Ashley Bell: A Novel (48 page)

While Bibi made her way down through the house from which Ashley had been kidnapped, sidling around the gruesome corpses, two spirits of different sizes darted initially at the periphery of her vision, as quick and elusive as bats, although the size of people. They were as silent as before, and again she sensed that they flung themselves through the house in a state of torment, not fury. They moved even faster than before, in a frenzy. With sudden unpredictable lunges, they began exploding from the periphery into her immediate presence, startling her even after she came to expect these assaults on her nerve. She began to think that they wanted something from her and that it was something she could not—must not—give. Repeatedly, with growing boldness, these featureless figures brushed her in passing. Because they lacked substance, she could not feel the pressure or texture of their touch, but each time a chill shattered through her, a chill that didn’t arise from within, as earlier, but burst through her in distinct shards, like a shrapnel of ice, so that in spite of the absence of pain, she half expected to see bloodstains spreading through her clothes.

Overcome—in truth,
slammed
—by an urgent need to be out of the house, alarmed but not terrified, rising to the challenge of the alarm rather than fleeing in response to it, she holstered the pistol to free both hands. As she descended the stairs from the second floor and crossed the foyer to the front door, she swung her arms at the spirits when they leaped upon her, as if to warn them to stay clear. Because they were as weightless as shadows, she was powerless to throw them off or backhand them aside. She felt foolish, clumsy, but she was convinced that if she didn’t mount a resistance, they would become more aggressive and perhaps gain the power to pose a real threat.

She erupted from the front door, across a simple brick stoop, and into the yard, an expanse of sandy earth and stones and clumps of pale weedy grass that had perhaps never been green, all dimly illumined and heavily shadowed by the moon. As she had hoped, the spirits did not follow her out of the house, remained tethered to its rooms, in which they had lived and died and lived again in grief.

Bibi ran and stumbled and almost fell more than once before she reached the graveled shoulder of the state route, where she turned to look back at the house. The residence still appeared to be misplaced in space and time. She gasped for breath, waiting for the place to sink as Poe’s House of Usher had sunk. But there was no black and lurid tarn here, as there had been in the story, no muck into which the structure could be submerged.

With no need to return overland, she followed the pavement to the east, where Pogo’s Honda was parked alongside the road. As she walked, she thought of the spirits in the house, about what they might have wanted from her.

Of the several wants that came to mind, there was one she knew must be true the moment that it occurred to her: They wanted to delay her, hinder, hamper. Which meant they had not been, as she’d thought, the spirits of Ashley’s dead parents, the shot woman and the beaten man. She had been spared from brain cancer in order
TO SAVE A LIFE
, Ashley’s life; but there were forces, both human and supernatural, that wanted Ashley dead.

If the girl was murdered, perhaps Bibi’s cancer would return, for she would have failed to earn its remission.

The walk back to the Honda seemed longer than it should have been, and she began to worry that she had already passed the place where she had parked it, that the car had been stolen, leaving her with no choice but to continue on foot to Sonomire Way.

Delay. Hamper. Hinder. The ink-black bat-quick spirits in the house had not been the only entities that had sought to impede her since all of this had begun. When she had been at the small table in the motel room, making new street names from the lettered tiles that spelled
MOONRISE
, something had knocked on the door, had scratched at the door, had tapped at the windows, distracting and delaying her word search before at last she found
SONOMIRE WAY
. The fog! The first night, the hampering fog billowed in from the sea, slithered inland, and the following day, it retreated only to repeatedly return, until with sunset and this second night, it thickened into a blinding mass that had slowed her significantly. Now it seemed to her that the fog had been unnaturally dense and persistent, that it had been settled upon her not by Nature but by whatever power Terezin could command to oppose her actions and retard her progress.

Still no Honda.

She began to run.

Maybe the greater rush of blood from her laboring heart shifted gears of thought in her brain, because as she sought the car, a new and disturbing possibility demanded consideration. Maybe her enemies were not as devious and numerous as they seemed to be. She could have imagined the knocking-tapping-scratching at the motel, for when she had opened the door and ventured outside, there had been no threat.

If the inky spirits had not been real, they had been hallucinations, which represented a level of self-deception suggesting derangement. After all, she had earlier turned traitor against herself, cutting the lines from the books by O’Connor and Wilder and London, burning them in the motel-bathroom sink, to prevent herself from confirming some suspicion she’d had about Chubb Coy.

Of course she could not be her
only
enemy. For one thing, she couldn’t imagine a massive fog bank into existence. The fog had to have been conjured by Nature or by Terezin using his occult power.

Didn’t it?

Did it?

She stopped in the middle of the highway. Heart knocking in its cage of ribs. As if it would slip free and beat away into the night and leave her defeated, dead upon the blacktop. An immense, terrible, vaguely discerned secret—secret or lost memory—swelled darkly at the back of her mind. Bibi could sense its presence, its awesome size, and she knew that its revelation would be devastating. She stood waiting on the road. Waiting. The black sky and its moon, its planets, its infinite array of stars began to weigh on her, and a weakness came upon her, so that she thought her knees would fail. An eerie electronic whine, what she imagined tinnitus sounded like to those afflicted with it, rose from ear to ear, and she thought,
It’s just the inner workings of the damn brain monitor,
but had no idea what she meant by that, nor what she intended when she reached to her head to pull off the confining electro cap and found, of course, just the baseball cap. Her vision blurred. Or was it the world around her that blurred, that began to lose coherence, began to diffuse?

She closed her eyes.

In that instant, she knew what must be happening to her, and she rallied in anger and self-disgust. Fate. She was giving in to the illusion that fate dictated the possibilities of her life. Whatever will be will be.
Que sera, sera.
Screw that. She loved her parents, but she was not them. Fate did not rule her. She was the master of her fate, the captain of her soul. She would not quit.
S
URRENDER
was not a word that could be made from the lettered tiles of her name. She had come this far, and she would not quit.

The trillions of stars weighed less heavily upon her, and the dark matter that constituted most of the universe lifted from her shoulders. And if the piercing whine had been the cry of planets rotating around their liquid cores or something ordinary, in either case it stopped. She opened her eyes, walked eastward, and the night that had begun to blur now clarified. When she topped a low rise, the Honda waited on the descending slope, where she had parked it.

Before she opened the driver’s door, she looked to the north, across the highway, where the raw land rose slightly, appearing softer in the night than it would in daylight, folding upward like gray blankets under which lay an army of sleepers. Whether a sound had alerted Bibi or her attention had been drawn by supernatural means, near the limit of vision she saw the tall figure in the hoodie, and then the dog, both faintly silvered by the moonwash.

Her initial impulse was to cross the road, call out, and hurry toward the pair, here where no fog could shroud them and foil her. But then she realized that they were alike to the fog, and to the ink-black spirits in the house, serving the same purpose as whatever had knocked-tapped-scratched at the motel-room door and windows. They were here to distract and delay her. That had been their purpose from the beginning. They had not healed her. By whatever singularity of her immune system or act of providence she had been made well, the cancer must have been cast out before the man and dog appeared in her hospital room. Whether they were flesh-and-blood or occult entities haunting her, she would learn nothing from them even if she managed to catch up with them and snared the tall man by a hoodie sleeve.

However ardently Bibi hoped to save Ashley Bell, no matter with what persistence she tracked the girl, there was someone—Terezin, but perhaps someone for whom Terezin was merely a front man—who was equally determined to thwart her. As she watched the ghostly man and dog walking at a distance precisely calculated to minimize their visibility and maximize their otherworldly quality, Bibi wondered if the murder of Ashley was not her enemy’s ultimate goal, if possibly the girl was only a lure with which they were drawing their most-desired victim, Bibi, to a place of no escape.

She turned away from man and dog, got into the car, and started the engine.

Stucco for bread, teak decks for meat, garnished with stainless-steel-and-glass railings: Dr. St. Croix’s house was stacked like what in another era would have been called a Dagwood sandwich, named for the hapless Dagwood Bumstead, a cartoon character once much loved by readers of newspaper funny pages but now largely forgotten. Paxton knew Dagwood from the
Blondie
comic strip, because his grandmother Sally May Colter had enjoyed it almost as much as her all-time favorite comic,
L’il Abner.
Books had been published, collecting many years of both strips, and Grandma had owned them all.

At the front door, Pax said, “Remember, honey works better than vinegar.”

“You’ve seen the photo in that magazine Bibi has? Yeah? Looks to me like the famous professor
thrives
on vinegar.”

“Maybe she’s not even home,” Pax said, and he rang the bell.

He almost didn’t recognize the woman who opened the door. Gone was the tailored, expensive, but drab suit. She wore an
ao dai,
a flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensemble, white with irregularly placed peacock-blue and ultramarine-blue and saffron-yellow flowers, classic Vietnamese apparel, a garment as feminine as any in the entire world of women’s fashions. Her hair was usually drawn back into a bun that looked as dense as stone, that gave her the severe appearance of a nineteenth-century pioneer woman who had been hardened by decades spent in a contest with the heat and cold and wind and Indians and innumerable hardships of the prairie; however, on this Sunday afternoon, she had let down her graying hair, which revealed itself as less gray than silver-blond, lustrous and thick, as silken as the
ao dai
. Her skin, always flawless in photographs and public-television appearances, was flawless now, but appeared more like flesh and less like quartz. Her eyes, which Bibi had once described as the blue of the chemical gel in a refreezable ice pack, were precisely that color, but there was nothing icy about her stare. Clearly, the professor had once been a head-turning boy-stunning all-American babe; at fifty-something, she still was, when she wasn’t being her public image.

“Dr. St. Croix—” Pax began.

Before he or Pogo could say another word, Solange St. Croix saw the ink on Pax’s right bicep, said, “I don’t believe it,” and with one finger pushed up the T-shirt sleeve that half concealed his only tattoo. It was the official SEAL emblem: an eagle in an overwatch position on a trident that was also the cross of an anchor, with a flintlock pistol in the foreground, rendered in shades of gold with black detailing. “Are you a fraud, young man?” she asked.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“No, you’re not,” she decided. “You’re the real damn thing, an honest-to-God Navy SEAL. I’ve only met one before, and everything I wrote about him is locked away where no one can see it, where it’ll remain until I’m old enough to want everyone to see it.”

Letting the T-shirt sleeve slide half over the tattoo once more, the professor looked at Pogo and smiled, and Pogo blushed, which Pax had never seen him do before.

To Pax, with girlish enthusiasm, she said, “I could use a jolt of the exotic. Tell me you’re here in an official capacity, on a mission of grave importance, you’re military intelligence conducting an investigation on which the fate of the nation depends.”

“Not the fate of the nation, ma’am. But it
is
a matter of life and death,” Pax said.

He didn’t confirm or deny that he was with one branch or another of military intelligence, allowing her to infer that, with academic perspicacity, she had known the truth of him at first sight. Judging by her manner and the delighted surprise in her eyes, Pax thought that this Sunday had been of a grayer cast than she had hoped, as perhaps had been some number of days before it, and that she would insist upon the risk of believing he was what she imagined, welcoming them into her house. More than anything at this moment, perhaps she needed color in her life, while Pax and Pogo offered all the hues of a box of forty-eight crayons.

“Ma’am, I’m Chief Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe, and this is Averell Beaumont Stanhope the Third.”

“Of the Boston Stanhopes?” the professor asked.

“No, ma’am,” Pogo replied, lest there be no Boston Stanhopes and her question a trap. “Of the Virginia Stanhopes.” Which was a lie, but a reasonably smooth one.

Pax said, “If you can spare us fifteen minutes, we’d be most grateful, but we can meet with you tomorrow, in your office at the university, if you prefer.”

He still half expected her to ask for proof that he was with one intelligence service or another, whereupon he would be able to produce only his military ID, which would not identify him as what he was now pretending to be. But she stepped back from the door and welcomed them inside and led them through dramatic but sterile rooms of starkly modern décor, her
ao dai
both loose and yet clinging to her as she seemed almost to float through the shadowy spaces with the grace of a brightly painted koi in half-lit waters. She was barefoot, and her feet were small for a woman of about five foot eight, like the well-formed feet of a child destined for ballet.

“I have to stir the soup,” she said, and brought them into a spacious kitchen with a maple floor finished in a gray wash, matching cabinets, black-granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. The soup-in-the-making stood on the cooktop, blue flames caressing the bottom of the large pot. “Potato leek,” she said. Pax smelled potatoes and leeks and tarragon and an abundance of butter. Padded stools were lined up along one side of the large center island, and St. Croix suggested they sit there.

On the island stood a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan Scotch, a container of half-and-half kept cool in a bowl of ice, and a Baccarat-crystal on-the-rocks glass containing those three ingredients. Whether Dr. St. Croix began drinking by 3:10 on the average Sunday or whether this indulgence was an exception, she evidently felt no need whatsoever to justify herself. After she finished stirring the soup and set the lid askew on the pot, she produced two more Baccarat glasses. With the certitude of someone who had always done what she wanted and encountered no objections, the professor neither asked if they would join her in a cocktail nor inquired if they would like something different. Standing across the island from them, as she spoke of her love of cooking and built the drinks, Pax realized that declining the Scotch would be taken as a gross insult and that in spite of her girlish delight in their visit and her hospitality, she could turn on them in an instant.

Pogo watched her through squinted eyes, as if he suspected that she might be concocting poison, but he appeared to have reached the same conclusion as Pax.

As St. Croix pushed their drinks across the black granite to them, she said, “So…you called it a matter of life and death.”

Concerned about dropping Bibi’s name without preparation, Pax injected the equivalent of Scotch and cream into the absurd military-intelligence fantasy. “Life and death, yes, and although it sounds melodramatic, it’s also a matter of national security.”

“A little melodrama is good now and then,” the professor said. “If life were nothing but Raymond Carver stories, we’d all go mad.”

Pax knew who Raymond Carver was, but he thought it more in character if he looked puzzled for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, we’re here to ask you about a person of interest to us—”

“A suspect,” she interrupted, seeming to take this as seriously as some people took the con men who phoned and, posing as IRS agents, induced them to wire money to foreign bank accounts.

“A suspect, more or less,” Pax said. “But we’re not able to share the details of her activities with you. For security reasons.”

“A woman? I know a genuine security threat? How stimulating!”

“Yes, ma’am, a former student. Bibi Blair.”

The Sunday softness in her face hardened into school-day stone. “That syphilitic little whore.”