In the night room Page 0,99

the other side of all this frustration. More than Cyrax, she was his guide. As he watched, April leaned forward, extended a slightly grubby nine-year-old arm, and, with surpassing gentleness, patted his shoulder.

When Tim Underhill cruised along the overpass from the exit and in the near distance saw the outline of Millhaven rising up, heavy clouds too dark for both the hour and the season hung above the southwest quadrant, far from the granite towers and pillars near the Pforzheimer. He thought, The Dark Man knows I’m home.

The Woman

Glimpsed

at the Window

PART FIVE

28

At the Pforzheimer’s front desk, a young clerk who had fallen in love with Willy the moment he looked at her confirmed that Tim had a fifth-floor junior suite in the old part of the hotel. An hour earlier, a suitcase had arrived for him from New York. Underhill preferred the old wing to the more modern tower on the other side of the hotel. The rooms were warmer in tone, and in the mid-eighties he, Michael Poole, and Maggie Lah had spent three memorable nights on that same fifth floor. Plastered with FedEx labels and strapped shut with yellow tape, the suitcase was produced in the care of an old friend and schoolmate of Tim’s, a five-foot-two bellman named Charlie Pelz.

In the ascending elevator, Charlie Pelz smiled at Willy and said, “Welcome to the Pforzheimer, miss. We hope you enjoy your stay with us.” Having dispensed with the preliminaries, he turned to his old acquaintance and said, “Peddling another book, huh? I see this time, your title’s all lowercase, like some beatnik wrote it. You gonna give me a copy, or do I have to buy one?”

“Oh, you don’t want to read this one, Charlie,” Tim said. “Hardly anybody gets killed in it.”

“You must be outta your mind,” Charlie said. “Who wants to read something like that? You should write a book about me. I got stories, they’d make what hair you got left fall out.”

Charlie Pelz escorted them down the wide ocher corridors and over the rose-patterned carpet and around a corner to Room 511. Tim experienced a rush of nostalgia he explained to Willy only after Charlie had been pacified with a ten-dollar bill and sent back to his station.

“In 1983, I wrote about four pages of the book I was working on in this room.”

“Which book?”

“Mysteries.”

“I liked that one,” Willy said. “Can you remember which pages?”

“Of course.” Yes, he could remember what he had written in this room. And he could remember what he had seen while writing them: a dark lake ringed with expensive lodges, and a boy walking through dying sunlight to a clubhouse overlooking the water. He remembered how he had felt at each moment of the boy’s progress.

“Good. You should remember them.”

“In the next room down, my friends Michael Poole and Maggie Lah went to bed together for the first time, and they’ve been together ever since. They love each other. It’s marvelous to be with them. They don’t exclude you; you’re part of the circle.”

“We love each other,” Willy said. Then, heartbreakingly: “Don’t we?”

“Oh, Willy,” Tim said, and put his arms around her. A wave of emotion ignited by the mingled losses and gains of both the past and the present blazed through him, and he was not sure that in the end it might not be more than he could really handle. For a moment it was exactly that, and he wept, shamelessly, holding her, also weeping, as closely as he could.

It was Willy who returned them to a state in which they could do things other than cry and hold on to each other. She moved a fraction of an inch away, ran a hand beneath her nose, and for all time proved the immensity of her worth by saying, “You should write books that Charlie Pelz wants to read, or your career’s down the drain.”

“From now on, I’ll send Charlie everything I write, so he can give me his critical opinion.”

“Actually,” Willy said, “nuts to Charlie Pelz. Could we go to bed now? I know it’s not very late, but I feel sort of wrung out and exhausted. And I want to be with you.”

They undressed; like newlyweds, they brushed their teeth side by side before the sink; they went into the bedroom and, first naked Willy, then enchanted Tim, mounted the three wooden steps that, as in a fairy tale, led them upward to the surface of the bed, into which they fell, open-armed and open-hearted.