Instead of sustaining her, a half pint of ice cream before dawn had led to a sugar crash. She went directly to a Norm’s restaurant, the ultimate working man’s eatery, because the food was pretty good and reliable, but also because she had a hunch that the Wrong People wouldn’t be seen in a Norm’s even if they were starving to death and it was the last source of nourishment on the planet. During their short telephone conversation, Birkenau—“Call me Birk”—Terezin had sounded like a snob and a narcissist. His associates were likely to be of the same cloth; power-trippers put a low value on humility. When your enemies were elitist snarky boys, one way you could go off the grid was to eat at Norm’s and buy your clothes at Kmart.
The hostess put her in a small booth at the back of the room, and Bibi chose to sit facing away from most of the other customers. More than food, she wanted coffee. Her thoughts were fuzzy from too little sleep and too much weirdness. She needed to clear her head. The pleasant and efficient waitress brought a second cup of strong black brew with Bibi’s order of fried eggs, bacon, and hash browns, which promised to grease her thought processes for hours.
In movies, people on the run from killers, having recently seen the severed fingers of a corpse, did not take time out for breakfast. They didn’t take time out for the bathroom, either, or to think about how little life and movies resembled each other.
With a pen and a small notebook that she carried in her purse, she made a note to that effect, which she headlined REMEMBER FOR NOVEL: MOVIES AND LIFE. While she ate, her intention was to make a list of things she needed to buy and to do in order to stay off the grid as much as possible, but she wasn’t surprised that she should also be jotting down ideas for her fiction. After all, she wasn’t always running for her life and trying to save the life of another, though she was always a writer.
Okay, she needed a disposable cell phone. Although it didn’t have the smartphone features she might need, it couldn’t be traced to her and wouldn’t make her vulnerable to GPS bloodhounds. And if they still sold those electronic GPS maps, which wouldn’t have any link to another device known to be owned by her, she could use one.
She found herself making another note off the subject, this one regarding the three occasions that she had used Captain’s trick to forget unwanted memories. They had been spread over ten years. She headlined the list IMPORTANT!
The first time had been when, with Captain’s help and a candle flame, she had burned to ashes the incident of the crawling thing. She’d been five years and ten months old when the creature terrorized her, six and a half when she took steps to forget it.
The second time, she was ten, and the captain had been dead about four months. She burned the memory of what happened in the attic above his apartment, which still remained beyond recollection. In that instance, she had not even written the memory on paper, but had merely stood before the ceramic logs in the bungalow’s living-room fireplace and had offered the memory to the gas flames.
As Bibi composed her list with salient details, Norm’s resonated with conversations, clinking cutlery, rattling china and glassware, and background music that she could not identify and that soon she did not hear. With her concentration came a silence broken not even by the sounds of her eating, for she heard nothing now other than the whisper of pen on paper.
The third time, she had been sixteen, half crazy over the loss of Olaf, confused and distraught and bitter and angry, when to her had come a most hideous idea, an intention so loathsome that she could hardly believe it had originated in her own mind; and though the plan that began to form was so out of character, she knew that the temptation to implement it would be irresistible. Had she acted on that idea, she would have ruined her life and the lives of her parents. And so she wrote it on a page of a notebook, tore it out, and fed the page to flames in the fireplace, taking no chance that offering it without committing it to writing would work as it had worked before.
In those three forgotten moments were the roots of her current troubles. What had crawled the floor of her bedroom? What happened in that spidered attic where fog quested through the vents? To ease the unendurable pressure of her emotions in the wake of the dog’s cremation, what abomination had obsessed her, what violence or outrage had she feared committing so much that it must be burned out of her memory?
She was surprised that she had finished eating. As she put her fork down on the empty plate, the sounds and pleasing aromas of the establishment seeped back into her awareness.
There in the ordinariness of Norm’s restaurant, Bibi wondered about the extraordinary nature of her secret self. Proof seemed to be mounting that a singular darkness gathered in her heart, though she saw herself as a child of sea and sand, of ocean breeze and summer light. She knew that few people ever completely—or even largely—understood themselves. And yet she had assumed that she was one of the enlightened few, that she could read herself from first page to last and grasp every nuance of Bibi Blair.
After she assured the waitress that she wanted nothing else, Bibi left a tip, picked up the check with the intention of paying at the cashier’s station, and rose from the booth. As she slung her purse over her shoulder and turned, she saw Chubb Coy at the farther end of the busy restaurant, having breakfast in a booth by the big front windows. The hospital security chief had no evident interest in her, apparently didn’t even know she was there. His attention was focused entirely on his pancakes and his breakfast companion, Solange St. Croix, holy mother of the university writing program.
Whether Chubb Coy and Dr. St. Croix were Wrong People or were compatriots of another kind, conspiring for their own purposes, the professor seemed to regard Norm’s with the disdain that Bibi imagined Terezin and his pals would hold toward any restaurant lacking white tablecloths and designer china. Before her stood only an untouched glass of water. Her expression was more sour than usual, and she sat with the shoulders-back rigidity and lifted chin of a stern advocate of temperance who found herself unaccountably in a tavern. Her apparent contempt was not directed at Coy, as he plowed through his pancakes, for the two of them were engaged in animated conversation that seemed to amuse rather than offend him.
Before they might take notice of her, Bibi turned away from them, sat down, and fished enough money out of her purse to pay the entire bill, which she left on the table with the tip. At the back of the room were double portholed doors to the kitchen, and she headed for them as though she had legitimate business with someone on the staff, her face averted from Chubb Coy and his date.
Cooks and other staffers looked up in surprise, less because she didn’t belong there than because she had slammed through the doors with the energy of someone bent on lodging a loud complaint. When she started to make her way through prep aisles, past the griddles and grills and ovens, someone asked what she wanted, and someone else tried to give her directions to the women’s restroom. She saw the distant back door and waved them away, saying, “Air, need some air,” as though the dining room behind her had abruptly become a vacuum.
In the parking lot, after she moved the Honda to have a clear view of the entrance to the restaurant, Bibi slouched behind the steering wheel and wished that she had a baseball cap. Twenty minutes later, Coy and the professor came outside and stood talking for a minute before shaking hands and parting. He went to his black Lexus, and she got into a Mercedes.
Starting the engine, Bibi figured she should follow one or the other, but then decided not to bother with either. Being a former cop, Chubb Coy would spot a tail in minutes. Wherever the professor was going, it was unlikely to be as revelatory as finding her here with this man. That they knew each other was enough to convince Bibi that they were in league against her and that she had been a topic—if not the topic—of their meeting. If later she needed to have a few words with Solange St. Croix, she knew where to find the bitch.
After the Lexus and the Mercedes were out of sight, Bibi sat for a while, thinking about coincidences. She didn’t believe in them. Could t
hey have known where to find her? Could they have wanted to be seen? Could they be all-knowing masters of the universe in human form? “For God’s sake, Beebs,” she said, “you’re losing it.” Even if they knew what kind of car she was driving now, which they didn’t, they couldn’t have known she would be going to Norm’s until she got there. Anyway, she was certain she hadn’t been followed. But she still didn’t believe in coincidences.
From Norm’s, she went to three different branches of her bank and withdrew two hundred dollars from each ATM, bringing her supply of cash to $814. At a big-box store, she purchased a disposable cell phone and an electronic map with GPS. She also bought a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses in case she again needed to disguise herself a little.
In the parking lot, as she unlocked the Honda and put her purchases on the front passenger seat, she began to feel like a sly operator, slipping off the grid with the ease of a senior CIA agent.
Which was when someone behind her said, “Is that you, Bibi? Bibi Blair?”
Bibi swung around to confront a woman who was vaguely familiar, but no name came to mind. Maybe thirty. Lots of tumbling blond hair. Face as smooth and unlined as raw chicken flesh with the pebbly skin stripped off. Pert nose, porn-star lips. Teeth white enough to blind. A projecting bosom on which a line of crows could perch.
“Hope you haven’t gone too big-time literary to remember us little people, Gidget. It’s not even been six years.”
“Miss Hoffline,” Bibi said, not because she could confirm the woman’s identity from the visual clues, but because no one other than her eleventh-grade English teacher had ever called her Gidget.
“These days, it’s Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack. Married right at the top two years ago. His name’s Leopold. Real-estate development.”
Bibi almost said, If that’s his name, why aren’t you Marissa Hoffline-Development? Miss Hoffline, however, had been a world-class mistress of mean, capable of eviscerating you with such finesse that, if you were hurt by her sharp tongue, she could successfully argue that you had misunderstood either her intention or every word she’d said. Better not to get into a pissing contest with her. Instead, Bibi said, “You look…really good.”
“Four years ago, I refreshed myself a little. Nice of you to notice.”
Before she had refreshed herself, Miss Hoffline had been a thirty-five-year-old brunette of the mouse-brown variety with crooked teeth and the chest of a sixteen-year-old boy. This transformation involved industrial plastic surgery, at least a quart of Botox, and more than a little voodoo.
“Of course I don’t teach anymore. Don’t have to. That’s my café-au-lait Bentley over there. But I always tell people,” said Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack, “I was the first to recognize your talent.”
That was a crock and a half. She had focused more criticism on Bibi than she had on any of the other kids in the class, especially when the subject was her writing. Bibi had benefited from many good teachers in high school, but it was for one like this that kids had long ago invented spitballs.
As if Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack saw a flash of resentment in her former student’s eyes, she said, “I was always a little hard on you, dear, just a little, because you needed some prodding now and then to reach your full potential.”
Bibi managed a smile that must have looked like that on a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I appreciate that. Well, nice to have seen you again.”
Leaning closer, so that her heroic bosom seemed about to topple her off balance, the woman said, “May I ask one question?”
Bibi wanted only to be gone from there and off the grid, which would probably happen quicker if she allowed the question. “Sure, of course,” she said, expecting a nasty crack about the ancient Honda.
Instead, Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack asked, “Has your novel made enemies for you? Why are you packing heat?”
For a moment, Bibi blanked on the word heat, but then she said, “A gun? But I’m not.”
“Now, really, Gidget, my Leo gets threats, a man of his position, so he has a concealed-carry license. If you’ve got a trained eye, as I have, a very sharp eye, no tailoring is good enough to entirely conceal the telltale bulge.”
There was no telltale bulge. The shoulder rig held the pistol at Bibi’s side, in the roomiest part of her blazer.
“Well, sorry to say, your eye has misled you this time. I’ve no reason to carry a gun.”
As Bibi started to turn away, the woman gripped her by one arm. With concern that was no more real than her bosom, the refreshed ex-teacher said, “Oh, damn, you don’t have a concealed-carry permit, do you? Bibi, really, you can get in a lot of trouble, you really can. Carrying without a license, you could go to prison.”
The parking lot was busy with shoppers going to and from the store, and Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack had the volume, although not the graceful cadences, of an auctioneer. People were looking at them, curious, frowning.
With through-clenched-teeth intensity, Bibi said, “I have no gun. Now let go of me.”
The woman let go of Bibi’s arm, only to grab her left lapel and pull aside her blazer, revealing the holster and pistol. “You always were a bit of a rule-breaker, girl. Always. But being the first to recognize your talent, I don’t want to see you ruin your career.”
Bibi clawed Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack’s hand off her blazer. “Lady, what is wrong with you? Get away from me.”
“If you don’t have a concealed-carry permit, you should take that off right now, this very minute, and put it in the trunk.”
A few passersby stopped to watch the altercation. They must have been people who never saw TV news. These days, in situations like this, if you didn’t keep moving, you became part of the body count.
“I have a concealed-carry license,” Bibi hissed, and she started around the Honda to the driver’s door.
The former English teacher caught up with her between the headlights. “If you really, truly had one, then why didn’t you say so already? Why didn’t you?”
Turning a withering glare on her assailant, Bibi bit off each word of her reply. “Because. I. Don’t. Want. Every. Idiot. To. Know.”
Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack’s resistance to withering was equal to that of granite. “Don’t you snap at me, young lady. If you have a license, show it, and I won’t worry you’ll ruin your life. Otherwise, I’ll have to call your parents.”
“I’m twenty-two years old, for God’s sake.”
“Not to me, you’re not.”
As Bibi reached the driver’s door with the former teacher close behind, one of the onlookers stepped forward. Tall, muscular, with a weathered face and a walrus mustache, wearing a bandana around his head and a tank top unsuited to the cool morning, arms and shoulders and neck crawling with tattoos of reptiles and spiders, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a version of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man written in an alternate universe where Bradbury had dropped acid while at the keyboard. “Excuse me, ladies. Maybe I can negotiate a little peace here.”
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.