In the night room Page 0,65

Her suitcase weighed little, but the bag of money dragged at her right side. All of the sky split into incandescent, swiftly moving bolts of lightning. Thunder exploded overhead and echoed off the buildings on both sides of Broadway. Everywhere, people began to run.

Bulletlike rain shattered down. Instantly, Willy was soaked to the skin. Then her right foot skidded out before her, and she felt her balance begin to go. Inevitably and with shocking swiftness came the moment when her body obeyed gravity, not her will. She readied herself for a rough landing. Both of her legs unfolded before her. Instead of hitting the sidewalk, Willy felt herself propelled, supine and feet-first, along the Broadway sidewalk, which had become a canyon of roaring wind and slashing rain. She was passing through the canyon, and what indisputably had been Broadway was no more. Like a cork in rapid water, Willy shot forward, accelerating with every heartbeat. Borne along by a great force, she seemed to cover great distances in her skidding flight down the canyon made of darkness, wind, and rain. An incandescent vibration took hold of her and rattled her until she felt battered and limp. The world darkened and contracted, then expanded into a brief, brilliant burst of light and threw her forward like a rag.

Then again she was in the world of big buildings with lighted windows, and her feet skidded across solid pavement. She realized she was upright again, her legs beneath her. Momentum staggered her forward through the monsoon downpour toward the brightest window in sight, one of a row on the ground floor of a supersized Barnes & Noble. A great many books hung in the window, as did a modest placard featuring a photograph of an author who was scheduled to read from his work.

Beneath the photograph was printed:

TONIGHT 8:00

TIMOTHY UNDERHILL

READING FROM LOST BOY LOST GIRL.

The author she read when depressed seemed almost ridiculously appropriate for her circumstances. She needed to get out of the rain. She needed to sit down and recover, to the extent recovery was possible, from Tom’s murder and her extraordinary flight through the darkness and the wind. Her head felt as though it was literally spinning, and the center of her body seemed still to be traveling at great speed through a kind of cosmic rabbit hole. It was the only time in her life that Willy Bryce Patrick had ever felt she had anything in common with Alice in Wonderland.

She wobbled to the door, barely able to see through the curtain of water, and realized that she did not know if Coverley and Roman Richard had followed her through that violent passageway. Her final, most comforting thought before getting out of the rain was that a bookstore reading was the last place Mitchell’s henchmen would think to look for her.

On the other side of the revolving door, a security guard in a blue blazer looked her up and down. Water streamed down her legs and pooled on the carpeted floor.

Willy said, “The Underhill reading?”

“Second floor, top of the escalators, turn right. First, though, you might want to go through the children’s section and dry off in the ladies’ room.”

“Thank you.” Willy smiled at him and stepped backward out of her puddle. Water continued to slide off her hair, her clothes, her legs.

“Please tell me that’s not blood on your shirt, ma’am.”

“Just stage blood,” Willy said, forcing a brighter smile, and moved smartly toward the escalator.

In the bathroom, she peeled off her blouse and rubbed little paper towels over her arms, neck, and torso. Her jeans were so wet that to remove them, she had to yank down and wriggle at the same time. She swabbed her legs with paper towels that turned dark and useless. When she had done as much as she could, she still looked like a drowning victim, but a more recent one. Willy pulled another handful of sheets from the dispenser, gave her face a last blotting, and left the bathroom.

A winding path through the bookshelves brought her to the reading area, where she collapsed onto an empty chair and peered at Timothy Underhill through the space between the heads of an emaciated hippie boy and a roly-poly hippie girl. Underhill was leaning on the podium and calling for questions. The sight of this middle-aged man at the other end of the reading space had a startling effect on her. Immediately, she felt as though everything that had happened to her during this terrible