Ashley Bell: A Novel (42 page)

Tattooed and renewed, Bibi returned to the Honda, where she had parked it on Via Lido. She sat watching the street and its businesses melt away in the thick tides of mist, partially re-form, and melt away again, over and over, as if some celestial power had ordered the end of the world but kept having second thoughts.

When she worked out what she would say, she used the disposable cell phone to call her mother.

“Bibi? We thought you’d call long before this. Did you get a motel? Where are you staying?”

“I drove all the way to San Diego, Mom. Then I played tourist for a while, it’s a cool town, and then I found a nice little place for dinner.” She didn’t lie, not about anything important, and she particularly didn’t lie to her parents; however, to her own ear, she sounded as though she was becoming at least a good apprentice liar. Although keeping Murphy and Nancy ignorant about her situation was necessary in order to keep them off Terezin’s execution list, Bibi didn’t feel justified and wanted to get through the deception as fast as possible. “Anyway, I have a room at the Best Western. It’s clean and quiet, and I’m going to sleep like a stone.”

“Which Best Western?” Nancy asked.

“The Best Western Best Western. You know, the chain.”

“But there must be several of them in San Diego.”

“Well, I don’t know, it just says Best Western on the building.”

“There must be another part to the name. Best Western Downtown, Best Western Old Town, Best Western Harbor, something like that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Look for an ad card on your nightstand or a brochure in the drawer. It’ll have the full name. Go look.”

“Okay. Wait a sec.” Bibi clamped the palm of her hand over the phone and counted to twenty while she watched the less than thrilling spectacle of the fog. “Okay. There’s both an ad card and a brochure, but they just say Best Western. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m happy and well fed and sleepy, and I’m only staying one night. Tomorrow I might drive back up to La Jolla, stay there a day or two.”

She expected her mother to demand that she go to a window and describe the part of the city immediately around the hotel, but Nancy said, “You’re not going to surf at La Jolla Shores, are you?”

“No. I’m not surfing anywhere. Too chilly for me.”

“Your dad says there’s a storm in the South Pacific, supposed to be some smokin’ behemoths rolling in from Baja to La Jolla Shores. You
did
just get out of the hospital, remember.”

“I don’t even have my board with me, Mom. I’m going to spend the day shopping for things I don’t need, indulging myself. Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask. About the captain. About Grandpa.”

“I know you still think of him often.”

“I do,” Bibi agreed. “But this is a research thing, for the novel I’m writing. Did he ever talk much about when he was an intelligence officer? About the interrogation-resistance techniques his team developed?”

“That was all classified stuff, sweetie.”

“But he talked about it a little.”

“Very little.”

“Did he ever say anything about memory suppression?”

“Which is what?”

“Making people forget things. Wiping an entire experience out of your mind, so you don’t remember it ever happened.”

“That sounds more science-fictiony than anything your grandpa would have been working on.”

“The research I’ve done so far tells me it’s possible. But if it’s possible, I’m wondering how it could be undone.”

“This is for the book you’ve been working on? It sounds awful science-fictiony.”

“It’s not really. Not at all. Anyway, I’m wiped out. I need to grab a nightcap from the honor bar and hit the sheets.”

“If you need downtime to put the whole brain thing behind you, then you should damn well make it total downtime, honey. Forget your work for a few days.”

“You’re right, Mom. I will. Okay. Gotta crash. I love you. Tell Dad I love him. Tell him I’m not going to paddle out into any smokin’ behemoths in La Jolla Shores.”

After declarations of love bounced back and forth a few more times, Bibi terminated the call and switched off the phone.

She piloted the Pogomobile off the peninsula, onto Pacific Coast Highway, and motored slowly through a phantom sea of fog, heading to her motel in Laguna, trying to convince herself that she was not a natural-born liar. As a troubled child, she had withheld things from her parents, all the secrets that she had revealed to Captain, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t told them bald-faced lies. Some people thought that novels were a kind of lie, because the stories and the characters were made up, but fiction could be a search engine with which you could find elusive truths and peel them layer by layer, especially those truths that writers of nonfiction rarely if ever considered, either because they did not believe such truths existed or because they did not want them to exist. By the time that she reached Corona del Mar, she decided she was a liar, but not a mean or vindictive one.

En route, she stopped at a supermarket and bought extra-strength Tylenol. And aspirin. And Motrin. A big tube of unscented analgesic cream. No matter how much she overmedicated, she wouldn’t blow out her liver in one night. Valiant girls should be able to take a lot of physical punishment without complaint, but they weren’t invincible. She didn’t like admitting that she hurt and that she was getting stiff from the knockabout she had endured, but self-delusion wasn’t necessary to remain resolute. Gauze, tape, iodine. A family-size bag of Reese’s peanut-butter cups. However she might die, she wasn’t at much risk of dropping dead from either diabetes or arteriosclerosis.

She bought a pint of vodka, too. Her motel didn’t have an honor bar like the well-stocked one that she had imagined for the Best Western that wasn’t.

In Laguna, she parked two blocks from the motel. Carrying the electronic map that she’d purchased earlier in the day, the Scrabble game, the bookstore bag containing fresh copies of the three story collections, and the items from the supermarket, she returned to her room, stopping only to get a bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine.

Although she wasn’t much of a drinker, she looked forward to a couple of shots of vodka with her Coke, to fortify her for what might lie ahead. On the other hand, she suspected that in the next hour or so, she had a good chance of locating Ashley Bell, in which case she would need to be clearheaded and ready to roll.

Bibi took off her blazer, mixed Coke and vodka in a motel glass, popped a pair of Tylenol, and sat at the small table to compare the text in the new copies of O’Connor, Wilder, and London to the pages from which earlier she had cut out lines with the switchblade. She repeatedly read the words that she excised and burned and forgot, but studying them did not bring enlightenment. If these lines or part of these lines, or variations of them, were what Chubb Coy had said to her in Dr. St. Croix’s third-floor Victorian retreat, they no longer triggered a revelation, perhaps because she had forgotten in what context he said them, or simply because the captain’s memory trick could not be that easily undone.

Putting the books aside, she turned to the lettered tiles from the Scrabble game that she had purchased. She didn’t possess a silver bowl, didn’t need one. She had no desire to engage in divination. Now and then over the years, she’d heard people warn that playing with a Ouija board could be dangerous, that when you posed questions to it and received answers, the responses didn’t come from the board, but from some spirit realm, from an entity that was not necessarily benign. And even if that entity didn’t boldly deceive and mislead with its answers, you had opened a door to it by initiating contact, after which it might not remain content to stay with the dead or the damned or with whomever it currently hung out. For other reasons—surfing, books, boys—Bibi had never been interested in Ouija boards. She had not given much credence to the notion of malevolent entities crouched in some Otherwhere, waiting for unsuspecting and ignorant humans to open a mystical gate for them. But if there might be any truth to such beliefs, Scrabblemancy would be no less dangerous than seeking answers from the Ouija. Besides, she wasn’t going to thrust a needle through the meat of her thumb, especially considering that she suspected the answer to Ashley’s whereabouts had already been conjured by Calida Butterfly in the hour before she’d been murdered.

Someone knocked softly on the motel-room door. Three quick faint raps.

What fresh hell is this?
She drew the pistol and got to her feet and waited.

When the knock was not repeated, she went to the door and peered through the fisheye lens into a self-distorted world herewith further distorted. In the fall of light from the exterior lamp directly above the door, neither Death nor anyone else stood at her threshold in the atmospheric fog. She kept one eye to the lens, in case her elusive visitor returned to knock again. A minute passed, and then another, and her patience wasn’t rewarded.

She considered going to one or both of the windows and easing aside the blackout draperies. Not a good idea. If she revealed her position, she would be an easy target.

Call the front desk? Report a prowler? Doris might still be on duty. Sympathetic Doris would believe her.
No. Don’t put anyone else at risk.

There seemed to be nothing better that she could do than return to the table. The knocking had been feather-soft, almost an idea of a sound. Maybe she imagined it.

She arranged twenty-seven Scrabble tiles in two lines, one above the other, just as they had been on the round table in Calida’s home office. The first line was
ASHLEY BELL
. The second offered an address:
ELEVEN MOONRISE WAY
.

According to the electronic map, that address did not exist in Orange County or anywhere else in Southern California.

The previous night, in Bibi’s kitchen, when they sought to learn why she had been spared from cancer, Calida hadn’t been able to find the correct message in the first eleven letters. She had arranged the tiles to read
A FATE SO EVIL
, then
EAST EVIL OAF
, and
VIA LEAST FOE
. Bibi had discerned the true message:
TO SAVE A LIFE
.

Likewise, in the second group of letters, Calida found
SALLY BHEEL
and
SHELLY ABLE
, but neither name felt right. Bibi spelled
ASHLEY BELL
, which subsequent events had proved to be the correct name.

Most likely, in the seventeen letters of this address, Calida hadn’t arrived at the pertinent combination. For some reason, logical or supernatural, Bibi—and Bibi alone—might be required to puzzle out the true location where Ashley could be found.

Of the many synonyms for the word
street,
only two could be formed from that combination of letters. Not
AVENUE
, not
BOULEVARD,
not
HIGHWAY
or
PLACE
or
CIRCLE
or
DRIVE
or anything other than
WAY
and
LANE.

She tried using
LANE
. But working with the remaining thirteen tiles, she couldn’t form a credible word or two without leaving unused letters. Evidently,
LANE
was wrong, and
WAY
was correct.

A finger tapping lightly on a windowpane.
Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
As quiet as the previous knocking. Repeated.
Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
The window to the right of the door.

Her table stood to the left of the door. At a distance of twelve or fifteen feet from the farther of the two windows, Bibi couldn’t be certain that the cause of the noise was what it seemed to be. Maybe just a large moth bumping against the glass. But could a moth be so busy in the mist, which would quickly saturate its fragile wings and weigh it down?

To one side of the Scrabble tiles, the pistol lay ready. She put a hand on it. Although she had never fired it at anyone, she knew now that she could do the deed. She had stabbed a man to death with a knife, after all, which was a more disturbing—because more intimate—method of killing. Intellectually, she’d long known the difference between killing and murder. Now she understood it emotionally, and her sensitivity to the abomination of violence and the necessity for mercy would not dangerously restrain her if the moment came when killing was justified.

She waited for the furtive tapping at the window to come again. Nothing.

The door featured a deadbolt in the mortise lock, a second and independent deadbolt above that first assembly, and a stainless-steel security chain.

By comparison, the windows could be easily breached.

When nothing further occurred, Bibi sipped the vodka-spiked Coca-Cola.
Pax, whatever mess you’ve been sent to clean up, you damn well better stay alive. I need you here, big guy, I need you.

Now that she had rejected lane and settled on
WAY
, the remaining fourteen letters could not be formed into a single sensible word. Nor two words that were likely to be a street name.

She decided that the number,
ELEVEN
, might also be correct and that only
MOONRISE
must be wrong. Calida had found the word because it was obvious, and perhaps she had stuck with it because it appealed to her exotic nature.

The abbreviations for south and north—
So.
and
No.
—had to be considered. Bibi started with the former and began making a list in her spiral-bound notebook:
So. Remino, So. Mirone, So. Inmore, So. Emorin
….If the street bore somebody’s surname and had been meant to honor a local family or a valued person, there would be perhaps a score of possibilities.

Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
At the nearer window. Two feet from where she sat. The heavy blackout draperies prevented anyone from knowing her precise location.

After straining from the soup of letters as many possibilities as she could for the south and north lists, she quickly made another—and shorter—list using all eight letters in
MOONRISE
but without specifying a direction. She switched on the electronic map and began inputting the addresses, starting with the shortest list.

Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum. Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
The sound came from both windows simultaneously. So feeble. If not moths, imagination. No reason to react until glass broke.

11
O
MNI
R
OSE
W
AY.

NOT FOUND.

11
R
OSE
O
MNI
W
AY.

NOT FOUND
.

Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
Then more insistent though still quiet.
Tumtumtum, tumtumtum, tumtumtum.

11
R
OSE
M
INO
W
AY.

NOT FOUND.

11
S
IMEROON
W
AY.

NOT FOUND.

11
M
ORISOEN
W
AY.

NOT FOUND.

A scratching noise at the door. Like a dog standing on its hind legs and digging at the wood with its forepaws. Whatever it might be, if she opened the door, it would not be a dog.

11
S
ONOMIRE
W
AY.

On the screen of the electronic map appeared a cartographic spread of Orange County. A blinking red indicator drew her attention to Sonomire Way in the southeast quadrant, in unincorporated land under the county’s jurisdiction rather than that of any city. She summoned a full-screen view of the quadrant, and then of the fourth of the quadrant in which the street was located.

Sonomire Way was one in a grid of sixteen three-lane streets named this Way and that Way. The distance between streets and the lack of alleys resulted in blocks too large to serve as residential neighborhoods. She assumed it must be a business or industrial park, although no legend on the screen identified it by name.

When the scratching at the door ceased, someone insistently tried the doorknob, rattling it back and forth. There was no chance that this was an imagined noise or the work of a fog-loving moth, because she could see the light purling along the curve of the knob as it turned back and forth.

The knocking, the tapping at the window, the scratching, and now the testing of the lock didn’t seem to be the actions of someone who seriously wanted to get at Bibi right away. The entire performance felt like an attempt to distract her from finding a new word in
MOONRISE
, from the electronic map and the search for Sonomire Way.

The doorknob stopped turning. No one knocked or scratched.

As she switched off and unplugged the map, Bibi thought about the moment earlier in the evening when she had turned traitor against herself. Because of that self-betrayal, she had not purchased another butane lighter. If she became aware of tearing a sheet of paper into small pieces, with the intention of flushing it down the toilet, she would hope to be able to turn away from that intention, puzzle together the fragments, and read what she had meant to commit to a memory hole. That she had been a reluctant—even unaware—treasonist did not mean she had reformed or was ineffectual.

If
she
had been the one trying to distract herself from the search for Sonomire Way, however, the noises at the door and the windows should have been imaginary; yet she was certain she’d heard them. And she definitely saw the doorknob turning back and forth. If the sounds and the testing of the lock were real and if also she was the perpetrator of those distractions, then she must possess some paranormal power that she used unconsciously, like the living equivalent of a poltergeist.

The prospect of having such a power didn’t please her. If that was part of what she’d long hidden from herself by using Captain’s memory trick, she would prefer that the knowledge remained scattered ashes. If she managed to save Ashley Bell, all she wanted thereafter was to return to the tracks of a normal existence, to the life that cancer—and this obsession with the threatened girl—had derailed. Ordinary daily life, which so many people thought had no flash or filigree, was to Bibi at all times extraordinary; so much magic and wonder were at work in the world, so much mystery in its depths, that she didn’t want—and couldn’t cope with—any more than what it offered to anyone who was willing to
see.