Bibi seized the moment. “This woman insists she knows me, I’ve never seen her before in my life, she’s a mental case.”
Wounded by the accusation, Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack turned to the hulking would-be arbitrator to defend herself against Bibi’s slander, stepping away from the Honda and pointing to her car in the facing row of vehicles. “Do you see that Bentley over there, my Bentley? Mental cases do not drive café-au-lait Bentleys.”
As the woman made her case to be judged sane, Bibi got into the Honda and started the engine. When she gave the car too much gas as she pulled out of her parking space, Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack reeled back as if in danger of being run down, but the illustrated man did not flinch, as though he had no doubt that his pumped physique would prevail undamaged in a collision with a mere sedan.
Driving away from the big-box store and into the street, Bibi raised her voice as she had not done during the bizarre encounter: “What the blazing hell was that about?” The confrontation seemed to have been more than a chance interaction with a former teacher. She sensed in the incident a suggestion of design, a prefiguring of an event to come, some elusive meaning that she needed to pin down and examine.
A few blocks from the big-box store, Bibi took refuge in the parking lot of a strip mall. In addition to the line of shared-wall businesses, a freestanding building housed Donut Heaven, on the roof of which a golden halo revolved above a giant glazed doughnut.
Although the disposable phone promised “instant activation,” she wasn’t surprised that the call-back confirmation would take a while.
In the meantime, she read the instructions for the electronic map while brooding about the ludicrous encounter with Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack, which continued to seem important and to be tied somehow to her current troubles. To imagine that the former teacher was part of the conspiracy against her, however, would be to step out of justifiable paranoia onto a steep path toward mania. If Hoffline-Vorshack, why not the unnamed arbitrator with the walrus mustache and the swarming tattoos? And if him, why not every customer of the nearby Donut Heaven? Everyone in every car passing in the street? Everyone everywhere?
“Better chill, Beebs,” she warned herself.
When the map, with its GPS link, was up and running, she tried to locate 11 Moonrise Way, the address that had been spelled in Scrabble tiles on the table in Calida’s home office. She didn’t have the name of a town or city, but the device allowed her to search also by county. There was no Moonrise Way or Lane or Street or Avenue or Boulevard or Parkway anywhere in Orange County or in the surrounding nine counties. Without a city name, the search process proved tedious when compared to what she could have achieved with her laptop, but using her online account might allow the Wrong People to locate her as soon as she logged on.
When her disposable phone came into service, she considered calling her parents. They might be hungover from the previous night’s celebration, though clearheaded enough. If they hadn’t already tried to phone her, they would soon, and they would become alarmed as, one after another, their calls went to voice mail.
But if Terezin and his crew had the connections and capabilities of which he had boasted, they might be able to monitor Nancy’s and Murphy’s phones as readily as could Homeland Security. In that case, if Bibi called her parents, Terezin might capture the electronic signature of her disposable phone, thereby making it possible to track her again, putting her back on the grid. To remain invisible, she could phone only people that he would not expect her to call.
Among the county’s more than three million souls, she was, for the moment, if not forever, alone.
Reluctantly she switched off the phone, put it in her purse, and took out the hardcover book that had belonged to Calida. Opening the volume, she thought she saw the inlaid-leather panther spring into motion, leaping toward the spine. Startled, she almost dropped the book, but when she closed the front cover, the panther remained as it had been, frozen in a pounce.
She turned the blank pages, hoping to glimpse again the rippling ghostly lines of script that had swum across the paper, schooling words too pale and swift to be read. But the phenomenon did not repeat, though she paged front to back, back to front, as the light dimmed to darkness and the darkness then faded into light….