Ashley Bell: A Novel (31 page)

As Bibi turned toward the door between the bedroom and the parlor, the time seemed to have come for her to draw the Sig Sauer from her shoulder rig.

Pax had given her a few days of instruction at a shooting range, and in his company she had fired hundreds of rounds at paper targets in the form of human silhouettes. She had been concerned that in a crisis she would make a wrong decision, shoot when she should hold her fire, accidentally take down someone other than her target. Her defense had always been words, and if she shot off the wrong ones, an explanation and an apology had remedied her mistake. But apologies didn’t heal a mortal chest wound.

When no one appeared in the portion of the parlor that Bibi could see through the doorway, when the silence became so attenuated that she began to feel she was being tested, perhaps mocked, she overcame her lingering inhibition and drew the pistol. She held it in her right hand, with the muzzle aimed at the ceiling.

She glanced at a window, wondering if beyond it lay one of the teak decks to which she could flee if necessary. Her journey through the house had disoriented her. She didn’t know in what direction this window faced, and the fog that cloistered the coast prevented her from getting her bearings by the intensity and angle of sunlight.

Silence could be an effective strategy. It frayed the nerves and encouraged the imagination to invent one anxious-making scenario after another, until you mistook every smallest and most innocent sound for the start of the expected assault, and were at a fateful moment distracted from the true threat. With every step that Bibi had taken in this house, her apprehension had been whetted, until now it was razor-sharp.

In movies, the silence-tortured character asked,
Is someone there? Who’s there? Hello? What do you want?
The answer to that last question would always be a variation of Terezin’s response when Bibi, on the phone, had inquired of him what he wanted from her:
Only to kill you.
Therefore, silence should be met with silence—and with well-considered action.

She brought the pistol down into a two-hand grip, arms extended, as Pax had taught her. She cleared the open doorway fast, bedroom to parlor, staying low, sweeping the gun left to right, right to left.

No one crouched behind the Chesterfield or the armchair. No one sheltered behind the voluminous draperies.

Bibi stood alone, wondering if the door had been slammed by a draft. But the tight construction of the house disfavored drafts no less than it fostered silence. She did not believe in dramatically timed currents of air any more than she believed in coincidences.

Silence now lay deeper than any ordinary hush, as deep as though commanded by a sorcerer’s spell. She could not hear her own breathing or the knocking of her heart, and therefore it was a weak odor, faded almost beyond detection, that alerted her. Not a perfume. More subtle than the most diluted and refined product of flowers or spices. It might have been the smell of clean hair rinsed free of the slightest trace of a shampoo’s fragrance, or skin likewise scrubbed of all sweat and soap. Neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant scent, it was as disturbing as it was faint, suggesting a cold, implacable presence.

When Bibi turned, pistol still in a two-hand grip, Solange St. Croix halted only seven or eight feet away. The professor seemed to have resolved out of thin air, until Bibi saw beyond her the entrance to a bathroom with pedestal sink and claw-foot tub. In the interest of perfecting the Victorian décor, the door was integrated seamlessly into its surroundings, the lower portion stained and trimmed with molding to match the wainscoting, the upper section wallpapered.

The woman was dressed as always in a stylish but severe suit that would have served her well had she been a mortician. Graying hair pulled back tighter than ever and captured in a bun, skin paler than before, lips all but bloodless, she seemed to have been born of the fog that licked the lace-curtained windows.

Wary of the pistol but not intimidated, St. Croix came no closer to Bibi, but began slowly to circle her, as if waiting for an opening. Her intentions weren’t obvious, because she carried no weapon, though it would not have been a surprise if a knife had appeared magically from tailoring that seemed too severe to conceal one.

In a mutual strategic silence, the professor circled 360 degrees and Bibi turned in place to follow her. Which of them was the moon and which the planet, it was hard to say. St. Croix chewed on her lower lip as if biting back words, and throughout her revolution, she met her former student’s stare without looking away for an instant. Her blue eyes were two jewels of hatred.

As the professor began a second circling, bumping against the side table, rattling the art and curios upon it, she said, “And now another outrage. What are you doing here, Miss Blair? What did you come to steal? Or is it something other than theft that gets you off, something degenerate, something kinky?”

Instead of answering, Bibi said, “Why were you having breakfast with Chubb Coy?”

Squinting, eyes glittering through her lashes, St. Croix said, “So you still follow me, do you? After all these years?”

“The opposite is true, and you know it.”

“The opposite of what is what?”

“You’re the one who followed me. I was in the restaurant first.”

“You’re the same lying bitch you always were. A sick little lying bitch. But you’re not half as clever as you think you are.”

Although there was nothing cuddly about the woman, she had a feline quality, as intense and merciless as a cat on the hunt.

Bibi said, “What do you have to do with Terezin, with Bobby Faulkner?”

Still circling, perhaps calculating whether she could come in under the pistol, St. Croix said, “Is that someone I’m supposed to know in whatever fantasy or scheme you’re cooking up?”

“Seventeen years ago, he killed his mother in this house and nearly killed his father.”

The professor didn’t dispute that statement. She didn’t react to it at all. “Are you ready to admit what
you
have done, Miss Blair?”

“I broke in here to find something that might explain how you’re involved with the murderer, Robert Faulkner, with Terezin.”

St. Croix stopped circling. The image that she projected so forcefully to the world was one that she also cherished, which was why she made such an effort to suppress the evidence of her natural beauty, a little of which was always evident nonetheless. At this moment, however, her expression of contempt was so fierce that the last traces of loveliness were purged, and she was the very avatar of animosity, of pure detestation.

“I mean,” she said, “what you did
then,
the rotten damn thing that got you thrown out of the university.”

“I wasn’t thrown out. I quit.”

On the two previous occasions that she and the professor had a confrontation regarding Bibi’s unknown offense, St. Croix hadn’t been this over-the-top furious. But now she worked herself from rage to fury, too hot for the cool priestess of the written word.

“You quit. Yes, you quit. Because if you hadn’t, I would have seen that you were thrown out on your ass.”

Frustrated, of half a mind to shoot St. Croix in the foot to force her to stop being so enigmatic, Bibi said, “Okay, all right, so tell me what I did.”

“You know damn well what you did.” Her cold eyes were hot now, the gas-flame blue of the fire in a pet-cemetery cremator.

“Pretend I don’t know. Tell me. Spit it out and humiliate me. If it’s so bad, then make me feel like the shit you think I am.”

A man said, “Enough of this.”

Chubb Coy had opened the black-lacquered door and entered the third-floor suite. He wore a black suit, gray shirt, no tie. His pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor.

Bibi kept the P226 on the professor, who was nearer than the chief of hospital security (and whatever the hell else he might be).

Judging by her reaction, St. Croix was no less surprised by Coy’s arrival than was Bibi. “What are you doing here? You have no right. This is my
home.
First this sneaky little bitch and now you? I won’t tolerate—” She failed to finish the sentence before Coy shot her twice in the chest.

For an instant, Bibi thought that Chubb Coy had meant to shoot her, but, as a consequence of being a poor marksman, had killed the professor instead. However, when he declared, “She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life,” his intention was no longer in doubt.

Bibi had seen the terrible aftermath of murder but never the act committed. Whatever she might have imagined about such a moment, all that she had written or considered writing about a homicide, failed to capture the shock of it, the piercing and hollowing wound of being witness to a life ended prematurely, the immediate sense that a world ended and with it all the experiences of she whose world it had been. The horrible convulsive reflex of the body as each bullet impacted. The light of being at once extinguished in the eyes. A collapse so different from the fall of anyone with still a spark of life, the hard and undignified drop not of a person but of a thing. Solange St. Croix, no friend of Bibi’s, nevertheless evoked in her a pang of grief, not all or even most of it for the professor, but for herself, too, and for everyone born into this world of death.

That she had any compassion at all for St. Croix was remarkable, considering that, when the woman fell, a knife slipped from her sleeve. A switchblade, judging by the operative button on the handle.

The suppressed sound of the two shots did not crash wall to wall, but was like quick words whispered in some incomprehensible language, absorbed without echo by the layered fabrics and the plush upholstery of the Victorian parlor. Even in that muffled moment, as Dr. St. Croix changed from person to remains, Chubb Coy lowered his weapon, thereby making it clear that he would not shoot Bibi, though he did not holster the gun.

“What the hell?” she said, letting the words out in a rush of pent-up breath.
“Why?”

Coy said, “Such rage. The foolish woman lost control of herself. That babbling. Tongue so loose it might have fallen out of her mouth. I’ve got interests to protect.”

“What interests? She was one of you. You had breakfast with her this morning.”

Those blue-flecked steel-gray eyes, which previously were as sharp as scalpels, carving in search of lies to reveal them like tumors, were now blunt bulkheads keeping secret all thoughts that lay behind them. “You don’t understand the situation, Miss Blair. There are many factions in this. Some factions may be allied with others now and then, but we aren’t all on the same side. This is a high-stakes game, and in a high-stakes game, most people are out for themselves.”

“What game?” Bibi demanded. “What’s all this about? Where is Ashley Bell? What are they going to do to her?”

His round and amiable face produced an infuriatingly charming smile. “You don’t need to know.”

“I do. I
need
to know. People want to kill me.”

“And they will,” he assured her. “To keep the secret, they will kill you six ways at once.”

“What secret?”

He only smiled.

When she aimed the pistol at him, he continued to smile—and put away his weapon. “You don’t have what it takes to kill a man in cold blood.”

“I do. I will.”

He shook his head. “Cop intuition. Anyway, I’d rather die than share anything with you.”

Bibi lowered the pistol. She said, “Ashley is just a child. Twelve? Thirteen? Why does she have to die?”

He shrugged. “Why does anyone? Some say we’ll never know, that to the gods we’re like the flies that boys kill on a summer day.”

She hated him for his studied indifference. “What kind of bastard are you?”

That smile again. “Any kind you want me to be, Miss Blair.”

When he started to turn away from her, she said, “Are you with him, with Terezin?”

His blunt eyes sharpened briefly as he turned to her once more. “That vicious fascist creep and his crypto-Nazi cult? Miss Blair, you almost make me want to kill you for that suggestion. I despise him.”

“Well, then, the enemy of your enemy—”

“Is still my enemy. Accept the inevitable, girl. You’re easy prey. As a boy, Terezin was a dog, and now he has gone back to the wild. He’s a wolf now, like and yet unlike all other wolves, always running at the head of the pack. He dreams of turning the world backward, of a younger world, which is the world of the pack. They’ll drag you down sooner than later. You think it’s a cult, and it is, but it’s bigger than you think. There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources.”

He walked out of the Victorian suite. She started after him, but then stopped, halted by a suspicion that at some point in the past few minutes, he had given her a clue that she had missed, had left for her the frayed end of a thread that, if she were to wind it on a spool, would unravel the mystery in which she found herself, revealing every warp and weft of this intricately woven conspiracy. She stood there in the company of the corpse, in the colorful riot of Victoriana, looking but perhaps not seeing, listening in memory to their conversation but perhaps not hearing.