Ashley Bell: A Novel (27 page)

This girl. This Ashley Bell. Her face beautiful. Her expression serene. But in that serenity, Bibi saw a hard-won composure, a mask meant to deny the photographer his subject’s true emotions, which were fear and anger. She warned herself that she might be reading into the photo a scenario from her imagination. Maybe the girl was just bored or trying for one of those vacuous expressions that models were encouraged to assume for the haute-couture magazines these days. But no. For Bibi, the proof could be seen in that remarkable stare. If the colors in the picture were true to life, those enchanting reddish-blue eyes were as limpid as distilled water and revealed a profoundly observant and quick mind. They were wide-set eyes but also as wide open as they could be without furrowing her forehead, as if she meant to belie the apparent tranquillity of her face, or as though the photographer or something else beyond the camera disquieted her.

In addition, Bibi perceived in the girl a tenderness and vulnerability that inspired sympathy, a kindredness that she could not—or would not—explain to herself. This reaction, this sense of equivalence, hit her with such force that it changed everything.

Until now, the search for Ashley Bell, such as it was, had been to a degree unreal, a game without rules, a joke quest without many laughs. It might even be a hoax involving a cleverly staged, phony divination session enhanced by hallucinogens, perpetrated by a group of crazies whose motivation was likely forever to elude a sane person. To this point, Bibi had played this dangerous game as though she exclusively stood at the center of it, focus and sole target. Because of the girl’s appearance and demeanor, which were at once radiantly ethereal and as real as stone, Bibi’s perception changed. She was the paladin, the white knight, and a secondary target only because she would act to save the girl. Ashley Bell was the primary target of the Wrong People and the focus of all that would happen hereafter. In surfing terms, Ashley was the grommet, the trainee surf mongrel, and Bibi was the stylin’ waverider who had to save her from being mortally prosecuted by a series of storm-generated behemoths.

Reality had finally resolved out of the chaos of the last twelve hours. It had bitten hard, infecting Bibi with conviction.

Ashley Bell was real. And in desperate trouble. The people who threatened her were in some way weirdly gifted and beyond the reach of the law. Also well organized. Also homicidal.

Calida had printed out a picture of Ashley that someone had emailed to her as an attached JPEG. It would be helpful to know the source of the photograph. Maybe she had printed the email, too.

Like any house, this one produced noises separate from those its people generated. Creaks and ticks and soft groans of expansion, contraction, and subsidence. A series of these caused Bibi to freeze and listen intently, but silence and a guarded sense of safety settled after the building finished complaining about gravity.

She looked through desk drawers for the email. Nothing. An electric shredder fed the waste can, which contained mostly quarter-inch-wide ribbons of paper suitable for celebrating a welcome-home parade of astronauts returning from the moon, but otherwise useless. The remaining contents did not include the email.

She suspected that she’d already spent too much time in the house. Exploring Calida’s computer might be interesting, but it would also require a reckless delay.

Carrying the photograph in her left hand, keeping her right free to reach beneath her blazer to the pistol, Bibi descended the stairs through a stillness that no tread disrupted. She passed also through a lens of morning gold admitted by a skylight, in which particles of dust not evident elsewhere were revealed revolving around one another, as though she had been given a glimpse of the otherwise invisible atomic structure of the world.

The ground-floor rooms were without eccentricity, furnished as normally as those in any house. But when she got to the kitchen, she found the aftermath of a visit by the Wrong People. The dinette table had been jammed into one corner; the chairs stood upon it. A heavy-duty white-plastic tarp, fixed to the floor with blue painter’s tape, protected the glazed Mexican tiles. A few stained rags had been left on the tarp; but there was not much blood. Apparently, they killed her in such a way as to avoid a mess, possibly by strangulation. Then the amputations had been performed postmortem, both to minimize the need for cleanup and to ensure there would be no shrill screams to alarm the neighbors. The body had been removed, perhaps in the Range Rover and for disposal, but the ten fingers, each sporting a flashy ring, were on a counter near the refrigerator, lined up neatly on a plate, as if they were petits fours to be served with afternoon tea.

Human cruelty could disgust Bibi, but not shock her. She wasted no time reeling from the hideous sight or wondering for what purpose the fingers had been kept. She understood at once the urgent message the scene conveyed: The cleanup was not finished; either those who had left in the Range Rover would return or another crew would soon arrive to complete the job.

As she started across the kitchen, she heard a vehicle in the driveway and the muffled clatter of the rising garage door.

When she heard the roll-up door rising in the garage, Bibi reached under her blazer, to the holstered pistol, wondering if she would be able to get the drop on whoever might be coming, disarm and restrain and interrogate them. If there was only one of them, the answer was probably not. If two, the answer was definitely not. If more than two, they would butcher her into more pieces than they evidently had rendered Calida. Courage and steadfastness were not enough when you were up against a crew of sociopaths and you weighed 110 pounds on a fat day and your gun had only a ten-round magazine and you weren’t self-deluded. She didn’t hesitate even long enough for the garage door to finish its ascent, fled the kitchen, went directly to the living room and out the front door.

She stayed away from the east end of the porch, where the driveway led past the house to the garage. Avoiding the steps as well, she hurried to the west end of the porch, vaulted over the railing, and landed on her feet. She raced across the front lawn, across the street, and took refuge in Pogo’s Honda, in the deep shadows under the live oak.

She put the photograph of Ashley on the dashboard and extracted her purse from under the driver’s seat. If she could sound genuinely horrified and panicked, which shouldn’t be a problem, a call to 911 might bring the police to Calida’s house while someone remained there to be arrested.
Bloody rags. Severed fingers. Murder.
If that wasn’t enough to bring out Costa Mesa’s finest, they must be busy filming a reality-TV show. Only as she zippered open the handbag did she recall that she no longer had her phone. She had abandoned it—and its GPS—with her Explorer, the previous night.

If she got out of the car and screamed, trying to rouse the neighbors, she would accomplish nothing except to alert the murderers to her presence and provide them an opportunity to see what she was driving these days. She sat stewing in frustration for a minute or two, but she gained nothing from that, either. When she drove away, she hung a U-turn, heading west, to avoid passing the house.

Instead of sustaining her, a half pint of ice cream before dawn had led to a sugar crash. She went directly to a Norm’s restaurant, the ultimate working man’s eatery, because the food was pretty good and reliable, but also because she had a hunch that the Wrong People wouldn’t be seen in a Norm’s even if they were starving to death and it was the last source of nourishment on the planet. During their short telephone conversation, Birkenau—“Call me Birk”—Terezin had sounded like a snob and a narcissist. His associates were likely to be of the same cloth; power-trippers put a low value on humility. When your enemies were elitist snarky boys, one way you could go off the grid was to eat at Norm’s and buy your clothes at Kmart.

The hostess put her in a small booth at the back of the room, and Bibi chose to sit facing away from most of the other customers. More than food, she wanted coffee. Her thoughts were fuzzy from too little sleep and too much weirdness. She needed to clear her head. The pleasant and efficient waitress brought a second cup of strong black brew with Bibi’s order of fried eggs, bacon, and hash browns, which promised to grease her thought processes for hours.

In movies, people on the run from killers, having recently seen the severed fingers of a corpse, did not take time out for breakfast. They didn’t take time out for the bathroom, either, or to think about how little life and movies resembled each other.

With a pen and a small notebook that she carried in her purse, she made a note to that effect, which she headlined
REMEMBER FOR NOVEL: MOVIES AND LIFE
. While she ate, her intention was to make a list of things she needed to buy and to do in order to stay off the grid as much as possible, but she wasn’t surprised that she should also be jotting down ideas for her fiction. After all, she wasn’t always running for her life and trying to save the life of another, though she
was
always a writer.

Okay, she needed a disposable cell phone. Although it didn’t have the smartphone features she might need, it couldn’t be traced to her and wouldn’t make her vulnerable to GPS bloodhounds. And if they still sold those electronic GPS maps, which wouldn’t have any link to another device known to be owned by her, she could use one.

She found herself making another note off the subject, this one regarding the three occasions that she had used Captain’s trick to forget unwanted memories. They had been spread over ten years. She headlined the list
IMPORTANT!

The first time had been when, with Captain’s help and a candle flame, she had burned to ashes the incident of the crawling thing. She’d been five years and ten months old when the creature terrorized her, six and a half when she took steps to forget it.

The second time, she was ten, and the captain had been dead about four months. She burned the memory of what happened in the attic above his apartment, which still remained beyond recollection. In that instance, she had not even written the memory on paper, but had merely stood before the ceramic logs in the bungalow’s living-room fireplace and had offered the memory to the gas flames.

As Bibi composed her list with salient details, Norm’s resonated with conversations, clinking cutlery, rattling china and glassware, and background music that she could not identify and that soon she did not hear. With her concentration came a silence broken not even by the sounds of her eating, for she heard nothing now other than the whisper of pen on paper.

The third time, she had been sixteen, half crazy over the loss of Olaf, confused and distraught and bitter and angry, when to her had come a most hideous idea, an intention so loathsome that she could hardly believe it had originated in her own mind; and though the plan that began to form was so out of character, she knew that the temptation to implement it would be irresistible. Had she acted on that idea, she would have ruined her life and the lives of her parents. And so she wrote it on a page of a notebook, tore it out, and fed the page to flames in the fireplace, taking no chance that offering it without committing it to writing would work as it had worked before.

In those three forgotten moments were the roots of her current troubles. What had crawled the floor of her bedroom? What happened in that spidered attic where fog quested through the vents? To ease the unendurable pressure of her emotions in the wake of the dog’s cremation, what abomination had obsessed her, what violence or outrage had she feared committing so much that it must be burned out of her memory?

She was surprised that she had finished eating. As she put her fork down on the empty plate, the sounds and pleasing aromas of the establishment seeped back into her awareness.

There in the ordinariness of Norm’s restaurant, Bibi wondered about the extraordinary nature of her secret self. Proof seemed to be mounting that a singular darkness gathered in her heart, though she saw herself as a child of sea and sand, of ocean breeze and summer light. She knew that few people ever completely—or even largely—understood themselves. And yet she had assumed that she was one of the enlightened few, that she could read herself from first page to last and grasp every nuance of Bibi Blair.

After she assured the waitress that she wanted nothing else, Bibi left a tip, picked up the check with the intention of paying at the cashier’s station, and rose from the booth. As she slung her purse over her shoulder and turned, she saw Chubb Coy at the farther end of the busy restaurant, having breakfast in a booth by the big front windows. The hospital security chief had no evident interest in her, apparently didn’t even know she was there. His attention was focused entirely on his pancakes and his breakfast companion, Solange St. Croix, holy mother of the university writing program.