Ashley Bell: A Novel (29 page)

A few blocks from the big-box store, Bibi took refuge in the parking lot of a strip mall. In addition to the line of shared-wall businesses, a freestanding building housed Donut Heaven, on the roof of which a golden halo revolved above a giant glazed doughnut.

Although the disposable phone promised “instant activation,” she wasn’t surprised that the call-back confirmation would take a while.

In the meantime, she read the instructions for the electronic map while brooding about the ludicrous encounter with Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack, which continued to seem important and to be tied somehow to her current troubles. To imagine that the former teacher was part of the conspiracy against her, however, would be to step out of justifiable paranoia onto a steep path toward mania. If Hoffline-Vorshack, why not the unnamed arbitrator with the walrus mustache and the swarming tattoos? And if him, why not every customer of the nearby Donut Heaven? Everyone in every car passing in the street?
Everyone everywhere?

“Better chill, Beebs,” she warned herself.

When the map, with its GPS link, was up and running, she tried to locate 11 Moonrise Way, the address that had been spelled in Scrabble tiles on the table in Calida’s home office. She didn’t have the name of a town or city, but the device allowed her to search also by county. There was no Moonrise Way or Lane or Street or Avenue or Boulevard or Parkway anywhere in Orange County or in the surrounding nine counties. Without a city name, the search process proved tedious when compared to what she could have achieved with her laptop, but using her online account might allow the Wrong People to locate her as soon as she logged on.

When her disposable phone came into service, she considered calling her parents. They might be hungover from the previous night’s celebration, though clearheaded enough. If they hadn’t already tried to phone her, they would soon, and they would become alarmed as, one after another, their calls went to voice mail.

But if Terezin and his crew had the connections and capabilities of which he had boasted, they might be able to monitor Nancy’s and Murphy’s phones as readily as could Homeland Security. In that case, if Bibi called her parents, Terezin might capture the electronic signature of her disposable phone, thereby making it possible to track her again, putting her back on the grid. To remain invisible, she could phone only people that he would not expect her to call.

Among the county’s more than three million souls, she was, for the moment, if not forever, alone.

Reluctantly she switched off the phone, put it in her purse, and took out the hardcover book that had belonged to Calida. Opening the volume, she thought she saw the inlaid-leather panther spring into motion, leaping toward the spine. Startled, she almost dropped the book, but when she closed the front cover, the panther remained as it had been, frozen in a pounce.

She turned the blank pages, hoping to glimpse again the rippling ghostly lines of script that had swum across the paper, schooling words too pale and swift to be read. But the phenomenon did not repeat, though she paged front to back, back to front, as the light dimmed to darkness and the darkness then faded into light….

When she looked up from the book, Bibi thought more time had passed than just a minute or two. She felt as though she was rising from a kind of waking sleep that had held her for long hours, and in fact she yawned and blinked and worked some saliva into her dry mouth. But the sensation of having been in a trance, of sloughing off the grip of some hypnotic power, had to be a misapprehension, because she still felt full from breakfast and because she was not stiff and achy from having sat for a long period behind the wheel. According to her wristwatch, only a few minutes had passed.

Nevertheless, she closed the volume rather than gaze into it again. And when she returned it to her purse, she said, “Something’s very wrong here.”

This was one of those days when the fog mimicked the wave action of the sea but in slow motion, gradually receding in the weak warmth of morning light, though never pulling entirely off the coast, then surging inland after an hour or two, reaching not quite as far as previously, retreating once more before returning.

When Bibi drove back into Newport Beach, she had to turn on the headlights long before she reached the bridge to Balboa Peninsula. Once she was cruising on that long arm of land that bulwarked the sea and embraced the harbor, she set the windshield wipers on intermittent to wipe away the insistent condensation.

Kelsey Faulkner’s address was in the commercial zone before the super-pricey real estate of Peninsula Point. A tourist destination in warmer months, this district varied between two and three blocks in width, oceanfront to harborfront. It was a fabled piece of ground that brought to mind Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, who created surfer music there in the 1950s, though its flatness inspired in nervous types occasional visions of the obliterating power of a tsunami.

Bibi parked in a metered lot and walked through sea-scented fog to the address, which was an unlikely location for the home base of a cult of homicidal lunatics. The shop, Silver Fantasies, offered handcrafted silver jewelry that ranged from inexpensive souvenirs such as leaping-porpoise pendants to exquisite necklaces and bracelets that sold for a few thousand dollars. It was open on an off-season weekday morning, which meant they enjoyed a large local clientele.

Bibi had often seen the place in passing, but having little interest in jewelry, she had never ventured inside. The cheaper items hung on brass racks. The better pieces were displayed in glass cases.

The thirty-something woman sitting at a corner worktable, polishing a bracelet, might have been cast forward in time from the late 1960s. In a long swishy cotton skirt, tie-dyed blouse, crocheted dog collar, and dangly silver peace-symbol earrings, she could have gotten on the stage with any band of that period and been taken for one of them as long as she held a tambourine.

She looked up from her work, smiled, and said, “Not the kind of day they’re dreamin’ about when they’re California dreamin’.”

“Better than a tsunami,” Bibi replied, though she had never before been one of those nervous types. “Is Kelsey around?”

Pointing to a door at the rear of the shop, the woman said, “In his studio. Just go on back.”

Although it was unlikely that she would be dismembered in the workroom of a jewelry shop, Bibi hesitated.

“It’s okay,” the woman said. “He’s not smelting or anything, just designing some new pieces.” She frowned. “You do know him?”

Bibi hesitated. “My dad knows him.”

“Who’s your dad?”

“Murphy Blair. He owns—”

“Sure, Murph. He’s cool. Go on back.”

Faulkner’s studio was more industrial than she expected of an artist-slash-craftsman. Small but arranged for efficiency. Clean but smelling of metal polish and machine oil. Four small high windows at which the fog pressed its blank face.

About fifty, with a mane of white hair that reminded Bibi of Beethoven’s, Kelsey Faulkner perched on a stool at a draftsman’s table. He was sketching a necklace.

He looked up and smiled. “Now, here’s a sudden light in a dreary day.”

If the woman in the front room had prepared Bibi, she might still not have been ready for his face. Half of it was handsome. The other half was out of
Phantom of the Opera:
a gnarled mass of keloid scars and furrowed flesh, blister-red twisted through with greasy-looking white tissue. The scars distracted from—but didn’t disguise—underlying problems with the structure of cheek and jaw, as if he had suffered a hard impact at speed. Most of his left ear was gone, and the remainder resembled a crust of fungus.

Although Bibi told him that he made lovely jewelry, and though she thought that she concealed her shock, Faulkner read her reaction correctly. He spoke a bit slowly, with precise diction, as though calculation must be required to avoid speaking with an impediment. “I’m sorry. Rita did not prepare you, did she?”

“The saleslady? I said you knew my father. She just assumed….”

“Who is your father?”

“Murphy Blair.”

“Nice man. So enthusiastic. He buys my jewelry for your mother.”

“That’s how you know him?”

“It has been many years since I chose to meet anyone new, other than those customers who insist on expressing their regards to the artisan.” He indicated the sketch. “I have my work, my apartment upstairs, my books. That is enough. Sometimes too much.”

Because the silversmith seemed to invite the question, Bibi asked, “What happened?”

After a hesitation, he cocked his head and regarded her with greater interest than before. “You are not like the others, are you?”

“What others?”

He studied her for a moment, and then said, “Any others.”

“I’m just me. Like anyone.”

“Different,” he disagreed. “Yours is not just cheap curiosity.”

Sensing that he was analyzing her and not yet finished, Bibi said nothing, concerned that pressing him would silence him.

“You do not pity me. Compassion, yes, I see your compassion. But no pity, none of the quiet disgust or contempt that comes with pity.”

She waited.

Faulkner closed his eyes and, after a moment, nodded as if in response to some conversation with himself. When he opened his eyes, he said, “A young man clubbed me with a length of steel pipe. While I was unconscious, he raped my wife, my lovely Beth, and stabbed her twenty-three times. As I lay dying…” He corrected himself. “As she lay dying, he poured acid in her face. And then in mine. The burning acid, the fierce stinging, woke me as he was leaving. I lived. Beth did not.”

Bibi would have settled into a chair if one had been available. “Who was he?”

“Robert Warren Faulkner. Bobby. Our only child. Sixteen years old at the time.”

“My God.”

At that moment, the ruined face didn’t trouble Bibi. The man’s eyes were what she found distressing, yet she could not easily look away from them.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked away.

The central element of the sketch on the drawing board was a stylized rising bird, wings spread. It might have been a phoenix.

“Your face,” Bibi said. “It could be made…much better.”

“Yes. Surgery. Reconstruction. Some radiation and corticosteroid injections to prevent new scars from forming where the old ones were removed. But to what purpose? Beth will still be dead.”

Bibi could think of no response, and if she found the words, she knew that she should not speak them.

“You see,” the silversmith continued, “the boy was obsessed with Nazis, the war, the death camps.”

“Auschwitz-Birkenau. Terezin,” she said.

“Dachau, Treblinka, all of them. And because this animal Hitler was interested in the occult, Robert developed an interest as well. Beth became concerned, wanted to consult a therapist. I said, no, at that age, many boys are fascinated by horrors of one kind or another. It is part of growing up. Nazis. The walking dead. Vampires. One thing or another. He will outgrow it, I said. I had no clue what was happening in his head. Beth had a suspicion, intuition, but I had no clue. Until…”

Fog seeking blindly at the high windows. The soft rumble-roar of an airliner, fresh from John Wayne Airport and gaining altitude over the sea.

Out in the salesroom, Rita greeted a customer. Muffled voices.

Bibi said, “What happened to him?”

“They never found him. He took our money, some things of value. He had a plan. But I think he is dead.”

“Why do you think so?”

“In all this time, he would have called to torment me. Toward the end, he had become arrogant, verbally abusive. He enjoyed my reaction to his insolence.”

“How long ago did it happen?”

“Seventeen years.”

“He’d be thirty-three now.”

In the other room, conversation and soft laughter. Business as usual. Outside, the voice of the airliner fading toward Japan.

The silversmith said, “Why are you here, Miss Blair?”

She surveyed the studio. “Are you afraid he might come back?”

“No. His cruelty is such, he would rather I live…and suffer.”

She met his eyes. “But if he did come back? What then?”

From the shelf under the tilted drawing board, Kelsey Faulkner drew a pistol. Evidently, he kept it with him at all times.

Bibi wasn’t convinced. “After all, he is your son.”

“He was my son. I do not know what he became.” He regarded the pistol with a solemn longing before returning it to the shelf. “It will never happen. Because I do not deserve the satisfaction.”

Bibi didn’t believe that her last question was germane, that silver was a meaningful link, but she needed to ask it nonetheless. With the tiles spelling
ASHLEY BELL
aligned in her mind’s eye, she said, “Have you ever made bowls, Mr. Faulkner? Silver bowls?”

“Only jewelry. My talent is limited. I am no Georg Jensen.” His smile was not truly a smile, for its mother was melancholy. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why are you here, Miss Blair?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Faulkner. I hope you get that satisfaction.”