Ashley Bell: A Novel (51 page)

Bibi parked alongside the highway, certain of being alone in the car. Relatively certain. For the moment.

She needed to get to Sonomire Way and find Ashley Bell, but she also needed to regain control of herself. She had been plunging from one untenable situation to another, crisis to crisis, letting events knock her from here to there to anywhere, as if she were a pinball. Events could overwhelm anyone. Nobody could stand tall and unmoved in a tsunami. But she could fight the undertow. Keep her head above water until the tumult subsided, and then swim.

Worse, she had allowed herself to be manipulated. She had taken far too long to recognize that, by one ruse and then another, she was being distracted from her quest. She had invested too much energy and emotion—
and time!
—fearing and worrying about responding to things that were no real threat to her. Tapping at a window. Scratching at a door. Hoodie Guy and his dog. The tattoo was a different kind of distraction. Why had she gotten the tattoo?
ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE
. She didn’t need flamboyant displays of dauntless intentions, which wasn’t her nature, quiet perseverance being more her style, didn’t need rah-rah and you-go-girl cheerleading. The tattoo was a challenge, but to whom, to what, if not to fate?
And she didn’t believe in fate.
She was the master of her fate by virtue of free will. In her life, she
was
fate.

Earlier, she had killed the engine. Now she started the car again, but didn’t switch on the headlights.

She was living in both the present and the past, at least in the sense that occurrences in the past—forgotten, half remembered—shaped events now. She knew how to cope with the present, how the world of now worked and how to make her way through it to her best advantage. But she was lousy with the past. When moments of potential revelation arose, she needed to seize them and peel away the thick skin of all those yesterdays, to see what fruit waited within.

As well, she was living in two worlds. She’d been living in two since Calida Butterfly began to seek hidden knowledge at the table in the kitchen. The first world was that of cause and effect, reason and design, where truth was discovered by intuition and observation. The second world was far wilder, a place where the supernatural no longer remained behind a veil, to be recognized or not, but frequently burst into view. Within the past hour, Bibi had begun to understand that her past, through the year that she was ten, had been lived in the second and wilder world.

From her purse she extracted the beautiful leather-bound book that had belonged to Calida but in which she had seen faint gray lines of her handwriting fluidly flowing and vanishing across the pages. She realized only now that it had been the cursive script of her childhood, much like what she produced these days, though with flourishes she no longer used. Somehow the book was a link between present and past, also between the two worlds in which she now lived.

She turned on the overhead light and opened the magical volume and searched through its blank leaves of creamy paper, but she did not see the ghostly script this time. The lines of the Donald Justice poem, which she had inscribed on a page and which had vanished, had not reappeared. They had not been written with disappearing ink. An ordinary pen. So the lines had gone somewhere. Like email, they had gone from one screen to another, one book to another.

To regain control of herself, to become again the Bibi Blair that she had been when all of this chaos started, she needed to knit together past and present, as well as the two worlds in which she lived. She did not know how the book could do that or
if
it could do that, but intuition suggested that nothing else at hand could serve that purpose. What good did it do to have a magical book if you did not in some way use it?

Bibi rummaged through her purse and found the pen. Although she sensed the petty god of time, in all three of its incarnations—past, present, future—washing away from her, and though near the center of her value system was the admonition to work and achieve—to
do
for the sake of doing—she put out of her mind the urgency of her quest for the girl. She gave considerable thought to what she should write rather than at once inking words onto the page.

As she began each new line, the previous line disappeared from the paper. When she was finished, she watched the last few words fade from view. Although it appeared as if she had done nothing, a sense of accomplishment welled in her and with it a fragile hope.

She put away the pen and the book, and she shook two capsules from the bottle of Tylenol. Her abraded ear and bruised face ached. The tattoo on her forearm stung in every vertical and horizontal line of its eighteen block letters. In the bottle that she had brought from the motel, enough warm Coke remained to wash down the pain reliever.

She turned off the interior light, switched on the headlights, and drove back onto the highway.

Within seconds, the stern but caring voice of the woman that issued from the GPS began once more to give directions to Sonomire Way, a journey now of less than ten minutes.

To say that the fog returned would be to misrepresent both its origins and the quality of its locomotion. The mist did not drift in from the west, not from the sea that had birthed the previous clouds, but from the forbidding east, out of the Mojave Desert, where no source of water existed that could have generated such obliterating white masses. The fog came not on little cat feet, per Carl Sandburg, but in a racing flood so dense and swift that Bibi steeled herself for the impact, as if it would have the power of a wall of water, which it did not. From one instant to the next, the road before her and the landscape around her disappeared, and the headlights were hardly of more use to her than would be the memory of the sun to a coal miner trapped by a cave-in.

As she followed the instructions of the GPS, Bibi realized that the woman she had been, the woman she wished to be again, was not the woman she should have been, because she had never integrated within herself some key experiences of her childhood. She had, with the aid of Captain’s memory trick, repressed information that would have had a profound effect upon the shaping of her character, of her intellect and emotion and will. To be formed even in part by half truths was to be ill-formed. With this realization, a different kind of chill shivered through her, a peculiar chill like none that she had ever known before. If in the hours ahead she learned the truth of her past, a change would descend upon her, would be
forced
upon her by new knowledge, and whether or not she saved Ashley Bell, she would never again be the Bibi Blair who had set out on this quest.

With nowhere else to go, with no leads to be followed at the moment, they went to Pogo’s favorite restaurant. The three large sharks hanging from the ceiling were said to have been alive once, not made of plastic or papier-mâché, preserved by a taxidermist, their skin as glossy as if they were still wet from the sea, swimming one after the other in search of a good meal. Some claimed that an engraved medallion and ruby ring belonging to the legendary and mysteriously vanished surfer, Tommy Cordovan, had been found in the gut of the largest shark, but that was about as credible as another claim that in the same stomach had been found bones DNA-matched to the missing aviator Amelia Earhart. The walls were decorated with colorful custom surfboards and photographs of local surf celebrities dating all the way back to the 1930s, guys and—more and more as the years went by—girls who were largely unknown to the world outside of the Southern California community of devoted boardheads, but who were admired and regarded with affection and sometimes revered as demigods by members of the local beach tribe.

People came there for the food, which was good, but as much for the atmosphere, which was saturated with the romance of California as it had once been and, sadly, would likely never be again. Pax had not eaten breakfast, and both he and Pogo had missed lunch. They sat in a corner booth, in the welcome quiet before the dinner rush.

The waitress who brought menus was in synch with the intensity of the décor, if not with its theme. A well-tanned Amazon with a blond pageboy haircut, she stood nearly six feet tall, a fortyish looker who was a version of Nicole Kidman writ large. Her eyes appeared to be blue or green or maybe blue-gray depending on the angle at which she regarded you. Uniforms weren’t required of the wait staff, and this woman—her badge identified her as
KANANI
, which was Hawaiian for
a beauty
—was dressed in white slacks and a white blouse accessorized with a red-silk sash worn as a belt and a red-and-gold silk scarf at her throat. Elaborate dangling gold earrings. Flashy bracelets. Eight diamond finger rings. She might have worn ten rings, except that she had only eight fingers. Ironically, on each hand, she was missing the ring finger, which was next to the pinkie.

Kanani smiled and seemed pleasant enough, but there was a remote quality to her, a sense that she held the truest part of herself in reserve, letting the world make of her what it would, which likely had little to do with who she really was.

After she had taken their orders for beer and had gone, Pogo said, “Beebs is fascinated with Kanani. I figure she’ll put her in a book someday.”

“What happened to the fingers?”

“Nobody knows. Someone asked her once—and wished he hadn’t. I wasn’t here when it happened, so I don’t know if he was a smart-ass about it or just asking the question was enough to set her off, but Kanani decked him, knocked him out cold.”

“And wasn’t fired?”

“She’s a good waitress. Besides, Wayland Zuckerman—he’s the owner—is either head-over-heels in love with her or terrified of her. Nobody can quite figure out which.”

When Kanani brought two bottles of Corona, two glasses, and napkins, she proved as dexterous as any ten-fingered waitress and more so than many.

Pax and Pogo ordered fish tacos plus a plate of enchiladas suizas with black beans and rice to be split between them.

“Where’d you get the Pogo moniker?” Pax asked.

“Don’t have a clue.”

“You really don’t know—or the nickname is nobody’s business, just like Kanani’s missing fingers?”

“I never punched out anyone who asked me. I’ve been called Pogo as long as I can remember, and no one’s ever taken credit for pinning it on me.”

“There was a cartoon character way back, in the funny pages.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think that’s where it came from. Everyone in my family’s too serious to read the funny pages, and anyway that was before their time.”

Kanani brought their food, and they ate with enthusiasm for a while before Pogo said, “I don’t feel right, scarfing up tacos and beer, while Beebs needs us to be doing something.”

“Except there’s nothing to do right now. You want to call the AV god and see if he’s got the tape recorder working?”

“At least that’s something,” Pogo said, and put down a taco to pick up his smartphone.

Earlier, on the way to see Dr. St. Croix in Laguna Beach, they stopped at the house of a guy named Ganesh Patel, a surfer whose passion for designing audio-video systems flowered into a business that he hadn’t really wanted, that eventually he had sold for enough money to spend his life beachside. He’d explained that microcassette recorders of that type were long out of style, largely replaced by digital systems with greater storage capacity, but that he could fix their example of pathetic Neanderthal technology because he could fix anything.

Ganesh answered the call. For a minute or so, Pogo listened, saying only, “Uh-huh, okay, uh-huh, mmmm, cool, uh-huh, uh-huh. Latronic, dude,” before he terminated the call.

Having been around the Blair family long enough to pick up some surfer lingo, Pax knew that
latronic
meant
later on
or
see you later.

“He’s taken it apart, he’s got it spread out on his workbench,” Pogo said, “and now he just needs to find the kink and put it back together right. Man, when he talks about this stuff, you’d think it was some hot chick he had laid out on that workbench.”

“Everyone to his thing. Don’t get me talking about the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle.”

“Is that something that blows things up?”

“Beautifully,” Pax confirmed.

They were nearly finished eating and thinking about a second beer when Pogo said, “You really think it’s a possibility?”

“What is?”

“That wherever Beebs is, I mean besides the hospital, something could happen and she could die there and die here, too.”

“She’s got brain cancer, Pogo. Whether or not something really bad happens to her out there in the Twilight Zone, she could die from the glioma.”

“Yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah, I know.” He looked around at the yellowing photographs of the long-dead surfers, up at the sharks in their motionless but perpetual hunt, as if those familiar sights were new to him, as if the restaurant had become as strange as the surreal angles and metamorphic flow of a dreamscape. “But then…what’s going to happen to us if she dies?”

After a silence, Pax said, “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then we won’t.”

Finished eating, each of them ordered a second beer.

Pax had brought with him the spiral-bound panther-and-gazelle notebook. Now he opened it on the table to skim through some of the Jasper stories, looking for he knew not what, for anything that might be a clue that would help them fulfill Bibi’s request:
Find me.

They were stories written by a ten-year-old girl, but a damn smart ten-year-old. They had flair. They were compelling.

Nevertheless, Pax found himself repeatedly turning past the last tale of Jasper, to the first two blank pages that followed. On the left-hand page were the two lines from one of Bibi’s favorite poems:
Now comes the evening of the mind / Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood.
He dunked a finger in his beer and wiped it across
Now comes the evening.
The black ink smeared readily.

“She didn’t write this when she was ten. She wrote it recently. I’d guess within the last month, but maybe not nearly that long ago.”

Squeezing a slice of lime over the lip of his beer bottle, Pogo said, “What do you think—does it mean something?”

“It has to.”

“What does it mean?”

As Pax was about to admit that he didn’t know, words began to appear as if by magic on the right-hand page, in the familiar elegant cursive script. Before all of this with Bibi, he had a few times over his twenty-eight years tasted the spice of the uncanny, but suddenly it was a staple of his diet. Its effects—a chill, a spidery capering sensation along the nape of the neck, a not unpleasant swelling of the heart—were as reliable as the oral heat and pop-sweat that attended the consumption of a habanero pepper.

Pogo, too, saw the words appearing, and Pax turned the notebook so that both of them could read the message as it formed.

The first line declared,
I am a Valiant girl.