and I can keep it under control. I think.” She demolished the rest of her candy bar, picked up a third—a 100 Grand bar—and removed the wrapper with a single downward stroke. “But I also think it is time for you to let me in on these big secrets of yours, because I really have to know what the HELL is going on.”
I turned the key in the ignition. “I’ll try to explain over lunch. This isn’t going to be easy for either of us, but after what just happened, there’s a chance that you’ll believe me.” I looked at her and started driving back to the center of town, which is where I thought I probably would find the restaurant mentioned by the boy at the gas station. Willy was chewing a cud of chocolate, peanuts, and caramel and regarding me with a mixture of confusion, anger, and hopefulness that I felt penetrate into my viscera, if not my soul. “Because, and this is a promise, you wouldn’t have believed me before this.”
“The town I live in doesn’t exist—at least not in this universe! I remember stuff that you remember! I didn’t go Lawrence Freeman Elementary School, and I didn’t have Mrs. Gross as my second-grade teacher. You did, but I didn’t. What would happen if I tried to call the Institute? It wouldn’t have a number, would it? Because it isn’t there. Just like Dr. Bollis.”
“To look on the bright side, there isn’t any Baltic Group, either.”
“But Giles Coverley and Roman Richard still exist, and I’m sure they’re still trying to find us.”
“I bet they’re running into a lot of problems right about now.”
“I bet they’re scarfing down a lot of sugar right about now. But I guess I don’t have to worry about Mitchell anymore.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not exactly true,” I said.
“Save it. Is this the place?”
A tall, vertical sign outlined in lights spelled out CHICAGO STATION above a long, rectangular building faced with stone. I drove into the lot and parked under the only tree in sight.
“You’re not paying for lunch. I should split everything with you. Do you know how much money is in that bag back there?”
“A hundred thousand dollars, in hundred-dollar bills.”
Her face went soft and confused, almost wounded. I was afraid she would start to weep.
“Did I tell you that? Don’t answer.”
She got out of the car and opened the back door. The long white bag lay across the seat, and she pulled it toward her and unzipped the top. Curious about what all that money looked like, I stood behind her as she reached in and lifted a neat, banded bundle of bills out of the bag. “Let’s just take two of them,” she said. “You carry them.”
Willy tugged two of the hundreds out of the pack and handed them to me. She leaned back into the car to replace the rest of the bundle, and I looked at the topmost bill in my hand. What I saw made me gasp. For a hideous moment it struck me as funny. It was a hundred-dollar bill of the usual size, color, and texture. The numbers were all in the right places. Just left of the center, in the big oval frame where Benjamin Franklin should have been, was what looked like an old-fashioned steel engraving of me, in three-quarter profile, from the top of my head to the base of my neck. I did not look anything like as clever as Franklin, and I appeared to be wearing my old blazer and a button-down shirt with a frayed collar. The little scroll beneath the portrait gave my name as L’Duith.
“Your money’s no good in this town,” I said, settling at the end for a cheap joke. “Take a look.”
Willy stared at the front of the bill, glanced up at me, then back at the bill. “That’s your picture on there.”
“So it seems,” I said.
Now she was so dumbfounded she seemed hypnotized. “How did that happen? How did you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Let’s go into the restaurant and get some real food in you.”
Willy took my arm like a wounded child. “Look, do I actually exist?”
26
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
“Of course you exist,” I told her. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
Willy leaned out of our booth and waved to a waitress taking orders at one of the tables in the middle of the room.
“But as you have noticed, you don’t quite exist in the normal way.”
“How come the town I live in