In the Night Room (6 page)

12

In Hendersonia, the rain predicted by Roman Richard Spilka came and went in under an hour, never amounting to much more than a sprinkle. (There was something suspiciously overdetermined about that storm over SoHo.) The sun shone the entire time it rained. The workmen who wore shirts shed them to enjoy the sensation of mild, warm rain falling on their upper bodies. Willy envied them. She wished she could strip naked to the waist and stroll through the sun-gilded rain.

Suddenly, she felt like talking to Mitchell, not just listening to his voice on the answering machine. Mitchell disliked intrusions of his personal life into his work world, and probably wouldn’t like being called back. He especially wouldn’t like it if he were in bed with some woman who worked for the Baltic Group. The thought of her husband-to-be in the embrace of one of his female colleagues gave Willy an entirely unwelcome pang. Sometimes she wondered why he had chosen her, Willy Bryce, Willy Patrick, with her funny little gamine body and clementine breasts. Gently, in a series of little nibbles, despair attempted to draw her downward through a psychic drain. She really did want to talk to Mitchell, and at first hand, not through an exchange of recorded messages.

The Internet soon found the telephone number of the hotel in Nanterre. She dialed for what seemed a frustratingly long time, but was then rewarded with a series of rings that sounded like the wake-up signal of a portable alarm clock. A male, wonderfully clear French voice said something she had no hope of understanding.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but do you speak English?”

“Of course, madame. How may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to one of your guests, please, a Mr. Mitchell Faber.”

“Moment.”
Soon he was back on the line. “I am sorry, madame, Monsieur Fay-bear is no longer a guest of the Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.”

“I must have just missed him. When did he check out?”

“Monsieur Fay-bear checked out this morning, madame.”

“He couldn’t have,” Willy said. “He just left a message on my voice mail, and he was speaking from your hotel.”

“There is some mistake. Unless he called you from a telephone in the lobby?”

“He said he was in his room.” She hesitated. “You said he checked out this morning? What time was that?”

“Shortly before ten, madame.”

“And what time is it there now?”

“It is 4:45
P.M.
, madame.”

Mitchell had left the hotel almost seven hours earlier. Willy hesitated again, then asked, “I’m calling from New York with a message for his wife. Was Mrs. Faber with him, or did she go ahead to Toledo?”

“We have no record of a Mrs. Faber.”

She thanked him and hung up. Back to the Internet for more information, then back to the telephone to dial another endless series of numbers. When she was connected to the Hotel Domenico in Toledo, she had trouble communicating with the man on the other end of the line, and finally succeeded in replacing him with a hotel employee whose English was less like Spanish.

“Mr. Faber? No, no Mr. Faber is registered here. I am sorry.”

“What time do you expect him?”

“There is no record of a Mr. Faber reserving a room in this hotel, I regret.”

She thanked him, hung up, and pushed the intercom button that connected her to Giles Coverley’s telephone. His bland drawl asked, “Can I help you with something, Willy?” A light on his phone told him where the intercom message had originated. “Hold on there, Giles,” she said. “I’ll be right in.”

“I believe the boss left a message for you. Did you hear it?”

“Roman Richard told me as soon as I drove in, and yes, I did hear it. You two don’t want me to miss anything, do you?”

“We want Mitchell to have whatever he pleases, you could put it that way. And you, too, of course. Did he mention a trip into the city?”

“I’ll be there in a second, Giles.”

That last-minute bit of diplomacy was typical of Coverley. From Willy’s first meeting with her future husband’s assistant, she had understood that Giles Coverley would always be delighted to perform any tasks she might assign him, as long as they coincided with his employer’s desires. Occasionally, as she had begun to settle into the house and arrange a few insignificant things to her liking, a taut, short-lived expression on Giles Coverley’s smooth face had reminded Willy of Mrs. Danvers in
Rebecca.

Giles’s office, a long narrow alcove Mitchell had partitioned off what he called the “morning room,” was only slightly more familiar to Willy than her husband’s office upstairs, but she had far less curiosity about what it contained. Her presence in his lair tended to make Coverley speak even more slowly than usual and consider his words with greater care. This deliberation struck Willy as both self-protective and pretentious. Giles always dressed in loose, elegant overshirts and collared tops, handsomely draped trousers, and beautiful shoes. As far as Willy knew, he had no sexual interest at all in either gender. Giles seemed perfectly self-sufficient, like a spoiled cat neutered early in kittenhood.

The door to the alcove stood half open; Willy assumed Giles had positioned it like that, in an ambiguous gesture of welcome. As she approached, he offered the therapeutic smile of a man behind a complaints counter. Giles’s desk was extraordinarily neat, as it had been on every other occasion when Willy had stood before it. His flat-screen monitor looked like a modernist sculpture. Instead of using a telephone, Giles wore a headset and spoke into a little button.

“Good morning, Willy. I didn’t realize you’d gone out. Didn’t get you into any difficulty, I hope, did I?”

“I went out for groceries, Giles, I didn’t run off with anybody.”

“Of course, of course, it’s just . . . well, you know. If Mitchell thinks somebody’s going to be there, he can get a little heated when they’re not.”

“Then you’ll be happy to hear that Mitchell seemed perfectly rational.”

“Yes. In the future, we might do ourselves a favor by keeping in better communication about your comings and goings. Is that something you’d be willing to think about?”

“I’m willing to think about anything, Giles, but I’m not sure I want to feel obliged to tell you every time I go to Pathmark or Foodtown.”

Giles held up his hands in mock surrender. “Willy, please. I don’t want you to feel
obliged
to do anything. I just want things to go as smoothly as possible. That’s my job.” He nodded his head, letting her see that his job was a serious matter. “Anything else you’d like from me?”

“Do you know where Mitchell is right now?”

Coverley tilted forward and looked at her over the top of an imaginary pair of glasses. “Right now? As in, this moment?”

Willy nodded.

Giles continued to stare at her, without blinking, over the tops of his imaginary glasses. A couple of seconds went by.

“From the information I have, Mitchell is in France today. And is expected to stay there for perhaps three more days. To be more specific, he’s in a suburb of Paris called Nanterre.”

“He told my voice mail he was in Nanterre.”

“I thought he might have done, you see. That is why your question rather took me by surprise.”

The reason your question sounded so stupid
was what she thought he meant.

“He said he was staying at the Hôtel Mercure Paris something-or-other Parc.”

“Mercure Paris La Défense Parc.”

“That’s it, yes. I called them as soon as I listened to his message, and the man I talked to said Mitchell checked out almost seven hours earlier. That’s like five in the morning here.”

“Well, then, he checked out without telling me. He’ll be in touch later today or tomorrow, I’m sure.”

“But he told me he was still checked into that hotel.” For a moment, their eyes met again. Coverley did not blink. “You can see why I would be a little concerned.”

Coverley pressed the fingers of one hand to his lips and, without any change of expression, lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling. Then he looked back down at Willy. “Let us clarify this situation. I’ll get the hotel’s telephone number.”

“I already talked to them,” Willy said.

“It never hurts to get a second opinion.”

For a little while Coverley moved his mouse around and watched what was happening on his screen. “All right,” he said at last, and punched in numbers on his keypad. Then he held up an index finger, telling her to wait. The finger came down.
“Bonjour,”
he said. Then came a long sentence she did not understand that ended with the word
Fay-bear.

Pause.

“Oui,”
he said.

Pause.

“Je comprends.”

Pause.

“Très bien, monsieur.”
Then, in English: “Would you please repeat that in English, sir? Mr. Fay-bear’s wife asked me to inquire about his status at the hotel.”

He clicked a button or flipped a switch, Willy could not tell which.

Through the speakers on either side of the monitor came a heavily accented male voice saying, “Mrs. Fay-bear, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Willy said. “Are you the man I spoke to earlier?”

“Madame, I have never spoken to you before we do it now. You were inquiring about your husband’s residence in our hotel?”

“Yes,” Willy said.

“Mr. Fay-bear is still registered as a guest. He arrived three days ago and is expected to remain with us yet two days.”

“Somebody else just told me he checked out at ten this morning.”

“But you see, he is very much still here. His room is 437, if you would care to speak to him. No—excuse me, he is not in his room at this time.”

“He’s there.”

“No, madame, as I explained—”

“He’s staying in your hotel, I mean.”

“As I have said, madame.”

“Is he . . .” Willy could not finish this sentence in the presence of Giles Coverley. “Thank you.”

“À bientôt.”

Coverley raised his hands and shrugged. “All right?”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“You got through to some other hotel with a similar name, Willy. It’s the only explanation.”

“I should have asked to leave a message.”

“Would you like me to call him back? It would be no trouble at all.”

“No, Giles, thanks,” she said. “I guess I’ll wait for him to call me back. Or I’ll try again tomorrow.”

“You do that,” Coverley said.

That night, again in the grip of her compulsion, Willy drove back to Union Street. All the way she asked herself why she was doing it and told herself to turn back. But she knew why she was doing it, and she could not turn back. Already she could hear her daughter’s cries.

Her headlights picked out the entrance to the parking lot and the huge dark ascent of the warehouse’s facade, and without intending to do so, she swerved into the lot. Her heart fluttered, birdlike, behind the wall of her chest.

She had known what she was going to do ever since she had realized that she really was backing her little car out onto Guilderland Road. She was going to break into the warehouse.

Holly’s high, clear, penetrating voice pealed out from behind the massive brick wall. Sweating with impatience, Willy drove around to the back of the building. Her headlights stretched out across the asphalt. A voice in her head said,
This is a mistake.

“I still have to do it,” she said.

A high-pitched wail of despair like that of a princess imprisoned in a tower sailed out from the wall and passed directly through Willy’s body, leaving behind a ghostly electrical tremble. In her haste, Willy struggled with the handle until muscle memory came to her aid. Her body seemed to flow out of the car by itself, and she took her first steps toward the loading dock in the haze of light that spilled through the open door. Her headlights cast a theatrical brightness over the loading bay.

There it was again: Holly’s song of despair, the wail of a child lost and without hope. Willy’s feet stuck to the asphalt; her legs could no longer move.

The long platform emerged from a wide, concrete-floored bay that opened up the back of the building like an arcade. At the rear of the bay, a series of doors and padlocked metal gates led into the building itself.

I can’t deal with the fact that she’s dead right now,
Willy thought.
First I have to get her out of this damned building.

Holly screamed again.

Willy opened her trunk, rooted around the concealed well, and discovered a crowbar Mitchell had forgotten to remove. She picked it up and went toward the stairs. Again she was halted in midstride, but by nothing more alarming than a meandering thought. With the memory of Mitchell borrowing her car had come the strange recognition that while she had imagined him bailing her out of jail, she had never considered his reaction to being presented with his fiancée’s living daughter. Holly and Mitchell seemed to inhabit separate universes—

For the first time in her life, Willy saw literal stars. She seemed on the verge of falling backward into a limitless darkness. What she was doing was crazy. Mitchell and Holly could not be thought of in the same room because they did live in different universes, those of the living and the dead. Even in his absence, the sheer irrefutability of Mitchell’s physical presence pushed Holly back into the past, the only country where she could still be alive.