Ashley Bell: A Novel (24 page)

Bibi tweaked open one of the slats in a window shutter and stared out at the sidewalk and the pier parking lot, where the fog sparkled like diamond dust in the glow of the streetlamps. She stood there until she felt sure that Pet the Cat was not under observation, until she stopped trembling.

She recalled now….

The memory of the crawling intruder in her bedroom had inspired a repetitive nightmare that had tormented her for eight months, until she was six months short of her seventh birthday. Then, for the first time, she used the captain’s magical technique for shedding memories so distressing that they poisoned your life. On an index card, with the captain’s help, she had written a description of the events in her room on that bleak night when Mickey Mouse had failed to keep the boogeyman at bay, not just what it had been but how and why it had happened. Holding the card in a pair of tongs, repeating the six magic words that Captain taught her, she set it afire with a candle flame. When the captain swept up the ashes with his hands and blew them from his hands into the trash compactor, the unwanted memory was blown from her mind.

This slate-wiping trick was a childish device, nothing but a wishing-away, no more magical than were the paper and the fire. But she had wanted so desperately and intensely for it to work that it had worked for many years. Bibi didn’t understand the psychology of repressed memories. Maybe she didn’t want to understand, because if she had deceived herself in this fashion, perhaps she was not, after all, the bring-it-on-I-can-take-anything girl that she had always believed she was.

More than fifteen years after burning that memory in the candle flame—and more than sixteen years since the creepy encounter had occurred—the extraordinary stress of this strange night had brought the dormant memory back into flower. But it had not restored to her all the details of the repressed experience. That long-ago night, she had known what crawled the room and creeped beneath her bed. She had seen it then. But she could not see it now in her mind’s eye.

Maybe sooner than later, the full truth would come back to her. Although if it did, she might wish that it never had.

What she could see clearly now was that some extraordinary event in her past must be related to the remission of her cancer and to all that had occurred since Calida Butterfly had begun to pull Scrabble tiles from that silver bowl. In the dream that was a memory, maybe the crawling thing in her bedroom had in fact been a horror and far beyond ordinary human experience, but perhaps calling it a
thing
was a way of clouding the truth, an attempt to evade what had actually happened by transforming the threat into a harmless cliché, into the generic monster of all nightmares. She tried to force recollection, to expand the most crucial moments in the dream, but for the time being, no more details could be recovered.

By the time her tremors stopped, it was 4:04
A.M.
She returned to her father’s desk, searched the drawers, found a pack of unused flash drives, and made two copies of the 248-page manuscript that was on her laptop. She crawled into the kneehole and, with Scotch tape, securely fixed one flash drive to the underside of the desktop. She slipped the other one into a pocket of her jeans.

She took a shower in the small bathroom adjacent to her father’s office and then put on again the clothes she had been wearing since she’d fled her apartment.

Hungry, she searched the refrigerator in the kitchenette, but found nothing that she wanted to eat except a pint of dark-chocolate ice cream with peanut-butter swirl. Not a healthy breakfast by any standard. So what? If the supernatural insisted on weaving its web through her life, denying her the solace of pure reason—then to hell with such reasonable things as low-fat diets and exercise regimens.

While she ate, she sat at her father’s desk, searching the address book on his computer. Violating his privacy disconcerted her, so that more than once she hesitated to continue. But her future was at stake, if not her life. Her embarrassment never matured into shame, and she searched for the four names that were thus far most central to her dilemma. She found a phone number and address for Calida Butterfly. When she could not find an entry for Ashley Bell or Birkenau Terezin, or Chubb Coy, she was relieved. To have found any of them—especially all of them—would have forced her to question not just the judgment but the reliability of her parents, which would have been painful in the extreme.

Online, she googled Birkenau Terezin. Although she did not find a man with that name, she found two places with a history of evil.

Terezin proved to be a town in the Czech Republic, which seventy-five years earlier had been called Theresienstadt and had been part of German-occupied Bohemia. The Nazis had ejected the seven thousand residents of Terezin in order to use the town as a Jewish ghetto, where as many as fifty-eight thousand were forced to live at one time and where more than one hundred fifty thousand passed through during the war years. They lived there only temporarily, because Terezin was a transport center to which Jews were taken from all over Czechoslovakia and from which they would be conveyed to various death camps as the gas chambers and furnaces could accommodate them. One of the camps to which they were transported by the tens of thousands was Auschwitz-Birkenau.

She wondered what kind of man so hated books and bookish people that he would trade the name Faulkner for names that were synonymous with cruelty and death.

Halfway through the pint of ice cream, she realized that she had forgotten something when she’d been searching her dad’s address book. Bibi returned to it and, with a pang of remorse for suddenly being such a doubting daughter, typed in
FAULKNER
. The directory popped to
KELSEY FAULKNER
, complete with a local address and phone number.

With the desk light turned off, Bibi felt her way to the window and used the tilt rod to open the louvers on one half of the shutter. She stood staring out at the lamplit fog that still drifted onshore like the ghost of some poisonous sea that had existed billions of years earlier, before the current healthy sea had formed.

With no one to turn to, she would have to be her own detective. And she was as certain as she had ever been about anything that she had little time to wrap the case. The Wrong People were searching for her, and she sensed that their numbers might be daunting, that they were not just a cult of a dozen or two dozen deranged individuals, but were more like a battalion—or an army. Whether they sought her by ordinary or paranormal means didn’t matter; either way, when they found her, they would kill her—and for reasons she still didn’t quite understand.

If Bibi was right about Ashley Bell, that she was a prisoner of these people, held for God knew what purpose, then it would be necessary to find them in order to find her. For that detective work, she needed wheels, and she thought she knew where to get them. But she had to wait for a more reasonable hour, at least seven o’clock, before making the call.

Fog could paint mystery on the most mundane scene. Now when she thought of Pax in some hellhole unknown to her, the mist also painted the night with melancholy. Sorrow was a degree of sadness that she dared not indulge; it would sap her will and strength. As much as she yearned for Pax, she could not dwell on him.

She thought of another foggy night, when she had been six years old for just two weeks, the evening of the day when Captain had moved into the rooms above the garage. He was the only important newcomer in Bibi’s life until, four years later, Olaf came to live with her.

Previously the apartment had been rented by a twenty-something woman, Hadley Rogers, who was busy with a career in art, not as a painter or instructor, but as a dealer or broker or agent, whatever. She had not been a meaningful presence in young Bibi’s life, seen most often flitting down the stairs to her Corvette in the carport. Miss Rogers seemed puzzled by children, as if she wasn’t entirely sure of their origin or purpose. She seemed less substantial than a real person, more like an animated painting of a person.

Captain, on the other hand, was obviously real and important. Tall, rugged-looking, with thick white hair, he was attentive and polite to everyone, even children. Bibi had accompanied her mother when the captain had been shown the apartment, and by the end of the tour, she liked him and knew she would always and forever like him. In spite of his scarred hands and two missing fingers, though his face was weather-beaten and his eyes were as sad as those of a bloodhound, Captain was glamorous; she just knew he had a lot of good stories to tell.

That night, after the fog had laid siege to Corona del Mar, Bibi couldn’t fall asleep. After a while, she slipped out of bed and went to get a glass of milk. As she approached the kitchen, where her parents were at the table, talking over mugs of coffee and Kahlua, she heard her mother say something that warned her to step to the side of the doorway, be silent, and listen.

“I’m thinking it’s a mistake. This has a bad vibe.”

Murphy said, “Well, I’m not getting any vibe, good or bad. I’m vibeless, babe.”

“I’m serious, Murph.”

“Yeah, I figured that out an hour ago.”

“Who moves into a place with just two suitcases and a duffel bag?”

“They were big suitcases. Anyway, it’s a furnished apartment.”

“People still have boxes and boxes of personal belongings.”

“You’re making yourself crazy for no reason.”

“What about Bibi?”

“Listen to yourself, babe. He’s not a child molester.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. But he’s not like Hadley, hardly home. He’s going to be up there all the time. He’ll be an influence. She was instantly fascinated with him.”

“Retirees do tend to be more homebodies than hot young girls climbing the art-world ladder.”

“You think Hadley is hot?” Nancy asked.

“Not by my standards, not even lukewarm. But I have a lot of empathy. I can see the world through other guys’ eyes.”

“You might need to, if I poke out
your
eyes.”

“Here you are threatening your own husband, and you think maybe some worn-out, worn-down geezer with eight fingers is a problem.”

Nancy laughed softly. “I just don’t want any bad influences in Bibi’s life.”

“Then we’ll have to move to Florida or somewhere, because right now your sister Edith is just across the border in Arizona.”

Young Bibi had gone back to bed without milk and worried herself to sleep, afraid that the exotic and interesting captain would soon be gone, replaced by another bland and boring Hadley.

She need not have lost sleep. Captain lived above the garage for more than four wonderful years, until that terrible day of blood and death.

Now, standing at the window in her father’s office, Bibi saw what might have been dawn light refracting through the fog, faintly pinking it. She looked at the radiant dial of her watch. Almost time to call Pogo.