In the night room Page 0,73

up in front of the Golden Mountain garage, I tipped the driver fifty bucks. A car just like the one we had left came down the ramp, and we got in, and with Willy Bryce Patrick beside me I drove across the Hudson River in a night suddenly glittering with a thousand points of distant illumination.

I might have seen Mitchell Faber’s sharklike vehicle emerging from a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it is possible that just before she fell asleep, Willy spotted it coming over a hill about half a mile behind us. That’s why I made a quick tour of the parking lot before going back to our room.

We are in Room 119 of the Lost Echoes Lodge, located nine or ten miles from the freeway in Restitution, Ohio. We’re a long, long way from New York. It would be a miracle if they found us here, and I don’t think they will. There has already been a kind of miracle in the Lost Echoes Lodge, and one is enough.

I had been going to take two adjoining rooms, but Willy told me there was no sense in throwing money away, and besides, she had no intention of sleeping alone this night. “I want a warm body beside me, and since Tom is dead and we don’t have a golden retriever, you’re elected,” she told me.

We were still standing outside the lodge, taking in the astonishing structure before us. It looked like an infinitely ramifying Bavarian hunting lodge built in the 1920s for a timber millionaire. Gewgaws and rickrack ornamented the facade, which included complicated turrets and window embrasures. Every inch of the building seemed to be decorated with something, giant ivy sprigs carved from a dark wood, wooden ducks in flight and owls on branches, big clamshells half-embedded in cement. Once every sixty minutes, a giant cuckoo should have popped out of the heavy, cross-braced front door. Warm light shone through most of the windows. Dense trees edged in from the near side of the parking lot and crowded the back and sides of the building.

When we checked in, the desk clerk (a sweet little man named Roulon Davy, who turned out to be the owner of the Lost Echoes Lodge) nodded at our request for a room overlooking the parking lot, signed us in under the first name that came into my head, accepted a cash payment for one night, and led us up to Room 119.

“Most of our folks want a forest view,” he said, marching past the enormous bed to reach the set of windows at the far end of the room, “but if you fancy a prospect of the parking lot, here it is.” He pulled aside the heavy brocade curtains and let us look out. Over the tops of the trees, we could see the back half of the lot. Beyond it, thousands of trees blanketed the side of a steep hill.

Willy yawned. “Sorry. I can’t stay awake much longer.”

The little man twinkled to the middle of the room—there is no other way to describe his retreat. It looked like tap dancing, but his feet barely touched the floor. “Then, Mr. and Mrs. Halleden, I beg you to enjoy the perfection of your bed, the pleasures of your dreams, and the company of one another.”

He saluted us and was gone before I could offer him a tip.

“Methinks our gracious host is of the fairy folk,” Willy said.

“No,” I said, “I’m of the fairy folk.”

“Then let’s get in bed and be brother and sister.” She yawned again, and stretched her back. I thought it was one of the best things I’d ever seen. “You want to go in the bathroom first? You can use my toothbrush, if you like.”

I went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush; then she went into the bathroom, washed up, and used her toothbrush. There was no top sheet on the bed, only a soft, daisy-patterned comforter that seemed to tuck itself around my shoulders. The bed felt cool, slightly yielding, unconnected to anything as solid as the floor.

Willy’s head poked out of the bathroom door, and she laughed at the sight of me. “You look pretty good, for an old dude. Or shouldn’t I say that?”

“Keep talking. Everything you say surprises me.”

“Lights out.”

The switch for the overhead light was between the bathroom and the door, and I saw a bare arm and a bare leg emerge into the room as she reached out. Her