Ashley Bell: A Novel (46 page)

Bibi’s apartment was tastefully furnished in mid-century modern with Art Deco accents, simple and clean and welcoming and, in these circumstances, mysterious. Paxton dropped his duffel bag inside the front door. He stood with Pogo, surveying the living room, the dining area, the open kitchen beyond, listening warily, as though something unknown and unpleasant might materialize at any moment.

“What’re we looking for?” Pogo asked.

“Anything that doesn’t seem like our girl.”

“That’s kind of vague, don’t you think?”

“It’s as clear as could be. If someone laid out three hats and said one of them was Bibi’s, you’d know which it was—wouldn’t you?”

“She doesn’t like hats.”

“Exactly. If you see a hat, it’s suspicious.”

“So a hat is just like a metaphor for anything unBibi.”

“We’ll know it when we see it.”

“We will, huh?”

“If we’re expecting to see it, yes. People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren’t expecting to see them.”

“Do
all
Navy SEALs have a tendency to go mystical?”

“War,” Pax said, “either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths.”

“Who said that?”

“I did. Let’s split up the rooms.”

“I’ll take her study,” Pogo said. “You take the bedroom. I wouldn’t feel right, looking through her lady things.”

Pax didn’t feel right looking through them, either, although not entirely for the same reason that Pogo would have found the task disconcerting. When he was eleven, a week after the sudden death of Sally May Colter—his much loved maternal grandmother—his mom had taken him to Sally’s house to pack the woman’s clothes in boxes to donate to a thrift shop. They also sorted through Sally’s books and jewelry and bibelots, deciding which items should be given to which friends and relatives as remembrances of her. That would have been a grim day, if his mom hadn’t told him numerous stories about Sally that he hadn’t known and that had kept her fresh in memory all these years. Going through the drawers in Bibi’s nightstands, highboy, and dresser, he repeatedly felt as if he were conducting a preliminary assessment to determine what would need to be disposed of upon her death.

In the walk-in closet, standing on a three-step stool, he found the metal lockbox on the highest shelf. It was about twenty inches square, ten inches deep.

He could not imagine anything more unBibi than this. She was practical, and the box was not. Fire-resistant but not fireproof, it would buckle in a vigorous blaze, and the lip of the lid would sneer open, inhaling flames. Portable, it was no obstacle to a burglar, but instead invited attention. And what was the point of having a lockbox for which you taped the key to the lid, as she had done?

Having finished searching the study, Pogo was looking through the kitchen cabinets when Pax entered and put his discovery on the dinette table. Against the red Formica, the metal box with its baked-on black finish looked ominous, as if they might be wise to call in a bomb-disposal specialist to deal with it.

“Something?” Pogo asked.

“Maybe.”

They sat at the table. Pax used the key. The piano hinge was a little stiff, but the lid opened all the way. Most of the contents lay under a rumpled chamois cloth, which held within its loose folds a worn and cracked and dirt-crusted dog collar.

Lifting that item with one finger, Pax said, “Have you seen this before?”

“No.”

“Why would she keep such a thing?”

Pogo took the collar, and as he examined it, dirt crumbled between his fingers. “Jasper,” he said, reading the name that had been neatly scored into the leather.

“Did she once have a dog named Jasper?”

“Kinda, sort of.” Frowning, Pogo pointed to another object in the document box, a spiral-bound notebook. “It’s full of stories about a dog named Jasper.”

The notebook measured perhaps six by nine inches and was almost an inch thick, containing well in excess of two hundred lined pages. On the cover, the name and logo of the stationery company had been painted over, creating a pale-beige background for a beautifully designed and rendered pen-and-ink Art Deco drawing of a leaping panther and a leaping gazelle, each on its hind legs and bounding away from the other.

“I drew that for her,” he said, “I drew special covers for most of her diaries and notebooks. She loved Art Deco even then.”

“I didn’t know you had such talent.”

Pogo shrugged.

“How old were you when you did this?”

“She was…ten when she wrote the Jasper stories, so I’d have been eight.”

“You had this technique at eight? Hell, you’re a prodigy.”

“I’m no Norman Rockwell. Drawing ability shows up early, that’s all. A sense of form. Perspective. People go to art school not to learn it, just to refine it. I could have. But there’s lots of things I could have done. Could-do only matters if it’s also want-to-do.”

Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.

“Why a panther and gazelle?”

“It’s just a cool design. If there was another reason, I don’t remember.”

Pax fanned through the pages of neat handwriting, much like Bibi’s cursive script twelve years later, but with girlish flourishes that she no longer employed. Sometimes she dotted an
i
with a tiny circle, sometimes not, apparently preferring the circle when the word was particularly colorful, and she always dotted
j
’s with asterisks.

“She wrote the first draft of each story in a tablet,” Pogo said. “Edited it a couple times. Then copied it into the notebook.”

Short stories filled two-thirds of the volume. On the first blank page following them, Pax discovered two lines of verse that he recognized as coming from one of Bibi’s favorite poems, “The Evening of the Mind” by Donald Justice:
Now comes the evening of the mind / Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood.

The stories had been written in blue ink. These lines of verse were in black. The blue had faded with time. The black remained dark and appeared freshly inscribed. Not a single
i
had been capped with a circle instead of a dot; and there were none of the other flourishes to be found in the handwriting of the ten-year-old Bibi.

Still puzzling over the leather collar, Pogo said, “She told me Olaf was wearing a worn-out, muddy collar when he showed up in that rainstorm. But she never told me there was a name on it.”

“Jasper. The name of the dog in these stories. Maybe she knew someone who had a dog named Jasper and this was his collar.”

Pogo shook his head. “The dog in the stories is her invention. Entirely. And it was smaller than Olaf. A black-and-gray mongrel, not a golden retriever. This collar would’ve been too big for Jasper.”

Pogo turning the leather strap. The buckle softly clinking. Bits of dirt flaking through his fingers and onto the table.

He said, “What’re the odds that she’d write all those stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper, and one day an abandoned dog named Jasper would show up at her front door?”

“The best in Vegas couldn’t figure those odds,” Pax said. “Maybe what you’re wondering is…could it have been a coincidence?”

Looking up from the collar, Pogo said, “You think it could be?”

“Bibi doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

“Yeah. I know. But could it be?”

“I don’t believe in them, either.”

Putting down the collar, with the name revealed—
JASPER
—Pogo said, “Then what the hell? Why did she never tell us?”

Pax didn’t know what to make of this development. He was pretty sure, however, that although the shared name seemed like a small if freaky detail, Jasper the fictional mongrel and Jasper the golden retriever who became Olaf were of considerable importance. Intuition, the knowledge that comes before all reasoning and teaching, raised the hairs on the nape of his neck and lowered the temperature of his spine.

Instead of answering Pogo’s question, he said, “Let’s see what else is in this box,” as he picked up a small Ziploc plastic bag of the kind that people often used to hold the day’s vitamin pills or prescription medications. It contained a withered scrap of scalp with an attached lock of hair, the lower third of which was matted and crusted with what must have been dried blood.

Armed and anxious, Bibi argued silently with herself about the necessity and the wisdom of venturing uninvited to a house as strange as the one that stood like a massive gravestone in a desolate plot of the Mojave Desert. She approached the residence overland rather than along the county highway, through sand and loose shale and parched vegetation, all vaguely phosphorescent under the moon, which deceived as much as it illuminated. She was noisier than she would have liked, especially as she had imagined herself whidding through the arid landscape with the grace of a coyote. At least the night was chilly enough that she didn’t have to worry about rattlesnakes, though she thought that scorpions might be scuttling through the darkness.

The house faced north, and she arrived at the east wall, along which she made her way, cautiously looking in the lighted windows, which were curtained only with sheers. The rooms were furnished, but quiet and without occupants.

As at the front, the house at its south side lacked a porch. Only a six-foot-square pad of bricks presented the back door, which had been broken down as if with a battering ram that had torn it off its hinges. The breached door lay cracked and splintered on the limestone floor of a hallway lit by frosted-glass sconces. The evidence of violence should have turned her away. She went inside.

She had never seen the house before, and yet it felt familiar. She had a fragment memory of Ashley Bell standing in a front window, in this place. The voice issuing from the electronic map, telling her that she would want to stop here, had been that of a young girl, perhaps that of Ashley. Bibi could not retreat. Impossible. She had been spared from cancer
TO SAVE A LIFE
, and only she stood between Death and a girl of twelve or thirteen.

The fallen door rocked underfoot, an unavoidable clatter, though she got quickly off it. No one called out or came to see who might be responsible for the noise. The residence stood in silence.

Upon entering the house, Bibi had also entered a peculiar state of simultaneous knowing and not knowing. It wasn’t quite déjà vu, the illusion of having experienced something before that in fact one was encountering for the first time; she not only recognized things as she encountered them, but also had continuous presentiments of what lay ahead. A laundry room to the right of the hall. Yes. A walk-in pantry to the left. Yes. And ahead, yes, the kitchen. But though she could predict what room came next, she could not recall having been there before.

The kitchen was rather primitive by twenty-first-century standards. No microwave. No dishwasher. The gas range and undersized refrigerator—bearing the name Electrolux on its door—were many decades old, and yet looked new or at least well maintained.

In the other rooms, the furniture was oversized but sleek and modern, Art Deco pieces of Amboina wood, others of polished black lacquer, all of it expensive in its day and far more expensive now, having become über-collectible. Here and there, a chair or a desk had been overturned; but most things were as they should be. The glass in a breakfront had been smashed but not the contents that the cabinet displayed. The destruction wasn’t systematic, instead almost casual, as though whoever did it had come here on a more important task than vandalism and had committed this damage only in passing.

As Bibi returned from the drawing room to the front hall, she glimpsed swift movement to her left, a dark and darting form. Tall, thin, stoop-shouldered. She pivoted toward it, pistol in a two-hand grip, but no one was there. If the presence had been real, surely it would have made some sound—swift footsteps, a creaking of mahogany floorboards, a ragged inhalation—but the uncanny silence was not disturbed. Besides, the figure seemed to have moved with inhuman speed, crossing the hallway from room to room in a fraction of a second.

The window from the fragment of memory, in which she had seen Ashley standing in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, was on the third floor. She climbed stairs to a landing, and then another flight. As she neared the second floor, an inky form, so swift and fluid that Bibi had only the impression—not the conviction—that it was human, appeared above her and plunged past her. Although the figure did not brush against her, a coldness prickled across her in its passing, and she almost lost her balance. She fell against the railing, remained upright, and turned to look down, in time to see a shadow disappear off the landing, onto the first flight of stairs.

She couldn’t know if it might be the same spirit—if
spirit
was the word for it—that she had seen in the ground-floor hall, but she sensed that it was not flinging itself through the house in a rage, that it was instead a spirit in extreme torment, sustained here by anguish, vigorous with the energized despair called desperation.

When she got to the second floor, she found a dead man lying faceup on the carpet runner. He appeared to have been beaten to death with truncheons wielded by a man or men for whom physical violence was an intoxicant. His clothes were a blood-soaked shroud, his face and skull a cratered terrain from which she had to look at once away.

His crime had been resistance. He had dared to protect his own. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew.

If Ashley Bell was still here, perhaps she would be on the third floor, in the room with the window seen in the fragment of memory.

Heart racing, feeling as might a deep-sea diver in a pressurized suit struggling toward the surface countless fathoms overhead, Bibi went up more stairs. The pistol was strangely heavy, and her wrists ached with the weight of it.