In the night room Page 0,3

an alarm. She would attempt to conceal herself, would be discovered and taken to the police station, there to try to explain herself.

After his return from England, or France, or wherever his mysterious errands had taken him, maybe Mitchell Faber could talk her out of custody, but then she would have to face Mitchell. In almost every way, her husband-to-be was more threatening than the local cops.

Willy had no doubt that a brush with the police would have a dire effect on Mitchell. Given his capacity for well-banked fury, it would take her weeks to worm her way back into the sunlight. Unlike her late husband, Mitchell was dark of eye, dark of hair, dark dark dark of character. His darkness protected her, she felt; it was on her side and alert to threat, like a pet wolf. Far better not to attract its dead-level glare. For a person who appeared to wield a great deal of influence, Mitchell Faber refused the limelight and demanded to live in the shadows at the side of the stage.

Willy released the handle and grasped the steering wheel with both hands. This felt like progress, and at the same time like an unimaginable betrayal. Although the temperature had dropped, slick moisture clung to her face like a washcloth. She could all but hear Holly’s clear, high voice, calling out to her. How could she turn her back on her daughter? Her left hand drifted to the handle again. Only a massive effort of will permitted her to pull her hand back to the wheel. For a second or two, she granted herself leave from rationality and howled like an animal stuck in a trap. Then she shut her mouth, forced herself to turn the key, and put the car in reverse. Without looking at the rearview mirror, she backed away from the building. On the lot, the surfaces of all the puddles seemed to shiver in rebuke.

Driving too quickly, she bumped her tires against the curb. When she shot forward, fleeing a sound audible only in her head, the front of her car crashed down onto the road, and she gave the inside of her cheek a quick, sharp bite. The pain in her mouth helped her through the dangerous two and two-tenths miles to the Pathmark. After that, each passing mile brought her a greater degree of clarity. It was as though she had been in a trance, no longer responsible for her thoughts and actions.

Willy drove the rest of the way home in a complicated mixture of relief and bright panicky alarm. Very narrowly, she had escaped craziness.

5

hard death hard

More than a little creeped out, Tim stared at the message on his screen. Narym had joined in with Huffy, presten, and the others to disrupt a stranger’s day with what was either a joke or a threat. If it was supposed to be a joke, the disruption had been hideously mistimed. A little more than a year earlier, Tim’s nephew, Mark, his brother’s son, had vanished utterly from the face of the earth. Tim still felt the boy’s loss with the original sick, vertiginous sharpness. His grief had only deepened, not lessened. How greatly he had loved Mark he understood only after it was too late to demonstrate that love. Hard death hard, yes, hard on the survivors.

Tim had wanted to bring his nephew to New York City and advance his education by showing him a thousand beautiful things, the Vermeers at the Frick, an opera at the Met, little hidden corners of the Village, the whole rough, lively commerce of the street. He had wanted to be a kind of father to the boy, and if he could have seen Mark enrolled at Columbia or NYU, he would have been a better father than Philip ever was. Instead, after watching his brother almost immediately abandon hope for his son’s survival, Tim had written a novel that permitted Mark the continued life a monster named Ronald Lloyd-Jones had stolen from him—in lost boy lost girl, to be published in a week, Mark Underhill slipped away into an “Elsewhere” with a beautiful phantom named “Lucy Cleveland,” in reality Lily Kalendar, the daughter of a second homicidal monster, Joseph Kalendar. She had almost certainly died at her father’s hands sometime in her fifth or sixth year, although as with Mark, no remains were ever found. In Tim’s imagination, the two of them, the lost boy and the lost girl, had escaped their fates by