In the night room Page 0,70

had done it for my sake. In some sense, April had given Willy to me. Then I saw the hand, or at least the style, of Cyrax in all this, and wished I hadn’t.

“I felt like a leaf being shot through a tunnel.” Her body went extraordinarily still, as a bird’s does when it is cupped in your hand. “I was crazy for a while, you know. Maybe I’m going crazy all over again.”

Willy leaned back without losing contact. Her short, scrappy blond hair looked as though a Madison Avenue hairdresser had devoted hours to it, and her face filled with emotion. Early in my book, I had written that she looked like a gorgeous lost child, but I had not understood how beautiful she actually was. What could have been superficial prettiness had been deepened by sorrow, fear, intelligence, effort, imagination, and steadfast, steady application of her capacity for response and engagement. I knew that kind of work; I also knew that I had not done right by her. She was a more considerable being than I had taken her for. When I looked down at her face and into her eyes, I also understood part of the reason why I had to take her with me—this lost girl was supposed to be lost in Millhaven. Once I took her there, she was not supposed to come out again.

So I can never pretend, can never say, that I didn’t understand that from the beginning.

“I feel as though I’ve known you for the longest time,” she said. “Is that true for you?”

“Yes, like I’ve been living with you for months.”

Her shaggy head dropped to the center of my chest again, and she tightened her embrace around me. I could feel the tremble in her arms.

Then she released me and backed away. “You want to hear another weird thing? You’re the author I read when I’m—”

“Depressed?”

I had surprised her again. “How did you know that?”

“I hear that a lot. I’m literary Zoloft, I guess.”

She shook her head. “I don’t read you because you’re going to cheer me up. It’s another condition altogether.”

While I was speculating about what that might be, which included wondering why I did not already know, I noticed something related to the most important question I’d asked earlier, about the term of her existence.

“Willy,” I said. “Look at your shirt.”

She looked down. Her shirt had dried to the extent that her bra was no longer visible beneath it, and its color was the bright, unbroken white of a movie star’s smile.

“What happened to Tom’s blood? It was right there!” She spread her neat little hand over the front of the shirt. “Where’d it go?”

“Good question.”

“Tom’s blood,” she said, and shock and fear rose to the surface of her face again. “I want it back. This isn’t fair.” She struggled with her emotions. “No. At least, this way I won’t be so conspicuous to the police. They’re after me, too.” She threw me a look of challenge, asking, Are you up for this, pal? “I don’t get it,” she said, staring back down at the brilliant white of her shirt. “I guess now I’m in Timothy Underhill’s world.”

I had to turn my head to keep her from seeing the tears in my eyes. “We’d better be sure your pursuers aren’t lurking outside when we get into the car.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Mine is in a garage on Canal Street. The one that’s going to take us there is parked right out in front.” She looked a little confused. “My publishers arranged for a car to pick me up and drive me home afterward. Brian’s very good about things like that.”

Willy gave me an odd, dark look. “You didn’t ask me why the police are looking for me. You didn’t even blink.”

Of course I could not tell her that I already knew about the falsified criminal charge. “Things have moved so fast, it never occurred to me.”

“I was accused of something. Bank robbery. It’s ridiculous, but the police are looking for me. I mean, I might as well go to Millhaven—I can hide out there until the charge is dismissed.” She sighed. “The evidence is a Photoshopped picture of me holding a gun on the bank president. It’s all a setup, but I do have a lot of money in that bag between your legs. If we’re caught, that won’t look too good, will it?”

I began to lead her out of the narrow passage into which I had drawn her and toward