As the friends paled out of sight, Bibi thought, There go two dead girls.
That grim sentiment so surprised her that she sat up straighter behind the wheel, disquieted by the possibility that those five words were prophetic, that the girls weren’t walking home, but instead were headed toward their imminent deaths. She started to open the driver’s door into traffic, and a horn blared. The sound startled her out of superstition’s grip, and she sat for a moment, letting her nerves unwind a little. She was no prophesier, no crystal-gazing Gypsy. She had no power to see with certainty five minutes into her own future, let alone into that of others.
She realized that the disturbing thought—There go two dead girls—was an expression of her sense of isolation, for now they were dead to her, never to be seen again, and once more she was alone in her flight and quest. In fact, an awful loneliness overcame her, more intense than any she had known before, an almost disabling weight of loneliness, pinning her, paralyzing her. In spite of being illegally parked, she thought that she might sit there until night fell, until dawn followed. She could not turn to anyone she loved, for fear they would become Terezin’s targets. Paxton was different. Pax could deal with threats. Pax, please come home, please. To the authorities, her story would sound like the fevered rambling of a deranged mind, and she would be suspect number one in the murders of Solange St. Croix and Calida Butterfly. As the fog thickened around the Honda and the headlights of passing cars repeatedly washed over her, she was swamped by confusion, seeking solace in something perilously like self-pity.
Until she couldn’t stand herself anymore. Which was after about ten minutes. Damn it, there were things she could do, answers she could seek. Many of them were locked inside herself. She knew their basic shape and, like a blind woman in a house half known, should be able to feel her way to a fuller understanding.
She waited for a break in traffic, pulled onto Coast Highway, and drove south as if her life depended on it.
In Laguna Beach, the atmosphere was apocalyptic, fog seething like the smoke from a world afire. The unseen sun was so exhausted that the last light of the day had neither force nor color, a bleak and eerie radiance that might have been intended not to illuminate but to penetrate the bones and print X-ray images of her skeleton on the sidewalk, fossil proof that humanity had once existed.
Every third store seemed to be a gallery. Fortunately, there were as many clothing stores as art merchants, and Bibi was able to buy a change of clothes. She purchased a soft-sided suitcase with wheels, and in a market she bought a junk-food dinner, among other items.
On her way back to the car, she passed the Bark Boutique, which sold toys and other gear for dogs. One of the items in the window was a leather collar that arrested her attention because it reminded her of Olaf’s collar before he was Olaf, when he had come to her out of the rain, though his had been worn and cracked and caked with mud.
The memory that troubled her now, however, was not of the day the dog arrived, but of an incident that occurred three years after his death, when she was nineteen and moving out of her parents’ bungalow into an apartment. By then, instead of a single carton of books stored in the back of her closet, there were four filled with overflow volumes from her shelves. She sat on the floor, sorting the contents, putting aside titles that had lost meaning for her. In the last box, she discovered that she’d packed the books so as to create, at the center, a hollow in which were several objects, including a chamois cloth wrapped around Olaf’s old collar. She had forgotten that she’d kept it. If she once had a sentimental attachment to it, she felt none now. The loop of leather was cracked, filthy, mottled with long-dormant mold, the buckle bent and rusted. There was no reason to keep it. But again she did not throw it away. In fact…What had she done? Hadn’t she gone to a business-supply store and bought a fire-resistant metal document box? Yes. Twenty inches square and ten inches deep, with a piano-hinge lid and a simple lock and a brass key, for the storage of grant deeds, wills, insurance polices, and the like. Hadn’t she put the chamois-wrapped neckband in that box, as well as the other items she had found with it? Yes, but…
Now, at the display window in downtown Laguna, staring at a similar leather collar, Bibi could not recall what other items she had found in the secret hollow within the carton of books. And what had she done with the metal document box? Where was it now?