Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(118)
“Holy moly, Batman,” Pogo said. “What would have happened to us if we’d gone up with her to the third floor?”
“I think my SEAL training would have been enough to get me out alive. I’m told you can punch pretty hard with your right.”
“Half-and-half with Scotch. Did her mother start her on that in the crib?”
Surveying the large sheets of heavily tinted window glass in the stacked slabs of the house, wondering if he and Pogo were watched in turn by the woman and if, catlike, she were licking cream from her lips, Pax said, “There’s something about her that’s almost likable. In fact, I feel sorry for her.”
Pogo wasn’t convinced. “How does that work?”
“She pretends she’s made the life she wanted, but on some level, she knows she got it wrong. She wanted artistic influence, and she got raw power instead. She wanted a literary life, but she got a life of writers’ conferences and symposiums and committees pressing for fiction to sell the approved social issues of the moment. Cocktail parties where networking takes the place of wit. Being targeted by envy blogs. She fancied herself a free spirit, Holly Golightly, but with a Jane Austen brain. But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.”
Pogo stared at him.
After a moment, Pax said, “What?”
“I thought you just blew up things.”
“I’ve blown up a lot of things.” Pax looked at his wristwatch, at the dashboard clock, and felt again that time was running out. “We better get moving.”
Starting the engine, Pogo said, “Well, all I know is, she pushed Beebs out of the writing program and humiliated her in a supermarket that time. And she called her some pretty rank names.”
As they drove downhill toward Coast Highway and the commercial heart of Laguna Beach, Pax said, “Okay, position check. For some reason, we don’t know why, Captain gives Bibi a list of quotations celebrating imagination.”
“Yeah. And she reads it so often, she just about wears out the paper.”
“So then Captain dies. Bibi’s ten, she’s brokenhearted, deep in mourning. She writes stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper.”
“Hundreds of pages of stories.”
“And one day a dog named Jasper shows up out of the blue.”
“Yeah. But she hides his collar with his name on it.”
“You’re sure she never told you about it.”
“Never did,” Pogo confirmed, and he turned north on Coast Highway.
“Then she’s seventeen,” Pax said, “and she writes about St. Croix’s house—”
“It’s a stupid lie that Beebs got a key and went in there.”
“Of course. But just by observing St. Croix, by considering the professor’s psychology, and by applying her imagination, she got it uncannily right. How’s that possible?”
“Well, because she’s Beebs.”
“I’m not Watson, and you’re for sure not Sherlock.” Pax checked his G-Shock watch again. “Can you make a little speed?”
As usual, Laguna traffic came to a choke point at Forest Avenue. Pogo said, “I’ve souped up this crate, but it doesn’t teleport.”
Pax said, “Sorry. It’s just I think we don’t have much time to work this out, we’ve got to move.”
“Move. Okay. But where are we going?”
Pax took a deep breath and blew it out. “I don’t know.”
Bibi parked alongside the highway, certain of being alone in the car. Relatively certain. For the moment.
She needed to get to Sonomire Way and find Ashley Bell, but she also needed to regain control of herself. She had been plunging from one untenable situation to another, crisis to crisis, letting events knock her from here to there to anywhere, as if she were a pinball. Events could overwhelm anyone. Nobody could stand tall and unmoved in a tsunami. But she could fight the undertow. Keep her head above water until the tumult subsided, and then swim.
Worse, she had allowed herself to be manipulated. She had taken far too long to recognize that, by one ruse and then another, she was being distracted from her quest. She had invested too much energy and emotion—and time!—fearing and worrying about responding to things that were no real threat to her. Tapping at a window. Scratching at a door. Hoodie Guy and his dog. The tattoo was a different kind of distraction. Why had she gotten the tattoo? ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE. She didn’t need flamboyant displays of dauntless intentions, which wasn’t her nature, quiet perseverance being more her style, didn’t need rah-rah and you-go-girl cheerleading. The tattoo was a challenge, but to whom, to what, if not to fate? And she didn’t believe in fate. She was the master of her fate by virtue of free will. In her life, she was fate.
Earlier, she had killed the engine. Now she started the car again, but didn’t switch on the headlights.
She was living in both the present and the past, at least in the sense that occurrences in the past—forgotten, half remembered—shaped events now. She knew how to cope with the present, how the world of now worked and how to make her way through it to her best advantage. But she was lousy with the past. When moments of potential revelation arose, she needed to seize them and peel away the thick skin of all those yesterdays, to see what fruit waited within.