Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(122)
Beyond another window lay a room containing two large drawing tables adjustable to various heights and angles, along with support furniture. Architect’s elevations and construction schedules were pinned to the corkboard walls.
She continued past a dark window to another where light leaked around a drawn blind and painted feathers on the fog. Muffled voices in that room tantalized her, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Construction crews began early in the day, though not before dawn. Whoever conspired here might be discussing serious issues more pertinent to Bibi than the cost of concrete and the expected delivery date of the next truckload of steel beams.
She proceeded to the rear of the double-wide, where another window proved to be covered by a pleated shade. She continued around the corner, hoping that the office extended the width of the trailer and that it might offer a last pane of glass over which no shade had been drawn.
In the impossible Mojave fog, two parked vehicles were almost fully concealed in mist as thick as mattress batting, one of them an entirely possible Cadillac Escalade, but the other an improbable sedan. Visibility remained so poor that Bibi had almost passed the big car before she recognized the Bentley ornament on the hood. She stepped close to confirm that the paint, when seen in better light, was pale enough to be café au lait.
When two worlds collided without catastrophe and occupied the same space, a world of cause and effect and an unpredictable world where supernatural wild cards could be thrown onto the table at any time, it seemed inevitable that former teacher and remade woman Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack should be there regardless of the hour. According to the ever-changing rules of this game, of all the real-estate developers in California, the one in charge of the Terezin project could have been no other than the shopaholic’s husband.
The most urgent questions now seemed to be where the grandly inflated breasts and the woman behind them were at this moment and whether Bibi could avoid the crazy bitch. Both were answered when the headlamps of the Bentley flared, dazzling Bibi, and the driver’s door opened.
She who had been first to recognize the young writer’s talent exited the sedan, limned by the interior light that flowed out after her and by the backwash of headlamps. As the woman approached, Bibi saw that she was dressed inappropriately for the hour and the place: stiletto heels, black toreador pants held up with a jeweled belt, a blouse that revealed enough cleavage in which to conceal a litter of kittens, and a white leather jacket with black detailing.
The former teacher, a subtle and calculating mistress of mean in the classroom, favored Bibi with an expression that was familiar from days of old, in spite of the extensive makeover of the woman’s features. A smug power-trip smirk. Colored with the inexplicable resentment of someone who, though you never offended her, believed that you were owed revenge. The woman felt now, as always, justified in doling out a real injury for an imagined one, pleased to rain upon her target a storm of petty reprisals.
Except that this time they might not be petty.
“I would ask you what the hell you think you’re doing here,” said Hoffline-Vorshack. “But I don’t care, and you would only lie, anyway. Like you lied about having a pistol and about possessing a concealed-carry license. You’re still the little rebel and liar you always were.”
The fog seemed to part for Hoffline-Vorshack, to vacate a space that she could occupy, as if she and the mist were two magnetic substances whose poles repelled.
“Stop right there,” Bibi said. “No closer.”
The woman stopped, but only after taking two more steps and forcing Bibi to back away from her. “Will you ever grow up, Gidget?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? Because it strikes a nerve? Frivolous little Gidget, all about surfing and beach-blanket parties and looking cute in a bikini, an even more empty-headed and ridiculous version of your perpetually adolescent parents.”
“You don’t know anything about my parents, you don’t know who they are.”
“They came to parent-teacher meetings, didn’t they? I knew them at first glance for what they were. And I’ve always known you’re a girl in need of discipline.”
Bibi didn’t think anyone in the trailer could hear them, but she drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, just the same.
The former teacher’s smile was a mezzaluna of contempt, no less sharp than the crescent-shaped kitchen knife of which it reminded Bibi. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, you stupid girl, running around in the night, playing Nancy Drew. Or worse than killed. We can take you down and break you down so completely, no one could ever put you together again. And we will.”
The wired sharks in a dead swim overhead. Decades of surfers, fit and tanned, standing tall with their shortboards and longboards, smiling on the walls. And on the table, on the notebook page, five words: I am a Valiant girl.
“This is wild,” Pogo said. “But I know what that means.”
“Me, too.”
“Of course you, too. Those books.”
“Those books,” Pax agreed, his mouth gone dry, his heart finding a new rhythm.
The next two lines read, When I saw her yesterday, why didn’t I ask Halina Berg if she’d heard of Robert Warren Faulkner—is he a known neo-Nazi?
“Either name mean anything to you?” Pogo asked.