Ashley Bell: A Novel (13 page)

When the ladder folded out of the ceiling to the floor of the walk-in closet, Bibi knew that an invitation had been issued, but she hesitated to accept it. In spite of the rigid geometry of the ladder, something about the way it zigzagged downward in segments made her think of a snake.

As she stared up into the attic, the darkness above retreated, although not entirely, when a string of bare bulbs brightened the upper realm from gable to gable.

This second invitation failed to encourage her to ascend in search of the captain.

She had called him Captain because at one time he had been a captain in the United States Marine Corps. He’d had many colorful adventures in times of war and times of peace, and Bibi had enjoyed his stories no matter how often she cajoled him into repeating them. He’d held other jobs after leaving the corps, and he’d been the tenant in the apartment above the garage for five years—until she found him dead in the kitchen, lying in so much blood that he seemed to be afloat.

Captain was a man of courage and integrity and honor. She had always been safe in his company. He would never have harmed her. He would have died for her.

If the captain was in the attic, even if he had come back from a place where dead heroes went for eternity, surely she had no reason to fear him. Valiant girls did not discourage—and certainly did not defeat—themselves by abandoning reason and indulging superstition with all its irrational fears.

“Captain?” she asked again. “Are you up there, Captain?”

In answer came the sweet ringing of bells. Rather, it was the ringing of a single special bell that sounded like three. The captain had brought it back from Vietnam many years earlier, a souvenir of his days in a wearying and misfought war.

Beautifully crafted of silver, the size of a wineglass, the bell housed an ingenious mechanism. The three clappers were suspended so that they operated simultaneously and yet didn’t interfere with one another’s arcs. The first clapper struck the waist of the bell. The second summoned sound from the hip of the classically shaped silver, the third from the lip. The three notes were different but complementary, and together they produced a most pleasant musical ringing.

Before the war, before the gray pall of communism, Vietnam had been a land of enchantment, with unique myths and much exotic lore. By its appealing music, the bell suggested the magical nature of the country’s history. The memory of the elegant shape and glimmer of the silver form, the unison notes—each an octave apart from the one below it—and her profound affection for the man who had owned this bell at last drew Bibi up the ladder.

Upon his death, Captain had no siblings or children in far-flung places for whom his charming little collection of souvenirs needed to be accounted and forwarded. Nancy said all those items were Bibi’s if she wanted them, and she wanted them very much. The sight of his humble treasures, however, sharpened her grief. Back in November, less than three months earlier, her mother had helped her pack them away for the day when the sting of Captain’s death had been dulled by time.

Although she mourned him no less than she had on the day that she found his corpse, she entered the attic with a tentative gladness equal to her intense curiosity, which would not be quenched. Particleboard provided a floor, and the raftered space rose high enough for an adult to stand erect everywhere except near the eaves. Upon Bibi’s arrival, the ringing stopped.

At the periphery of vision, movement caught her attention. She looked up to see what, for an alarming moment, appeared to be lazily billowing smoke, evidence of a smoldering fire. But those fumes were only slithers of mist seeping through the screen that covered the attic vents, as though the ocean of fog outside possessed curiosity about the contents of the houses currently submerged in it.

Little of the room’s copious contents had been the property of the captain; most belonged to Nancy and Murphy. Bibi had forgotten where in the aisles of stacked boxes the bell and other items had been tucked away.

Sans bell, in the small soundless exhalations of fog, the silence pooled so deep that Bibi felt as if she were in a cellar rather than an attic. She might have thought that she had imagined the silvery ringing if the ladder and the lights hadn’t been proof of another presence.

Because the one-inch particleboard had been securely screwed to the joists, rather than nailed, her feet found no creaks in it as she moved along the center line of the attic, looking left and right into the aisles of shelving and free-stacked goods. The captain had provided the labor to replace the old rotting plywood flooring, one of a number of small jobs that he did for free, to prove his value as a tenant, although no one felt it needed to be proved. That was just Captain’s way: always wanting to be useful.

When she reached the next-to-last aisle at the east end of the attic, Bibi discovered a presence, perhaps the one who for some weeks she had been seeking with both yearning and misgiving. He—or someone—stood at the back of the aisle, ten feet from her, in the shadows past the fall of light.

The apprehension that she had overcome before, that she felt was unworthy of her, flowered again, a black-petaled fright that severely tested her image of herself. Valiant girl? Or was she just another uncertain and confused kid pretending to be mature and brave, self-deceived by the fake-out she pulled on everyone else?

“Captain?” she said softly.

The presence moved toward her, into the light.

She realized then that madness and sanity were two worlds separated from each other by no more than a single step.

When Nurse Hernandez returned to Bibi’s room, she brought with her the chief of security for the hospital, whom she introduced as Chubb Coy. Whether Chubb was his real name or a nickname, he lived up to it. Pleasantly rounded rather than markedly fat, he moved with the lithe and supple ease of a dancer, which was peculiar to certain amply padded people. His last name was less appropriate than his first, because he was neither taciturn nor shy.

Mira Hernandez powered the unoccupied first bed to its maximum height, and Mr. Coy opened his laptop on the mattress. Bibi stood with them as Mr. Coy tapped into the hospital’s video files from the night just passed.

“Aren’t any security cameras in patients’ rooms,” he said, “or in other areas where their privacy has to be protected. Frivolous lawsuits already jack up medical costs. Costs would go through the roof if everybody’s grandma won a million bucks in court because she’d been humiliated being filmed while she used a bedpan.”

In a gently chastising tone, Nurse Hernandez said, “Of course, maintaining patient privacy is important for much better and more important reasons than defending against legal action.”

Mr. Coy in no way indicated that he realized he’d been quietly admonished for his frankness. “The stairwells are all monitored. And the public elevators. But not the elevators the staff use to move patients around. We monitor all the hallways. If a patient steps out of a room with his hospital gown untied in back and then wants ten million bucks ’cause Security had to look at his pathetic bare butt, well, so we have to go to court and hope there’s maybe at least a couple sane people on the jury. Not that I’d bet on it.”

Nurse Hernandez looked past her associate and smiled at Bibi, and Bibi returned the smile reassuringly.

Mr. Coy said, “Here’s the main east-west fourth-floor hallway, just outside your room. The time’s at the bottom.”

The digital clock on the screen read 4:01
A.M.
As the seconds flashed past and 4:01 turned to 4:02, a golden retriever appeared at the side of a man in a hoodie. The guy kept his head lowered as if to prevent the camera from capturing his face. He pushed open a door on the left and followed the dog through it.

“Mr. Hoodie just went into your room,” said Chubb Coy. He fast-forwarded the video. “Then he comes out three minutes later, at four-oh-five. There he is. He and the dog leave how they came, by the elevator.”

“Just like I told you,” Bibi said to Mira Hernandez.

The nurse shook her head. “Wait.”

Turning away from the laptop, face-to-face with Bibi, Mr. Coy said, “Here’s the problem. At that time of night, we’re locked up except for the main lobby entrance and through the ER receiving area. There’s no video of that guy or his dog using one of those, either coming or going.”

“Some other door that was supposed to be locked must have been open,” Bibi suggested.

“Not a chance. We run a tight operation. Here’s another thing—it so happens the camera in the elevator he used goes on the blink at three-fifty, ten minutes before he sashays on scene, so there’s no video of him and the dog in the elevator, either coming up or going down. The camera in the ground-floor elevator alcove
is
working, but it never shows Mr. Hoodie either boarding the cab or getting out of it later.”

Bibi looked at the laptop screen, where video from the previous night showed the corridor after the mysterious visitor’s departure. “I don’t understand.”

“Me neither,” Chubb Coy said. “It’s stupid to think he and the dog boarded the elevator mid-floor, coming through the hatch in the ceiling of the cab. No way, José. So did you recognize the guy?”

Bibi met the security chief’s eyes. They were gray flecked with blue, a steely contrast to the round amiable face in which they were set. “Recognize him from the video? But he didn’t show his face.”

“From his posture, his walk, the dog?”

“No. I didn’t recognize him.”

“Whatever he was up to,” Chubb Coy said, “it wasn’t good.”

“Well, I don’t know, but somehow I’m cured.”

“The doctors confirmed that?”

“Dr. Chandra is meeting with me this afternoon.”

“I hope you had a miracle, I really do,” Coy said, although he clearly had his doubts. “But, see, I was a real cop before this. I’ve known a bunch of bad guys. People that act like Mr. Hoodie…you can bet the rent money, they’ve got sinister intentions.”

Bibi did not remember turning away from the presence in the attic, but the next thing she knew, she was descending the ladder to the floor of the walk-in closet. At the bottom, when she looked up, she saw that the lights had been extinguished in the high room.

Panic had not seized her. She was in the grip of something else, perhaps shock, that rendered her half numb to all sensation. Her mind wasn’t spinning at the moment; instead each smallest impression and sentiment twitched to the next as if a pair of lever-wrench pliers in her brain were ratcheting them along in a futile attempt to restore her usual flow of thoughts.

She hesitated at the foot of the ladder, breath held, expecting someone to come into view above, uplit by the closet light. But when no one appeared, she gave the lowest segment of the ladder the hard push required to start it folding back into the ceiling. The ladder drew the trap door shut behind it, and the pull rope swayed back and forth like a pendulum.

She did not remember passing through the bedroom or the living room, but she became aware of being in the kitchen, standing at the dinette table, staring at the white vase. It had been empty when she entered the apartment. Now it contained three fresh scarlet roses.

As she descended the stairs from the balcony, thick fog flowed behind her and billowed around her as if it were the train of a magnificent white dress. In the courtyard, she could barely see the bricks underfoot, and the bungalow seemed to drift like a ghost ship on a shrouded sea, its lines visible but its substance unconvincing.

When she went into the house, her parents were still sleeping. Bibi retreated to her room, took off her shoes. Without removing her clothes, she slipped under the covers.

Something more had happened in the apartment attic than she had the fortitude to contemplate. She pushed away the memory of what had occurred, for it was both too frightening and too sad to bear, a weight no girl of ten—perhaps of any age—could carry for an hour, let alone for a lifetime. Better to put down that burden and let time bear it away.

She slept without rest, a sleep of denial and forgetting.

Her mother woke her. “Hey, sleepyhead. Get a move on. We’re going to brunch and then the movies.”

With the covers pulled to her chin, Bibi said, “I don’t want to. I stayed up all night reading.” That was a lie, but not a mortal one. “You go without me. There’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll make a big sandwich.”

Picking up a book from the nightstand, where at least one novel remained always near at hand, Nancy read the title: “
The Secret War in the Garden.
Pretty thrilling, huh?”

“Mmmmm,” Bibi agreed.

Imagining themselves to be free spirits, footloose children of Nature, her parents encouraged their daughter to be independent and self-directing. She would never be chastised for staying up most of the night, either to read or to watch one stupid thing or another on television.

“The movie’s supposed to be totally funny,” Nancy said. “It’s the new Adam Sandler.”

Insisting on her exhaustion by keeping her eyes shut and her face in a sort of slack pout, by speaking with weary exasperation, Bibi said, “He’s not funny.”

“You’re too old for Adam Sandler, huh?”

“Decades.”

“My daughter, the fifth-grade sophisticate. Well, all right. But don’t hit the surf alone.”

“I never do. And it’s too cold, anyway.”

She remained in bed for fifteen minutes after her parents left, to be certain they were gone.

A short while later, as she sat at the kitchen table, finishing a breakfast of chocolate milk and Eggo waffles smeared with peanut butter, she began to tremble and then to shake uncontrollably, as if the hinges of her bones had come loose every one and all at once. She didn’t ask herself why the shaking. She didn’t want to know why. It wasn’t about a ghost, either real or imagined. Ghosts couldn’t harm her. Even if it had been a real ghost in the attic, she would most likely never see another. Ghosts didn’t swoop up every day, from all around, like sparrows and meadowlarks taking wing. If something else happened in the high room, some moment of insight or even revelation, it had been of so little importance that it had evaporated from memory while she’d slept, before her mother woke her. She insisted that she just had a chill. That was all. That was enough to explain the shakes.

Leaving the last few bites of the meal on her plate, she went into the living room, where the gas fireplace featured an electronic ignition; she switched it on with a remote control. Hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans, she stood at the hearth, basking in the heat, staring into the blue-and-yellow flames that leaped around the ceramic logs. Sometimes she liked to search for animals and faces in the shapen clouds of a summer day. Flames were too quick and fluid for the eye to glimpse the suggestion of any presence other than fire, and that was a good thing.

When the shakes passed, she decided to walk to the park along Ocean Avenue and sit on the bench at Inspiration Point, even if the fog still largely obscured the Pacific. The sea always calmed her, even just the scent of it and the soothing sound of waves dashing against rocks and splashing across the sand. But as she stepped onto the front porch, even before she pulled the door shut, an unexpected flood of tears spilled from her. She was not a girl who wept in front of others, and she retreated into the bungalow.

She didn’t wish to understand this bitter emotion any more than she had cared to analyze the cause of her shaking. She wanted only to stop crying, to shut off the flow before it might wash into view a reason for this grief, if it was grief, or this dread, if it was dread. When she realized that the tears might be as persistent as the shakes, she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

Although her mother thought that Bibi had stayed up all night reading
The Secret War in the Garden,
which was the third young-adult novel in a beloved fantasy series, she had not yet begun the story. Now she snatched the book off her nightstand, hurried with it to the living room, switched on a floor lamp, dropped into an armchair, and sought refuge in the tale:
The first rumors of war came from the field mice, who traveled daily between the garden behind the Jensen house and the world below, which was far larger than our world and still unknown to most people, though known to certain children.

At first, as Bibi read, she wiped her tear-streaked face with the sleeves of her sweatshirt. Soon, however, the blurred print became clear, and her eyes stopped sabotaging storytime.

And so it was that hour by hour, day by day, she moved away from the disturbing knowledge that she needed to put behind her. The eerie and unsettling experience in the attic became about nothing more than an apparition or hallucination. She rejected the revelation that had been part of the incident, cut it from the cloth of memory and sewed shut the hole it left—or thought she did.

She read books and wrote stories about Jasper, a black-and-gray dog who had been abandoned by his owner and sought a new home along the coast of California. A couple of weeks later, when a golden retriever came to her out of the rain, she kept him and named him Olaf. As kids do, she made a confidant of her dog and told him all her secrets—as she knew them. She told him about Captain, how wonderful he had been. She told Olaf that the apartment above the garage was an evil place, but she didn’t tell him why.