In the night room Page 0,91

of the booth. “She was born . . .” Her eyes went out of focus; softly, her mouth opened. “I know this, of course I know it.” She closed her eyes, and I let go of her arm. “Doesn’t my life, this existence of mine, seem pretty stressful to you? When I feel like this, I really can’t remember everything. If you give me a second, it’ll come back to me.”

“All right,” I said. “Let it come back to you.”

Willy opened her eyes, tilted her neck, and looked at various spots on the ceiling, as if hunting for the answer she needed. “Okay. Holly was born in a hospital.”

“Which one?”

She let her eyes drift down to my face. “Roosevelt.”

“Willy, you got that from me. That’s the hospital my doctor sends me to. How much did your baby weigh?”

She went back to searching the ceiling. A couple of seconds later, she licked her lips. “She weighed a normal amount, for a baby.”

“You don’t have any idea of how much that would be, do you?”

She made a rapid, inaccurate calculation. “Ten pounds.”

“Way too much, Willy. Don’t you think it’s odd that you can’t remember giving birth?”

“But I did give birth, I had a daughter.”

“Willy, the little girl who was murdered was a version of your childhood self. She was you. Do you know why you’re named Willy?”

She shook her head.

“In my book, your real name was Lily—Lily Kalendar. You couldn’t pronounce the letter L, so you called yourself Wiwwy, and people thought you were saying Willy. And the name of your hero, your incredibly brave, smart, inventive boy, was Howie Small. Howie equals Holly the way Willy equals Lily. That’s how I got these names—from a little girl’s lisp.”

“My father’s name was Kalendar. You said that was someone’s name. What was his first name?”

“Joseph.”

“Tell me about him.”

“If you look into what you already know, Willy, you’ll find everything you need to know. Lately, Joseph Kalendar has been in my thoughts a great deal.”

“I don’t know anything . . .” She began to protest, but her voice died away. Whatever surfaced in her mind, on loan from mine, disturbed her greatly. The initial look of shock on her face gradually melted into sorrow, and tears filled her eyes again. “Oh, my God,” she said. “How many women did he kill?”

“Six or seven, I can’t remember which.”

“And my brother. And my mother.”

“Probably. No one ever found her body.”

“Can we get out of here now?” Willy asked.

We stepped outside into strong sunlight and moved slowly toward the car. It was like walking someone out of a hospital. She looked at my face. “This is what you know about my father.”

I nodded. Before Willy got into the car, she said, “He built secret hallways and staircases into our house.” She was still stunned. Her face was all but immobile. “And he built . . .” She stared at the fact she had just conjured and could not speak.

“He built an extra room at the back of the house. Get in now, Willy.”

Like a child, she climbed in. Her eyes were glazed. “He built that extra room. It had a slanting roof that came right down to the ground. It had a huge big wooden bed in it. My father did things there, things I can’t remember. And that was the real night room.”

I closed the door and went around to the driver’s side. Despite the shade I had found, you could practically have cooked a pot roast in the interior of the car.

“There were no lights in that room. And it didn’t have any windows.”

Willy was doing nothing more than parroting what she found in our shared memories. She wasn’t even close to responding to them, for they were not yet part of her emotional life. She had been overloaded with information, and what she had learned had exhausted and numbed her.

Her next question surprised me. “What were you going to do with me at the end of your book?” A little wall-eyed, her head back against the cushion, she spoke as though about someone in whom she had once taken an interest.

“You were going to walk into your old house at 3323 North Michigan Street, in Millhaven. That’s where Joseph Kalendar lived. You were going to go into the night room, meet the Lily who became Willy, and understand that she was the child you wanted to rescue. Or something like that. I was still working it out. The only reason you wanted to break