by Peter Straub
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“Well, there’s your answer! We went to the same school, we probably had a lot of the same teachers.”
“Kind of funny, though, isn’t it, that the school is right behind the St. Alwyn Hotel, in Pigtown, and the Children’s Home is way over on the north side of town.”
“I’m going into the shower, sorry. Come on, you’re getting hard again, let’s get this guy in the shower and see what he does when he’s wet.”
Tim found both amusement and a kind of wonder in having so underestimated his heroine’s sexual frankness and appetite. They forgot their worries until their hunger brought them back to the world. For Tim Underhill, every time he made love to Willy, his darling and his invention, he became more attached and involved, deepening the process that had started when he had placed her, like a figure on a chessboard, in front of the Michigan Produce warehouse.
At the end of their breakfast in the Swan Room, Mr. Davy told them that he had been visited by the police. Willy had displayed an amazing appetite, eating all four of her pancakes and all of her bacon, and following that with the two pancakes Tim still had left on his plate.
“They were wondering, do you see, if I might have checked in a woman who robbed a bank in New Jersey. They showed me a picture, but I don’t think it really looked like Mrs. Halleden, and I certainly don’t think that Mrs. Halleden ever robbed a bank in New Jersey!”
“I don’t think she did, either,” Willy said. “Will they be coming back?”
“Not until lunchtime. Our police officers have a distinct taste for our sauerbraten and Wiener schniztel.”
“We’ll be checking out in a couple of minutes,” Tim said. “And thank you, Mr. Davy.”
Willy excused herself and stood up. While Tim calculated a tip, the total to be added to his hotel bill, he noticed that his host was closely watching “Mrs. Halleden” on her way to the restroom. In his admiration, he had forgotten that Tim was present. While Tim watched Mr. Davy watching Willy, the little man registered some sort of quick, fleeting shock: his body clenched, and he thrust his head forward. Tim glanced past him at Willy, who was disappearing around the door to the ladies’ room.
Suddenly realizing that he had been observed, Mr. Davy twitched around to face Tim. A faint blush, a faint smile enlivened his cherubic face.
“What?” Tim asked.
“Mrs. Halleden is a striking presence. If I may, sir.”
Tim gestured for him to go on.
“If I might say this without being impertinent, sir, the lady is somehow more beautiful than one takes in at first glance. And I believe she looks younger than when the two of you arrived last night.”
“There’s more. There’s something you’re not saying. What startled you?”
Mr. Davy looked at him sharply. “Startled me, Mr. Halleden?”
“Something made you do a double take. I’m curious about what it was.”
“It was just a mistake, a trick of the eye,” Mr. Davy said. “I’ll be at the desk, sir, should you wish your bags taken down.” He whirled around and was gone.
Tim examined Willy for signs of youthfulness as, evidently considering something she found troubling, she wove her way back to the table. She had always seemed essentially young to him, but he wondered if she did in fact seem a bit younger than she had the day before.
Abruptly, she said, “I have that ‘light’ feeling again. I don’t mean hunger. That’s emptiness. This is lightness. It’s like a buzz or a hum going through my whole body. It’s like a thousand hummingbird wings, all beating at once.”
Upstairs, Tim called the Pforzheimer in Millhaven and was assured that he could secure a junior suite for as long as he liked through the end of September. He was a valued customer, and they would treat him right. Then he called Maggie Lah and asked her to FedEx some of his shirts, pants, jackets, and socks to the hotel.
When he put down the phone, Willy said, “Let me pay for our hotels, okay? I won’t feel like such a parasite.”
When he protested, Willy said, “You shouldn’t have to pay for me, I should be paying for you! We could probably live off this money for a couple of years. Let me show it to you.”
As Willy dragged the long, white gym bag toward the bed, the telephone rang. Tim picked up the receiver and heard Mr. Davy say, “Mr. Halleden, please take a look out of your window. It appears that someone is extremely interested in your car.”
“Willy, take a look at the parking lot, will you?” He thanked Mr. Davy and watched her go to the window.
“De nada,” Mr. Davy said. “Tell me if you or Mrs. Halleden recognize the gentleman. He’s too elegant to be a police officer.”
“Shit,” Willy said. “It’s Coverley. How did he ever find us here?”
Tim moved to the window and looked over Willy’s shoulder. A tall, slender man in a sweater the blue of a gas flame and pale gray trousers was walking back and forth beside Tim’s black Town Car. He had long, well-combed blond hair and the face of a bored priest, and he was stroking his chin as he peered through the windows. The man straightened up and looked around the lot, then checked his watch.
“He’s waiting for Roman Richard,” Willy said. “That soulless murdering prick.”
“Mrs. Halleden does not harbor friendly feelings toward the gentleman,” said Mr. Davy.
“No,” Tim said.
“Would he have any connection to the gray Mercedes sedan parked in front of the hotel?”
“What are you doing?” Willy asked.
“Yes, that’s his partner,” Tim said. “Willy, Mr. Davy and I are working something out.”
“Mr. Davy?”
“Listen to me, now,” said Mr. Davy. “For Mrs. Halleden’s sake, I am going to act against type. That lady not only never robbed a bank, she never did a wrong thing in her life. And that man in the parking lot is a scoundrel. When you hear a loud noise, or you see that blond-haired creature start to run out of the lot, leave your room. Three doors to your right, you’ll find a maid’s staircase that will take you down to the back of the hotel. Get in your car as quickly as possible and take off. Pay no attention to the fracas when you drive by.”
“The fracas?”
“Don’t worry about me.” He hung up before Tim could reply.
“Now what?” Willy asked.
Coverley was pacing beside Tim’s car, growing more impatient with every second. He pulled a yellow pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one with a match, and exhaled a plume of smoke.
“Giles smokes?” Willy sounded almost shocked. Every bit as startled as his beloved by this display of character treachery, Tim once again felt that loosening of the ground beneath his feet that occurred whenever Willy acted independently of the template he had made for her. An elegant character like Giles Coverley wouldn’t smoke, but here he was, puffing away anyhow, acting like a human being instead of a character in a novel.
Below, Coverley spotted something hidden from the occupants of Room 119 by the trees on the near side of the lot. He threw away his cigarette, gesticulated, pointed at the hotel, raised his arms in an angry query.
“Uh-oh.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“Our friend Mr. Davy was counting on Roman Richard staying in the Mercedes. He was going to create a diversion, and I think this one-armed creep was supposed to play some kind of role in it.”
On cue, Roman Richard Spilka strolled into view, suit jacket slung over his left shoulder, right arm encased in a plaster cast supported by a broad white sling. He was making conciliatory gestures to Coverley, half-turning to nod at the hotel. Again, there was a slight disconnect between the way Tim’s characters actually looked and the way he had imagined them when depicting them on the page. Where Giles Coverley was slimmer, taller, and more decadent-looking than the man bearing his name in In the Night Room, Roman Richard was heavier, more solid, more obviously a thug. From the back, his close-cropped head resembled a bowling ball.
/> “You know he had a broken arm? Tom told you?”
“I guess,” said Tim, wishing he hadn’t mentioned it.
“That’s incredibly interesting.” Willy turned her head to look over her shoulder. A hint of suspicion darkened her eyes. “Tom knew that I knocked him down with my car, but he didn’t know about the cast until a minute or two before he was killed.”
“Then I knew about it some other way.”
“There is no way at all you could know about it,” Willy said. She turned her head back to the window.
Tim and Willy watched Roman Richard moving across the lot toward Coverley. Both of the men indulged in a good deal of pointing and arm waving. Whatever camaraderie they might once have enjoyed had shredded under their multiplying frustrations, and now they were just two guys trying to make the best of a bad deal.
Then two things happened at once: a good-sized explosion at the front of the hotel rattled their window and shook the pictures in their frames, and Roman Richard and Coverley looked at each other and sprinted off across the parking lot with the reflexes of former soldiers. Roman Richard had worked out a more efficient way to wear his pistol, which was in his hand before he disappeared beneath the trees.
Tim took Willy by the elbow, spun her around, picked up the bags, and pushed her into the hallway. Three doors down to the right, he opened a door marked FOR STAFF ONLY and clattered down the dark, narrow set of stairs with Willy close behind. A door opened by pressing on a metal bar swung out onto a little paved area with uncapped garbage cans lined up on both sides of a dumpster.
“What’d he do?” Willy shouted behind him.
The sunlight drenching the parking lot shimmered on the tops of the cars. Underhill pounded toward the Lincoln. He was only ten feet away when the button on his key ring unlocked the door, honked the horn, and made the lights flash.
“Get in and duck down,” he called, and heard her footsteps coming along behind him instead of separating off to the other side of the car, as he had expected. He grasped the door handle and asked, “What the hell are you doing?” But he was asking the air, and already understood that she was going to get into the back seat. She opened her door a fraction of a second after he opened his, and as he threw the bags inside and slid behind the wheel, he heard her climb onto the back seat and close the door behind her. The ovenlike heat made him pant; his skin instantly felt sandblasted. Blurry features and a flash of blond hair swam across his rearview mirror as Willy Patrick sank out of sight.
He turned the key and hit the accelerator. After a moment’s rumination, the big car shot across the lot and into the narrow, tree-lined drive that led to the front of the hotel. On the left-hand side, the drive widened into the entry court; on its right, it continued on to the street. Tim clicked his seat belt into place, and felt Willy pulling herself up on the back of his headrest.
They came around the side of the hotel into expanding chaos. On the lawn between the edge of the forecourt and the sidewalk, a ruined silver-gray car sent up six-foot flames from its shredded rear end. Uniformed hotel staff milled around the burning Mercedes. Most of them looked like college students. Tim glimpsed a familiar-looking boy in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and black hair staring at him in inexplicable annoyance. People from the neighborhood walked or trotted toward the front of the hotel. In the middle of the street, two boys on bicycles stared at the car in shared fascination.
Roulon Davy stood alone on the sidewalk, watching a pair of police cars race toward the hotel. Roman Richard and Giles Coverley had posted themselves on the lawn between Mr. Davy and their boss’s former vehicle, keeping an eye on the hotel while they watched the conflagration. Roman Richard’s back looked stony with fury, and Coverley’s slouch expressed an elegant despair.
“Is your head down?” Tim asked.
“Just drive,” Willy said, meaning that it was not, entirely.
At the moment the Town Car zipped past the short lawn and was a second or two from shooting into the street, Coverley’s blond head snapped sideways, and his spoiled face hardened in concentration. He followed the car’s progress as it sailed over the sidewalk and raced away down the block. In his rearview mirror, Tim saw Coverley step out in front of the police cars and watch them go. Behind him, the boy in the black T-shirt walked away from the scene: he had taken two long steps before Tim realized who he was, and why Roulon Davy’s “diversion” had been so successful. His forearms prickled; his scalp tingled.
“He’s talking to the cops, all right,” Willy said, kneeling on the back seat. “He isn’t even letting them go up to the car. I wonder what good old Roulon actually did?”
Thinking of WCHWLLDN throwing off his clothes, unfurling his great wings, and leaping into the vastness of the sky, Tim turned toward the middle of Restitution. Beyond its white houses and thick green hedges lay the long, long unspooling of the highway. Quick tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away before Willy could turn around.
“Pull over so I can get into the front seat.”
He drew up at the side of the street, and she got out of the rear door and advanced toward the side mirror and the passenger door. Just before her right hand moved out of the mirror’s range, Tim realized that from midpalm to the tips of her fingers, it was a gauzy haze outlined by the grass and sky behind it. Then the hand slipped from view, and the passenger door opened.
Willy threw herself into the seat. As she closed the door, he tilted his head to look at her right hand, which was small, intact, and solid.
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, and took a breath, remembering Mr. Davy’s double take.
25
From Timothy Underhill’s journal
Good old 224 took us across the state of Ohio. Ohio is a big state, and we saw mile after mile of farmland. I didn’t see any suspicious-looking cars following us, but neither was I watching with any real degree of care. The police were my main concern, but the state troopers and local cops who had the chance to pull us over blew right on by.
“I still can’t figure out how Mr. Davy managed to create so much damage in so short a time,” Willy said. “You must have a guardian angel, or something.”
Then she started to complain about being ravenous again, and I said I would stop at the nearest thing that looked like a grocery store. “How can you have a grocery store when you don’t have a town? I’ve seen so many fields, I’m sick of the color green. But really, what did that man do?”
“Mr. Davy must have hidden talents,” I said.
“He’s not the only one. How did you know Roman Richard’s arm was in a cast? Tom didn’t tell you, so don’t lie to me about that.”
“Do you think I lie to you, Willy?”
“You’re not perfect, you know. You snore. You refuse to explain things to me. Sometimes you act like you’re my father or something. . . . Explain about the cast.”
I told her I couldn’t, and she went into a sulk. For the next fifteen miles of dead-ahead driving, Willy simply crossed her arms in front of her and stared out the window. It was like being with a grumpy twelve-year-old. I don’t think she paid any attention to the landscape. Of course, the landscape was nothing special. Once, a man on a tractor waved at us. Willy growled. She would rather have put a bullet in his heart than wave back.
“You could explain,” she finally said, “but you won’t.”
“Have it your way.”
“You’re the kind of person who likes secrets,” she said. “I hate secrets. Mitchell Faber loved secrets, so you’re like him.”
“Not really.”
“Okay, have it your way,” she said, and slumped back into angry silence.
Fives miles on, she said, “I can’t believe how hungry I am.” She placed her hands on her stomach. “I’m so hungry, it hurts.” For the first time in about half an hour, she turned her head to look at me. “By the way, although I am talking to you, we are not having a conversation. I am telling you something, and tha
t’s different from having a conversation.”
A gas station appeared in the distance, and she pointed at it and said, “Pull in there. Pull in there. Pull in there.”
“You want me to stop at that gas station?”
Now her eyes were bright with fury. “If you so much as try to drive past that gas station, I’ll murder you, dump your corpse onto the road, and drive over it on my way in.”
I asked her what she thought she was going to get at the gas station.
“Candy bars,” she said. “Oh, God. Just the thought of them . . .”
When we approached the station, she gave me a dead-level look of warning.
“I could use some gas,” I told her, and turned in.
She had her hand on the door handle before I pulled up to the self-serve tanks. By the time I stopped, she already had a leg out the door. I watched her moving toward the low, white, cement-block building, where the attendant sat behind his counter. Willy was walking as fast as she could. As I looked on, she stopped moving so abruptly she almost lost her balance. She appeared to be staring at her right hand, which her body blocked me from seeing. Then she bent over to get a closer look.
This is going to shake things up, I thought.
With the violence of a released force, Willy whirled around, held out her arm, and yelled, “Look!” For a second or two, the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand were transparent, and the last two fingers looked hazy and opaque. Then, without transition, her hand became solid again. Willy lowered it slowly, glancing from it to me—she had seen something in my response, and I would have to account for it—before she turned around again and walked, at nothing like her earlier velocity, into the station.
Gasoline pumped into the Town Car, and the numbers on the dial rolled upward.
In a couple of minutes, Willy popped out of the station empty-handed and came trotting toward me. Panic shone in her eyes. “Can you give me some money, Tim? Like twenty bucks? Please?”
