Murph had gone downstairs to the cafeteria to get sandwiches and pasta salads for dinner, which they would eat together in this room. Neither of them wanted to leave until visiting hours were over, and perhaps not even then.
While Murph was getting their dinner, Nancy had decided to bail out of the real-estate business, depending on what happened next. She loved selling houses, helping people who needed new homes, and she was good at it, better at being a Realtor than Murph was at selling surfboards, and he was pretty darned good. But if something happened to Bibi—not just the undefined something, face it, if she died—every property in the world would be, to Nancy, haunted. Every house she showed to every prospective buyer would have been a house where Bibi might have lived one day and raised a family with Pax. Every bare lot, waiting for an architect to finish the house design, would be a gravesite waiting for a headstone. Wrung like a rag in the hands of anxiety, that is what she told herself as she paced the room.
Although it sounded as if she might be making a bargain with fate, she wasn’t promising to give up her career if only Bibi were allowed to live. There was no point in such dickering. That kind of sentimental gesture made you feel a little better if you were feeling like crap, gave you a sense of control when in fact you had none, but it was meaningless. What would happen would happen. Fate was a bitch; she made no bargains. What Nancy was really saying to herself, by planning to give up real-estate sales, was that losing her daughter so young would surely drain the meaning from her work, her life. But you had to face reality even when reality sucked.
She was standing at the foot of the bed, watching the comatose girl, when dried blood and fresh blood flew from Bibi’s damaged ear, spattered across the pillowcase, the sheets. As though an invisible presence had clawed open the crusted abrasions, blood dribbled from them again.
For a hundred feet or so, Bibi made her way through a white-out worthy of an arctic blizzard, a white-out without wind or polar cold, but nonetheless disorienting and fearsome. When the lights of the construction-trailer windows were hardly brighter than the phantom phosphorescence on a just-switched-off TV screen, she took her flashlight from an inside jacket pocket and dared to switch it on.
If they had roaming security guards, she might be seen, but she could not worry about that. Intuition told her, the threats she faced from this point would not be as mundane as rent-a-cops. Since Pogo had brought the Honda to Pet the Cat, since she had set out on this quest, she had gone much farther than the miles on the odometer would attest. She felt as if she had traveled to an unknown country on an undiscovered continent, to the brink of a nameless abyss. There was the known world and the supernatural world that shadowed it, and the veil that had been deteriorating between them now began to dissolve entirely.
Or maybe it was another veil rotting by the moment, a veil between her life as she believed it to have been and her life as it truly had been, between what she was and what she could be. The abyss on the brink of which she stood was the truth.
Her body ached from the beating she had taken at the hands of the man she had killed, and her ear felt as if it were afire. She had left the Tylenol in the car. Didn’t matter. The pain would not incapacitate her. It focused her instead, sharpened her senses.
The thick fog resisted the power of light, and the flashlight beam proved a feeble tool. The fog did not only pool and eddy and creep, but also clung to surfaces in a way not foglike. Within the general murk, thicker shrouds grew like moss on tool-storage sheds, on pallets of concrete blocks and stacked crates of cobblestones. It draped backhoes and forklifts and other equipment like sheets thrown over furniture in a house closed for the season.
She became aware of—or imagined—low swift shapes paralleling her in the cloaking mist. They were pale-gray and featureless, as low as dogs or bobcats, but they were neither of those animals, slinkier than dogs and larger than bobcats, larger also than coyotes, wolfish and elusive. She saw no eye shine, and if they were more than shadows of a threat conjured by her mind, they were as silent as spirits.