“It’s a stupid lie that Beebs got a key and went in there.”
“Of course. But just by observing St. Croix, by considering the professor’s psychology, and by applying her imagination, she got it uncannily right. How’s that possible?”
“Well, because she’s Beebs.”
“I’m not Watson, and you’re for sure not Sherlock.” Pax checked his G-Shock watch again. “Can you make a little speed?”
As usual, Laguna traffic came to a choke point at Forest Avenue. Pogo said, “I’ve souped up this crate, but it doesn’t teleport.”
Pax said, “Sorry. It’s just I think we don’t have much time to work this out, we’ve got to move.”
“Move. Okay. But where are we going?”
Pax took a deep breath and blew it out. “I don’t know.”
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?