Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(47)
Before she quite realized it, the harbor glimmered to her left, and she was crossing the bridge. She raced down the final slope to the flats of the peninsula. Here land was in such short supply and so valuable, the seriously wealthy and the merely well-to-do lived in fabulous waterfront houses on postage-stamp properties, within shouting distance of older funky beach cottages rented by groups of surf rats working short-hour low-wage zombie jobs to preserve most of their time for tearing up epic waves or wiping out, either way, because all that mattered was being there.
Tentacled fog felt its way slowly, blindly off the sea and through the streets, breathing a cold dew on Bibi’s face. She left the bicycle in an alley behind a block of businesses, closed at that hour, and continued on foot to the nearer of two piers.
As Thursday waned, traffic was light. For a place of such tight-packed structures and dense population, Balboa Peninsula felt lonely just then. It was easy to believe that an unaccompanied woman might vanish between one block and the next, never to be seen again.
As the fog married the land to the sea, passing traffic made Bibi think of submersibles plying the ocean through a sunken city, though one with humbler architecture than Atlantis. By the time she reached the vicinity of the pier, where faux-antique iron lamps silvered the mist, she seemed to be the only person in sight.
For emergencies, she had a key to Pet the Cat. Just inside the front door, during the alarm system’s one-minute delay, she entered the code with the keypad. Spaced throughout to inconvenience thieves, security lamps provided more than enough light for Bibi to reach the stairs in the back-left corner of the shop.
The store occupied two commercial units. Her dad also leased the rooms above, which otherwise would have been rented as an apartment. He used half that upper space to store merchandise, and the other half served as his office, complete with a kitchenette and a cramped bathroom with shower.
In addition to a desk and filing cabinets, the office contained a comfortable sofa and two armchairs. On the walls hung five framed, mint posters for The Endless Summer. Her dad would not sell even one.
After turning on a desk lamp, Bibi closed the louvered shutters, which were tight enough to allow only a little light to escape.
When she sat in the office chair where her father had sat, she felt safe for the first time since she’d fled her apartment. Beside the desk lamp stood a framed photograph of Bibi and her mother.
She so wanted to call them. But she remembered Terezin’s threat. If she went to her parents for help, he would kill them, too.
She wondered what the police would say if she approached them with her bizarre story. Would they invoke the danger-to-herself-and-others law and remand her for a psychiatric evaluation? For the moment, at least, the usual authorities were of no use to her.
She opened her laptop and plugged it in. On the desk stood a mug holding a selection of pens and pencils. She opened a desk drawer in search of a tablet or notepad.
Among the items in the drawer was a silver bowl containing a One-Zip plastic bag full of Scrabble tiles. She stared at it for a while before she picked it up.
The online phone directory for Orange County included numerous people named Bell, but Bibi could not find an Ashley. There might be a spouse or daughter named Ashley not included in the listing, but to find her would require calling every number or visiting every address where one was provided. And there were surely other Bells who had unlisted numbers. The task was too daunting. She needed to think of a smarter, quicker way to conduct the search.
She googled Ashley Bell and found a number of them in states from Washington to Florida, but none in Orange County, which made her doubt her assumption that this person must be a local. She discovered photos of some of the Ashleys on Facebook—males and females—but she experienced no frisson of connection when she studied their faces.
During all this, she kept glancing at the bowl full of lettered tiles. It wasn’t the same bowl that Calida had used. And the Amazon’s tiles had been in a flannel bag, not a One-Zip.
So…questions. If Scrabblemancy was just a lark to Murphy and Nancy, why would he want his own gear? Had an amusement grown into an obsession? But assuming that Calida wasn’t a fraud, that she was a gifted diviner, the gear itself was of no use to people without her power. Did Murphy fancy himself some kind of medium?
That seemed absurd. People who made it to fifty by coasting happily along on an it’ll-be-what-it’ll-be mantra, whose relationship with fate was guided by a don’t-ask-don’t-tell mentality, who never exhibited a passing interest in philosophical issues, who lived for work and surf and surfers’ simple pleasures, didn’t abruptly become occultists any more than they became true-believing Jehovah’s Witnesses, passing out pamphlets door to door. And if her father had gone over the edge, her mother had gone with him, because in a fundamental way, each had always been the other; perhaps their foremost saving grace was their commitment to each other, deep and unshakeable. If anything, Nancy would be less likely than Murphy to become a seeker of hidden knowledge. She was top agent, hard-nosed flogger of dream homes and fixer-uppers, a surfer babe who insisted on shag-cut hair because it saved her X number of minutes each day that could better be spent on maintaining a tan and catching some waves, drinker of tequila shots and beer, eater of jalape?os and habaneros, and all but certainly more enthusiastic in her marriage bed than her daughter cared to contemplate. Nancy was far too earthy to be floated off her feet by the helium of occult pursuits. And if not Nancy, then never Murphy. Divination with Scrabble tiles could be no more to them than a party game.