Ashley Bell: A Novel (30 page)

In the parking lot, behind the wheel of the Honda, Bibi got her money’s worth from the quarters that earlier she’d fed to the meter. She spent a few minutes studying the photo of Ashley Bell, though she didn’t know why and didn’t see anything in the face that she hadn’t seen previously. No less than before, she felt a poignant kindredness and a compelling desire to give everything she had to the search. No, that was not quite right. She wasn’t compelled, wasn’t driven by some exterior force, not by any conventional motive that she could name. Rather, she was
impelled
to find the imprisoned girl, pressed forward by an urgent inner prompting, not by mere desire but by need, as though she had been born and had lived twenty-two years for one purpose, which was to spare Ashley Bell from whatever outrage her captors intended to perpetrate upon her.

She put aside the photograph, opened her laptop, and dared to go online for a brief monster hunt. She quickly found the story, a sensation at the time, when she had been only five and oblivious of what occurred beyond the sphere of her family. In those days, the Faulkners had lived farther down the coast, in Laguna Beach. Bibi already knew more than she cared to know about the savage details of Robert’s attack on his parents. She wanted photographs of him, and on different sites she located seven, six of them apparently provided to the authorities by people other than his father.

Two snapshots showed him at ages too young to be useful for her purpose, and in the other five, he was between fourteen and sixteen. A handsome boy, even striking, he stared directly into the camera, solemn in every instance except one, when he was fourteen and smiling broadly, posed against a backdrop of palm trees bracketing an ocean view. Bibi resisted the temptation to read wickedness in the tilt of his smile or derangement in the sheen and squint of his eyes; he looked like any other boy and, instead of a future murderer, could as easily have been a saint in the making.

The two photos taken closest to the night of the crime—in the first, he was fifteen, in the other sixteen—revealed that Robert had changed. Undeniably, his posture was more aggressive, and there seemed to be a challenge in his attitude. Bibi was not imagining an arrogance in his expression, almost a sneer. He wore his hair shorter than before, especially on the sides. He parted it on the right, as always, but more severely, so that white scalp showed like a chalk line. Combed to the left across his brow, the hair spilled down his temple in a familiar way, and after a moment she saw that he had styled it after Hitler’s haircut.

She had intended to send the best picture to her parents with a warning to be on the lookout for a dangerous man who resembled this young boy. But now, she realized, seventeen years would have changed Robert so much that a photo from his adolescence would be inadequate proof of his current appearance. Besides, Nancy and Murphy would want to know why he was dangerous, what threat he posed to her, what mess she had gotten into. If she answered their questions, they were more likely to be targeted than if she told them nothing.

Or were they?

On Balboa Boulevard, traffic cruising down-Peninsula toward the Wedge, one of the most famous and dangerous surfing spots on the planet, and traffic headed up-Peninsula roiled the insistent fog. White masses churned around the Honda, as if the world Bibi knew had dissolved, as if from the atomic soup of its diffusion, a new world was forming, one that would be hostile to her at every turn.

Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Birkenau Terezin, living under a more ordinary name as yet unknown, had threatened her mom and dad if she contacted them. He wanted to keep her isolated, the easier to deal with her when he found her. But she suspected that no matter what she did, Nancy and Murphy and Pogo and everyone she loved were already on Terezin’s termination list. Like the genocidal maniac whom he so admired, Terezin would want a final solution, eliminating not just Bibi but also all the people who cared about her enough to ask questions and pursue justice after her death.

Paxton Thorpe could be no help to her in the current crisis, and she didn’t for a moment fantasize about him riding to the rescue from some distant corner of the world. But she allowed herself to dwell on him for a few minutes because the beauty of the man—mind and heart and body—purged some of her anxiety, inflated her hope.

She started the car and pulled onto the street. She knew where she had to go next, but she didn’t have any idea what she would do when she got there. Solange St. Croix lived in Laguna Beach, which Bibi had known for years. But in searching for photographs of Kelsey Faulkner’s homicidal son, she had noticed that the professor’s house and the scene of the crime shared the same address.

Deep in the floating city, Gibb had lain sleepless.

A Navy SEAL was trained to endure things that he once would have thought he could not survive. And if he could not sustain physically and mentally and emotionally through the worst shitstorms of war with his confidence intact, he needed to get out of spec ops and become a mall cop or a librarian, or whatever the hell. As a SEAL, you saw—and confronted—things no one should have to see, horrors that would leave most people in need of therapy for years, but you could not let what you saw make you cynical, diminish you, or in any way corrupt you. Once you bought into valor, it was your residence forever; you could neither sell it like a house nor remodel it into something less grand, and if the day came when you refused to live there anymore, you would also be unable to live any longer with yourself.

Nevertheless, SEALs were of course afraid at times, and like everyone else, they had bad dreams. That first night after taking out Abdullah al-Ghazali and his crew, in a four-bunk cabin aboard ship, Pax Thorpe had muttered and exclaimed in his dreams. Having plunged rather than fallen into sleep, Perry and Danny had not been disturbed by their lead petty officer’s brief and mostly quiet outbursts.

Gibb and Pax were in the lower bunks, a narrow aisle separating them. Although exhausted from the mission, Gibb had been for a while unable to sleep, and he had listened to Pax’s peculiar outbursts, committing some of them to memory.

In the morning, over breakfast, he had said, “Pax, you sounded like you were at a Hitchcock triple feature last night. Who threw acid in whose face?”

Pax had gone pale as he looked up from his mess tray. “Damnedest dream. Crazy bits and pieces, none of it connected, but way vivid.”

“Was it Hitler raped his mother,” Gibb asked, “and whose fingers did he cut off? Man, when you give up spec ops, you should get a job writing for one of the crazier cable-TV shows.”

In Laguna Beach, the murder house stood three stories tall on a steep street, inland of Coast Highway, where the residences faced either north or south, in both cases lacking ocean views but still expensive. There were enormous old trees, shallow front yards, and an eclectic mix of architectural styles, some poorly conceived. The house where Beth Faulkner had died was moderne, slabs of stucco and smooth teak decks piled like the layers of a wedding cake baked for a bloodless bride and groom as romantic as carrots.

At that hour of a weekday, Dr. Solange St. Croix would most likely be at the university, guarding the standards of contemporary American fiction and dispiriting young writers. Bibi parked across the street and watched the house for half an hour. No one appeared on any of the decks or in any of the rooms beyond the expansive windows.

The fog was somewhat thinner than it had been in Newport, though still thick enough to backdrop an urban version of
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
And of hounds there was no shortage, a parade of Lagunans walking a dog show’s worth of breeds uphill and down. No one seemed to find it odd that a woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses should be slouching in a junker, conducting surveillance. Laguna prided itself on being an artist’s colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them.

After taking off the cap and sunglasses, Bibi proceeded boldly to St. Croix’s front door. When no one responded to the bell, she moseyed to the back of the residence with the practiced nonchalance of an experienced housebreaker. The doors and windows were locked, though the rear door to the garage was secured by a flimsy lockset. Even if the house had an alarm, the garage was not likely to be on the system. She could have slipped the latch by sliding a credit card between door and jamb; but she had left her purse in the car.

When she considered returning to the Honda to get her Visa card, something snapped in Bibi. Not a big snap. Not like the thick trunk of her psychology splitting all the way through and toppling. But not the subtle crack of a twig, either. Her resentment at the disruption of her life, the anxiety and frustration and bewilderment arising from the frightening events of the past eighteen hours, had stressed her to the point that something had to give. Just one branch broke, one branch in the elaborate tree that was Bibi, and it was labeled
CAUTION
. To hell with her Visa card. She didn’t need no stinkin’ Visa card. She kicked the door. She didn’t regret the noise. She
liked
the noise. She was accomplishing something at last. She kicked again. With the third kick, the latch gave. The dark garage welcomed her.

She found the light switch. No vehicles. She pulled shut the door behind her.

The interior door, between the garage and house, had a solid core and a serious deadbolt. She could kick it until she dropped of exhaustion, without effect. A credit card would be useless, too.

Gardening implements hung on a wall. Nearby stood a workbench with drawers flanking the knee space. She found a variety of tools tumbled in the drawers, including a screwdriver and hammer.

At the lowest of four door hinges, she inserted the blade of the screwdriver between the head and the shank of the pivot pin, and pried it half an inch out of the hinge barrel. She tapped the bottom of the screwdriver with the hammer until the pin came free. Soon all four were extracted, tossed aside, ringing across the concrete floor.

Each hinge barrel was formed by five knuckles; two were part of the frame leaf, three were part of the center leaf. Without pins to hold the knuckles together, they separated slightly, but the door remained in place. “No quitters,” she muttered. With the screwdriver, then with the claw hammer, she pried open a crack between door and jamb, big enough to hook her fingers through. She wrenched on the barrier until—scraping, screaking—the hinge knuckles parted and the door stuttered outward maybe two inches, arcing across the threshold. No alarm. Sweet. It was now held only by the deadbolt, which wouldn’t swivel like a hinge. As she struggled, the wood began to crack around the screws that secured the mortise lock. The engaged bolt rattled against the striker plate. She grunted and cursed and put everything she had into the battle until, after more splintering of wood, the door came open just wide enough to allow her to squeeze through into the kitchen, where she stood listening to the house and wiping sweat off her brow with the sleeve of her jacket.

Sometimes Bibi wished she was Paxton. He would have used a packet of C-4 explosive to blow open the door and take out a portion of the wall with it. Neighbors were tolerant in Laguna. They probably wouldn’t complain until the second or third explosion.

Filtered by the marine layer that swaddled the town, morning light floated through, rather than pierced, the floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving shadows in places, providing an adequate though mysterious somber radiance like that of a late-afternoon snowscape.

As she moved through the ground floor, one chamber opening to the next with minimal space given to hallways, she thought that the construction must be far better than the exterior architecture. The sounds of the busy world didn’t intrude. Pale limestone floors, the sparest possible use of area carpets, no draperies whatsoever, marble fireplace surrounds, mirrors of remarkable depth, steel-and-leather furniture so acutely angled and forbidding that it seemed to have been designed by an insect consciousness: Every hard surface should have rung with brittle echoes of every noise that Bibi made, but she walked in silence, like a spirit, as if this were a temple buried for centuries under a hundred feet of desert sand.

There were moments when she felt as alone as she had ever been, but other moments when she paused to listen intently, more than half convinced that someone waited here for her, like a trapdoor spider anticipating her fatal step.

The ground floor clearly was intended for entertaining, for the cocktail parties and literary soirees that were legendary among Dr. St. Croix’s fellow faculty members, guest lecturers, and students. Bibi had not lasted long enough in the writing program to have been invited here; yet room by room, detail by detail, everything upon which she turned her gaze seemed familiar. With uncanny accuracy, she could predict what waited around every corner, beyond every doorway.

In those cold and sparely furnished spaces, nothing explained the professor’s role in recent events or confirmed that she was in some way connected to Terezin. If there was a study or home office where some clue was most likely to be found, it must be on the second floor.

Bibi climbed an open spiral staircase of glass and steel, past large windows where the fog pressed a legion of half-formed faces.

The second floor was alike to the first, with a glitz-free home theater, a lightly equipped gym, and finally the study that Bibi had hoped to find. A Spartan room in the vein of St. Croix’s on-campus office. Two black-and-white abstract paintings. Bookshelves largely empty. A forbidding couch. A black Herman Miller office chair, the only comfortable-looking furniture in the house, stood behind a desk of brushed steel and gray-enameled panels.

All this, too, was disturbingly familiar.

Only the desk offered possibilities, though not many. The study lacked a computer. Not a single object stood on the desktop. There were four drawers, in which Bibi found nothing of interest.

In the southwest corner of the study, a single flight of stairs led to the third floor. For the first time, she had to switch on a light. At the top, she arrived at a black-lacquered door.

Bibi suspected that when there were guests in the house, this door would be locked, for it and the stairs that led to it felt like a fateful passage to a forbidden realm. The lock was not now engaged.

As she gripped the doorknob, she knew what she would surely find beyond, not the precise details but the essence: rooms that were in stark contrast to everything on the first two floors.

When she stepped across the threshold and, with a wall switch, turned on several artfully positioned stained-glass and blown-glass lamps, she passed from stark modernism to high Victorian. The door opened onto a parlor with hand-printed wallpaper in a colorful floral pattern. Delicate lace curtains overlaid with maroon-velvet tasseled-and-fringed draperies. Two étagères full of porcelain collectibles. Chesterfield sofa. Studded-leather armchair. A large circular side table, covered with fabric that itself was covered with a crocheted overlay, accommodated portrait busts and enameled ornaments and small framed drawings.

Bibi felt akin to the children who discovered Narnia, as though she’d passed into another world, but also as if she had returned to a place she’d visited before. The contrasting sumptuous fabrics and the extreme clutter were, even for the period, evidence less of a passion for Victoriana than of a troubling obsession.

Beyond the parlor, a master-bedroom suite offered more of the same. The centerpiece was a bed with an elaborate layered canopy, its four posts carved with twining vines and gilded flowers.

Bibi stood just inside the bedroom, both enchanted and filled with misgiving, wondering if anything of interest might be found in the nightstands. Before she could explore further, the black-lacquered door at the head of the stairs slammed shut.