If there had been visible smoke, it had dissipated quickly, leaving only an unpleasant odor.
Hadn’t she been leaning on a chair? Now she found herself leaning on the Corian countertop of the bathroom vanity. Curled in the sink were furry gray forms, like dead caterpillars. Ashes. The remnants of fully burned strips of something. Beside the sink lay a butane lighter. She recalled buying it in the market, in Laguna, where she had purchased the makings of her dinner, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other items. Never having smoked, she didn’t know why she needed a lighter. Well, obviously, to burn something.
She raised the stopper, turned on the faucet labeled COLD, and washed the ashes into the drain. The swirling water reminded her that she had been dizzy, but she was not dizzy now.
Indecision held her at the bathroom vanity. She was not confused or uneasy, just directionless. Then she returned to the bedroom.
One of the straight-backed chairs was overturned. As she set it right, she noticed three books on the little dining table. The spine of each volume had been broken, so that it lay open in a limp two-page spread. Excisions had been made, pieces of three pages sliced out with the switchblade that had slipped from Dr. St. Croix’s sleeve when Chubb Coy had shot her.
Bibi’s spiral-bound notebook also lay on the table. It was open to a blank page. Evidently, she had intended to write something.
Her mood had begun to change. She felt less detached. Coming into focus.
The books puzzled her. O’Connor, Wilder, London. She recalled buying them, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t have time to read, not with Terezin and his crew trying to find her and kill her.
Chubb Coy. The books had something to do with him.
Suddenly she knew what she had done. Captain’s memory trick.
She loved the captain. He had helped a troubled little girl keep her sanity. But the help he had given had not resolved her problem (whatever it might be), had only taught her to suppress all knowledge of it. The thing of terror had not been vanquished. It still lived and waited. Waited for her to open the door and be consumed by it.
Trembling, shocked, she sat at the table, staring at the vandalized large-size paperbacks.
In the professor’s house, Coy had said something peculiar, the importance of which Bibi had at first not understood. She could not recall what it had been. Of course she couldn’t. She had burned it from memory in a childish ritual that worked less because of the six magic words Captain had taught her than because she desperately needed it to work. What Coy said must have had something to do with the three books; it had alarmed her, brought her into the presence of a truth so monumental that she had not been able to face it.
She used the switchblade to cut what remained of the three key pages from the books. She folded them and put them in the spiral-bound notebook and slipped it into her purse.
The room was warm, but Bibi felt carved from ice. One more name could be added to the list of the many people conspiring against her. She could not entirely trust herself.
With only her gun and her purse, Bibi left the security of her motel room, which was an imagined security anyway, as imaginary as every moment of seeming peace and safety in this new world that she inhabited. Thank you, Calida Butterfly, or whatever the hell your name was. Now every stronghold proved to be a place with paper walls, every hideaway a trap. Instead of a stout barrier, every door was an invitation to threats natural and supernatural. The lesson here was the opposite of what the old adage advised: You should always look a gift horse in the mouth. A gift horse or a gift masseuse. A relaxing massage, and then chardonnay and a silly-fun session of divination, and the next thing you know, you’ve attracted the attention of an incarnation of Hitler, and you’ve invited occult forces into your life, and you’ve been spared from cancer only so that some lunatic can stab you to death with a thousand pencils. She wanted to kick someone’s ass, but there was no one she could find to kick, except maybe Murphy and Nancy for hiring Calida, but Bibi wasn’t going to boot them. Honor thy father and mother, and all that. She left the motel in a mood of righteous indignation and exasperation too consuming to be sustained.
Although it was only 7:40, Laguna Beach appeared to have closed down for the night, the mist-shrouded hills sloping through silence to the sea, the traffic already midnight-light as the ocean sloughed off ever thicker masses of land-hugging clouds, a lone coyote howling out of a canyon as if lost and grieving for its vanished pack.