Ashley Bell: A Novel (21 page)

Bibi watched Calida Butterfly fleeing the courtyard until the woman disappeared into the parking lot and the night.

Amped on adrenaline, apprehension, and the mystery of all things, Bibi glanced at her wristwatch—10:04. Looking up at the third-floor balcony, she thought of her bed. Under the currents of energizing fright and amazement that kept her mind spinning, she felt a deep weariness that, given a chance, would surge up and overwhelm. The unfinished wine in the bottle of chardonnay might be just the key to open the door to dreamland. Would she really be at risk in that cozy haven where she had for years locked out the world and all its temptations, all its frustrations, to create worlds of her own? Calida said yes, said run, said hide. But the name Calida wasn’t a synonym for
truth.
When Bibi had left the apartment, the roses had been as beautiful and fragrant as when she’d first come home, not rotting as she thought they were while she’d been mesmerized by Calida at the kitchen table. Here in the fresh air and normalcy of the California night, she could half convince herself that nothing of the recent events had been as strange as it had seemed at the time.

Half convinced was not convinced enough. Heart still beating too fast, too hard, she picked up the purse that she’d dropped when she collided with the diviner, slung it over her left shoulder. Carrying her laptop in her right hand, she started toward the parking lot.

An object lying in a fan of trembling palm-frond shadows and lamplight caught her attention. She scooped up a small hardcover book that must have fallen out of Calida’s suitcase with the other divination gear. Bound in high-quality tan cloth, the volume featured two inlaid, stylized Art Deco figures crafted of intricately stained and engraved leather; they were depicted back to back, in profile—a panther leaping toward the spine, a gazelle leaping toward the right. There was neither a title nor an author’s name.

From nearby came the deep, hoarse, trumpeting cry of a great blue heron, startling Bibi. She surveyed the sky, certain she had heard the bird’s flight call low overhead. Except for a distant police helicopter thumping through the cool night, nothing plied the heavens. A bird the size of the heron—four feet tall with a six-foot wingspan—could not be overlooked in motion. When the cry came again, louder and more protracted than before, it seemed to be not a common expression out of nature, but from out of time, a mystical alarm meant to shake her awake from her indecision. Hoping to be gone before the wrong people showed up, she ran out of the courtyard and into the parking lot.

The story that Murphy had told Dr. Sanjay Chandra ended with the cremation of Olaf and with Bibi’s retreat into her bedroom, where she remained for three days alone with the urn that contained the dog’s ashes. This seemed to be the natural end point of the tale, but there was another scene known only to the girl. Perhaps it did not qualify as a fully developed scene, only as a coda; no one but Bibi could know the extent and complexity of it.

In any other family, a sixteen-year-old girl would not have been able to sequester herself in her locked bedroom for three full days, feeding on a supply of apples, cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, and dry-roasted almonds. When her parents were asleep, she ventured out to snatch sodas and bottled water from the refrigerator. She refused to respond to questions addressed to her through the door, though after the first few hours, her parents granted her the consideration of silence.

Her mother and father had always loved her deeply and without reservation, had always wanted the best for her, but their love had not been twined with expectations. They had not given her guidance regarding anything more than the rules of the household. Never had they suggested that any endeavor or aspiration was better than anything else she might be doing or wish to achieve. Their politics, to the extent that they had any, were libertarian, and their love for their daughter grew in a libertarian garden. If their attitudes in this matter had been different, the family might have been a place of unceasing argument and tension, for even by the time that Bibi was six or seven, she had ideas about some subjects that were different from her parents’ positions on those issues.

Often in her childhood, relatives and others had commented on her quiet nature and reserve (by which they intended to imply that she seemed shy or, worse than shy, aloof), had observed that she was unusually assured and self-reliant for her age (by which they meant that she struck them as being peculiar and suspicious), had noted always with well-meant concern that she took everything perhaps too seriously, that she engaged in every activity—whether reading books or surfing, or competitive skateboarding, or learning to play the clarinet—with a disturbing intensity (by which they wished to warn that she had the potential for obsessive-compulsive disorder), and had remarked in a tone of praise characterized by uneasiness that she might be some kind of genius or prodigy, or at least gifted (by which they avoided saying that they found her a bit weird). Nancy and Murphy understood that, in one sense at least, an alien lived with them, an otherworldly but benign creature who loved them but did not understand key things about them, such as the it’ll-be-what-it’ll-be doctrine that stood central to their creed; and they were cool with their daughter’s difference.

Therefore, with the urn containing Olaf’s ashes always near at hand, Bibi spent three days in solitude, though she was never lonely and certainly not bored. At her small corner desk, in her armchair, and often sitting up in bed, she wept with grief and wrote for hours at a stretch. Sometimes she made entries in her spiral-bound diary, at other times composed fiction in a large lined yellow tablet, her meticulous cursive script never faltering, regardless of the length of those sessions.

Frequently in the past, she had written while in a condition of infatuation—with ideas, with language, with storytelling—when, for an hour or two at a time, she had neither the desire nor the will to look up from the page. Alone with Olaf’s ashes, this infatuation was shot through with desperation, energized despair, as never before. Her primary motivation during those three days was to argue herself out of some bad ideas, one in particular, compared to which mere suicide would have been preferable.

She exhausted herself with writing, so that it seemed when she crashed, she should have had no imagination left to craft stories in her sleep. But her dreams swelled with wild adventure, threat, and mystery. She dreamed repeatedly—but not exclusively—of the tall and monkish figures in a variety of settings and scenarios. When those menacing phantasms turned toward her, she erupted from the nightmare every time, certain that she would have died in her sleep if she had glimpsed more than the pale moonlit suggestion of their horrific faces.

On the third day, she remembered a trick of forgetting that the captain taught her. In more than one war, Captain had seen things—the bloody aftermath of human viciousness, outrages from the darkest end of the spectrum of cruelty—that disturbed his sleep night after night, that left him despondent. He could not bear to live with the memories. The trick of forgetting had been revealed to him by a Gypsy or a Vietnamese shaman, or by an Iraqi version of a voodooist. The captain could not remember the identity of his benefactor, no doubt because for some good reason he had used the magic procedure to forget that person, too. Anyway, what you needed to do first was write the hated memory or the reckless desire or the evil intention on a slip of paper; the trick worked for more than the disposal of garbage memories. Then you said six words that had great power, said them with sincerity, with all your heart. After you had spoken that incantation, you put the slip of paper in an ashtray or a bowl, and you set it afire. Or you scissored the paper into tiny pieces and flushed them down a toilet. Or buried them in a graveyard. If you recited those magic words with humility, and if you were entirely truthful with yourself when you claimed to want forgetfulness, you would receive it.

Bibi forgot. Not forever, as it turned out, but for years, she forgot the bad idea that she had written on the slip of paper, the thing she had wanted to do—had almost done—that would have ruined her life. Her sharp grief remained, but her fear was lifted from her with the memory. She slept without dreams that night and on the following day returned to family life.

That was the third time that she had used the captain’s method of forgetting. She as yet had no memory of the first and second.

In the lot behind the apartments, the parked vehicles and the thick posts supporting the roofs of the open-air carports provided cover for anyone who might have bad intentions. At the very least, Bibi expected the guy who brooded over the meaning of vanity license plates.

She walked directly to her Ford Explorer, which was parked beside Nancy’s BMW. Step by step, she surveyed the night for a suspicious malingerer, ready to drop the laptop and draw the pistol from her shoulder rig to warn him off. She reached her SUV without being assaulted and, in the driver’s seat, at once locked the doors.

She felt foolish for wondering if the Explorer would explode when she switched on the engine, and of course it did not. Whatever real-life drama she had been thrown into, it thus far had been free of mafia-movie clichés.

Just as she pulled out of the lot and turned left, headlights flared behind her, glaring off her rearview mirror. A sedan followed her into the street. When she turned right at the first intersection, so did the other vehicle. After two more turns, she had no doubt that she was being tailed.

Might this be one of
them—
one of the mysterious Wrong People?
she wondered, capitalizing the term for the first time. No. Common sense argued that adversaries with paranormal abilities, which the Wrong People evidently possessed, wouldn’t need to resort to standard private-investigator techniques, shadowing her the same way that a PI would conduct surveillance of a wife suspected of adultery.

There was only one means by which to identify the follower in the sedan, but Bibi hesitated to plunge into a confrontation. She was grateful to Paxton for encouraging her to get a firearm and teaching her how to use it, but the difficult truth was that acquiring a gun, with expert knowledge of its function, was not adequate preparation for pointing it at another person and squeezing the trigger. For five minutes she drove a random route, brooding about options. The tail fell back and moved closer and fell back again, even allowing another car to come between them and provide him with cover, but he didn’t fade away as she hoped he might.

At last she became sufficiently agitated to force the issue. She drove to Pacific Coast Highway, to an area that boasted a wealth of trendy restaurants and nightspots, ensuring a flood of traffic and enough witnesses to make her feel safe. She timed her approach to an intersection and stopped first in line as the controlling light turned red. The stalker-on-wheels was two vehicles behind her, mostly blocked from view by a Cadillac Escalade. She put the Explorer in park, set the brake, and got out.

As she strode past the Escalade, which sparkled with a surfeit of aftermarket gewgaws, the man behind the wheel flashed her a scowl and a what-the-hell gesture, powering down his window to say gratuitously, “You don’t own the road, bitch.” In a mood, she drew one finger across her throat, as if threatening to slash his, and left him to worry that he had insulted a violent lunatic.

The stalker slouched in a black Lexus. Even through a windshield half cataracted by reflections from a streetlamp, the identity of the driver was as apparent as it was surprising: Chubb Coy. The head of hospital security. Who had all but accused Bibi of lying about the middle-of-the-night visit by the man with the therapy dog. Chubb Coy sat like a humorless Mr. Toad behind the wheel of the Lexus, his old cop intuition no doubt itching like poison ivy.

The moment he saw Bibi coming, Coy wheeled the Lexus to his left, nearly clipping her with the front bumper, and crossed the double yellow lines into the southbound lanes. To a chorus of car horns and shrieking brakes, he completed a 180-degree turn and accelerated into the night.