Selena was back in her hotel suite in the Alcazar, having breakfast, trying to think about how she would handle Tessio today when they met at the Monterey Court, as they did every Wednesday.
But she was really thinking about what she had done last night, and she was not happy. She felt something had gone terribly wrong, although it had all worked exactly as she hoped it would, because she was a meticulous planner and it had been her experience that, if you planned carefully, and considered every possible twist, and if you were always ready to adapt to changing events, most of the time it would all work out satisfactorily. And, on the face of it, it had gone exactly the way she had hoped it would go.
She had goaded Little Anthony into a run at Clete’s wife, and he might have been successful, and her problem was solved that way. Or, as it turned out, Clete might have put a police detail around her, and if so, she was going to have to improvise.
And Clete had put a watch on the house, so when the Vizzinis’ car went cruising by on the second night, the County gun dogs had followed after it like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.
And she was surprised, and delighted, when the Forrests had come out to watch the chase. She waited in the darkness at the edge of the road as the three of them stood on the porch, the police lights and sirens fading into the distance.
After a while, when everything was quiet again, the old couple wandered off to bed, and the single woman, a delicate blonde flower, Mary Alice Redding, stood out on the porch, taking in the sound of the ocean roaring out there in the velvet night and breathing in the salty tang of the onshore breeze.
Selena, improvising, had materialized out of the darkness at the bottom of the drive, coming into the glow of the porch light, smiling, simply a neighbor brought out by all the excitement, just like everyone else.
A few friendly words at the bottom of the drive, a comfortable connection established, and then the woman was taken. Into her own car, a massive Oldsmobile, at gunpoint, Mary Alice at the wheel.
Two miles up the road, to the place where Highway One curved around the headland of Matanzas Inlet, Mary Alice in tears, but brave, a true cop wife, asking questions that Selena didn’t bother to answer, since the gun at the woman’s right temple was explanation enough.
Pulled over at the edge of Matanzas Inlet, a vicious blow to Mary Alice’s head, making sure she was unconscious, waiting awhile to see that no one was coming. And then Selena put the car into Drive, and it eased its ponderous way down the steep bank and into the water, where it floated, bubbling and bobbing for a while, sinking slowly, until, by the engine’s forward weight, it heeled up, trunk rising, like the Titanic tilting its massive stern, and the tank-sized car took the woman down.
Selena had watched it go until the last of the bubbles floated away under a gauzy veil of starlight, and Matanzas Inlet grew quiet again, as if nothing at all bad had ever happened here, although in Spanish its name meant Massacre Bay.
Then the long walk back to her car, parked in a stand of palms a mile down the road, thinking, as she walked through the salty cool of the shoreline road, that it had all been so easy, that perhaps it was supposed to happen that way in the first place.
Although she knew that couldn’t be true, because, in the original event, Selena had actually not been involved.
It had been exactly what it had looked like, a terrible accident, just as Tessio had told her when she had visited him in his seaside compound before the Shimmer brought her back here.
So this time, she had made it happen, and yes it was three days early, but she was sure that the outcome would be much the same. Clete would attack the Vizzinis, but this time, the Vizzinis would be waiting for him.
And he’d die. And all would be well.
She reached the car, opened the driver’s door—
And then this happened.
* * *
As she slipped into her car she was suddenly overwhelmed by a tidal shift in her reality. She seemed to fall down into a spinning eternity of time, always repeating the same series of events—the gun the car the drive the blow, and into the water, the gun the car the drive the blow, and into the water, the gun the car the drive the blow, and into the water—over and over and over again, an endless roundabout circle with no escape, no exit, no way out, for the rest of eternity.
It only ended when she found the locket on its chain around her neck. She clutched it so hard she broke the chain, held the locket to her breasts, closed her eyes, willing the locket to take her back to that soft white room at the Pontalba, the one fixed time point in her long chaotic life...and the locket helped...she felt the spinning slow down, the cycle became irregular, the vortex dissipated, and then only gradually, but the time loop slowed, faded and, finally, eventually, released her.
* * *
She sat there for a long time, clutching her locket, sick with shock and fear—this had never happened to her before—and she only snapped out of it when a sheriff’s car sped past, lights on, racing north toward Matanzas Inlet, going by so fast they never saw her car parked deep in a stand of palms.
She gathered herself together, took a deep breath, sighing, deeply shaken to her core, put the rental car in gear and headed south, staying far away from Matanzas Inlet, taking an inland route back to St. Augustine.
On the way down the coast she thought about what had just happened, and she wondered if the fact that she had deliberately altered a real event—causing it three days early, and not allowing Mary Alice to die in a natural accident—had somehow created a dangerous ripple in the time stream.
But, as usually happened with Selena, the farther away she got from Matanzas Inlet, the weaker her memory of that looping time lock became, until finally, as she came back up the mainland and turned right toward the coast and saw the lights of St. Augustine up ahead, and the Alcazar Hotel waiting, it faded away into nothing.
By the time she laid her weary head back onto her pillow in her hotel suite, it was utterly gone from her, and all that was in her mind, as she drifted away, was to remind herself that she was seeing Tessio Vizzini tomorrow—no, later today, at the Monterey Court—and she would have to handle that meeting carefully.
And so she slept, secure in the feeling that, although the evening had been challenging, she had risen to it, achieved her goals, and that all was now perfectly right in Selena D’Arcy’s world.