The long-legged Scrabblemancer bounded down the stairs two at a time, her footfalls hammering reverberant groans from the ironwork. In vanilla-white slacks and top, flamboyant sash and scarf, multiple hoop earrings, and a glittering trove of finger rings, she might have been a glamorous fugitive from a 1950s movie comedy about a Las Vegas showgirl on the run from the Mob.
Nimble and agile, Bibi plummeted after her, risking a bad fall, but proving, if there had been any doubt, the symptoms of gliomatosis cerebri were gone without a trace. “Hey, you know, sometimes you can be damn frustrating.”
“Better than snarky.”
“I wasn’t snarky.”
“Ear of the beholder,” Calida said as she came off the last flight of stairs and made her way between the row of sun loungers and the glimmering pool, where the trout-swift young man had earlier been swimming laps.
Sprinting to close the gap between them, Bibi reached with her left hand and snared the expensive-looking gold-star-on-blue-field silk scarf that trailed behind Calida, hoping to use it to ransom a few answers from the panicked diviner. The exquisite scarf was not merely wrapped around the woman’s throat, however, but was instead loosely knotted, which called before the court the laws of physics, in particular those that dealt with motion, action, and reaction. With a choking sound, Calida Butterfly abruptly ceased forward motion and dropped her ostrich-skin suitcase to clutch at the strangling silk, simultaneously staggering backward two steps and colliding with Bibi, whose forward speed was at that instant decisively checked. For a moment they wheeled around each other like the gimbal mountings of a gyroscope, but though one of the functions of a gyroscope was to maintain equilibrium, they were not able to maintain theirs. They teetered together on the pool coping, a mere degree of tilt away from a wet plunge. When Bibi thought to let go of the scarf, the forces of Nature, which had been cunningly engineered to make amusing fools of human beings in most circumstances, at once rebalanced themselves, thereby casting both women off balance. Calida fell to her knees on the pavement, while Bibi tottered backward and dropped hard into a sitting position on one of the sun loungers.
The Amazon diviner had progressed from fear and anger to terror and rage. She acted on the latter as she thrust to her feet, cursing Bibi and the Thorpe children that she hadn’t yet produced. “Get away from me, stay away from me, you insane crazy bitch.”
As Calida turned toward her dropped suitcase, Bibi said, “Crazy bitch? Me? Me? Meeeee? I was just having the best day of my life, that’s all, free of cancer, then you show up and…”
But she abandoned that line of response. She loathed the whine in her voice, did not want to paint herself as a victim. Valiant girls did not whine. They never played the victim even if there were benefits to be had from inhabiting that role, which there were, huge benefits, which was why everyone wanted to be a victim these days.
Half of Calida’s custom-crafted two-sided suitcase had fallen open when she dropped it, spilling the silver bowl and some of the other items that she used for divination. She stooped to repack with urgency.
Bibi rose from the lounge chair. “Look, maybe I am crazy, running from my apartment because you say someone’s coming—someone or something—I don’t even know who or what or why, crazy for buying in to this Ashley Bell thing, but here I am. So tell me how to find her. Tell me who these wrong people are.”
Turning to face her, suitcase in hand, Calida said bleakly, “Oh, you’ll know them.”
Because the apartment complex catered to young professionals, most of them single, thought had been given even to the lighting in the courtyard. In the service of romance, or whatever the hippest of the cool called it these days, the tall bronze lamps and every fixture used in the landscape lighting produced a calculated radiance—a candescence, resplendence—that flattered every face, that buttered an appealing sheen of health on the skin of every limb and curve that might be revealed.
In this well-schemed, computed, designed light, Calida remained as pale as bleached flour. Oppressed by fear, she had a face that appeared sliced-bread flat, incapable of offering any expression other than dread. “You’ll know them when you see them.”
“What’re we going to do?” Bibi asked.
“We aren’t doing anything. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. Not now. Not ever. What I’m going to do is run. Run and hide.”
With that, she turned away and hurried toward the parking lot, all of her bejeweled and silk-scarfed glamor gone, now just one more desperate woman overwhelmed by the madness of the world.