Frequently in the past, she had written while in a condition of infatuation—with ideas, with language, with storytelling—when, for an hour or two at a time, she had neither the desire nor the will to look up from the page. Alone with Olaf’s ashes, this infatuation was shot through with desperation, energized despair, as never before. Her primary motivation during those three days was to argue herself out of some bad ideas, one in particular, compared to which mere suicide would have been preferable.
She exhausted herself with writing, so that it seemed when she crashed, she should have had no imagination left to craft stories in her sleep. But her dreams swelled with wild adventure, threat, and mystery. She dreamed repeatedly—but not exclusively—of the tall and monkish figures in a variety of settings and scenarios. When those menacing phantasms turned toward her, she erupted from the nightmare every time, certain that she would have died in her sleep if she had glimpsed more than the pale moonlit suggestion of their horrific faces.
On the third day, she remembered a trick of forgetting that the captain taught her. In more than one war, Captain had seen things—the bloody aftermath of human viciousness, outrages from the darkest end of the spectrum of cruelty—that disturbed his sleep night after night, that left him despondent. He could not bear to live with the memories. The trick of forgetting had been revealed to him by a Gypsy or a Vietnamese shaman, or by an Iraqi version of a voodooist. The captain could not remember the identity of his benefactor, no doubt because for some good reason he had used the magic procedure to forget that person, too. Anyway, what you needed to do first was write the hated memory or the reckless desire or the evil intention on a slip of paper; the trick worked for more than the disposal of garbage memories. Then you said six words that had great power, said them with sincerity, with all your heart. After you had spoken that incantation, you put the slip of paper in an ashtray or a bowl, and you set it afire. Or you scissored the paper into tiny pieces and flushed them down a toilet. Or buried them in a graveyard. If you recited those magic words with humility, and if you were entirely truthful with yourself when you claimed to want forgetfulness, you would receive it.
Bibi forgot. Not forever, as it turned out, but for years, she forgot the bad idea that she had written on the slip of paper, the thing she had wanted to do—had almost done—that would have ruined her life. Her sharp grief remained, but her fear was lifted from her with the memory. She slept without dreams that night and on the following day returned to family life.
That was the third time that she had used the captain’s method of forgetting. She as yet had no memory of the first and second.
In the lot behind the apartments, the parked vehicles and the thick posts supporting the roofs of the open-air carports provided cover for anyone who might have bad intentions. At the very least, Bibi expected the guy who brooded over the meaning of vanity license plates.
She walked directly to her Ford Explorer, which was parked beside Nancy’s BMW. Step by step, she surveyed the night for a suspicious malingerer, ready to drop the laptop and draw the pistol from her shoulder rig to warn him off. She reached her SUV without being assaulted and, in the driver’s seat, at once locked the doors.
She felt foolish for wondering if the Explorer would explode when she switched on the engine, and of course it did not. Whatever real-life drama she had been thrown into, it thus far had been free of mafia-movie clichés.
Just as she pulled out of the lot and turned left, headlights flared behind her, glaring off her rearview mirror. A sedan followed her into the street. When she turned right at the first intersection, so did the other vehicle. After two more turns, she had no doubt that she was being tailed.
Might this be one of them—one of the mysterious Wrong People? she wondered, capitalizing the term for the first time. No. Common sense argued that adversaries with paranormal abilities, which the Wrong People evidently possessed, wouldn’t need to resort to standard private-investigator techniques, shadowing her the same way that a PI would conduct surveillance of a wife suspected of adultery.
There was only one means by which to identify the follower in the sedan, but Bibi hesitated to plunge into a confrontation. She was grateful to Paxton for encouraging her to get a firearm and teaching her how to use it, but the difficult truth was that acquiring a gun, with expert knowledge of its function, was not adequate preparation for pointing it at another person and squeezing the trigger. For five minutes she drove a random route, brooding about options. The tail fell back and moved closer and fell back again, even allowing another car to come between them and provide him with cover, but he didn’t fade away as she hoped he might.