In the night room Page 0,84

My doctor, my main doctor, the one who did me the most good, was named Dr. B——”

She sat up and looked at me in wonder. “That’s almost the same name!”

“And the town, Stockbridge, was home for most of his life to a famous magazine illustrator named—”

“So was Stockwell! I can’t believe this! Our guy was—”

“Norman Rockwell.”

“Norton Postman,” Willy said, and her eyes underwent a subtle change. “This is an amazing coincidence.”

“It certainly is. Norman Rockwell painted hundreds of covers for the Saturday Evening Post, so in a way, you could call him the Post man.”

“But so did Postman,” Willy said. “I didn’t know there were two of these guys.”

“Not to mention two world-famous mental-health facilities in little towns in the Berkshires, and two excellent psychiatrists who practically have the same name.”

Willy tucked her lower lip between her teeth, a gesture that for some reason I would never imagine her making. Maybe I thought it was too girlish for her, but there she was, biting her lower lip, and it didn’t look at all girlish. Willy unpeeled a Mounds bar and began to fend off another attack of lightness.

Ten minutes later, we were walking into the pleasant, air-conditioned space of the Willard Memorial Library, a modern-looking building on West Emerald Street, just two blocks off the main drag. Oh, Emerald Street, I thought, and began to sense the close, hovering presence of my sister. Ever since my stunt in the Barnes & Noble, The Wizard of Oz had been as implicated in her appearances as Alice in Wonderland.

“Atlases?” said the librarian. “Right over there, in our reference room. The atlas shelves are directly to the left of the door as you enter.”

A couple of men read newspapers at a blond wooden desk; two girls in their preteens plowed through copies of the same Harry Potter book in a dead-serious race to the end. Diffuse light filtered in through the high windows and hung evenly throughout the large room. Separated by four empty seats, an old man and a high school student leaned over the keyboards of computers as if listening to voices.

I swung open the glass door to the reference room, and Willy followed me in. To my left, three tall shelves of outsized atlases stretched off to the far wall. We were alone in the room.

“Do you have a favorite atlas?” I asked Willy.

“The Oxford, I guess,” she said. It was the one I used.

I pulled the Oxford Atlas of the World from the lowest of the three shelves and slid it onto the nearest table. “Let’s get one more, for backup.”

“Backup?”

“You’re going to want a second opinion.”

After a little searching I found the National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World and placed it beside the Oxford. Balanced on one hip, Willy watched me with her hands behind her back, seeming to glow with the light of her own curiosity.

I gestured to the chair placed before the books, and she sat down and tilted her head to look up. The expression on her face made me feel as though I was just about to strangle a puppy. I leaned over the table and pushed the National Geographic toward the center of the table, leaving the Oxford Atlas of the World in front of her.

I asked Willy where she had been living before she fled to New York.

“Hendersonia, New Jersey.”

“See if you can find it.”

Giving me a suspicious glance, she flipped to the index on the last pages of the atlas. I saw her trace her finger down the long list of the H’s, going from Hampshire, UK, quickly down to the place names beginning with He. And here were Henderson, AR, Henderson, GA, Henderson, KY, and Henderson, NV. Where Hendersonia should have been, she found only Hendersonville, TN, and its namesake in North Carolina.

She frowned at me. “It must be too small to put in the index.”

“Oh,” I said.

She held up a finger, this time telling me that inspiration had struck, and flipped backward to the A’s. Her finger went down the list to Alpine, NJ, and when she had the page and coordinates she turned more pages until she came to the one she wanted and moved her finger along the lettered squares until it intersected with the proper numerical one.

“It’ll be in here,” she said, and motioned me forward.

I put a hand on her shoulder and bent down. Willy’s finger circled around until it hit upon Alpine, from whence she drew it in a southerly direction, apparently without