Ashley Bell: A Novel (26 page)

Because Pogo enjoyed tinkering with cars more than attending college but less than surfing, the Honda drove better than it looked. The well-tuned engine offered good takeoff from a stop and plenty of power for hills. In spite of the joke he had made about the brakes, they were in good working order.

Calida Butterfly lived in Costa Mesa, in a neighborhood that had once been middle-class, had fallen into decline, but had begun to come back strong before the crash of 2008. In the current economic malaise, gentrification had stalled, leaving newer semi-custom two-story homes next door to fifty-year-old ranch-style residences, some well kept and some not. Seventy-year-old bungalows were in the mix, too, this one stucco and that one clapboard, most of them in need of new paint and repairs. Some properties were landscaped and neatly kept, but here and there were weedy yards and overgrown shrubs, and bare dirt scattered with gravel.

The biggest pluses of the neighborhood were its future if the country ever got back on a vigorous growth path and the massive old trees that spread sheltering limbs over the streets, an eclectic urban forest of podocarpus, oaks, carrotwood, stone pines, and more.

Bibi parked across the street from—and a hundred feet west of—Calida’s place, in the enrobing indigo shade of a California live oak. The fog had retreated somewhat from this area, although a scrim still stirred close to the ground, like a lingering poison gas that had been shelled into the neighborhood by an enemy army.

The masseuse-diviner’s house stood on a lot and a half, a well-maintained two-story bungalow with touches of Craftsman style. Bibi had been watching the place less than five minutes when the segmented garage door rose and a silver Range Rover rolled down the driveway, turned east into the street, and motored away, roiling the low fog in its wake. She had never before seen what Calida drove and didn’t know if this might be it. Distance and the vehicle’s tinted windows prevented her from identifying the occupants.

She hadn’t been sure if she’d come here to have a face-to-face with Calida or to nose around. The departure of the Rover helped her make up her mind. Nose around.

Preferring not to be encumbered by a purse, she tucked it under the driver’s seat. She locked the doors of the Honda and boldly crossed the street to the house, the small oval leaves of the live oak, dead and dry, crunching underfoot like beetle shells. When no one answered the doorbell, she rang it again, with the same result.

Without any furtive behavior, as though she had every right to be there, Bibi went around the side of the house, through a gate that stood ajar, past a patio shaded by a wisteria-entwined arbor, into the backyard, where a property wall screened her from the neighbors.

Her attention was drawn at once to an unexpected structure: a quaint decorative greenhouse of white-painted wood and glass, about twenty feet by thirty, set at the back of the property. This was such an unlikely discovery that she felt compelled to investigate it.

Four statues cast in terra-cotta, representing the four seasons, stood on plinths, two on each side of the approach to the building. The entire quartet—not just winter—looked threatening, as if they had been crafted in a place and a century that had never known a day of good weather.

There wasn’t much point in locking a house of glass containing nothing of value, and Bibi found the south door open. She stepped into a warm and moist enclave of exotic plants, most of them growing in trays of fecund-smelling soil set upon tall tables flanking narrow work aisles. There were no orchids or anthuriums or other species grown solely for their flowers. All appeared to be herbs. But only a few were the herbs that people used in their kitchens. She recognized basil, mint, chicory, fennel, rosemary, tarragon, and thyme. But there must have been a double score of other thriving varieties unknown to her. Some of the tables featured a bottom tier, where sunlight never directly reached, and in those still pools of wine-dark shadows were fungi—toadstools and puffballs and molds—that looked unhealthy, maybe even lethal.

Wandering through the greenhouse, Bibi thought of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the hookah-smoking caterpillar that had offered Alice pieces of this mushroom and that. Although she had accepted the reality of the events in her kitchen the previous night—the sudden plunge in the room temperature, the strange behavior of the candle flames and clocks, the stench of rotting roses where the only roses were in fact fresh and fragrant—perhaps she should consider the possibility that a part of what she had experienced might have been related to the effects of some hallucinogen distilled from one of these plants. It could have been slipped into her glass of chardonnay when she wasn’t looking.

She turned a corner and, on one of the tables, discovered a wire cage about a yard long and two feet wide, occupied by fifteen or twenty mice in various shades of brown and gray. The rodents were busy feasting at small bowls of food and water, coming and going from shallow burrows in coagulated masses of damp shredded newsprint, grooming, defecating, and copulating. Granted that mice were by nature nervous creatures, this community nonetheless seemed unusually jittery, fidgeting from end to end of the cage, twitching in alarm when others of their kind unintentionally stepped on their tails, ceaselessly surveying their domain with eyes as dark and liquid as beads of motor oil.

Movement drew Bibi’s attention to the concrete floor, where a possible explanation for the mice’s agitation slithered to her feet: a snake, and then another, and a third.

Bibi saw at once that the squirming serpents on the greenhouse floor were not rattlesnakes and that each was different from the others. Never having had the slightest interest in herpetology, she could neither identify them nor tell if they were deadly. She assumed they couldn’t be venomous, because Calida wouldn’t let them roam free if they were dangerous.

Of course, with what they believed to be cold and unassailable logic, people made assumptions all the time that got them killed. And Bibi had so recently promised Pogo that she would not give him another reason to cry. So she backed slowly away from the sinuous trio, dreading that she might step on a fourth behind her, ready to turn and sprint if one of them began coiling to strike.

Perhaps the snakes had been interested in her only because she might have been Calida come to feed them mice. As she retreated, they did not follow. Two glided silently beneath the table on which stood the cage of rodents. The third twined around a table leg and oozed upward to inspect the various nervous entrées that might be selected for dinner.

Bibi’s breath escaped her in a sigh of relief when she stepped outside and closed the greenhouse door.

At least she had learned something in return for the risk she had taken: Calida’s occult interests exceeded Scrabblemancy. Whether the murdered mother, too, had been a woman with numerous cabalistic pursuits or whether Calida had added new lines of business to her mom’s basic enterprise, the masseuse seemed to be seriously twisted, maybe fully wacked.

In either case, Bibi had to go into the main house. Considered as a preview, the greenhouse suggested that essential information would be found in the bungalow.

She tried the kitchen door, but it was locked. She hadn’t seen a sign warning that the house was protected by an alarm company. But she was loath to break a pane of glass. For the novel that she had been writing, she had researched burglary, speaking with detectives in the robbery detail and with a convicted criminal serving time for a score of offenses. She had learned that in some jurisdictions, you needed to force entry
and
steal something to be guilty of burglary. If you did neither, merely trespassed, you were at most guilty of the lesser charge of housebreaking.

That she should be calculating the legal consequences of her criminal activity, committing a crime rather than contemplating it, was disturbing. Well, screw it. She had no choice. The cops didn’t help you with complaints of supernatural harassment, and it was likely that
some
Wrong People were on the police force, too. The thing to keep in mind was that, two days earlier, Death had not just been on her doorstep but had been ringing her bell and knocking and calling for her to come out and play. Whatever trouble she got into now would be, by comparison, as sweet and smooth as pudding.

Among the many interesting things she learned when researching burglary was that a surprising number of people were diligent about locking potential points of entrance on the ground floor but were careless regarding second-story windows and sometimes even balcony doors.

At each end of the wisteria-entwined arbor that shaded the back patio, the vertical members were made of two-by-twos and appeared strong enough to serve as ladder rungs. She chose the end where the wisteria grew thinner. Assuring herself that this was less dangerous than surfing, since there were no sharks in the arbor, she climbed to the top with an agility that gratified her. She might have spent the last few years being more of a desk-bound writer than she would have preferred, but she hadn’t gone soft yet.

Four double-hung windows overlooked the arbor and the backyard. The third proved to be unlocked. Bibi slid up the lower sash. When no alarm sounded, she climbed over the sill, leaving the window open in case she needed to make a hasty exit.

Sneak thief, even minus the theft, still wasn’t a title that made her feel dashingly romantic, certainly not proud. She almost drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, to search the house at the ready, but that seemed stupid. She had no experience of a job like this. Her nerves were tripwire tight. If she turned a corner and encountered Calida—or, worse yet, a total innocent—she might squeeze the trigger in startled reaction. Instead, she went naked, or so it seemed, wondering why she had never thought it essential to earn a black belt in one martial art or another.

She had entered what seemed to be the master bedroom, which looked more ordinary than she might have expected. Neatly made bed with dust ruffle. Reproductions of California plein-air paintings. No zodiac carpet, no black candles in polished-bone holders, no weird totem hanging on the wall behind the bed. No snakes. The door to the walk-in closet stood open, and the clothes were hung in an orderly fashion.

Although she had risked a housebreaking conviction to come here, Bibi had no intention of pawing through Calida’s dresser drawers in search of secrets, which would probably turn out to be about things that had nothing to do with her and that were in one way or another pathetic, as most bedroom-kept secrets were. She suspected that if anything important waited to be found in this house, it would be grotesque or at least singular. She would recognize it the instant she opened a door or crossed a threshold.

The maple floor of the upstairs hallway talked back underfoot. She could do nothing to silence it. Staying close to a wall didn’t lessen the noise. Proceeding quickly caused no greater disturbance than stepping slowly and cautiously.

Beyond the hall bath were two rooms, the first peculiar but not helpful. No furniture whatsoever. Nothing hanging on the walls. The windows had been blacked out by fitting them with mirrors. She glimpsed her reflection and didn’t like the way she looked. Anxious, small, uncertain. In the center of the pale maple floor, in neat black letters an inch high, had been painted
THALIA
. The name of Calida’s mother. If you could believe anything the diviner said, Thalia had been cruelly tortured and dismembered by the Wrong People, twelve years earlier. Most likely not in this house. Somewhere else. This room, with the name on the floor, didn’t feel like either a marker of the crime or a shrine to the victim. For reasons that Bibi couldn’t specify, the chamber felt as if it had been established for the purpose of communication, although with whom or what, she could not say.

Across the hall from the empty room lay an office. A corner desk held a computer and two printers, the second for color work, all the equipment dark and silent. More plein-air paintings. A rosewood sideboard along one wall. In the center of the space stood a round worktable attended by a single chair.

She had found the grotesque, the singular, the something.

On the table stood the silver bowl filled with lettered tiles. In addition, two lines of tiles had been arranged on the table, as though Calida had returned to the inquiry that had begun in Bibi’s kitchen the night before. The first line read
ASHLEY BELL.
The line below it was an address:
ELEVEN MOONRISE WAY
.

Beside the bowl lay a sheet of high-quality photographic paper of the kind used in a color printer. When Bibi turned it over, she was staring at a lovely girl of perhaps thirteen. Champagne-yellow hair. Wide-spaced violet eyes the shade of certain hyacinths. It was mostly a head shot, from the shoulders up. The girl wore a white blouse with a crisp white collar, and across that garment were written five words:
Calida, this is Ashley Bell.