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-maché, 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.