Ashley Bell: A Novel (37 page)

The motel deserved neither a five- nor a four- nor perhaps even a three-star rating, but it looked clean and proudly kept and, most important from Bibi’s perspective, anonymous. She parked on a side street two blocks away and walked, pulling the wheeled suitcase.

A lone woman manned the front desk in an office painted pale Caribbean blue and yellow. The counter was a free-form slab of koa, either genuine driftwood or sculpted to suggest a heroic history of shipwreck and travail, red and lustrous and with a watery depth.

These small motels were often owned by a couple, and the clerk was as gracious as if welcoming a guest into her home. The badge on her blouse identified her as Doris. She was pleased to accept cash, but their policy required a credit card and a driver’s license for ID, which was probably in case the guest trashed the room.

“He didn’t let me have credit cards,” Bibi said. “He cut up my driver’s license.” She surprised herself when her mouth trembled and her voice conveyed fear, bitterness, and anguish. She was no actress. Her true condition, anxiety and loneliness, provided the emotion with which she sold her story of spousal abuse. “I came in a cab partway and walked till I saw this place.” Her vision blurred with tears. “He won’t come here to make a scene. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone.”

Doris hesitated only a moment before making an exception to the rules. “Do you have family, dear? Someone to turn to?”

“My folks are in Arizona. My dad’s coming for me tomorrow.”

Wanting to avoid seeming either nosy or unconcerned, Doris said, “If he hit you, girl, then you should report him.”

“He more than hit me.” Bibi put one hand to her stomach, as if with the memory of a punch. “A lot more than hit.”

She signed the register as Hazel Weatherfield, with no idea where she got that from. She said it was her maiden name.

Three rooms were available, all in a row, and she took Room 6, farthest from the street. It was simply furnished but cozy.

Sitting in one of the two chairs at a small round table, she ate a dinner of cashews, dried apricots, and aerosol cheese squirted on crackers, washed down with a Coke from a motel vending machine.

While she ate, she studied the photo of Ashley Bell, and heard in memory Terezin’s voice, when she had spoken to him on St. Croix’s phone:
Too bad you can’t come to the party. Ashley will be there. My guest of honor. It’ll be the last chance you’ll have to find her alive. It all begins again. The little Jewess’s role is historic.

He fancied himself the heir of Hitler. Evidently, he had made it his mission, even if with one symbolic victim, to launch again the Final Solution to “the Jewish problem.” The swarm of cultists—both airborne and ground troops—that had sought Bibi at the shopping mall suggested Terezin’s intentions were ambitious. But whether he meant to kill one Jewish girl in celebration of his birthday or had also planned a terrorist atrocity that would result in many more deaths, either way Ashley Bell would die if Bibi couldn’t soon find her.

If this had been a time of widespread sanity, a mere decade or two ago, Bibi might have found it hard to take Terezin seriously. But the world had gone mad in recent years. Anti-Semitism, that vampiric hatred that could never quite be staked through the heart and turned to dust, had infected not only the expected foreign capitals but also politics here in the States, and not just politics but academia and the entertainment industry as well. It was nearly epidemic among all elites, though fortunately not among average Americans, who so far and for the most part seemed immune to the fever. What could once have been dismissed as the unlikely plot of a bad movie must now be regarded as a real threat. Terezin had followers and a significant source of funding, all that was needed these days for him to join the myriad groups blasting away at the foundations of civilization.

And in addition, he had some kind of occult power. Bibi knew from personal experience that it was more than charisma drawn from a mystical magnetic current in the earth, as Halina Berg had proposed, though that might be part of it. She wished she had a better idea of what paranormal resources he possessed, a wish that turned her mind to the mysterious book of the panther and gazelle.

Finished with dinner, she took from her purse Calida’s curious little book. She returned to the table with it.

Three times, she had glimpsed lines of cursive writing flowing swiftly across the creamy paper, pale gray and seen as if through water, so that she hadn’t been able to read them. Now she riffled through two hundred or so blank pages, alert for the manifestation of the script. Just when she thought the phenomenon would not recur, she saw it, and then again, but still the words flowed at such speed and with such distortion that she could not track them—though this time she recognized the writing as her own.

She didn’t understand how her handwriting could appear, even in this ghostly form, in a book to which she’d never put pen or pencil. But that was only one more ingredient in this stew of mysteries.

From her purse, she retrieved a pen and sat again with the book, wondering what might happen if she
did
write in it. She hesitated, but then began to inscribe lines from “The Evening of the Mind,” a poem by Donald Justice that she particularly admired. As she started on the second line, the first disappeared from the page, vanished left to right, in the order that she had put down the words. By the time she finished the second line, it was the only one to be seen, and it flowed out of existence while she finished the third.

As when she’d paged through the book in the parking lot that served Donut Heaven, she had a sense of time passing in units much larger than seconds or minutes, and she felt…spellbound. She became aware of something flickering in her peripheral vision, and though turning her head required effort, she slowly brought her gaze around to the right. Apparently oblivious of Bibi’s presence, a woman in a uniform, perhaps a maid, flitted about at an inhuman pace, as if in a film projected at high speed, and it wasn’t a motel room anymore, it was someplace else.

Startled, Bibi dropped her pen, let go of the book—and found herself alone in the room, everything as it had been. The Barnes & Noble bag on the bed. Her wheeled suitcase beside the bathroom door. According to her watch, not more than a minute or two had passed.

Nothing she had written remained in the book. Where had those lines by Donald Justice gone?

Pax sat alone in the lounge, listening to the roar of engines as airplanes taxied and were airborne, but thinking about St. Angelus Meadows, the family horse ranch in Texas. His folks had on the one hand been disappointed when he chose not to go from high school into the family business; but they were proud to say their boy was a Navy SEAL. Of his three brothers, Logan, two years his junior, had also made it in the SEALs, while Emory and Chance had forgone military service, somewhat reluctantly, to work the ranch, get married, and have kids. Angelus was great for kids, a fine place to grow up with a deep attachment to the land and family that kept you balanced all your life. There was the river for swimming, the dogs always ready to play and chase, winters white and magical, summers hot and green, walking doves and quail up from the tall grass in the autumn hunt, and of course the horses, the beautiful and wise and joyous horses.

They raised Appaloosas, ideal working horses for their own ranch and for sale to others. Paso Finos for aficionados of that exquisite riding horse with its singular gait. Likewise Andalusians and Belgian Warmbloods, magnificent for dressage, show winners more often than not. And there were the quarter horses bred and raised and raced. You could spend a life with horses, day and night, and never become blasé about them, about the ever-charming colts in spring, about their intelligence, their capacity for affection, their beauty and grace.

Bibi was born a surfer, not a horsewoman. Pax loved to surf and especially with her, but the horseman could never be trained out of him. It was a question for which they had to puzzle their way to an answer. They had talked about it some, but he still had a few months left of his commitment to the teams, and neither of them had doubted for a moment that they would settle the issue to their mutual satisfaction—if given a chance. The coast or the high plains, or both, or neither. It wouldn’t matter which, as long as they were together.

The door opened, and an aircrewman leaned in from the hallway. “Chief Petty Officer Thorpe? Your ride is ready.”

Pax rose from the chair and hefted his big duffel bag, relieved to be in motion once more.

After murdering Professor St. Croix in her Victorian hideaway, Chubb Coy had revealed the existence of factions in this bewildering conspiracy, but perhaps he’d meant to convey more than that to Bibi. Some of the things he’d said were not phrased as Chubb Coy would say them. Certain expressions were not characteristic of his speech. In fact, she had recognized three instances where he seemed to be making literary allusions, which was the last thing she would expect from him. By all evidence, he wasn’t a bookish man. He seemed more likely to quote a sports star than to toss off a line from Shakespeare.

Bibi wondered if, in that Victorian parlor, Coy felt monitored, if in fact he knew that he would always and anywhere be overheard by some dangerous authority while in her presence. It was as though he knew that she herself—not her purse or her clothes, but her very body—was wired for transmission of everything she said and heard. That was a wildly paranoid and deeply unsettling thought. Absurd. Preposterous. But she couldn’t think of another reason why he would speak to her in code, which was what she suspected he had done. His code consisted of veiled references that he must have prepared in advance to use the next time he encountered her, which happened to be on the third floor of St. Croix’s house. References to works of literature that he seemed to think she would know.

Before opening the three volumes that she had bought at the bookstore in Fashion Island, she sat at the motel-room table with a pen and the small spiral-bound notebook that she carried in her purse. Searching her memory, she tried to recapture and write down, as best she could recall, the pertinent things Coy had said. Ten minutes later, they were before her on the page, in her neat script.

The first instance. After shooting Dr. St. Croix, he had said,
She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life
.

Bibi knew where that one could be found. She opened
The Complete Stories
by Flannery O’Connor and located one of the most terrifying short stories ever written: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She turned to the last page of the piece, after the merciless murderer had killed the last member of the family, and she read silently the applicable sentence:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

The similarity in phrasing and sentiment between what Coy said and the line from the story couldn’t be accidental. He must have spoken those words with the intention of snaring Bibi’s attention and by indirection transmitting to her some vital piece of information.

The second instance. When Bibi had asked why Ashley, a mere child of twelve or thirteen, had to die, Coy had said,
Why does anyone? Some say we’ll never know, that to the gods we’re like the flies that boys kill on a summer day.

Thornton Wilder. The volume contained three of his short novels. She turned to
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
a story concerning the five people who died in July of 1714, when the finest footbridge in all of Peru collapsed and dropped them into an abyss. Bibi scanned the last few pages, but eventually she found what she wanted much earlier in the story, at the end of the first chapter:
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day….

Again, the similarity required intent.

The third instance. Bibi had asked if Coy might be allied with Terezin, and he had replied adamantly that he despised the fascist creep. When she had suggested that the enemy of his enemy—meaning her—might be his friend, Coy rejected her and said,
Accept the inevitable, girl. You’re easy prey. As a boy, Terezin was a dog, now he has gone back to the wild. He’s a wolf now, like and yet unlike all other wolves, always running at the head of the pack. He dreams of turning the world backward, of a younger world, which is the world of the pack.

Jack London. The lead story in the volume was “The Call of the Wild,” which concerned a good dog named Buck, half St. Bernard and half Scottish shepherd. He was torn from a cozy life in California and sold into a kind of slavery as a sled dog in the Klondike, during the Alaska gold rush of 1897. Abused, he adapted to his new rough existence, came to understand the essential wolf in himself, and escaped to a better life in the wilds, where he paid back humanity for its cruelty.

In this case, part of Coy’s allusion was to the plot of the story itself, the device of the dog reverting to its fierce inner wolf. The actual quotes from the text were smaller than in the first two instances, but in the final paragraph Bibi found this:
…he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight…as he sings a song of a younger world, which is the song of the pack.

At first it seemed that these three references were unlikely code because they would be too hard to work into conversation. But then she realized that if Coy had for some time
intended
to kill Dr. St. Croix, he would have known how he could use the O’Connor quote. And since he could be sure Bibi would at some point speak of Ashley Bell and Terezin, the conversation could easily be manipulated to use the Wilder and London excerpts.

But what message did he hope to convey by this elaborate ruse, by this maddeningly indirect communication? If he secretly wished to help her, couldn’t he have more easily slipped a note to her—or a twenty-page detailed report, for that matter? There could be no doubt that his references to the three authors were calculated, but did such an enigmatic form of communication suggest that he was clever and sincere—or that he was capricious and deranged? The longer she puzzled over the three allusions, the more they seemed to say only the obvious: that Coy was a nihilistic killer like The Misfit, that Terezin was a ruthless wolf with demented fantasies, that Ashley Bell’s murder would be an act committed by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A code was not devised to convey secretly what both the sender and receiver already knew.

Frustrated, all but crackling with nervous energy, Bibi got up to pace the room, and the moment that she became more physical, her mind went into motion, too, shifting from the issue of the literary allusions to the possibility that she carried within herself some device that broadcast everything she said and heard. To whom? Not Terezin, for if he had such an intimate connection with her, he would already have found and killed her.

How would a transmitter be implanted? Surgery? But she had no scars. Injection? Microminiaturization, nanotechnology…There were experts who insisted that, one day soon, incredibly complex machines made of surprisingly few molecules could travel the bloodstream, reporting telemetrically on the patient’s health from an interior perspective, even removing plaque from arteries and performing other procedures on the microscopic level. If one day soon, why not now? If for medical purposes, why not for surveillance?

This was the road to madness. Kafka Land. She was suddenly afraid not because she believed that she had been injected with a tiny transmitter, but because for a minute she had seriously considered the possibility. Which was ridiculous. Lunatic.

She went into the bathroom and repeatedly splashed cold water in her face. She rubbed vigorously with the towel, as if needing to slough off some thick and clinging residue.

When she looked in the mirror, she knew the face but not its aspect, not the haunted quality, not the dread that paled the skin, not the foreboding that pinched the mouth.

“Go away,” she said to the woman in the mirror. “I don’t need you.” She had no use for the weak Bibi who might have been. She needed to be the Bibi she had always been.

She returned to the bedroom and sat at the table and studied Coy’s three allusions, comparing what he’d said to the sources he had not always precisely quoted. She considered them in the context of the ornate Victorian parlor in which he’d made them. She thought about the three stories, their plots and characters and themes and subtext. She brooded about the authors, recalling what she knew of their lives and interests beyond their writing.

A possibility occurred to Bibi, something that Coy might have been trying to say. If her mind had always been spinning when she was a girl, it had for years now been ceaselessly weaving, a tireless loom that issued an ever-changing fabric of impressions, sentiments, thoughts, ideas, concepts, theories. The possibility that occurred to her began as one frail thread, hardly noticed in the rush of thoughts and worries, but in seconds there were other threads feeding into the web, and with astonishing speed a pattern formed, a possibility so alarming that she erupted off her chair, knocking it over.

Doors in her mind, long closed, began to ease open, and once-forbidden rooms of memory welcomed her. She was all at once five years old and alone in her Mickey-lit bedroom with something evil, ten and hiding a dog collar, sixteen and struggling against a desire that could destroy her. Dizzy, weak in the knees, she stumbled to the second chair, grabbed the headrail with both hands to steady herself, closed her eyes, and in a voice stropped sharp with terror, she said,
“No, no, no.”