Ashley Bell: A Novel (22 page)

Bibi Blair trembled violently when she got behind the wheel of the Explorer and pulled shut the driver’s door. The cause of her shakes was not primarily fear, although fear was part of it. Anger, yes, all right. Coy’s offensive invasion of her privacy angered her, but she was smoldering, not hot. The principal cause of her distress was indignation, shock and displeasure at the intrusion of massive unreason into the workings of the world, resentment at the sudden tangle of narrative lines in her life, which she had spent so many years crafting into a tight and comfortable linear story. The whole Calida business made no sense: opening a door to Somewhere Else, to a cold and smelly rotten-flower elsewhere in which dwelt hostile and inhuman powers. The hoodie-wearing Good Samaritan and therapy dog who were visible to some cameras but not to others. Now Chubb Coy and his itchy intuition. Trailing her through the night. Far beyond the limits of his authority, which extended only as far as the hospital grounds. In retrospect, she was pretty sure it had been Coy’s voice on the phone, asking about
TOP AGENT
. He had come into her life before Calida Butterfly, before the divination session that supposedly had invited the supernatural upon her, before Bibi had even heard about the Wrong People, and yet common sense insisted that each weirdness was linked to the others.

The driver of the Escalade behind her pressed hard on his horn the instant the light changed, having gotten in touch once more with his essential rudeness, now that Bibi turned out not to be a violent psychopath.

A few minutes later, on a residential street lined with massive old sycamores gone leafless at winter’s end, she parked at the curb to think. She turned off the headlights but not the engine, because she felt safer if she remained able to rocket away from the curb at an instant’s notice.

Think.
Since everything had gone screwy in her apartment, she had been reacting with animal emotion to events, instead of with her usual calm and consideration. She had been playing by
their
rules, the Silly-Putty rules of crazy people. Now she realized that by doing so, she had contributed to the momentum of the insanity.
Think.
The unreal and flat-out seemingly impossible things that had happened would have logical explanations if she thought about them enough, and the threats that seemed to be rising all around her would then either diminish or even evaporate altogether.
Think.

Her phone rang. The caller ID indicated that Bibi was phoning herself. So they were mocking her. Clever bastards. Whatever else the Wrong People might be, they were apparently techno wizards.

She answered with minimal commitment. “Yeah?”

A man with a silken, subtly seductive voice said, “Hello, Bibi. Have you found Ashley Bell yet?”

She told herself that by participating in a conversation, she would be playing by their rules, but if she terminated the call, she stood no chance of learning anything useful. She said, “Who is this?”

“My surname at birth was Faulkner.”

From that peculiar reply, Bibi inferred that obfuscation and evasion would define his style, but she played along. “Any relation to the writer?”

“I’m delighted to say no. I hate most books and bookish people, so I changed my name. I am now—and have been for a long time—known as Birkenau Terezin.” He spelled it for her. “Friends call me Birk.”

She doubted that such a name appeared in any Orange County phone book, on the voter rolls, or in the property-tax records. “What can I do for you, Mr. Terezin?”

“I’m standing now in your apartment.”

She did not take the bait.

“If I may say so,” Terezin continued, “you have taste, but lack the means to afford fine things. The result is an earnest but tacky attempt at interior design. Your parents have resources. Why didn’t you reach into their pockets?”

“Their money is theirs. I’ll make my own.”

“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. We have found the two hundred forty-eight pages of the novel you’re currently writing, which we’re taking, along with your computer. We will destroy both.”

Bibi glanced at the laptop lying on the passenger seat. The 248 pages were duplicated in its memory.

“We’ll also get the laptop,” Terezin said.

Bibi wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting to that lame attempt to make her think he could read her mind.

“And if you should copy the pages onto a flash drive, we’ll get that as well. And smash it.”

On the sidewalk, a man approached through pools of lamplight and lakes of sycamore darkness. He was walking a German shepherd.

To her caller, Bibi said, “What do you want from me?”

“Only to kill you.”

Man and dog passed the Explorer. She watched them recede in the passenger-side mirror.

Terezin continued, “I’d rather it wasn’t something as common as a bullet to the head. Too banal for a writer whose short stories have appeared in such esteemed magazines. Death by a thousand stab wounds would be nice, especially if we used a thousand sharpened pencils and left you bristling like a porcupine.”

The response that occurred to her was straight out of a low-rent TV drama, so she remained mute.

“We believe in justice, Bibi. Don’t you think all living things deserve justice?”

“You do,” she said.

“Cancer cells are alive, Bibi. Did you ever stop to think about that? They are so enthusiastic about life, they grow far faster than normal cells. A tumor is a living thing. It deserves justice.”

“I haven’t done anything to you,” she said, being careful not to whine and thereby suggest weakness.

“You
offended
me. You deeply offended
us
when you allowed your ignorant masseuse to demand answers. Why was Bibi Blair spared from cancer? The answer is simple, as simple as this—so that she could die another way.”

Bibi had no hope that conversing reasonably with a homicidal fanatic would convert him to clear thinking, and there was a chance that she would stoke the fires of his madness and make him more dangerous than he already was.

Neither could she survive by hanging up on him and pretending that he didn’t exist. She went to the quick of it and said, “Who is Ashley Bell?”

The worm of condescension, turning in his voice, was almost as loud as his words. “You aren’t taking this pathetic quest seriously, are you?”

“Why do you care if I am or I’m not?”

Rather than answer her, Terezin said, “To us, you’re just a worm, a pissant, something we step on without noticing. You don’t have a hope of finding her. We’ll find you first and put an end to this. Did you know, lovely Bibi, that every smartphone is also a GPS? Everywhere you go, the traitorous phone reports your whereabouts in real time.”

She knew this, of course, but never imagined that she might be quarry.

“Anyone who has the right connections with the police or with certain tech companies can find you at any moment of any day. And anyone with the ability to hack their systems can find you, too, my lovely pissant.”

The phone felt
alive
in her hand.

“And your three-year-old Ford Explorer,” Terezin said, “bought without your parents’ money, a proud statement of your independence—of course it has a GPS. You can be followed by satellite anywhere you go. And by the way, if you go to Mom and Dad for help, we’ll kill them, too.”

She switched off the phone and dropped it on the floor, but she knew that wasn’t good enough. Its perpetual signal would still locate her. Although she killed the engine of the SUV, that wouldn’t be good enough, either.

She zippered open her purse, crammed into it the slim book with panther and gazelle, zippered it shut, and grabbed her laptop and, with it, the sole remaining 248 pages of her unfinished novel. She threw open the door and got out of the Explorer.

By abandoning the phone and the Ford, she would be conceding a possibility to the impossible. If she believed that the Wrong People could find her by such traditional means as high technology, it seemed she also had to accept that, when Calida held a divination session, these same people were alerted to the practice by the psychic equivalent of seismic waves that they could follow back to the source.

Headlights appeared three blocks to the west, ice-white and flaring strangely through the sentinel sycamores, as if this were the witchy light emanating from an extraterrestrial craft, stretching the bare-limb shadows until they broke. When Bibi pivoted at the sound of an engine, she encountered more headlights two blocks to the east, as an immense SUV rounded the corner with the menace of a vehicle packed full of CIA assassins. The moment seemed too genre-movie to be taken seriously, but many of the least credible movie villains of the past few decades had in recent years manifested in the real world, as over-the-top as any sociopath portrayed by any scenery-chewing actor. To run west or east might be to flee into the jaws of a pincer, and to go north would require dashing across the street in full view.

Left with no viable alternative, after the briefest hesitation, Bibi accepted the fact of this new dark and unfathomed world in which she found herself. She ran across the sidewalk, onto the front lawn of a shingle-sided house with dormered roof, white trim, deep front porch, and windows glimmering like the panes of a candled lantern. This was a place where you took refuge after a long and dispiriting day, where you could always go home again. But it was no home to her, and she suspected that if she attempted to take refuge there, her knock would bring to the door Chubb Coy or the once-named Faulkner now known as Birkenau Terezin, or someone more surprising and even more hostile. She raced alongside the residence, through the outfall of light from the windows, into the black night of the backyard, no destination yet in mind, driven by an instinct that promised safety only in perpetual motion.

Phone discarded, vehicle abandoned, clinging to the laptop not for its inherent value or its function, but for the 248 pages that existed nowhere except in its memory, Bibi Blair entered the backyard of the shingled house, wondering if she might be running from a twisted equivalent of the police detective in
Les Misérables
or from a variant of the robot assassin in
The Terminator,
as if it mattered a damn whether her ordeal conformed to classic fiction or to pop art.

From the street came the bark of brakes but no crash. Either an accident had been averted or two vehicles were disgorging pursuers. The property was encircled by one of those stucco-coated concrete-block privacy walls that Californians called a fence. At the rear of the lot, Bibi put her purse and computer on top of the fence. She got a two-hand grip on the bricks that capped the stuccoed blocks, and climbed into another backyard.

Having retrieved laptop and purse, she set out past a swimming pool dimly revealed by the quarter moon, circulation pump rumbling.

In the passage between the dark residence and the property fence, a bicycle with a front-mounted cargo basket leaned against the house. Bibi put the laptop and purse in the basket and wheeled the bike into the street. She boarded it and pedaled westward, adding theft to the crime of trespass. Glancing back, she saw no one and dared to believe that they would not discover she had nabbed the bicycle.

If bad men actually were pursuing her on foot, and if they returned to their SUVs to conduct a wider search, she would be dead when they caught her on the street. Their type wouldn’t be afraid to risk a four-wheel-drive execution in public.

Right away, she needed to get down from the hills and out of sight over the Balboa Peninsula bridge, so they wouldn’t know which way she’d gone. When she reached Newport Boulevard, she swung left past the hospital, leaning hard into the turn to shorten the arc and maintain speed. Out of the turn, onto a straightaway. All downhill from there to the peninsula. Three lanes, little traffic at the moment. If there was a bike lane, she had no interest, preferring the wide, clear pavement. Stones and sticks and junk ended up in the bike lane, all kinds of crap that, at high speed, could send you wobble-wheeled into an embankment or jack your ride out from under you. Leaning forward, head low, slicing through the cool night air. Going faster than she had ever ridden a bicycle before. Passing some of the cars and trucks, all of the drivers staying wide of her when they realized that she was among them. She would have been exhilarated if she hadn’t been expecting the Wrong People to ram her from behind.

She was anxious about encountering the police, too. A bicycle didn’t belong in the center of the boulevard. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, as the law required. And she was carrying a concealed weapon. She had a permit for it, but if there was a misunderstanding…

Before she quite realized it, the harbor glimmered to her left, and she was crossing the bridge. She raced down the final slope to the flats of the peninsula. Here land was in such short supply and so valuable, the seriously wealthy and the merely well-to-do lived in fabulous waterfront houses on postage-stamp properties, within shouting distance of older funky beach cottages rented by groups of surf rats working short-hour low-wage zombie jobs to preserve most of their time for tearing up epic waves or wiping out, either way, because all that mattered was
being there.

Tentacled fog felt its way slowly, blindly off the sea and through the streets, breathing a cold dew on Bibi’s face. She left the bicycle in an alley behind a block of businesses, closed at that hour, and continued on foot to the nearer of two piers.

As Thursday waned, traffic was light. For a place of such tight-packed structures and dense population, Balboa Peninsula felt lonely just then. It was easy to believe that an unaccompanied woman might vanish between one block and the next, never to be seen again.

As the fog married the land to the sea, passing traffic made Bibi think of submersibles plying the ocean through a sunken city, though one with humbler architecture than Atlantis. By the time she reached the vicinity of the pier, where faux-antique iron lamps silvered the mist, she seemed to be the only person in sight.

For emergencies, she had a key to Pet the Cat. Just inside the front door, during the alarm system’s one-minute delay, she entered the code with the keypad. Spaced throughout to inconvenience thieves, security lamps provided more than enough light for Bibi to reach the stairs in the back-left corner of the shop.

The store occupied two commercial units. Her dad also leased the rooms above, which otherwise would have been rented as an apartment. He used half that upper space to store merchandise, and the other half served as his office, complete with a kitchenette and a cramped bathroom with shower.

In addition to a desk and filing cabinets, the office contained a comfortable sofa and two armchairs. On the walls hung five framed, mint posters for
The Endless Summer.
Her dad would not sell even one.

After turning on a desk lamp, Bibi closed the louvered shutters, which were tight enough to allow only a little light to escape.

When she sat in the office chair where her father had sat, she felt safe for the first time since she’d fled her apartment. Beside the desk lamp stood a framed photograph of Bibi and her mother.

She so wanted to call them. But she remembered Terezin’s threat. If she went to her parents for help, he would kill them, too.

She wondered what the police would say if she approached them with her bizarre story. Would they invoke the danger-to-herself-and-others law and remand her for a psychiatric evaluation? For the moment, at least, the usual authorities were of no use to her.

She opened her laptop and plugged it in. On the desk stood a mug holding a selection of pens and pencils. She opened a desk drawer in search of a tablet or notepad.

Among the items in the drawer was a silver bowl containing a One-Zip plastic bag full of Scrabble tiles. She stared at it for a while before she picked it up.

The online phone directory for Orange County included numerous people named Bell, but Bibi could not find an Ashley. There might be a spouse or daughter named Ashley not included in the listing, but to find her would require calling every number or visiting every address where one was provided. And there were surely other Bells who had unlisted numbers. The task was too daunting. She needed to think of a smarter, quicker way to conduct the search.

She googled Ashley Bell and found a number of them in states from Washington to Florida, but none in Orange County, which made her doubt her assumption that this person must be a local. She discovered photos of some of the Ashleys on Facebook—males and females—but she experienced no frisson of connection when she studied their faces.

During all this, she kept glancing at the bowl full of lettered tiles. It wasn’t the same bowl that Calida had used. And the Amazon’s tiles had been in a flannel bag, not a One-Zip.

So…questions. If Scrabblemancy was just a lark to Murphy and Nancy, why would he want his own gear? Had an amusement grown into an obsession? But assuming that Calida wasn’t a fraud, that she was a gifted diviner, the gear itself was of no use to people without her power. Did Murphy fancy himself some kind of medium?

That seemed absurd. People who made it to fifty by coasting happily along on an it’ll-be-what-it’ll-be mantra, whose relationship with fate was guided by a don’t-ask-don’t-tell mentality, who never exhibited a passing interest in philosophical issues, who lived for work and surf and surfers’ simple pleasures, didn’t abruptly become occultists any more than they became true-believing Jehovah’s Witnesses, passing out pamphlets door to door. And if her father had gone over the edge, her mother had gone with him, because in a fundamental way, each had always been the other; perhaps their foremost saving grace was their commitment to each other, deep and unshakeable. If anything, Nancy would be less likely than Murphy to become a seeker of hidden knowledge. She was top agent, hard-nosed flogger of dream homes and fixer-uppers, a surfer babe who insisted on shag-cut hair because it saved her X number of minutes each day that could better be spent on maintaining a tan and catching some waves, drinker of tequila shots and beer, eater of jalapeños and habaneros, and all but certainly more enthusiastic in her marriage bed than her daughter cared to contemplate. Nancy was far too earthy to be floated off her feet by the helium of occult pursuits. And if not Nancy, then never Murphy. Divination with Scrabble tiles could be no more to them than a party game.

After working awhile longer with the computer, Bibi took a break to use the bathroom. On the vanity, beside the sink, she found a bottle of alcohol, a packet of seamstress’s needles, and a white-cotton cloth crusted with old bloodstains and damp with new ones.