In the night room Page 0,68

only slightly more intelligible, and raised her clasped hands to her eyes.

I guess that was my moment of decision, right then—when she stopped talking and let that name hang in silence before both of us. I could say what I did say, or I could have pretended that I didn’t know what she was talking about. In the end, though, I had no choice at all.

“Except for Tom Hartland,” I said. The building around me, the miles of books in that building, the cars and streetlamps on Broadway quietly held their breath.

Willy dropped her hands and gave me a look so overflowing with mingled relief and sorrow that it was all I could do not to take her in my arms.

“Did you know him?”

The walls of the building had not collapsed, the floor was still beneath my feet, and the traffic continued to move up and down Broadway. Everything and everybody breathed on, and so, with a breath of my own, I stepped deeper into the fiction I would eventually have to unmake.

“I knew Tom Hartland,” I told her. “And I know he was close to you.” For the moment, that was as far as I could go. “We shouldn’t talk about this here.”

She turned her head at the arrival within our charged perimeter of Katherine Hyndman, who broke in with an aggressive mimicry of harmless confusion that was clearly nothing of the kind.

“There seems to be some kind of problem,” she told Willy. “I can’t find your books. Nor can I find your name in our database. Where it ought to be, don’t you think?”

“I don’t understand,” Willy said. “Maybe you’re not spelling my name right.”

“B-R-Y-C-E P-A-T-R-I-C-K? Willy, W-I-L-L-Y?”

“That’s right, but—”

“And the title was In the Night Room? Which supposedly won the Newbery Medal?”

The expression on her face summoned Willy’s strength. “This is absurd. I have written three books. They’re all in print. The last one won the Newbery. If you don’t have my books on your shelves, you’re not doing your business very well, and if they’re not in your database, your computer needs to be brought up to date.”

Katherine turned to me. “I looked both in Books in Print and at the Newbery website—”

“I’m on the Newbery website!” Willy said. “What are you trying to say?”

“Ms. Hyndman looked in the wrong books,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

I grabbed the bag full of money with one hand and Willy Bryce Patrick’s elbow with the other.

When we reached the escalator, Willy a foot or two before me, she said, “I have to ask: how did you know Tom was dead? You said you knew him.”

I gestured for her to get on the escalator. When she did, she looked up at me and, both giving information and asking it, said, “You should know that the men who killed him are out there looking for me.”

“I know all about them,” I said. “You can pretty much take for granted that I understand what’s going on.”

“Tom called you on his cell phone, didn’t he? It’s so strange that he never told me he knew you so well.”

Instead of responding to that, I pulled out my cell phone, dialed 411, and asked for my publicist’s home telephone number.

“Who’s Brian Jeckyll?”

I shushed her. At home in Larchmont, Jeckyll answered. He was not entirely pleased to hear from me. Authors who call publicists, especially authors who call publicists who are at home in Larchmont, almost always want to complain about some fresh insult to their egos. Authors tend to be demanding, selfish, and easily wounded—just ask anyone in publishing. Brian Jeckyll became even less pleased with me when he heard what I had to say.

“You want to skip the reading in Boston and reschedule all those radio interviews? Are you out of your mind?”

“Probably,” I said. “And if I told you what is going on, you’d certainly think so. But what you have to know is that I’m going to drive to Millhaven, and I’m leaving tonight.”

In unison, Willy and Brian Jeckyll said, “Millhaven?” I was as surprised as they by what I’d said.

“I have that reading at New Leaf Books, remember, on Wednesday the tenth? My brother is getting married on Friday the twelfth, and I’ll stay over for that. Everything after the thirteenth can stay the way it is. And that’s about ninety percent of the tour you set up.”

In the end I agreed to do the most important of the radio interviews, scheduled for the morning of Thursday the eleventh, by phone from