Chapter 99: The Girl Who Loved Horses
Chapter 100: The Clock, the Watch, and the Ovens
Chapter 101: Devious and Numerous
Chapter 102: The Wicked Witch Lets Her Hair Down
Chapter 103: Valiant Girls Do Not Go Mad
Chapter 104: Boozer, Baker, Starmaker
Chapter 106: A Father’s Intuition
Chapter 107: By the Skin of Their Teeth
Chapter 108: The Enduring Chill
Chapter 109: The Eight-Fingered Waitress and the Possibility of Death
Chapter 110: The Girl in Need of Discipline
Chapter 111: Like a Message in a Bottle
Chapter 112: Teacher of the Year Award
Chapter 113: What Words Cannot Describe
Chapter 114: The Awful Woman and the Terrible Blow
Chapter 115: Toba’s Life of Fact and Fiction
Chapter 116: Reality and the Realtor
Chapter 117: The Tides of Night
Chapter 118: He Can Fix Anything. Almost.
Chapter 119: The Man Who Didn’t Belong There
Chapter 121: The Captain Regrets
Chapter 122: Bibi on the Brink
Chapter 123: A Moment in Her Life With Books
Chapter 124: The Captain and His Albatross
Chapter 125: In a World of Her Own Making
Chapter 126: The Dangerous Art
Chapter 128: God Bless You, Erich Segal
Chapter 129: Where She Goes From Here
Chapter 130: She Hears the Song in the Egg of the Bird
Read on for an extract of The Silent Corner
The Girl Whose Mind Was Always Spinning
THE YEAR THAT BIBI BLAIR TURNED TEN, WHICH was twelve years before Death came calling on her, the sky was a grim vault of sorrow nearly every day from January through mid-March, and the angels cried down flood after flood upon Southern California. That was how she described it in her diary: a sorrowing sky, the days and nights washed by the grief of angels, though she didn’t speculate on the cause of their celestial distress.
Even then, she was writing short stories in addition to keeping a diary. That rainy winter, her simple narratives were all about a dog named Jasper whose cruel master had abandoned him on a storm-swept beach south of San Francisco. In each of those little fictions, Jasper, a gray-and-black mongrel, found a new home. But at the end of every tale, his haven proved impermanent for one reason or another. Determined to keep his spirits high, good Jasper traveled southward, hundreds of miles, in search of his forever home.
Bibi