Ashley Bell: A Novel (50 page)

Spitting out wordless expressions of malevolent determination, the unseen creature seemed to have squirmed under the front passenger seat, trying to negotiate the adjustment tracks and the substructure, intent upon making its way into the forward footwell, from which it might more easily spring upon her.

Unwilling to abandon the car to proceed on foot through this strange and hostile night, Bibi pulled the pistol from under her blazer and drove with only her left hand, which required her to let the Honda’s speed drop.

If not cast back in time to that fearful night before her sixth birthday, she was at least cast back in spirit. There is no adult terror equivalent to what an innocent child experiences when first confronted with the truth that evil is not merely a figment of fairy tales, that it walks the world in countless forms, and that what it seeks most aggressively is the destruction of the innocent. With such an experience, childhood ends, regardless of the age at which that awful discovery is made. Bibi tasted again the metallic flavor of the first knowledge of evil, felt the childhood terror thrumming in her veins, her heart slamming as if it would either break the breastbone that armored it or hammer itself apart. The sense of helplessness that she had endured on that long-ago night was intolerable now, a condition to which she would not—
would not!
—allow herself to be subjected, not after all these years of striving to put behind her the primal—forgotten—horrors of her youth in favor of the ordinary fears and threats of a normal life.

“No,” she said, “hell, no, no, this cannot happen, will not happen,
is not happening.
”

Even though the writhing, twitching, wretchedly graceless thing had been real in the bungalow bedroom, it was not real here. She had killed it that night, whatever it had been, killed it by a means that she could not remember. Seventeen years later, it could not return to torment her. It was of another place and time, it could not possibly materialize like a ghost to haunt her now. The thing thrashing under the passenger seat, calling to her in phlegmy knotted syllables with less meaning than the cries of any animal, was only another variation of the thing that had knocked on the motel door, tapped on the motel window, a
distraction
like the fog and the spirits in the house from which the girl had been kidnapped, like the man in the hoodie and the golden retriever that had tried to lure her away from the search for Ashley Bell.

Like Chubb Coy. The chief of hospital security. What did he have to do with any of this except to serve as a distraction, to thwart her by misdirection? He showed up at Norm’s, at breakfast with St. Croix, later popped into the professor’s Victorian retreat to kill her when she might have been about to make an important revelation, alluding to Flannery O’Connor and Thornton Wilder and Jack London, with whose work he was no more likely to be familiar than he was likely to be a master of particle physics.

Suddenly a truth about Chubb Coy circled Bibi, circled like a night bird gliding the darkness with a keen eye on its prey, the same truth from which she had recoiled earlier, the truth that she had burned with the memory trick. She drove with her left hand, the pistol clutched in her right, weaving along the lonely highway, her heart seeming to jump-jump-jump rather than merely beat, frenzied convulsions in her chest, and she thought,
He didn’t quote those books because he wanted to, he quoted them because I made him do it.
That was not the truth that she rendered ashes in the motel sink, but it was somehow a funhouse-mirror reflection of that truth. She didn’t understand how she could make Chubb Coy do anything. That made no sense. She kept replaying the curious thought, trying to understand it, but instead of gaining clarity with repetition, it lost coherence—until she abruptly realized that the thing under the passenger seat, the unwanted passenger, had been silent for some time.

Room 456. Sunday afternoon, 3:29. Blue sky beyond the window. Sun westering but not yet declining in a red swoon. On the EKG screen, the girl’s heart rate spiking, the sound switched off but the trace line pumping, pumping faster. On the EEG, five brain wave indicators all tracking optimal patterns simultaneously, as every neurologist knew was not possible.

Nancy sat near the window, holding a newspaper that she hadn’t requested but that she had accepted from a well-meaning young candy striper, seeming to read it but never turning from the front page to the second.

Perched on another chair with his smartphone, Murph checked the surf conditions in Australia. Byron Bay and Narrabeen and Torquay and Point Danger. Then on to Bali: wave height at Kuta Reef, Nusa Dua, Padang Padang. Mainland Mexico at Mazatlán and San Blas. Todos Santos in Baja California, and Scorpion Bay. Durban in South Africa, and Cape St. Francis. He wouldn’t be surfing any of them today, probably never. He kept checking anyway. Pipeline and Sunset and Waimea on the north shore of Oahu. Honolulu Bay and Maalaea on Maui. He felt that he was losing his grip on sanity, sliding slowly into a defensive kind of madness.

Between Hawaii and Uruguay, he looked up from the phone and saw the EKG, where the heart trace was jumping above and below the midline, systolic and diastolic as they should be, not irregular, but faster than he had seen them track before.

In the bed, hair frizzed out around the grotesque electro cap, Bibi lay in silence, as she had lain for days. But then abruptly she groaned in distress.

Nancy dropped the newspaper and got to her feet. She reached the bed just as Bibi said, “No, hell, no, no…”

Waves and tides and far places forgotten, Murph scrambled bedside, the girl between him and Nancy.

Her sweet face squinched and her closed eyes closed tighter. “…cannot happen, will not happen,
is not happening.
”

Leaning over the bedrail, putting a hand on Bibi’s shoulder, Nancy said, “Sweetie, do you hear me? Bibi, it’s okay. We’re here, honey. Daddy and me, both here.”

“Not happening, not happening,” Bibi insisted. She turned her head from side to side, as though afflicted. Denying, resisting.

Murph reached for the call button looped to the bedrail, but he hesitated to push it.

There was a father-daughter connection that had always been a mystery to him, a knowing without knowing how, knowing when she was safe and when she was not. She could be at the Wedge in wicked water, riding mountains, big quakers three times her height, with the very real danger of being swept into the stacked rocks of the breakwater at the harbor’s mouth, where surfers had been killed, but he knew that he didn’t need to worry. Another time, she might have been with a friend or two, riding bicycles nowhere more dangerous than on the paved “boardwalk” that served the long peninsula or in the lightly traveled streets south of Balboa’s lower pier; and he phoned her to suggest that she come home or stop by Pet the Cat to keep him company for a while. She’d always heard the vague note of worry in his voice, and she had always done as he asked, and nothing had ever happened to her. But he believed that something might have happened if he hadn’t phoned her and changed the pattern of her day. It wasn’t as powerful as clairvoyance, this connection, but it was stronger than a hunch.

When Bibi groaned again and rolled her head upon the pillow, Nancy moved her hand from the girl’s shoulder to her bruised face. “Honey, can you hear me? Will you wake up for your mom? Can you wake up and smile for Daddy and me?”

In that way of knowing without knowing how, Murph understood that, as irrational as it seemed, Bibi was safe in the coma, or at least safer than she would be if she woke. The injuries to her face and the tattoo, as mysterious as stigmata, argued against what he felt, but the feeling remained undiminished. In fact he sensed that the coma was her only hope, that somehow in the coma she had a chance to…to what? Somehow defeat the cancer? The gliomatosis cerebri that no one had ever survived? Was that truly a possibility or only a father’s desperate wish? He watched her eyes twitching rapidly beneath the pale lids, looked at the five brain waves describing their optimal patterns, a phenomenon never before witnessed, and he thought about who Bibi was, the unique girl she had always been, and his desperate wish seemed like a rational hope.

Bibi repeated,
“Is not happening.”

Putting a hand to her daughter’s brow, which was half covered by the electro cap, Nancy again urged her to wake, to return to them.

“No!”
Murph whispered, but with such force that he startled his wife. “No, no, no, baby. Let her sleep. She needs to sleep.”

Nancy regarded him as if he were the king of kooks, a spleet, a geek-a-mo. “This isn’t sleep, Murph. This is a damn hateful cancer coma.”

Indicating the brain-wave readout, he said, “It isn’t a coma. It’s…something.”

Nancy looked from him to the precious girl, to him again, and whatever she saw in his face, his eyes, gave her pause.

A blush suffused Murph’s brow, his cheeks, a heat not quite like anything he had felt before. Fine beads of perspiration prickled his face, a sweat of awe, if there could be such a thing. His face must be glazed and shining; and he knew that his eyes were. Staring at his daughter, reassuring his wife, he said, “She’s walking the board.”

In the Honda, across the street and twenty yards uphill from Solange St. Croix’s house, Pogo sat behind the steering wheel, and Pax sat shotgun. Scattered through a rich currency of shadows, gold coins of sunlight shimmered on the windshield.

“Holy moly, Batman,” Pogo said. “What would have happened to us if we’d gone up with her to the third floor?”

“I think my SEAL training would have been enough to get me out alive. I’m told you can punch pretty hard with your right.”

“Half-and-half with Scotch. Did her mother start her on that in the crib?”

Surveying the large sheets of heavily tinted window glass in the stacked slabs of the house, wondering if he and Pogo were watched in turn by the woman and if, catlike, she were licking cream from her lips, Pax said, “There’s something about her that’s almost likable. In fact, I feel sorry for her.”

Pogo wasn’t convinced. “How does that work?”

“She pretends she’s made the life she wanted, but on some level, she knows she got it wrong. She wanted artistic influence, and she got raw power instead. She wanted a literary life, but she got a life of writers’ conferences and symposiums and committees pressing for fiction to sell the approved social issues of the moment. Cocktail parties where networking takes the place of wit. Being targeted by envy blogs. She fancied herself a free spirit, Holly Golightly, but with a Jane Austen brain. But there’s no room at all for free spirits in modern academia, with its speech codes and humorless moralizing. So she makes two lives for herself, or three for all we know, or four, and in the end there’s no satisfaction in being multiple Solange St. Croixs instead of one.”

Pogo stared at him.

After a moment, Pax said, “What?”

“I thought you just blew up things.”

“I’ve blown up a lot of things.” Pax looked at his wristwatch, at the dashboard clock, and felt again that time was running out. “We better get moving.”

Starting the engine, Pogo said, “Well, all I know is, she pushed Beebs out of the writing program and humiliated her in a supermarket that time. And she called her some pretty rank names.”

As they drove downhill toward Coast Highway and the commercial heart of Laguna Beach, Pax said, “Okay, position check. For some reason, we don’t know why, Captain gives Bibi a list of quotations celebrating imagination.”

“Yeah. And she reads it so often, she just about wears out the paper.”

“So then Captain dies. Bibi’s ten, she’s brokenhearted, deep in mourning. She writes stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper.”

“Hundreds of pages of stories.”

“And one day a dog named Jasper shows up out of the blue.”

“Yeah. But she hides his collar with his name on it.”

“You’re sure she never told you about it.”

“Never did,” Pogo confirmed, and he turned north on Coast Highway.

“Then she’s seventeen,” Pax said, “and she writes about St. Croix’s house—”

“It’s a stupid lie that Beebs got a key and went in there.”

“Of course. But just by observing St. Croix, by considering the professor’s psychology, and by applying her imagination, she got it uncannily right. How’s that possible?”

“Well, because she’s Beebs.”

“I’m not Watson, and you’re for sure not Sherlock.” Pax checked his G-Shock watch again. “Can you make a little speed?”

As usual, Laguna traffic came to a choke point at Forest Avenue. Pogo said, “I’ve souped up this crate, but it doesn’t teleport.”

Pax said, “Sorry. It’s just I think we don’t have much time to work this out, we’ve got to move.”

“Move. Okay. But where are we going?”

Pax took a deep breath and blew it out. “I don’t know.”