Mystery Girl: A Novel by David Gordon Page A

for support.
    Then she returned, without the drinks, looking pale and unsteady herself, as if the whole deck had tilted on a rising wave. She leaned into me, muttering swiftly under her breath, “I have to go. Right now.”
    “Sorry?”
    She gripped my wrist and whispered in my ear. I smelled perfume and shampoo and behind that something sharper, sweet and sour—late afternoon cocktails and sweat. But her voice was sober and serious. “I have to leave right now. Walk out with me. Please.”
    I remembered suddenly that I really was a detective (sort of), following a mystery woman, not just a writer pretending to be one to make a mystery woman smile. Was this the danger I was here to fight? Whom was she hiding from? A husband? A stalker? A spy? Ilooked around, but it was just the same lame crew as before. Unless they were in disguise.
    “Don’t look,” she hissed. “Let’s just go, this way.” She guided me toward the back of the deck and down a stairway that led to the parking lot. “Where is your car?”
    “There,” I said. “But what’s wrong? Who was it?”
    “Please. Not now. Let’s just get out of here. Please.”
    She hurried ahead to my car, so I unlocked it and we got in. As I rolled toward the highway, she slid low in the seat, shielding her face.
    “Where to?”
    “Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Someplace quiet where I can breathe.”
    “OK.” I made a right onto the One, headed south.
    “No,” she said. “Turn around. Let’s go to the forest. You know, the redwoods.”
    “OK.” Glancing quickly, I U-turned in a driveway and headed north. She relaxed after I passed the hotel, taking a lipstick from her purse and touching up her mouth in the mirror.
    “So,” I asked, “what was all that about?”
    “Please don’t,” she interrupted. “Don’t ask. Don’t ask me anything ever. That way I won’t have to lie to you. I haven’t yet, well not really, not much, and it feels good for once. I’m such a dirty liar. Maybe that’s why I feel close to you, even though we’re strangers. I feel like you’re the one person who I’m honest with. Just myself. Without any lies or masks.” She gripped my knee and looked at me intently. “Don’t even ask my name. Please?”
    “Sure. No problem.” I chuckled assuredly, like a man of the world. She was making me a little nervous. “We’ll be anonymous. And don’t go asking me anything either,” I warned, poking her leg. “I’m very deep and troubled and I don’t want to talk about it.”
    She giggled happily. “Go ahead. Make fun of me. I deserve it.” She finished her lipstick, and sat back, gazing at the scenery. “I’m happy here, with you,” she sighed. “I feel safe.”
    That was good enough for me. I turned into the entrance for the national forest, paid the attendant, and parked. We got out and walked up the path. We spoke not, but she touched my arm once or twice to steady herself as her red heels sank into the earth and we hiked into the broken shadows under the giant trees. They soared above us, hundreds of feet high, like cathedral pillars reaching for some vanished vault. These were the oldest living things on earth. In their history, we barely registered, our whole lives brief as a bug’s. And as for our thoughts and feelings, our little victories and dramas, these were less than nothing. Yet, that odd growth, the human mind, still clung to a vain idea, that our self-consciousness, the source of so much trouble for ourselves and our fellow life-forms, had to serve some purpose, some need of nature’s own. Perhaps we were flowers, brains on fragile stems, seeded here as the one creature aware of all this pointless beauty and its loss: our minds, nature’s weirdest blossoms, petals that open only to see the sun, and then go dark.
    “What are you thinking?” she asked me as we stood together among the waist-high roots. Our bodies were closer than I’d noticed. We nearly touched.
    “I don’t know,” I said, afraid