On the screen of the electronic map appeared a cartographic spread of Orange County. A blinking red indicator drew her attention to Sonomire Way in the southeast quadrant, in unincorporated land under the county’s jurisdiction rather than that of any city. She summoned a full-screen view of the quadrant, and then of the fourth of the quadrant in which the street was located.
Sonomire Way was one in a grid of sixteen three-lane streets named this Way and that Way. The distance between streets and the lack of alleys resulted in blocks too large to serve as residential neighborhoods. She assumed it must be a business or industrial park, although no legend on the screen identified it by name.
When the scratching at the door ceased, someone insistently tried the doorknob, rattling it back and forth. There was no chance that this was an imagined noise or the work of a fog-loving moth, because she could see the light purling along the curve of the knob as it turned back and forth.
The knocking, the tapping at the window, the scratching, and now the testing of the lock didn’t seem to be the actions of someone who seriously wanted to get at Bibi right away. The entire performance felt like an attempt to distract her from finding a new word in MOONRISE, from the electronic map and the search for Sonomire Way.
The doorknob stopped turning. No one knocked or scratched.
As she switched off and unplugged the map, Bibi thought about the moment earlier in the evening when she had turned traitor against herself. Because of that self-betrayal, she had not purchased another butane lighter. If she became aware of tearing a sheet of paper into small pieces, with the intention of flushing it down the toilet, she would hope to be able to turn away from that intention, puzzle together the fragments, and read what she had meant to commit to a memory hole. That she had been a reluctant—even unaware—treasonist did not mean she had reformed or was ineffectual.
If she had been the one trying to distract herself from the search for Sonomire Way, however, the noises at the door and the windows should have been imaginary; yet she was certain she’d heard them. And she definitely saw the doorknob turning back and forth. If the sounds and the testing of the lock were real and if also she was the perpetrator of those distractions, then she must possess some paranormal power that she used unconsciously, like the living equivalent of a poltergeist.
The prospect of having such a power didn’t please her. If that was part of what she’d long hidden from herself by using Captain’s memory trick, she would prefer that the knowledge remained scattered ashes. If she managed to save Ashley Bell, all she wanted thereafter was to return to the tracks of a normal existence, to the life that cancer—and this obsession with the threatened girl—had derailed. Ordinary daily life, which so many people thought had no flash or filigree, was to Bibi at all times extraordinary; so much magic and wonder were at work in the world, so much mystery in its depths, that she didn’t want—and couldn’t cope with—any more than what it offered to anyone who was willing to see.
After shrugging into her blazer, she carried the electronic map in her left hand, the pistol in her right, and paused to put an eye to the peephole. If the scratcher at the door waited for her, it was not immediately in view. The two-block walk to the Honda through fog and threat, as well as the events to come on Sonomire Way, promised to be a daunting test of her daring and courage. But whatever happened, even if this proved to be a test to destruction, the night ahead had two virtues: first, the much desired end of this ordeal was coming fast; second, she doubted that it would be dull.
She opened the door.
The door was closed, and Pax knocked on it, and Nancy opened it. She flung her arms around him and hugged him with something like ferocity, as if doubting—and confirming—his solidity. Then Murphy joined them, and he was a hugger, too. They stood in a three-way embrace for a minute before Paxton’s future in-laws, trembling and trying to suppress small wordless expressions of anguish, ushered him to the hospital bed as if to casketed remains standing ready for a ceremony in a church. Bibi, indomitable Bibi, lay insensate, comatose, dressed in pajamas, hooked to heart and brain-wave monitors, wearing an electro cap with its many electrode contacts across her scalp, catheterized, being hydrated and nourished by an intravenous drip.