Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(93)
“The Best Western Best Western. You know, the chain.”
“But there must be several of them in San Diego.”
“Well, I don’t know, it just says Best Western on the building.”
“There must be another part to the name. Best Western Downtown, Best Western Old Town, Best Western Harbor, something like that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Look for an ad card on your nightstand or a brochure in the drawer. It’ll have the full name. Go look.”
“Okay. Wait a sec.” Bibi clamped the palm of her hand over the phone and counted to twenty while she watched the less than thrilling spectacle of the fog. “Okay. There’s both an ad card and a brochure, but they just say Best Western. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m happy and well fed and sleepy, and I’m only staying one night. Tomorrow I might drive back up to La Jolla, stay there a day or two.”
She expected her mother to demand that she go to a window and describe the part of the city immediately around the hotel, but Nancy said, “You’re not going to surf at La Jolla Shores, are you?”
“No. I’m not surfing anywhere. Too chilly for me.”
“Your dad says there’s a storm in the South Pacific, supposed to be some smokin’ behemoths rolling in from Baja to La Jolla Shores. You did just get out of the hospital, remember.”
“I don’t even have my board with me, Mom. I’m going to spend the day shopping for things I don’t need, indulging myself. Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask. About the captain. About Grandpa.”
“I know you still think of him often.”
“I do,” Bibi agreed. “But this is a research thing, for the novel I’m writing. Did he ever talk much about when he was an intelligence officer? About the interrogation-resistance techniques his team developed?”
“That was all classified stuff, sweetie.”
“But he talked about it a little.”
“Very little.”
“Did he ever say anything about memory suppression?”
“Which is what?”
“Making people forget things. Wiping an entire experience out of your mind, so you don’t remember it ever happened.”
“That sounds more science-fictiony than anything your grandpa would have been working on.”
“The research I’ve done so far tells me it’s possible. But if it’s possible, I’m wondering how it could be undone.”
“This is for the book you’ve been working on? It sounds awful science-fictiony.”
“It’s not really. Not at all. Anyway, I’m wiped out. I need to grab a nightcap from the honor bar and hit the sheets.”
“If you need downtime to put the whole brain thing behind you, then you should damn well make it total downtime, honey. Forget your work for a few days.”
“You’re right, Mom. I will. Okay. Gotta crash. I love you. Tell Dad I love him. Tell him I’m not going to paddle out into any smokin’ behemoths in La Jolla Shores.”
After declarations of love bounced back and forth a few more times, Bibi terminated the call and switched off the phone.
She piloted the Pogomobile off the peninsula, onto Pacific Coast Highway, and motored slowly through a phantom sea of fog, heading to her motel in Laguna, trying to convince herself that she was not a natural-born liar. As a troubled child, she had withheld things from her parents, all the secrets that she had revealed to Captain, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t told them bald-faced lies. Some people thought that novels were a kind of lie, because the stories and the characters were made up, but fiction could be a search engine with which you could find elusive truths and peel them layer by layer, especially those truths that writers of nonfiction rarely if ever considered, either because they did not believe such truths existed or because they did not want them to exist. By the time that she reached Corona del Mar, she decided she was a liar, but not a mean or vindictive one.
En route, she stopped at a supermarket and bought extra-strength Tylenol. And aspirin. And Motrin. A big tube of unscented analgesic cream. No matter how much she overmedicated, she wouldn’t blow out her liver in one night. Valiant girls should be able to take a lot of physical punishment without complaint, but they weren’t invincible. She didn’t like admitting that she hurt and that she was getting stiff from the knockabout she had endured, but self-delusion wasn’t necessary to remain resolute. Gauze, tape, iodine. A family-size bag of Reese’s peanut-butter cups. However she might die, she wasn’t at much risk of dropping dead from either diabetes or arteriosclerosis.
She bought a pint of vodka, too. Her motel didn’t have an honor bar like the well-stocked one that she had imagined for the Best Western that wasn’t.
In Laguna, she parked two blocks from the motel. Carrying the electronic map that she’d purchased earlier in the day, the Scrabble game, the bookstore bag containing fresh copies of the three story collections, and the items from the supermarket, she returned to her room, stopping only to get a bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine.
Although she wasn’t much of a drinker, she looked forward to a couple of shots of vodka with her Coke, to fortify her for what might lie ahead. On the other hand, she suspected that in the next hour or so, she had a good chance of locating Ashley Bell, in which case she would need to be clearheaded and ready to roll.