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.
The apartment door wasn’t locked. The place was empty. Nothing remained to be stolen. Vandals would be discouraged by the fact that the buildings were soon being torn down; no one cared what damage they might do.
She switched on the flashlight, partly hooding it with her hand, but confident that the pale glow wouldn’t inspire curiosity in anyone outside. The apartment had been stripped of furniture when the house sold. The blue-and-gray speckled linoleum, dulled by dirt, littered with bits of paper and a few dead beetles, had split in places and curled back from the baseboard.
Bibi stood where she had stood on the morning that she found him dead, when she was ten years old. He’d been at his breakfast when it happened, a bowl of cereal and a plate of toast on the table before him, his newspaper folded open to the opinion pages. He must have gotten to his feet before he’d fallen and hit his head on the corner of the table. He’d been lying on his left side. A lake of blood had gushed from nose or mouth, or both. Blood colored his staring eyes as well, and his lashes were jeweled with scarlet tears.
She’d thought someone killed him. Even so, she had not run in fright. She had been too devastated to have a capacity for fear; she had room only for grief. She’d said aloud, Grandpa, no. Oh, no, no. I still need you, Grandpa.
That had been the only time she ever called him Grandpa. For the first couple of weeks after he moved in above the garage, she didn’t know that he was her mother’s father. By then he was forever Captain to Bibi. He preferred it that way, too, because he felt that Bibi’s mother would be rubbed raw by hearing the G-word all the time. Nancy didn’t call him Dad. To her, he was Gunther, his first name. He said that Nancy had it right, that he had never been a good enough father to deserve to be called Dad. But as far as Bibi was concerned, he had become a perfect grandfather.