In the night room Page 0,95

were writing a whole book about Lily Kalendar. Of course you love her.”

“I think I’m just supposed to see,” I said. “To understand. To see what I got wrong.”

“That’s going to be a big job.” Now she was sulking again, and I couldn’t blame her.

“Try not to be afraid,” I told her. “Whatever I’ll see, you’ll see, too.”

“Some crappy consolation.” Despite her words, she seemed a bit reconciled to whatever her fate might be.

“We’re going to have be on the lookout for a character named Jasper Dan Kohle—he’s Joseph Kalendar and Mitchell Faber kind of rolled up into one person.”

The SUV still hung behind us. I thought it would probably trail us all the way to Millhaven.

Willy jolted me back into engagement with her. “Jasper Dan Kohle isn’t a real name.”

“Kohle isn’t what you would call a real person.”

“No, I mean it sounds like a made-up name. Give me a pen.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Pen.”

I handed it to her. She groped around in the mess at her feet and found a candy wrapper that was blank white on the other side. “Does Kohle start with a K?”

“Yes.”

She printed JASPER DAN on the wrapper. “That doesn’t even look real,” she said. “Now spell his last name for me.” As I spoke the letters she wrote them down.

“Now watch this, but don’t steer us off the road.” Beneath JASPER DAN KOHLE, Willy printed JOSEPH KALENDAR. “Right?”

“Right,” I said, looking back and forth from the highway to the paper in Willy’s hands. Every now and then I checked the rearview mirror.

With my pen, she drew a line from the J in JASPER to the J in JOSEPH. Then she drew a line from the A in JASPER to the A in KALENDAR. “Do you need more?”

“It’s an anagram,” I said. “His name was an anagram for Joseph Kalendar. And I never saw it.”

“People with verbal sensitivity can always tell when something’s an anagram. There’s something a little off about anagrammed names. It’s like they almost always have the same taste, a little tinny.”

“Okay,” I said. “Enough punishment.”

“But you should have seen it.”

“Yes, you’re right. I should have seen it. I was feeling so clever about inventing Merlin L’Duith, too.”

“Now, there—see? ‘Merlin L’Duith’ has a perfect tinny flavor. No one in his right mind would mistake that for a real name. You’d know right away it was an anagram.”

Forty miles south of Millhaven, Willy demanded to eat again, and pointed at a billboard depicting a long white structure with ships’ wheels embedded in the plaster and nautical lamps hung beside the entrance. “I want to go to the Captain’s Retreat,” she said. “I’m sick of all this meat. I want to have seafood. Please, Tim. I’m starving again.”

He turned off at the next exit and followed, at a speed of sixty to seventy miles an hour, the directions painted on the billboard, which led him toward Duckvale, a little town he had heard of but never visited. Willy asked him why he was driving so fast, and he said, “I didn’t tell you this before, but I think we’re being followed.”

Willy looked over her shoulder. “That pickup?”

The pickup truck was the only other vehicle on Route 17, the road recommended by the billboard.

“No, it was an SUV, all covered in mud. Just in case it’s our boys, let’s make sure we’ve lost them.”

Tim spent the next twenty minutes dodging down side streets, cutting through vacant lots, and doubling back on himself without so much as glimpsing the Mountaineer. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t know that Coverley was driving the thing. We don’t even know if it was deliberately following us.”

“Take me to the restaurant. Please.”

He managed to find the Captain’s Retreat with only a little difficulty. When he pulled in to the parking lot, he went around to the side, where big concrete planters bordered a narrow rectangular space containing no other cars, and parked next to the building. The planters would hide him from traffic on the street. Willy gathered up her duffel bag, walked in silence beside him, permitted him to open the door for her, and carried the long bag into the restaurant. She steadily devoured candy bars while she read the menu. When the waitress came, Willy asked for blackened redfish, fried clams, a dozen oysters, the shrimp special, and the fried catfish.

“In any order,” she said.

Tim asked for a shrimp cocktail he had to force himself to eat.

After their meal, Willy wandered ahead while Tim was still getting out of