portrait. “What’s this L’Duith business, anyhow? You said it was part of an anagram.”
“The full version is Merlin L’Duith. Can you figure that out? You’re very good at Scrabble and crossword puzzles, so it should be easy for you.”
Willy popped the french fry into her mouth and stared at the altered banknote. “Um. Two L’s. An N and a D-E-R. That’s easy. It’s an anagram for Tim Underhill.”
“I started Part Two of my book with a message from Merlin L’Duith, in other words myself, who said that he was the god of your part of the world, plus Millhaven. Merlin, who’s a magician, wanted to speed the plot along, so he summarized the day you met Tom Hartland at the King Cole Bar.”
“Why is your face on that money?”
“Probably because I didn’t bother to say anything about Benjamin Franklin, and when the bills came through, there I was.”
She pondered that.
“Merlin did something a little strange in his section. He let you notice the bits that he dropped out of your life. The lost hours, the transitions that never happened. He’s a god and a magician—he can do anything he likes.”
Willy stopped eating and, in an almost belligerent way, stared at me for a couple of beats. She resumed chewing. She swallowed; she sucked Coke into her system. “That was in your book? You did that? Hiding behind this Merlin anagram.”
“I had you notice the gaps that people in novels can never be aware of, because if they did, they’d begin to realize that they are fictional characters. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing it, I just thought it would be interesting. I wanted to see what would happen. As it turned out, that was probably one of the things that let you leave the book and wind up in my life.”
Her stare darkened. She wasn’t blinking now.
“I hated those gaps. They made me feel that I really was losing my mind.”
She shoved her plate away, and the waitress, hoping to get us out of her territory very soon, instantly materialized at our booth and asked if we wanted anything else.
“Pie,” Willy said. “We heard you’re famous for your pies.”
“Today we have cherry and rhubarb,” the waitress said.
“I’ll have two slices of each, please.”
Willy waved her off and pointed a lovely finger at me. “Okay, you, or Merlin L’Duith, deliberately let me notice that these transitions had been left out of my life. But why did you have me leave Hendersonia in the morning and arrive in New York nine hours later? What was the point of that?”
Willy had turned a crucial corner, though she did not know it. She had already bought what I was selling. I wondered how long it would take her acceptance to catch up with her.
“You had to get there at night so that it would be night when Tom Hartland came to your room.”
“Why?”
“So that he could sleep in the same bed with you. At your invitation. It was the quickest solution—make it night instead of day. Whoops, nine hours gone.”
“Do you know how disconcerting that is?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
“You wanted Tom Hartland in bed with me because you wanted to be in bed with me. I’m right, aren’t I? If you invented me, you didn’t understand me very well, and no wonder, because you don’t understand yourself, either.”
“In the way you mean, I do,” I said.
“If you invented me, you did a BAD JOB!”
Before scurrying away, the waitress put two plates in front of Willy and, unasked, a cup of coffee. It was as though she had never been there at all.
“I didn’t want to go to Michigan Produce,” Willy said. “I didn’t want to hear my daughter screaming for help. How could you do that to me?” She levered a big section of cherry pie onto her fork and pushed it into her mouth. “You never understood what kind of person I was. I’m so much better, so much stronger than you thought. All you saw was this weak little woman being pushed around by men.” Her voice wobbled, and she brushed tears away from her eyes. “I suppose I’m not even a writer anymore. I suppose I didn’t have any talent.”
“Not at all. I gave you a beautiful talent, and an imagination so strong that twice you used it to rescue yourself.”
“On the Block and then in the Institute, you mean.” For at least a minute and a half, she ate big forkfuls of pie while crying steadily. Then she