On Wednesday, she and Pax sat on a bench at Inspiration Point, watching the sea as it carried to shore millions of fragments of the sun and cast them, cooled and foaming, on the sand.
With only three months to go on his current re-up, he had arranged to spend them stateside, assisting in the training of new recruits. He had given the Navy SEALs ten good years, and he would give to Bibi what years remained.
As pelicans flew in formation low along the coast and sandpipers worked the wet beach for lunch and a couple of hundred yards offshore schooling dolphins arced in and out of the water, she and Pax talked about how cautious she must be in the exercise of her imagination. This was not her world to change even if she thought that she could change it for the better. Considering how disastrous might be the unintended consequences of her actions, her greatest flights of fancy were best kept to the pages of books. If they had children—and they would—and if one terrible day cancer or some other hateful ailment threatened to cut short a precious life, she would have to risk those unintended consequences, as she might have to do as well in other extreme circumstances. Valiant girls, however, were always judicious and prudent. Pax wondered if she might be unique in all the world or if perhaps everyone possessed latent powers of imagination equal to hers. She thought the latter must be true, because she didn’t believe that she was special. She said, “If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline,” and out in the sun-spangled sea, the dolphins danced.
On Saturday, Bibi had a lunch date with Pogo at Five Crowns in Corona del Mar. She arrived half an hour early and left her car in the restaurant parking lot.
At the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Poppy Avenue, she stood remembering the two teenage girls as she had last seen them, Hermione and Hermione, one blond and one brunette, walking south to the corner and then west, not yet grown into their grace, leaning against each other, perhaps laughing, so alive. Bibi had known them only a short while, yet she had felt a remarkable affection for them because of their gameness and vulnerability, their combination of knowingness and innocence. That day, as they had faded out of sight in the fog, she had said to herself, There go two dead girls, and had been distressed by that surprising thought.
Now she understood the full meaning of those words. Hermione and Hermione, daughters of Harry Potter faniacs, had not been walking toward their murderer or anything as dramatic as that. They were two dead girls because they had never been living. They had been citizens of Bibi’s imagination, who had never drawn one breath or laughed one laugh that anyone could hear.
Now she walked the length of tree-shaded Poppy to the sea, and back again, past houses that she’d seen a thousand times. She studied each dwelling with greater interest than before, half hoping that she would glimpse those girls passing a window, discover them lounging on a deck, coming out a door. This casual search could end only as had the search for Ashley Bell: an encounter with no one other than herself. Nevertheless, she entertained a little hope anyway, as an antidote to the sadness that shadows every writer’s heart. For all the effort of creation, for all the hours at the keyboard and the intellectual exercise and the emotion expended, all of a writer’s creations are but a ghost of the Truth, as ephemeral as are all the works of humanity in this world within time.
Later, over lunch, when she shared that thought with Pogo, he said, “Yeah, but just like me, you’ve got today. You’ve got today, and there’s all of time and all the world in today. Walk the board, dudette.”
At sunset he came to the shop on Balboa Peninsula, near the second of the two piers. It was not a jewelry store named Silver Fantasies; and of course it never had been. Newport Beach had never been home to a silversmith named Kelsey Faulkner, and no child named Robert Warren Faulkner had ever murdered his mother here. The space was occupied by a souvenir shop that sold items made of seashells and driftwood and chunks of driftglass smoothed into sinuous shapes by the ceaseless action of the sea.