Book Description

The empty Sky Room was an oval Victorian greenhouse restaurant atop Chicago’s about-to-be-destroyed 17-story Majestic Hotel. It was a penthouse covering three-fourths of the roof, which was surrounded by a safety parapet about three feet high, capped with glazed tile the green color of oxidized bronze. I expected that Willie would be waiting to leap out at me from behind one of the abandoned fake plants. All I heard over the storm was the murmuring of pigeons hiding in the chimney from the rain. I stood in the center of the room, figuring Willie must have secreted herself in her trench coat and hat against one of the ebony oak pilasters along the edge of the room. I waited for lightning to give away her position. It did. I saw her outside the glass walls through rivulets of rain, as sheet lightning illuminated the clouds over the lake, silhouetting Willie perched atop the parapet wall on the far corner of the building like some sort of gargoyle. The tails of her trench coat were flapping in the gale rising from Quincy Street. Her rain hat was gone and her drenched black curls were writhing on each side of her face. I ran to the door she’d left open and stepped toward her. She crouched like a swimmer on a starting block, staring at the bottom of the pool stories below... a very dark pool. A flashing traffic light jaundiced her face like some wild Hitchcock effect. She didn’t look at me, but down toward the blinking amber light. I stopped dead in my tracks, not sure what to do. She was perched only a few feet from where I stood. If I startled her, she could fall. I looked for a gentle way to get her attention. The low thunder from the sheet lightning over Lake Michigan growled in our faces. Suddenly a shock wave of light and heat, like a nuclear blast, erupted as lightning struck the boom of the demolition derrick. A gust of hot firey dragon breath belched from the crane. Willie bolted straight up, but she lost her footing on the parapet’s wet glazed cap. As she did, I leapt from the doorway and was able to catch hold of the tail of her trench coat just as her butt hit the edge and slipped over the side. I had the trench coat and the trench coat had Willie, but only by her arms. I was in a tug-of-war where both sides would win, or both sides would lose. Without thought, I collected all the material from her coat that I could and twisted it by ducking and pirouetting behind the parapet. This wrapped the makeshift hawser around my left forearm for a more-secure grip. I peered over the parapet where I could see the top of Willie’s head with her arms raised up above her like count Dracula about to turn into a bat and take flight. “Cross your arms!” I shouted, but there was no response.