In the night room Page 0,80

were my main concern, but the state troopers and local cops who had the chance to pull us over blew right on by.

“I still can’t figure out how Mr. Davy managed to create so much damage in so short a time,” Willy said. “You must have a guardian angel, or something.”

Then she started to complain about being ravenous again, and I said I would stop at the nearest thing that looked like a grocery store. “How can you have a grocery store when you don’t have a town? I’ve seen so many fields, I’m sick of the color green. But really, what did that man do?”

“Mr. Davy must have hidden talents,” I said.

“He’s not the only one. How did you know Roman Richard’s arm was in a cast? Tom didn’t tell you, so don’t lie to me about that.”

“Do you think I lie to you, Willy?”

“You’re not perfect, you know. You snore. You refuse to explain things to me. Sometimes you act like you’re my father or something. . . . Explain about the cast.”

I told her I couldn’t, and she went into a sulk. For the next fifteen miles of dead-ahead driving, Willy simply crossed her arms in front of her and stared out the window. It was like being with a grumpy twelve-year-old. I don’t think she paid any attention to the landscape. Of course, the landscape was nothing special. Once, a man on a tractor waved at us. Willy growled. She would rather have put a bullet in his heart than wave back.

“You could explain,” she finally said, “but you won’t.”

“Have it your way.”

“You’re the kind of person who likes secrets,” she said. “I hate secrets. Mitchell Faber loved secrets, so you’re like him.”

“Not really.”

“Okay, have it your way,” she said, and slumped back into angry silence.

Fives miles on, she said, “I can’t believe how hungry I am.” She placed her hands on her stomach. “I’m so hungry, it hurts.” For the first time in about half an hour, she turned her head to look at me. “By the way, although I am talking to you, we are not having a conversation. I am telling you something, and that’s different from having a conversation.”

A gas station appeared in the distance, and she pointed at it and said, “Pull in there. Pull in there. Pull in there.”

“You want me to stop at that gas station?”

Now her eyes were bright with fury. “If you so much as try to drive past that gas station, I’ll murder you, dump your corpse onto the road, and drive over it on my way in.”

I asked her what she thought she was going to get at the gas station.

“Candy bars,” she said. “Oh, God. Just the thought of them . . .”

When we approached the station, she gave me a dead-level look of warning.

“I could use some gas,” I told her, and turned in.

She had her hand on the door handle before I pulled up to the self-serve tanks. By the time I stopped, she already had a leg out the door. I watched her moving toward the low, white, cement-block building, where the attendant sat behind his counter. Willy was walking as fast as she could. As I looked on, she stopped moving so abruptly she almost lost her balance. She appeared to be staring at her right hand, which her body blocked me from seeing. Then she bent over to get a closer look.

This is going to shake things up, I thought.

With the violence of a released force, Willy whirled around, held out her arm, and yelled, “Look!” For a second or two, the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand were transparent, and the last two fingers looked hazy and opaque. Then, without transition, her hand became solid again. Willy lowered it slowly, glancing from it to me—she had seen something in my response, and I would have to account for it—before she turned around again and walked, at nothing like her earlier velocity, into the station.

Gasoline pumped into the Town Car, and the numbers on the dial rolled upward.

In a couple of minutes, Willy popped out of the station empty-handed and came trotting toward me. Panic shone in her eyes. “Can you give me some money, Tim? Like twenty bucks? Please?”

I fished a twenty out of my pants pocket. She took it from me, then leaned forward and in a low, urgent voice said, “We’re going to talk about what happened to my hand. We both saw