Ashley Bell: A Novel (38 page)

A thin acrid odor.

Bibi opened her eyes and looked around at the toilet and the shower and the white towels on the chrome rack, not sure whose bathroom this was, but then she remembered the motel. Pogo’s car parked two blocks away. Hazel Weatherfield, the abused wife. Hazel’s daddy coming from Arizona in the morning. Cashews and crackers and apricots and aerosol cheese.

She felt strange. Neither good nor bad. Neither relaxed nor tense. Neither afraid nor confident. There was an emptiness in her. A hollowness. A drained feeling. She thought she had lost something, though she couldn’t recall what, so it must not have been important.

If there had been visible smoke, it had dissipated quickly, leaving only an unpleasant odor.

Hadn’t she been leaning on a chair? Now she found herself leaning on the Corian countertop of the bathroom vanity. Curled in the sink were furry gray forms, like dead caterpillars. Ashes. The remnants of fully burned strips of something. Beside the sink lay a butane lighter. She recalled buying it in the market, in Laguna, where she had purchased the makings of her dinner, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and other items. Never having smoked, she didn’t know why she needed a lighter. Well, obviously, to burn something.

She raised the stopper, turned on the faucet labeled
COLD
, and washed the ashes into the drain. The swirling water reminded her that she had been dizzy, but she was not dizzy now.

Indecision held her at the bathroom vanity. She was not confused or uneasy, just directionless. Then she returned to the bedroom.

One of the straight-backed chairs was overturned. As she set it right, she noticed three books on the little dining table. The spine of each volume had been broken, so that it lay open in a limp two-page spread. Excisions had been made, pieces of three pages sliced out with the switchblade that had slipped from Dr. St. Croix’s sleeve when Chubb Coy had shot her.

Bibi’s spiral-bound notebook also lay on the table. It was open to a blank page. Evidently, she had intended to write something.

Her mood had begun to change. She felt less detached. Coming into focus.

The books puzzled her. O’Connor, Wilder, London. She recalled buying them, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t have time to read, not with Terezin and his crew trying to find her and kill her.

Chubb Coy. The books had something to do with him.

Suddenly she knew what she had done. Captain’s memory trick.

She loved the captain. He had helped a troubled little girl keep her sanity. But the help he had given had not resolved her problem (whatever it might be), had only taught her to suppress all knowledge of it. The thing of terror had not been vanquished. It still lived and waited. Waited for her to open the door and be consumed by it.

Trembling, shocked, she sat at the table, staring at the vandalized large-size paperbacks.

In the professor’s house, Coy had said something peculiar, the importance of which Bibi had at first not understood. She could not recall what it had been. Of course she couldn’t. She had burned it from memory in a childish ritual that worked less because of the six magic words Captain had taught her than
because she desperately needed it to work.
What Coy said must have had something to do with the three books; it had alarmed her, brought her into the presence of a truth so monumental that she had not been able to face it.

She used the switchblade to cut what remained of the three key pages from the books. She folded them and put them in the spiral-bound notebook and slipped it into her purse.

The room was warm, but Bibi felt carved from ice. One more name could be added to the list of the many people conspiring against her. She could not entirely trust herself.

With only her gun and her purse, Bibi left the security of her motel room, which was an imagined security anyway, as imaginary as every moment of seeming peace and safety in this new world that she inhabited.
Thank you, Calida Butterfly, or whatever the hell your name was.
Now every stronghold proved to be a place with paper walls, every hideaway a trap. Instead of a stout barrier, every door was an invitation to threats natural and supernatural. The lesson here was the opposite of what the old adage advised: You should always look a gift horse in the mouth. A gift horse or a gift masseuse. A relaxing massage, and then chardonnay and a silly-fun session of divination, and the next thing you know, you’ve attracted the attention of an incarnation of Hitler, and you’ve invited occult forces into your life, and you’ve been spared from cancer only so that some lunatic can stab you to death with a thousand pencils. She wanted to kick someone’s ass, but there was no one she could find to kick, except maybe Murphy and Nancy for hiring Calida, but Bibi wasn’t going to boot
them.
Honor thy father and mother, and all that. She left the motel in a mood of righteous indignation and exasperation too consuming to be sustained.

Although it was only 7:40, Laguna Beach appeared to have closed down for the night, the mist-shrouded hills sloping through silence to the sea, the traffic already midnight-light as the ocean sloughed off ever thicker masses of land-hugging clouds, a lone coyote howling out of a canyon as if lost and grieving for its vanished pack.

She drove Pogo’s Honda north into the blinding murk, which seemed appropriate, given that her life had become a dismal swamp of puzzles and enigmas, that all the potential futures she’d foreseen for herself were now dissolved into a soup of possibilities she did not want to contemplate.

Although the swarm of cultists that had descended on Fashion Island surely didn’t remain there hours later, Bibi went instead to another mall. She purchased new copies of the story collections by Flannery O’Connor, Thornton Wilder, and Jack London. She also bought a flashlight, batteries for it, and a Scrabble game.

From there, she traveled south once more, to Corona del Mar, where she cruised past the sweet bungalow in which she had lived for nineteen years, until she had moved to her apartment. A year later, Murphy and Nancy had sold the place to a couple, the Gillenhocks, who made their money in cattle-rustling and cockfighting. Well, the story was that they were successful investment bankers who were able to retire at fifty-three, but the one time Bibi met them, she felt that they were no more investment bankers than she was a concert pianist. The Gillenhocks had spent the past two years offering ever more money to the reluctant-to-move people who owned the property next door, until they acquired it as well, meanwhile working with an architect to design a residence that would, they no doubt hoped, leave their neighbors abashed and envious.

Only recently, the combined properties had been surrounded with a construction fence: chain-link with a green polyurethane overlay for privacy. Although the landscaping had been torn out and hauled away, the buildings had not yet been demolished.

She parked two blocks from the bungalow. She put batteries in the flashlight, which she would use only in the garage apartment. She left her purse under the seat and locked the car and walked streets that were familiar even in the obliterating fog.

The night was as still as a funeral parlor, the houses like mausoleums in the mist.

In addition to a large gate at the front, the construction fence featured another off the wide alleyway, to which houses backed up from parallel streets. All the garage doors were here. At any moment, a car might turn in at one corner or the other, the driver remoting a door ahead of him, and even in the near white-out, she would be seen.

The privacy material was fixed on the exterior of the fencing, and she had to slash it with Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade in order to be able to get toeholds in the chain-link. Unlike the rest of the fence, the gate had a toprail that covered the cut-off twists of steel, eliminating the risk of puncturing her hands. She went up and over the gate, into the carport next to the garage.

In the brick-paved courtyard, something about the angles and the juxtaposed planes of the surrounding buildings magnified the vague exhalation of the sea into a somewhat less faint draft that set the fog in slow motion counterclockwise. Bibi felt as if she were being drawn upward even before she climbed the stairs to the apartment above the garage.

The apartment door wasn’t locked. The place was empty. Nothing remained to be stolen. Vandals would be discouraged by the fact that the buildings were soon being torn down; no one cared what damage they might do.

She switched on the flashlight, partly hooding it with her hand, but confident that the pale glow wouldn’t inspire curiosity in anyone outside. The apartment had been stripped of furniture when the house sold. The blue-and-gray speckled linoleum, dulled by dirt, littered with bits of paper and a few dead beetles, had split in places and curled back from the baseboard.

Bibi stood where she had stood on the morning that she found him dead, when she was ten years old. He’d been at his breakfast when it happened, a bowl of cereal and a plate of toast on the table before him, his newspaper folded open to the opinion pages. He must have gotten to his feet before he’d fallen and hit his head on the corner of the table. He’d been lying on his left side. A lake of blood had gushed from nose or mouth, or both. Blood colored his staring eyes as well, and his lashes were jeweled with scarlet tears.

She’d thought someone killed him. Even so, she had not run in fright. She had been too devastated to have a capacity for fear; she had room only for grief. She’d said aloud,
Grandpa, no. Oh, no, no. I still need you, Grandpa.

That had been the only time she ever called him Grandpa. For the first couple of weeks after he moved in above the garage, she didn’t know that he was her mother’s father. By then he was forever Captain to Bibi. He preferred it that way, too, because he felt that Bibi’s mother would be rubbed raw by hearing the G-word all the time. Nancy didn’t call him Dad. To her, he was Gunther, his first name. He said that Nancy had it right, that he had never been a good enough father to deserve to be called Dad. But as far as Bibi was concerned, he had become a perfect grandfather.

There had been no hostility between Nancy and the captain, just a distance that couldn’t be bridged, a staining sorrow neither knew how to wash away. There was even affection sometimes, moments when you could glimpse how things might have been between them.

The coroner declared the cause of death was an aneurysm, a rare type, that burst with force. The captain didn’t know he had it. He’d bled out so fast, there was no hope.

Nancy had wept, surprised by the intensity of her grief.

The weeks after Captain’s death had been hard for all of them, hardest for Bibi. When the golden retriever came to her out of the rain, a friend when she most needed one, she called him Olaf, because that was Captain’s middle name. Gunther Olaf Ericson, United States Marine Corps, retired.

She had warned the dog to stay away from the apartment because evil dwelt there. But nothing wicked had roamed those rooms when the captain lived in them. Because of him, it was a fine place. The evil came only in the weeks after he passed away.

Now, twelve years after those bad days, she had returned to learn if that evil might still linger. Or if not the abomination itself, something that would help her to recall what had happened in the attic. As she had written in her little spiral-bound notebook, that incident was one of three lost memories that were somehow the roots of her current crisis.

Call this shock therapy.

Or desperation.

She had not brought the butane lighter. On the walk between the motel and the Honda, she had dropped it in a public trash can. She hadn’t purchased another lighter at the mall. If she achieved some breakthrough, the recovery of a crucial memory, she would not be able easily to employ the captain’s memory trick and erase the newfound knowledge before putting it to use.

Following the flashlight, she went from the kitchen into the empty living room, darkness reclaiming the apartment behind her, darkness to either side of her, darkness retreating ahead, but only where the cold white LED beam forced it to relent.

She’d been aware of an unpleasant smell in the kitchen; but it lacked strength. By the time that she reached the bedroom, the odor intensified. A stink nurtured by two years of abandonment. Mold thriving in the walls. Mouse piss.

In the bedroom closet, she reached to the dangling pull-cord with her left hand and drew down the folding ladder.