what she did, or how terrible she acted, she calmed down enough for me to get some textbooks and readers. The point was, I wasn’t going to leave her, and I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was just going to do everything I could to make her feel better.

At first, she was always running away! She’d slip out of the house when my back was turned and take off, but she was so terrified of everything, everything meant so much to her, that she could never get very far. I found her hiding behind the bushes, lying flat under cars. Weeping her head off. Terrified to go any farther, terrified of coming back. She’d scream her head off when I carried her home, but she clung tight, she didn’t struggle. No night room, she said, no night room for Wiwwy, and I’d tell her right back, Honey, we don’t have a night room, you don’t have to worry about it. So what was a night room?

Separately, Timothy Underhill and Willy Patrick felt a succession of shocks like that of an electrical pulse zigzagging through their bodies and, like a pinball, lighting up whatever it touched.

I called up Georgia Lathem, said Diane Huntress, and asked her, and what she told me just about peeled my scalp off. That terrible, terrible man built a horrible room onto his house, and he didn’t put any lights or windows in there, all he put in there was a big wooden bed! With, like, handcuffs on it, restraints. And to be frank, Mr. Underhill, he raped his little girl on the bed—that was his punishment for her leaving the house. Well, I knew she’d been abused, but I hadn’t known it had been as bad as all that.

You see, he didn’t want her to leave the house because he didn’t want anyone to know about her. She had no birth certificate, which gave us problems I’ll tell you about later. Officially, Lily Kalendar didn’t exist. He kept that child as his toy, Mr. Underhill, and he beat her and starved her, because that was his version of love. When I learned that, I knew I was in for a long siege, and so I was.

After a while, I discovered the one thing that calmed her down. I read to her. It was like I had a charm, like I waved a magic wand over her. When I sat down next to this raging little thing and started to read, it never took her more than a couple of minutes to quiet down, stick her thumb in her mouth, and listen to the story. Oh my God, she was so adorable then. I must have read the same ten books over and over a thousand times, Goodnight Moon and Ping and Make Way for Ducklings and The Runaway Bunny. I can still see her, lying on the floor with her chin in her hands, drinking in every word I said. Concentrating, concentrating, concentrating. When I saw that, I knew hope—hope can just about strike you dead, so you have to take care with it, but Lily’s ability to concentrate made me feel that sunlight had just entered a very, very dark room.

And the other thing was, she was smart. She remembered everything we read, word for word, and once we moved past those ten books, she really demanded that what we read was stuff worth reading. I tore through that little library my father established down there on Sundown Plaza. Six books every week, and Lily was pretty vocal about what she wanted me to read to her and what she didn’t. We had about six months when all she wanted were murder mysteries and horror stories! Now, I’m not saying that any of this went smoothly, because it certainly did not. Lily could spend days doing nothing but pouting or screaming or breaking things—she even screamed in her sleep. There were days Guy came home from work and looked at the mess and listened to the uproar, and I could see on his face he was wondering if