“I don’t know,” Toba said. “It’s peculiar, isn’t it?”
“Who is Robert Warren Faulkner?”
“Never heard of him.”
“More important,” Pogo said, “who is Ashley Bell?”
The fog that Bibi drew into her lungs seemed for a moment to fill her head, as well. Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack had spoken about events of which she could know nothing. He asked you what you needed most, and you said to forget. But what you needed most back then wasn’t to forget. And it’s not what you need now. She had never known the captain. He had died years before this awful woman had come into Bibi’s life.
Dressed expensively for a cheap nightclub, dressed for a production number in an old Elvis Presley film, with spike heels and toreador pants and all that cleavage and the black-and-white leather jacket, standing in a bubble of clarity in the white murk, backlit by the Bentley, Miss Hoffline reinvented was demanding to be seen, to be considered and understood.
Bibi thought she heard something behind her, someone closing on her, revealed by the crunch of gravel. She pivoted, sweeping the night with the gun, but she found no one. Lights in the construction-office trailer, behind the window shades. Voices inside, less than half heard, unintelligible, perhaps not speaking English. Like voices from Beyond drawn to a séance and issuing from a scrim of ectoplasm floating in the air.
“They haven’t heard us,” said Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack.
Bibi swung toward her former teacher, expecting to be assaulted in the turn, but the woman had not moved. Her look of triumph seemed to imply that she didn’t need to attack Bibi physically, that she could destroy her with words.
“They haven’t heard us and won’t,” Hoffline-Vorshack said. “Unless you want them to. You can always want them to.”
Bibi still felt fogbound, mentally as well as physically, and even rage could not burn off the mists. Of all the ways she might have expected their confrontation to develop after Hoffline-Vorshack emerged from the car, this was not one of them. At no other point in the past two days had she felt so confused, with so little control over events.
“What do you want, Gidget?” Hoffline-Vorshack asked with a note of exasperation. “Huh? What do you really want?”
“Ashley Bell, damn it. Where are you keeping her?”
“Her location—that’s just the next turn in the narrative. What you want—now, that’s a bigger issue. Character motivation. If you’re driven to save the girl, if that’s your motivation, you first need to learn the full truth about yourself. If instead you’re afraid of that truth, if you’re the coward I think you are, then your motivation is to remain ignorant of it, and you’ll never save anyone.”
“Why are you going on like this? What is this bullshit? We’re not in a classroom.”
“Aren’t we?” There was such conviction in her voice and such challenge in her eyes that it seemed as if walls might form around the two of them, and rows of schoolroom desks appear. “What do you want me to be, Gidget?”
“Want you to be?”
“As you know, I’ll be whatever you want.”
The fog was everywhere, deep and opaque, everywhere except around Hoffline-Vorshack, but she was speaking fog, a machine of obfuscation.
“All you’ve ever been,” Bibi said, “since my junior year, is an impediment. People don’t change in a minute.”
“So you want me to be an impediment, prevent you from getting to Ashley, prevent you from facing the truth?”
Surrealism had been woven through the past two days, but now its thread count seemed to be increasing rapidly.