Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(57)
She stayed away from the east end of the porch, where the driveway led past the house to the garage. Avoiding the steps as well, she hurried to the west end of the porch, vaulted over the railing, and landed on her feet. She raced across the front lawn, across the street, and took refuge in Pogo’s Honda, in the deep shadows under the live oak.
She put the photograph of Ashley on the dashboard and extracted her purse from under the driver’s seat. If she could sound genuinely horrified and panicked, which shouldn’t be a problem, a call to 911 might bring the police to Calida’s house while someone remained there to be arrested. Bloody rags. Severed fingers. Murder. If that wasn’t enough to bring out Costa Mesa’s finest, they must be busy filming a reality-TV show. Only as she zippered open the handbag did she recall that she no longer had her phone. She had abandoned it—and its GPS—with her Explorer, the previous night.
If she got out of the car and screamed, trying to rouse the neighbors, she would accomplish nothing except to alert the murderers to her presence and provide them an opportunity to see what she was driving these days. She sat stewing in frustration for a minute or two, but she gained nothing from that, either. When she drove away, she hung a U-turn, heading west, to avoid passing the house.
Instead of sustaining her, a half pint of ice cream before dawn had led to a sugar crash. She went directly to a Norm’s restaurant, the ultimate working man’s eatery, because the food was pretty good and reliable, but also because she had a hunch that the Wrong People wouldn’t be seen in a Norm’s even if they were starving to death and it was the last source of nourishment on the planet. During their short telephone conversation, Birkenau—“Call me Birk”—Terezin had sounded like a snob and a narcissist. His associates were likely to be of the same cloth; power-trippers put a low value on humility. When your enemies were elitist snarky boys, one way you could go off the grid was to eat at Norm’s and buy your clothes at Kmart.
The hostess put her in a small booth at the back of the room, and Bibi chose to sit facing away from most of the other customers. More than food, she wanted coffee. Her thoughts were fuzzy from too little sleep and too much weirdness. She needed to clear her head. The pleasant and efficient waitress brought a second cup of strong black brew with Bibi’s order of fried eggs, bacon, and hash browns, which promised to grease her thought processes for hours.
In movies, people on the run from killers, having recently seen the severed fingers of a corpse, did not take time out for breakfast. They didn’t take time out for the bathroom, either, or to think about how little life and movies resembled each other.
With a pen and a small notebook that she carried in her purse, she made a note to that effect, which she headlined REMEMBER FOR NOVEL: MOVIES AND LIFE. While she ate, her intention was to make a list of things she needed to buy and to do in order to stay off the grid as much as possible, but she wasn’t surprised that she should also be jotting down ideas for her fiction. After all, she wasn’t always running for her life and trying to save the life of another, though she was always a writer.
Okay, she needed a disposable cell phone. Although it didn’t have the smartphone features she might need, it couldn’t be traced to her and wouldn’t make her vulnerable to GPS bloodhounds. And if they still sold those electronic GPS maps, which wouldn’t have any link to another device known to be owned by her, she could use one.
She found herself making another note off the subject, this one regarding the three occasions that she had used Captain’s trick to forget unwanted memories. They had been spread over ten years. She headlined the list IMPORTANT!
The first time had been when, with Captain’s help and a candle flame, she had burned to ashes the incident of the crawling thing. She’d been five years and ten months old when the creature terrorized her, six and a half when she took steps to forget it.
The second time, she was ten, and the captain had been dead about four months. She burned the memory of what happened in the attic above his apartment, which still remained beyond recollection. In that instance, she had not even written the memory on paper, but had merely stood before the ceramic logs in the bungalow’s living-room fireplace and had offered the memory to the gas flames.
As Bibi composed her list with salient details, Norm’s resonated with conversations, clinking cutlery, rattling china and glassware, and background music that she could not identify and that soon she did not hear. With her concentration came a silence broken not even by the sounds of her eating, for she heard nothing now other than the whisper of pen on paper.
The third time, she had been sixteen, half crazy over the loss of Olaf, confused and distraught and bitter and angry, when to her had come a most hideous idea, an intention so loathsome that she could hardly believe it had originated in her own mind; and though the plan that began to form was so out of character, she knew that the temptation to implement it would be irresistible. Had she acted on that idea, she would have ruined her life and the lives of her parents. And so she wrote it on a page of a notebook, tore it out, and fed the page to flames in the fireplace, taking no chance that offering it without committing it to writing would work as it had worked before.
In those three forgotten moments were the roots of her current troubles. What had crawled the floor of her bedroom? What happened in that spidered attic where fog quested through the vents? To ease the unendurable pressure of her emotions in the wake of the dog’s cremation, what abomination had obsessed her, what violence or outrage had she feared committing so much that it must be burned out of her memory?