The girl sighed and turned away.
Bea found a spot on a corner, about two blocks from her van, with a suitable storm drain. There she waited for a target. Someone not only with an expensive cell phone, but clearly enough wealth to purchase another.
It didn’t take long.
A family of three strolled by, a mother and father with a little girl who looked no older than ten or eleven. Granted, Bea was finding it harder to judge, and thought they all looked younger than they probably were.
And the little girl was staring at one of those modern phones as she walked, unheeding of what she might plow into.
Now why on earth would a girl that age need such a fancy phone? Bea could almost imagine that grown-ups and their phones had some larger purpose. Keeping in touch with work or not missing a call from the nanny. But a child?
“Excuse me,” she called.
The family stopped immediately and stared at Bea.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but my granddaughter and I . . . my granddaughter just went into that little store down the street to use the restroom . . . we were supposed to meet her mother here, and it’s getting late, and we have no idea where she is. I wanted to try calling her cell phone, but, well . . . you can never find a pay phone anymore. Used to be there was a pay phone on every corner, but the world is changing so fast . . .”
“Right,” the mother said. “Everybody has a cell phone now.”
Before Bea could say more, the little girl moved in Bea’s direction, the phone extended in her hand.
“You can call her on my phone.”
“That’s very sweet of you, honey,” Bea said in her best grandmotherly tone.
Meanwhile she was thinking, Damn you for being nice. I hate it when the people I’m about to scam turn out to be nice.
Bea almost aborted the plan. But the little girl had handed her the phone. And Bea had no idea how to fake a phone call. She didn’t even know enough about using the phone to pretend. If she let on that she knew nothing, some member of the little family would take it from her and ask for the number she wanted to call, and then what? Bea could make a number up, but a real person might answer.
No, she felt she had no choice but to move forward.
She turned away from the family and slid the phone into the inside pocket of her big, loose jacket. There she had stashed her reading glasses, which she pulled out and placed on her face, as if to peer at the phone. But it was only her bare hand at which she was staring.
That was the trick, Bea had found. Probably the hand-in-the-pocket motion could be seen from behind—though she’d gotten away with it that first time—so Bea was careful to come out of her pocket with reading glasses to explain the motion. Also she was careful to hold her hand as though the phone was still in it.
She pantomimed the drop.
Just as she was reaching down desperately for the invisible phone, she looked up to see Allie standing not five feet in front of her, holding a brown paper bag and looking suspicious and notably unhappy.
There was no time to be distracted, but Bea did feel her face redden with something like shame.
“Oh no!” Bea cried, and turned back to face the family. “I’m so sorry! I dropped it. I didn’t mean to drop it. I feel just terrible.”
For good measure, Bea sank to her sore and creaky knees on the grate of the drain and placed her hands, fingers spread wide, on its iron surface. She stared down at close range, as if anxious to somehow undo her error.
A moment later she felt a small presence by her side. It was the owner of the phone. The little girl. She placed a hand on Bea’s shoulder as if to comfort her.
“I can’t tell you how bad I feel,” Bea said, her voice just a soft breath of air.
“It’s okay. My parents will buy me a new one.”
Right, Bea thought with a sigh of relief. If it’s not that they’re awful people I’m stealing from, it’s the fact that they can well afford the loss. I remember now how I make this work.
“I still feel just awful. I’d pay for it if I could, but I don’t have very much money.”
“Don’t worry,” the girl said. “We always get that insurance thing with a new phone.”
“You can get insurance on a phone?”
“Oh yeah. I lose them a lot, so my folks always get that. Then if you lose the phone, or break it, or somebody steals it, you get another one pretty cheap.”
“Well, that’s good to know, but I still feel terrible.”
Bea raised her gaze, careful to avoid the eyes of Allie, who still stood close by holding what Bea hoped was her fried chicken dinner. She turned to face the parents, who hovered closer now, looking more than a little distressed.
“I feel awful about this,” Bea said. “If I could afford it I would pay you for it.”
The mother eked out a smile, but it looked forced. “We’re used to it. She loses two or three a year. But now how will you make your phone call?”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll walk down to that little market and ask the clerk if I can borrow their phone. Seems the only ones I can be trusted with are the ones attached by a cord to a wall.”
“No phones are attached to the wall with a cord,” the little girl said. “Well, maybe the base, but not the part you’ll be holding.”
Bea started to say her phone at home was. But she felt ashamed to admit that she could not follow the changes outside her own tiny world. And besides, it hurt to think about the trailer, with its understandable telephone, and its bathroom and refrigerator and electric lights. And anyway the family was walking away down the street.
The little girl looked back over her shoulder and waved at Bea. Bea waved in return.
Then Bea did what she had been dreading. She turned around and faced Allie, who at least had been smart enough to keep her mouth shut while that little endeavor played out.
“Thank you,” Bea said.
Allie held the bag out in Bea’s direction. It smelled wonderfully of greasy fried chicken. Once Bea had taken it from her, Allie turned and marched toward the van without a word spoken.
They stopped at a little restaurant that served salads and smoothies, and ate outside, Bea with her fried chicken, Allie with her bird food. All fruits and vegetables.
Still Allie never said a word.
Bea made a right onto Highway 1, the coastal route, going north.
She felt self-conscious and uncomfortable because Allie still had not spoken to her.
“How much did that woman pay you?” she asked.
At first, nothing. In her mind, Bea rolled around the idea that Allie might be so upset as to never speak to her again. Which meant her anticipated retirement would never come to be.
“Ten dollars,” Allie said after a time. Still she stared out the window as she spoke, her head turned to the right, away from Bea.
“That doesn’t seem like very much.”
“It was like twenty-five minutes’ worth of work. That’s more than twenty dollars an hour. That’s good.”
“Well, I suppose if you want to look at it that way.”
“And she threw in the fried chicken for free. I told her it was for my grandmother.”
“Just so long as you know I’m not really related to you and you don’t forget it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. You’re not so much the grandmother type. Oh my gosh! Zebras!”
“What on earth are you babbling about?” Bea asked, not attempting to hide her irritation.
She looked in the direction the girl was pointing. On the right side of the highway—the non-ocean side—behind barbed wire fencing, cattle grazed in the fields of tan grasses. Among them Bea saw a dozen zebras grazing in the orangey light of the sunset.
Bea would have assumed her eyes were playing tricks on her if Allie hadn’t just called the animals out by name. Besides, there were three cars stopped, their occupants walking to the fence or leaning on fence posts, snapping pictures and staring.
She
pulled the van over into the dirt and parked near the other cars.
Allie jumped out and jogged to the fence.
Bea sat in the driver’s seat, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. She could just put the van back into “Drive” and pull away. Maybe she should. The girl was talking to a couple of families. Bea wouldn’t be abandoning her. Well, not exactly. Well, yes, she’d be abandoning her, of course she would, but at least she’d be dumping her in a spot where someone else could give her a ride.
Let her be somebody else’s problem now, Bea thought. The last thing I need is someone looking over my shoulder and judging.
She reached her hand up to the gearshift, then dropped it again. If she left, she would never learn why there were zebras grazing in a field with the cattle. And now she felt quite curious about that.
A moment later Allie jogged back to the van and jumped in, and Bea shifted into “Drive” and pulled back out onto the highway. She vaguely recalled the highway north of San Simeon. The Big Sur coast. It was winding and narrow and full of tight hairpin turns, rising hundreds of feet above the ocean, with few guardrails. She felt a surge of fear at the mental image of driving it after dark.
“So what was the story with the zebras?” she asked the girl. “Were you able to find out?”
“Yeah, I did. All those people were tourists like us, but one family was just on a Hearst Castle tour today. The tour guide told them about it. William Randolph Hearst used to own all this property, and he had this big castle up high on a hill, and he had famous guests there, and he was really rich. This was like in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. He had this private zoo. Most of the animals are gone now, but the zebras survived all this time and bred and lived with the cows like they belonged here. They’re leftovers from the Hearst zoo.”
“I see,” Bea said.
“You know who he was? I studied him in school.”
“Yes, I’m familiar.”
“See? There’s the castle right up there.”
Allie pointed up to a distant hilltop on their right. The castle was a cluster of white buildings, with turrets like bell towers on the big main structure, and palm trees all around.
“Oh my, yes. I can see it. I think I’ve seen pictures of it in books. Or maybe there was something about it on TV.”
They drove in silence for a moment or two.
“What will you do with the phone?” Allie asked.
Bea was startled by the change in conversational direction. It took her a moment to pull herself together to answer. Also to decide how much information to share with her new passenger.
“I took the first one to a pawnshop. But I think that last town was too small to have one. So I’ll try when we get to Monterey. If there’s nothing there, San Francisco for sure.”
A long silence.
“Pull over here,” Allie said.
“More zebras?”
Bea craned her neck to the right and pulled off onto the scant shoulder in the fading light. She saw no zebras.
Allie jumped out.
“What are you doing?” Bea asked.
“Leaving. Walking back to Cambria. I think I might be better off with the lady in the store.”
“That’s ridiculous. Get back in here right now. You’re out in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing ahead of you for dozens of miles and it’s a couple of miles at least back to Cambria.”
“I’m not in the middle of nowhere. I’m a couple of miles north of Cambria. I can walk a couple of miles. I’ve done it before.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“I don’t care. It’s not that far.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I’ll ask that nice lady at the store if I can stay with her. Besides. What do you care? I’m not your problem. Remember?”
That’s true, Bea thought. It came as a relief to shake this new set of troubles off her shoulders.
“Close the door,” Bea said. “Before you let the cat out.”
The resulting slam made her wince.
Bea pulled back into the northbound lane and continued her drive up the coast. She did not look back.
Chapter Twenty
Too Many Comments from the Cat
“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” Bea asked Phyllis.
The cat looked up from her plate of canned food. Looked right into Bea’s eyes. Bea could swear she saw some kind of feedback there—a slightly critical assessment.
It was the third time Bea had told the cat that their current location was beautiful. This was what Bea’s father had used to call whistling past the graveyard, because actually she found the place a bit spooky. Still, it was rude of the cat to point that out.
“Well, it is beautiful.”
Phyllis returned her attention to her dinner.
Bea stepped out of the van and walked around to the passenger door, where she removed the litter box from the floor. She reached under the seat and felt around until she found the scoop. Then she walked the box over to the trash can that sat in a corner of the dirt parking lot overlooking the ocean. As best she could figure she was somewhere between San Simeon and the Big Sur coast.
As she scooped, she looked north up the coastline. It was almost completely dark now, and the place had a deserted feel. She could see the mountains of Big Sur—the place where the highway rose to hang terrifyingly at the edges of cliffs hundreds of feet above the sea. Yes, there were cars going by at fairly regular intervals. But nobody seemed to want to stop anywhere along this stretch of road except Bea. Perhaps they knew something she didn’t?
A horrible sound caused her to drop the litter box, scattering nearly half the mostly clean litter. It was a sound Bea never could have described. Like the roar or snort of some kind of wild animal, but with a strange echoing resonance. It was unlike anything she had ever heard before and seemed to defy classification.
She picked up the litter box again and ran—as best Bea could run at her age—back to the van. There she fairly threw the box and scoop in ahead of her, then locked herself inside with shaking hands.
The sound seemed to be coming from the ocean, which was a good twenty feet down from the bluff. In time she saw the shape of something like a huge seal—or walrus, or some such thing—in a thin stream of moonlight. Well, it had no tusks, so of course it was not a walrus, but it seemed altogether different from a seal. It tipped its head back and released another strange echoing snort. It sported a bizarre profile to its head, like its nose was ten times too bulbous and large.
Bea reached for the key to start up the van, then dropped her hand again. She didn’t want to go back to Cambria, because the girl was there. Or anyway, she likely would be there by now. Bea didn’t want to seem to be checking up on the kid. Even more to the point, she didn’t want to leave herself open to any more criticism from the little know-it-all. Besides, wasn’t it hard enough just to take care of herself? What did she have left over to offer to anyone?
She didn’t want to go north, because she was terrified of that next piece of highway.
It was an interesting phenomenon, her sudden terror of that road. When she and that girl had begun driving north from the zebra sighting, Bea had been only uncomfortable at the thought of driving that narrow, winding stretch of dangerous highway. A minute later it had paralyzed her to the point of forcing her to stop the van.
She looked at Phyllis, who looked back. The cat’s ears were laid back, listening to the strange sea monster noises.
“It’s in the ocean,” Bea said. “It can’t get to us up here.”
And with that, Bea felt a little more comfortable herself.
She looked into the cat’s perturbed face and wondered something. Was it possible that the highway ahead of her had grown scarier the moment that girl stepped out of her van? Because now Bea would be driving it alone?
“That’s ridiculous,” she said to the cat, who cautiously returned to eating.
Bea startled awake in her easy chair, un
aware that she had ever fallen asleep. She winced into a bright light. Someone was shining their headlights into her van. And she was all alone out here with no way to defend herself.
She fumbled her keys out of the pocket of her slacks and ducked under the curtain to the driver’s seat, where she attempted to find the ignition. Suddenly there was light in her eyes. She turned to see a male figure standing just outside her window. He was shining a flashlight in her face. Bea’s heart stopped, though thankfully only for a beat or two. Then it hammered its way back into the living.
The man reached up with one hand—the one that was not training a flashlight on her—and rapped on her window with the backs of his knuckles.
“Highway Patrol, ma’am.”
Bea gasped air and tried to calm herself. With absurdly trembling hands she placed the key in the ignition, turned it to accessory power, and lowered the window.
“You startled me.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t mean to do that.” He angled the flashlight so that Bea did not have to blink into it like a terrified deer crossing the highway. “But there’s no camping or overnight parking anywhere along this stretch of road.”
“Oh, I wasn’t camping.” Bea could hear her voice shake, and wondered if the officer could hear it, too. “I was headed north and I was a bit tired. And it’s such a . . . well, it’s a dicey piece of road ahead of me. I just thought I should stop and take a little break.”
“Okay, I understand. But in about fifteen minutes you’ll be within the hours that are considered overnight camping. There’s a fine for violations. So you’ll need to be somewhere else now. If you’re tired, it might be best not to drive the road north of here at night. I’m not saying people don’t do it. Plenty do. There’s no law against it. But mostly it’s the folks who know that road well and feel pretty confident on it. If you’re at all sleepy and you have any reservations about the drive, I’d stay somewhere tonight and tackle it in the light of morning.”
They fell silent for a moment. Bea was aware of that strange animal sound again. That rolling, echoing snort.
“What on earth is that beast I keep hearing?” Bea asked the officer.
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 14