Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(53)

He kissed her on the cheek and looked her in the eyes and said, “Who’re you hiding out from?”

“That’s not the way it is.”

In a staring contest, neither one of them would ever be the first to look away.

Pogo decided not to make it a contest. He surveyed the lonely mist-soaked morning, as the distant foghorn sounded at the mouth of Newport Harbor. “Just so you know where to get help when you’re finally not too stubborn to ask for it.”

“I know where,” she assured him.

He opened the passenger door and took from the seat a bag of breakfast staples from McDonald’s and a paperback novel.

After Bibi put her laptop and purse on the seat, she closed the door and said, “You don’t hide the books anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter if my folks find out I can read. I already escaped college.”

“You’ve always known what you wanted. Doesn’t it sometimes scare you that years from now, it’ll turn out not to have been enough?”

“The past is past, Beebs. The future is just an illusion. All we have is now.”

Indicating the McDonald’s bag, she said, “I don’t want that to get cold. But I have a couple questions.”

He gestured toward the store. “There’s a microwave inside. This stuff heats okay.”

She could smell the faint exhaust fumes as the Honda tailpipe pumped faux fog into the real stuff. “Has Dad ever mentioned someone named Calida Butterfly?”

After a hesitation, Pogo said, “She comes here. Tall woman, blond, jingles with jewelry when she walks.”

“Comes here to the store? How often?”

“A couple times a month.”

“I look at her,” Bibi said, “I don’t think boardhead.”

“She’s totally an inlander, not even a wish-was surfer. She comes to see Murph.”

“What about?”

“Beats me. They go up to his office.” She met his eyes, he read her instantly, and he said, “That’s not how it is, Beebs. They aren’t humping up there.”

It hurt her to ask, but she asked, “How do you know?”

“I don’t know, but I know. They go back a long way, but the vibe isn’t sex.”

“When did this start?”

“Maybe a year and a half ago.”

Continuing to pour in from the sea, the morning fog defied the sun. But there must have been some clearing inland, because jets were taking off from John Wayne Airport, the dragon roar of their engines speaking down through the fog as if from some Jurassic otherwhere.

“What about a guy named Kelsey Faulkner?”

Pogo considered, shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

“Birkenau Terezin?”

“That’s a name? Sounds like some kind of rash.”

“Ashley Bell?”

“I knew another Ashley once. Ashley Scudder. She traded surfing for corporate finance.”

“Must be some who do both, corporate-finance surfers.”

“Not many.”

“I better go, you better microwave,” Bibi said.

When she kissed him on the cheek, he hugged her fiercely. With his head on her shoulder, his face averted, he said, “When Murph called from the hospital Tuesday to say about the cancer, I closed the store, turned out the lights. Sat behind the counter and cried for an hour. Didn’t think I was gonna stop. Don’t make me cry again, Beebs.”

“I won’t,” she promised, and when he looked at her, she lightly pinched the tip of his perfect nose. “Thanks for the wheels.”

“Whatever thunder crusher you’re riding,” he said, “just walk the board the way you do so well.”

To maintain control of a board, a surfer walked back and forth on it, shifting her body weight.

Bibi went around the Honda, opened the driver’s door, and looked across the roof at Pogo. With an affection so profound that she could never have found the words to describe it in a novel, she smiled and said, “Dude.”

He returned her smile. “Dudette. Walk the board, dudette.”





Because Pogo enjoyed tinkering with cars more than attending college but less than surfing, the Honda drove better than it looked. The well-tuned engine offered good takeoff from a stop and plenty of power for hills. In spite of the joke he had made about the brakes, they were in good working order.

Calida Butterfly lived in Costa Mesa, in a neighborhood that had once been middle-class, had fallen into decline, but had begun to come back strong before the crash of 2008. In the current economic malaise, gentrification had stalled, leaving newer semi-custom two-story homes next door to fifty-year-old ranch-style residences, some well kept and some not. Seventy-year-old bungalows were in the mix, too, this one stucco and that one clapboard, most of them in need of new paint and repairs. Some properties were landscaped and neatly kept, but here and there were weedy yards and overgrown shrubs, and bare dirt scattered with gravel.

The biggest pluses of the neighborhood were its future if the country ever got back on a vigorous growth path and the massive old trees that spread sheltering limbs over the streets, an eclectic urban forest of podocarpus, oaks, carrotwood, stone pines, and more.

Bibi parked across the street from—and a hundred feet west of—Calida’s place, in the enrobing indigo shade of a California live oak. The fog had retreated somewhat from this area, although a scrim still stirred close to the ground, like a lingering poison gas that had been shelled into the neighborhood by an enemy army.