In the night room Page 0,66
day had been designed to lead her precisely to this point, and she had somehow come out at the place where she was all along intended now to be. That place—and the utter weirdness of this circumstance can hardly be expressed—was in the proximity of Timothy Underhill, a novelist she liked, pretty much, but whose concerns seemed to speak to her most clearly when she wasn’t feeling all that great. Timothy Underhill, it came to her, had something to give her; he had something to tell her; he would draw a map that she alone could read. What gripped Willy as she peered at Tim Underhill through the gap created by the heads and bodies of the people in front of her was the loony conviction that without this man she would be lost.
He looked at her—their eyes met without any particular urgency—looked away, and said, “You, sir,” to a bearded man who asked a boring question about getting published. While Timothy Underhill answered the man’s question with a series of anodyne banalities, he glanced back at Willy, this time with real interest and something like recognition in his eyes. A lot of questions followed, and as Underhill answered them, now and then moving his hands through the air, sometimes laughing at himself, he kept glancing back at Willy, as if to reassure himself that she was still there.
After the question period, a knot of people surrounded Underhill and the podium. Willy stayed pinned to her seat. She did not know what she would say when her time came, but she did know that what she would say had to be private.
He reminded her of Tom Hartland, she realized. Fifteen to twenty years older than Tom, a little heavier, shaggy hair going gray, Timothy Underhill did not so much look like her friend as suggest him. Much more than Tom, Underhill had the air of having survived something at which she could not even guess.
Underhill shot her another look, and she thought, No, there’s more to it than being reminded of Tom. It’s him.
Underhill whispered to the young woman who seemed to be in charge of the event, who then approached her with tactful concern, sat down beside her, and asked if she needed any help.
Yes, but not from you, Willy said to herself. Aloud, she said, “I got caught in the rain on my way here, and, well, look! I used up all these paper towels and I’m still soaked.”
“I’ll get you a towel from the back of the store,” the woman said, and went off. When she returned with a big red towel printed with GREAT BEACH READING FROM GLADSTONE BOOKS!, Willy threw it over her head and rubbed her head until both her hair and her scalp felt as though they might at last be dry, mostly. She pulled the towel off her head and ran it over her arms. Her shirt no longer stuck so conspicuously to her body. Like watercolor on wet paper, the blood spatter had softened and fuzzed out, and now had an almost Manet-like quality.
When the last person in the line had reached the desk, Willy stood up and carried her bags down the row of empty chairs. The woman in charge sauntered up to her and asked if she wanted to have a book signed.
“Not really,” Willy said. “It’s just that . . . I want to meet that man.”
A look of concern marred the perfect face. “You’re not going to cause any trouble here, are you?”
“None at all,” Willy said.
The wonder held out a small, smooth hand with sparkling nails. “I’m Katherine Hyndman, by the way. Community relations. I’m the person who invited Mr. Underhill here tonight.”
“Willy Bryce Patrick,” Willy said, expecting to see a spark of surprised recognition. None came. “I write YA novels. One of them won the Newbery Medal. In the Night Room?”
“In the what?”
“In the Night Room. That was the title of my book.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I know it. But, I gather you want to speak to Mr. Underhill author to author.”
“Pretty much.”
“It looks as though you’ll have your chance fairly soon.” They both looked at the signing table and the disheveled old man standing before it. While stuffing a good many Timothy Underhill books back into an old suitcase that resembled a battered clamshell, he was ranting.
“Book collectors,” said Katherine Hyndman. “When they come out of the woodwork, you never know what to expect. We’ve seen some of the strangest people, I mean