Ashley Bell: A Novel (47 page)

Sitting in Bibi’s kitchen, Paxton repeatedly thought that they needed candlelight, that he should put half a dozen or more votives on the table, though it was only 2:15 in the afternoon, with sunlight strong at the windows, and though the occasion certainly didn’t call for a romantic atmosphere. And several times he detected the rich fragrance of roses, although there were no roses in the apartment, nor any air freshener, as far as he could see, that might explain the phantom scent. These odd sensations felt akin to those moments in the hospital room when Bibi’s voice had come to him.

The perfume of roses wafted over him again when he stared in puzzlement at the tiny plastic bag that contained a desiccated scrap of human scalp from which sprouted a lock of thick white hair matted, around the roots, with dry rust-red blood.

“Well, if we’re looking for unBibi,” he said, “this seems about as un as it gets.”

“In a way, yeah, and in a way, no,” Pogo said. “The day of her grandfather’s funeral—”

“Captain, you mean?”

“Yeah. Everyone came from the cemetery to the bungalow for the usual get-together. You know—food, booze, memories. Like seventy or eighty people. It was a crowd, it got noisy. I realized Beebs wasn’t there anymore. She was torn up. She loved the guy. I figured if she’d go anywhere, she’d go to the ocean. So I walked down to Inspiration Point, and there she was, sitting on a bench. She didn’t see me until I sat beside her—and she was holding that little plastic bag in both hands.”

Pax said, “This is the captain’s hair?”

“Yeah. Seems when the aneurysm broke, he must’ve shot to his feet before he fell. He was a tall guy. On the way down, he hit the edge of the table hard, right at the sharp corner. Left behind that piece of skin and the hair stuck to it. Bibi took it after she found him, kept it.”

“Why would she do that? Seems too macabre for her.”

“She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. We’ve always been totally open with each other about most things, you know, but there’s always been this need-to-know clause, too, and neither of us ever violates it. She made me promise not to tell anyone, and I didn’t—until you. Anyway, I was just eight, she was ten, she was teaching me to move from a bellyboard to a shortboard, and she was a goddess to me. She still is. Always will be. You expect a goddess to have secrets, it’s part of their mystery, and you don’t want to learn their secrets, because if you learn them, you die.”

Pax considered the contents of the plastic bag for a moment, but then put it aside to examine the remaining four items in the metal box.

In the third-floor hallway, beyond the topmost of the stairs, a dead woman lay as further testament to the savagery of those who had invaded the house. Perhaps the corpse on the second floor had been her husband, and she had stood here as a last defense against the invaders, because not far from her lay, of all things, a pitchfork that would have no purpose in this elegant and stylishly furnished residence. The tines of that rustic weapon were not wet with blood, so Bibi could only assume that this poor woman, who lacked the effective defense of a gun, had no chance to wound the murderers of her husband. She didn’t want to examine the corpse, but she felt obliged to have a quick look at it, as if she owned a portion of the responsibility for what had happened here and must answer for it, though of course she was not accountable for what Terezin and his followers might do to anyone. They would do the same—or worse—to her if they got the chance. The woman had been shot more than once. In stomach, chest, and face. Bibi looked away, less in horror than in pity, as if to conduct even one more second in autopsy would somehow make her complicit in the murder.

She didn’t think that she would find a third dead body, but she proceeded along the hallway in dread of precisely such a discovery. If Ashley had hidden in her room, they would have found her and taken her away. According to Terezin himself, he wanted the girl for his upcoming birthday. Most likely, on that day, she would be raped in imaginative ways, later tortured, and then murdered in a ceremonial manner, as in his madness he set out to launch once more the Final Solution of what Hitler called “the Jewish problem.” But if the cultists, Terezin’s followers, had
not
taken the girl from the house, if she had resisted, as her father on the second floor and her mother on the third had resisted, their intention of taking her alive might have been foiled.

When she came to the room on the left, at the end of the hall, where the door stood half open, Bibi knew what else she would find in addition to either a dead girl or no girl at all: horses. Pistol in her right hand, aimed at the floor, no longer concerned that any of the fascist murderers remained in the house, Bibi crossed the threshold.

Her premonition was fulfilled: paintings of horses, bronzes of horses, porcelains of horses, books about horses. This house was one more thing that Bibi had forgotten, apparently by using Captain’s memory trick. She had been here before, but she didn’t know when or for what purpose. Hour by hour, she found more memories that had been burned, fragments of which survived in ashen form: this house, this room, the fact that Ashley Bell loved horses, might ride them as well as admire them. She thought,
I must know Ashley, I must at least have met her once!
Why else would this residence be familiar to her? How else could she have known about the horse motif in this bedroom?

The doors of a tall built-in armoire stood open. The clothes that had hung within it had been taken out and thrown on the floor.

She approached it with trepidation, although she did not raise the pistol. The secret panel in the back of the armoire, which Bibi had somehow known would be there, had been slid aside. The closet-size space thus revealed was unoccupied. If the girl had hidden there, Terezin and his men had found her.

Suddenly Paxton felt that they were running out of time. The sensation came out of nowhere, for no apparent cause, an impression of a brink looming, a void beyond. He became certain that Bibi was receding from him, captured by someone sinister and being carried away at high speed, in what direction and to what destination he couldn’t know. Which made no sense. She was comatose in the hospital. Nobody could abduct her from a secure medical facility. And if her condition had changed, Nancy or Murphy would have been on the phone to him.

The fourth item in the black metal box was a small recorder. It contained a microcassette, but they couldn’t listen to it because the batteries were dead.

While Pogo searched pantry shelves and kitchen drawers for spare batteries, Pax examined the fifth item, a twice-folded sheet of lined yellow paper on which were written a number of quotations and the attributions of their sources. The handwriting wasn’t Bibi’s, neither her precise adult script nor the decorative girlhood variant. The strong, slanted cursive seemed to suggest that a man had composed the list. The cheap paper was deteriorating at the corners, foxed by time and skin oil; and it had been opened and closed so many times that, at some point, the folds had been reinforced with Scotch tape.

Pax began reading the quotations aloud for Pogo’s benefit. “ ‘This world is but canvas to our imaginations.’ That’s from something by Henry David Thoreau.”

Pogo said, “The Walden Pond guy.”

“So you paid attention in school, after all.”

“No matter how much you try to keep that stuff out of your head, some of it gets in.”

“The next one’s also from Thoreau. ‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ ”

Having found a package of Duracell AAA batteries, Pogo brought two of them to the table. “Was Thoreau the Walden Pond guy
and
the power-of-positive-thinking guy?”

“No. That was Norman Vincent Peale. This next one’s by someone named Anatole France. ‘To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.’ ”

“Maybe I’m seeing a theme,” Pogo said as he removed the dead batteries from the recorder.

“Me, too. Imaginations, imagined, imagine. Here’s one from Joseph Conrad.”

Pogo said, “The
Heart of Darkness
guy.”

“Kid, you are such a fraud.” Pax cleared his throat and then read, “ ‘Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’ ”

“That’s heavy, dude.”

The sense of time running out, of some catastrophe looming over Bibi, grew stronger. Pax glanced from his watch to the wall clock, where the second hand swept smoothly around the face but where the minute hand
twitched
from 2:19 to 2:20, clicked like a trigger.

“Here’s another one. Kenneth Grahame wrote—”

Pogo interrupted. “He’s the
Wind in the Willows
guy. Mr. Toad, Mole, Badger, Ratty, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and all that.”

“So he wrote, ‘As a rule, indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.’ You know who Wallace Stevens was?”

“A poet guy. New batteries don’t help. The recorder is biffed.”

“Biffed?”

“Biffed, totally thrashed, broke, whatever. But I know someone who can fix it.”

“So this Wallace Stevens poet guy wrote, ‘In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.’ There’s one more. You might have heard of him. Shakespeare. ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.’ ”

Pogo considered Shakespeare, and then shook his head. “It’ll give me a migraine. What do you figure the list means?”

“Whatever it means, I think her grandfather wrote it.”

“Captain. Yeah. And I think she’s the one who opened it and read it so often, she wore out the creases.”

Pax glanced from his wristwatch to the digital time readout on the microwave, to the digital readout on the conventional oven, to the window, where the afternoon light had not begun to wane to any appreciable degree. Nevertheless, within him, a clock spring of worry wound tighter, tighter.

“You got a dance to go to?” Pogo asked.

“Bibi’s talking to me again,” Pax decided.

“What’s she saying?”

“It’s not words this time. It’s a feeling. That time’s running out. That someone bad is coming after her, and fast.”

Pogo looked grim. “The brain cancer.”

“Not some
thing
bad—some
one.
”

“Nancy and Murph are with her, one or the other, usually both, and not just them.”

“It’s not something that’ll happen in the hospital. It’s going to happen…wherever else she is.”

Pogo said, “I know we’re in the Twilight Zone. I accept that. But it still sounds nuts when you say things like that.”

Pax took the sixth item from the document box, a children’s picture book with a story told in short sentences and simple words.
Cookie’s Big Adventure.

“That’s been in print forever,” Pogo said. “It was Nancy’s favorite when she was little. She gave me a copy when I was five.”

“Didn’t Bibi like it?”

“Yeah, I guess. When she was little. Personally, I didn’t think it was such deathless literature.”

“If she liked it,” Pax said, “why isn’t it on a shelf in the living room or in her office?”

“Beats me.” As Pax leafed through
Cookie’s Big Adventure,
Pogo took the final item from the lockbox. “The saint bitch.”

“The who?”

Brandishing a few pages of typescript that were held together with a paper clip, Pogo said, “This is the piece Beebs wrote for the professor who made her bail out of the writing program.” He affected a snooty voice to pronounce her name: “Dr. Solange St. Croix.”

“In this case,” Pax said, “snarky doesn’t work when your name is Averell Beaumont Stanhope the Third.”

“Point taken. You ever read this?”

“She told me about it, but I never saw it.”

Pogo passed the four pages to him. “Read it. Maybe you’ll see what pissed off the great professor. Neither of us can figure it.”

Glancing from watch to clock to ovens, Pax said, “Maybe I should read it in the car, while we’re going wherever you’re getting the cassette recorder fixed.”

“It’s in the box with this other stuff, maybe it has something to do with what’s happening. Read it now.”

Relenting, Pax read the pages aloud, interrupting himself with laughter a few times, although the amusing lines were never mean. “Totally Bibi.”

“Vivid,” Pogo agreed.

“But I don’t see why it made the professor go ballistic.”

“Okay, then. Maybe that’s our best first lead.”

“How so?”

“Why don’t we visit Saint Bitch and ask her what made her blow like Vesuvius? I know where she lives.”

Pax no longer consulted the wall clock or the wristwatch, or the LED readouts on the ovens, because behind his face rather than upon it, unseen but sensed, a sweep hand swept away the seconds. He was as acutely aware of the passage of time as he’d been in certain moments of battle, felt time flowing as sand might feel as it slid through the pinched waist of an hourglass. They had found a trove of curious objects, but they had deduced little from them. Considered action was always better than considered inaction, even if talking to a college professor about her response to a student’s writing, five years earlier, didn’t seem to be enough action to amount to a damn.

“Okay,” he said, getting up from the table. “Let’s go see the professor.”

“You do the interrogation,” Pogo said.

“It’s not an interrogation. Just a chat.”

“The way she treated Beebs, I wouldn’t mind waterboarding her.”

“I never waterboarded anyone. Never used thumbscrews, electric shocks to the genitals, bamboo shoots under fingernails, never played loud disco music at anyone to break him—none of that Hollywood stuff. Psychology and a good shit detector are mostly all you need.”

Pax folded the sheet of handwritten quotations about imagination and paper-clipped it to the four pages of Bibi’s writing that had so incensed Dr. St. Croix. He tucked them into the panther-and-gazelle notebook that contained the stories about Jasper the dog. He didn’t see any reason to take the dog collar or the children’s book, or the little plastic bag with the lock of Captain’s hair, and Pogo had the tape recorder that needed to be repaired.

“Hang in there, Beebs,” he said, and Pogo asked if he thought she could hear him, and he said, “No. But it’s not the first time I’ve talked to her out loud when she wasn’t there to hear.”