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.
Bibi took off her blazer, mixed Coke and vodka in a motel glass, popped a pair of Tylenol, and sat at the small table to compare the text in the new copies of O’Connor, Wilder, and London to the pages from which earlier she had cut out lines with the switchblade. She repeatedly read the words that she excised and burned and forgot, but studying them did not bring enlightenment. If these lines or part of these lines, or variations of them, were what Chubb Coy had said to her in Dr. St. Croix’s third-floor Victorian retreat, they no longer triggered a revelation, perhaps because she had forgotten in what context he said them, or simply because the captain’s memory trick could not be that easily undone.
Putting the books aside, she turned to the lettered tiles from the Scrabble game that she had purchased. She didn’t possess a silver bowl, didn’t need one. She had no desire to engage in divination. Now and then over the years, she’d heard people warn that playing with a Ouija board could be dangerous, that when you posed questions to it and received answers, the responses didn’t come from the board, but from some spirit realm, from an entity that was not necessarily benign. And even if that entity didn’t boldly deceive and mislead with its answers, you had opened a door to it by initiating contact, after which it might not remain content to stay with the dead or the damned or with whomever it currently hung out. For other reasons—surfing, books, boys—Bibi had never been interested in Ouija boards. She had not given much credence to the notion of malevolent entities crouched in some Otherwhere, waiting for unsuspecting and ignorant humans to open a mystical gate for them. But if there might be any truth to such beliefs, Scrabblemancy would be no less dangerous than seeking answers from the Ouija. Besides, she wasn’t going to thrust a needle through the meat of her thumb, especially considering that she suspected the answer to Ashley’s whereabouts had already been conjured by Calida Butterfly in the hour before she’d been murdered.
Someone knocked softly on the motel-room door. Three quick faint raps.
What fresh hell is this? She drew the pistol and got to her feet and waited.
When the knock was not repeated, she went to the door and peered through the fisheye lens into a self-distorted world herewith further distorted. In the fall of light from the exterior lamp directly above the door, neither Death nor anyone else stood at her threshold in the atmospheric fog. She kept one eye to the lens, in case her elusive visitor returned to knock again. A minute passed, and then another, and her patience wasn’t rewarded.
She considered going to one or both of the windows and easing aside the blackout draperies. Not a good idea. If she revealed her position, she would be an easy target.
Call the front desk? Report a prowler? Doris might still be on duty. Sympathetic Doris would believe her. No. Don’t put anyone else at risk.
There seemed to be nothing better that she could do than return to the table. The knocking had been feather-soft, almost an idea of a sound. Maybe she imagined it.
She arranged twenty-seven Scrabble tiles in two lines, one above the other, just as they had been on the round table in Calida’s home office. The first line was ASHLEY BELL. The second offered an address: ELEVEN MOONRISE WAY.