Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(83)
She loved the captain. He had helped a troubled little girl keep her sanity. But the help he had given had not resolved her problem (whatever it might be), had only taught her to suppress all knowledge of it. The thing of terror had not been vanquished. It still lived and waited. Waited for her to open the door and be consumed by it.
Trembling, shocked, she sat at the table, staring at the vandalized large-size paperbacks.
In the professor’s house, Coy had said something peculiar, the importance of which Bibi had at first not understood. She could not recall what it had been. Of course she couldn’t. She had burned it from memory in a childish ritual that worked less because of the six magic words Captain had taught her than because she desperately needed it to work. What Coy said must have had something to do with the three books; it had alarmed her, brought her into the presence of a truth so monumental that she had not been able to face it.
She used the switchblade to cut what remained of the three key pages from the books. She folded them and put them in the spiral-bound notebook and slipped it into her purse.
The room was warm, but Bibi felt carved from ice. One more name could be added to the list of the many people conspiring against her. She could not entirely trust herself.
With only her gun and her purse, Bibi left the security of her motel room, which was an imagined security anyway, as imaginary as every moment of seeming peace and safety in this new world that she inhabited. Thank you, Calida Butterfly, or whatever the hell your name was. Now every stronghold proved to be a place with paper walls, every hideaway a trap. Instead of a stout barrier, every door was an invitation to threats natural and supernatural. The lesson here was the opposite of what the old adage advised: You should always look a gift horse in the mouth. A gift horse or a gift masseuse. A relaxing massage, and then chardonnay and a silly-fun session of divination, and the next thing you know, you’ve attracted the attention of an incarnation of Hitler, and you’ve invited occult forces into your life, and you’ve been spared from cancer only so that some lunatic can stab you to death with a thousand pencils. She wanted to kick someone’s ass, but there was no one she could find to kick, except maybe Murphy and Nancy for hiring Calida, but Bibi wasn’t going to boot them. Honor thy father and mother, and all that. She left the motel in a mood of righteous indignation and exasperation too consuming to be sustained.
Although it was only 7:40, Laguna Beach appeared to have closed down for the night, the mist-shrouded hills sloping through silence to the sea, the traffic already midnight-light as the ocean sloughed off ever thicker masses of land-hugging clouds, a lone coyote howling out of a canyon as if lost and grieving for its vanished pack.
She drove Pogo’s Honda north into the blinding murk, which seemed appropriate, given that her life had become a dismal swamp of puzzles and enigmas, that all the potential futures she’d foreseen for herself were now dissolved into a soup of possibilities she did not want to contemplate.
Although the swarm of cultists that had descended on Fashion Island surely didn’t remain there hours later, Bibi went instead to another mall. She purchased new copies of the story collections by Flannery O’Connor, Thornton Wilder, and Jack London. She also bought a flashlight, batteries for it, and a Scrabble game.
From there, she traveled south once more, to Corona del Mar, where she cruised past the sweet bungalow in which she had lived for nineteen years, until she had moved to her apartment. A year later, Murphy and Nancy had sold the place to a couple, the Gillenhocks, who made their money in cattle-rustling and cockfighting. Well, the story was that they were successful investment bankers who were able to retire at fifty-three, but the one time Bibi met them, she felt that they were no more investment bankers than she was a concert pianist. The Gillenhocks had spent the past two years offering ever more money to the reluctant-to-move people who owned the property next door, until they acquired it as well, meanwhile working with an architect to design a residence that would, they no doubt hoped, leave their neighbors abashed and envious.
Only recently, the combined properties had been surrounded with a construction fence: chain-link with a green polyurethane overlay for privacy. Although the landscaping had been torn out and hauled away, the buildings had not yet been demolished.
She parked two blocks from the bungalow. She put batteries in the flashlight, which she would use only in the garage apartment. She left her purse under the seat and locked the car and walked streets that were familiar even in the obliterating fog.
The night was as still as a funeral parlor, the houses like mausoleums in the mist.
In addition to a large gate at the front, the construction fence featured another off the wide alleyway, to which houses backed up from parallel streets. All the garage doors were here. At any moment, a car might turn in at one corner or the other, the driver remoting a door ahead of him, and even in the near white-out, she would be seen.
The privacy material was fixed on the exterior of the fencing, and she had to slash it with Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade in order to be able to get toeholds in the chain-link. Unlike the rest of the fence, the gate had a toprail that covered the cut-off twists of steel, eliminating the risk of puncturing her hands. She went up and over the gate, into the carport next to the garage.
In the brick-paved courtyard, something about the angles and the juxtaposed planes of the surrounding buildings magnified the vague exhalation of the sea into a somewhat less faint draft that set the fog in slow motion counterclockwise. Bibi felt as if she were being drawn upward even before she climbed the stairs to the apartment above the garage.