Ashley Bell: A Novel (52 page)

On the electronic map, the grid of sixteen streets, eight east-west and eight north-south, was given no overarching name. But when the GPS announced that a right turn would bring Bibi to Sonomire Way, a monument sign resolved out of the dense fog, a monolith that might have been erected by godlike extraterrestrials to humble and inspire ape-stupid humanity to make something better of itself during the millennia to come. The slab stood about fourteen feet high and seven wide, polished black granite inlaid with a matte-finish stainless-steel band surrounding embedded Lucite letters that were a luminous blue now at four o’clock in the morning. The letters were smaller than might have been expected in those ninety-eight square feet of granite, as if the slab was a shout to get your attention and the words were a whisper, a name to be spoken only in a respectful hush:
SONOMIRE TECHNOLOGY PARK.

Cruising slowly, cautiously along the four-lane street, Bibi had an impression of vast properties. Enormous low-rise buildings, four and five stories, yet of a scale incomprehensible, were revealed only by landscape lamps, which were in fact security lamps in elegant disguise, floods of pale light frozen in mid swash, and by scattered ranks of windows where people or robots labored in spite of the hour. The architecture was unintelligible in the fog and perhaps troubling even in clear daylight, inhuman and somehow militaristic, so that the structures were moored like massive battleships in the sea of mist, no, like starship fleets preparing to venture forth to extinguish not merely cities but entire planets.

“Eleven Sonomire Way, one hundred yards ahead, on the left,” said the GPS.

Bibi pulled at once to the curb, killed the headlights and the engine. She turned off the electronic map and sat in darkness, as the fog invented the many caissons of a ghost army and rolled them slowly through the night. She kept thinking of the bludgeoned man and the gunshot woman in the house from which Ashley Bell had been kidnapped, their broken bloody bodies. Every injury that she had sustained earlier, in the battle with the brute in the Corona del Mar bungalow, seemed to ache more than ever. She needed to gather her courage; the one good thing about doing so was that, given how little courage she still had, she didn’t waste much time in the gathering of it.

She got out of the Honda. The chunk and rattle of the closing door winnowed through the fog, the former traveling not very far, the latter perhaps attracting attention if anyone waited alertly for her arrival. The night pressed white around her, clammy, chilly. Fog in her ears. In her throat. Her lungs heavy with inhaled mist, she found the sidewalk and proceeded on foot.

Apparently not every property in Sonomire Technology Park had built out, for Number 11 was surrounded by a construction fence with a wide double gate, half of which stood open. A metal sign wired to the closed half of the gate declared
THE FUTURE SITE OF TEREZIN, INC
. The announced completion date lay less than fourteen months away; therefore, lost in the fog must be considerable construction, perhaps finished wings of a central structure or entire completed buildings.

The only light on the property glowed in the windows of one of two large double-wide construction-office trailers. She approached with caution across the unevenly compacted and littered earth, peered in a window, and saw a room containing six or eight office chairs surrounding what appeared to be a dining-table-size scale model of the project. It was a sprawling complex of scalloped and sweeping buildings that seemed about to be airborne, situated among plazas shaded by groves of phoenix palms, enlivened by numerous fountains as well as by a body of water large enough to be called a lake.

Beyond another window lay a room containing two large drawing tables adjustable to various heights and angles, along with support furniture. Architect’s elevations and construction schedules were pinned to the corkboard walls.

She continued past a dark window to another where light leaked around a drawn blind and painted feathers on the fog. Muffled voices in that room tantalized her, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Construction crews began early in the day, though not before dawn. Whoever conspired here might be discussing serious issues more pertinent to Bibi than the cost of concrete and the expected delivery date of the next truckload of steel beams.

She proceeded to the rear of the double-wide, where another window proved to be covered by a pleated shade. She continued around the corner, hoping that the office extended the width of the trailer and that it might offer a last pane of glass over which no shade had been drawn.

In the impossible Mojave fog, two parked vehicles were almost fully concealed in mist as thick as mattress batting, one of them an entirely possible Cadillac Escalade, but the other an improbable sedan. Visibility remained so poor that Bibi had almost passed the big car before she recognized the Bentley ornament on the hood. She stepped close to confirm that the paint, when seen in better light, was pale enough to be café au lait.

When two worlds collided without catastrophe and occupied the same space, a world of cause and effect and an unpredictable world where supernatural wild cards could be thrown onto the table at any time, it seemed inevitable that former teacher and remade woman Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack should be there regardless of the hour. According to the ever-changing rules of this game, of all the real-estate developers in California, the one in charge of the Terezin project could have been no other than the shopaholic’s husband.

The most urgent questions now seemed to be where the grandly inflated breasts and the woman behind them were at this moment and whether Bibi could avoid the crazy bitch. Both were answered when the headlamps of the Bentley flared, dazzling Bibi, and the driver’s door opened.

She who had been first to recognize the young writer’s talent exited the sedan, limned by the interior light that flowed out after her and by the backwash of headlamps. As the woman approached, Bibi saw that she was dressed inappropriately for the hour and the place: stiletto heels, black toreador pants held up with a jeweled belt, a blouse that revealed enough cleavage in which to conceal a litter of kittens, and a white leather jacket with black detailing.

The former teacher, a subtle and calculating mistress of mean in the classroom, favored Bibi with an expression that was familiar from days of old, in spite of the extensive makeover of the woman’s features. A smug power-trip smirk. Colored with the inexplicable resentment of someone who, though you never offended her, believed that you were owed revenge. The woman felt now, as always, justified in doling out a real injury for an imagined one, pleased to rain upon her target a storm of petty reprisals.

Except that this time they might not be petty.

“I would ask you what the hell you think you’re doing here,” said Hoffline-Vorshack. “But I don’t care, and you would only lie, anyway. Like you lied about having a pistol and about possessing a concealed-carry license. You’re still the little rebel and liar you always were.”

The fog seemed to part for Hoffline-Vorshack, to vacate a space that she could occupy, as if she and the mist were two magnetic substances whose poles repelled.

“Stop right there,” Bibi said. “No closer.”

The woman stopped, but only after taking two more steps and forcing Bibi to back away from her. “Will you ever grow up, Gidget?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why? Because it strikes a nerve? Frivolous little Gidget, all about surfing and beach-blanket parties and looking cute in a bikini, an even more empty-headed and ridiculous version of your perpetually adolescent parents.”

“You don’t know anything about my parents, you don’t know who they are.”

“They came to parent-teacher meetings, didn’t they? I knew them at first glance for what they were. And I’ve always known you’re a girl in need of discipline.”

Bibi didn’t think anyone in the trailer could hear them, but she drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, just the same.

The former teacher’s smile was a mezzaluna of contempt, no less sharp than the crescent-shaped kitchen knife of which it reminded Bibi. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, you stupid girl, running around in the night, playing Nancy Drew. Or worse than killed. We can take you down and break you down so completely, no one could ever put you together again. And we will.”

The wired sharks in a dead swim overhead. Decades of surfers, fit and tanned, standing tall with their shortboards and longboards, smiling on the walls. And on the table, on the notebook page, five words:
I am a Valiant girl.

“This is wild,” Pogo said. “But I know what that means.”

“Me, too.”

“Of course you, too. Those books.”

“Those books,” Pax agreed, his mouth gone dry, his heart finding a new rhythm.

The next two lines read,
When I saw her yesterday, why didn’t I ask Halina Berg if she’d heard of Robert Warren Faulkner—is he a known neo-Nazi?

“Either name mean anything to you?” Pogo asked.

“Halina Berg is vaguely familiar, but not the other.”

“How could she see this Halina Berg yesterday? She’s four days in a coma.”

“She couldn’t have.”

The fourth line began to appear, flowed swiftly, and, with the concluding question mark, read,
Why didn’t I ask Halina Berg about Ashley Bell?

“The name in her tattoo,” Pogo said.

For a minute or so, they both watched the notebook, waiting impatiently for a fifth line of script to appear, but then Pogo resorted to his smartphone.

Kanani returned to ask if they wanted anything more, and Pax said they didn’t, and she left the check.

While Pax busied himself with calculating the tip and paying the tab, Pogo said, “It’s not as bad as John Smith or Heather anything, but there are enough Ashley Bells spread around the country to waste more time than we have.”

“Try Robert Warren Faulkner.”

“Already on it.”

Nothing more appeared on the open pages of the notebook. Pax was reluctant to leaf farther back in the volume, in search of more deeply buried messages, lest he disturb whatever connection allowed this communication from Bibi in her coma or from whatever Otherwhere she also inhabited. It was as if his girl, adrift on the sea of an alien world, had put a message in a bottle and tossed it overboard, and somehow it had surfaced on the shores of
this
world.

He picked up his Corona. Put it down without taking a sip. His fingers were wet with condensation from the bottle. He blotted them on his jeans. He realized that he had grown nervous. He was rarely nervous. Cautious, concerned, alarmed, even afraid, yes, but seldom nervous. He tipped his head back and gazed up at the sharks. He knew how to deal with sharks. It was part of his training. He knew how to deal with the loss of men he fought with, brothers and friends, every one of them. He didn’t know how to deal well with loss outside the context of war.

Pogo said, “There’s a bunch of Robert Faulkners, but in a quick search, none of them with that middle name.”

“Halina Berg.”

Pogo came back to him quickly on that one. “It’s a pen name. She wrote one book under it. Her first novel. Something called
Out of the Mouth of the Dragon.
”

“Whose pen name?”

The smartphone was the planet in Pogo’s hand, which billions of advertising dollars and the wisdom of uncountable pundits had assured him was tech magic, the only true magic. But when he looked up, his eyes seemed to see—and his face to reflect—the wonder of a witness to otherworldly mystery that, luminous and melodic, had just entered the comparatively dim and discordant world of high-tech.

“Halina Berg was a pen name for Toba Ringelbaum.”

As a girl, Toba had escaped the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where her mother died in a typhoid epidemic. Later, she survived as well the Auschwitz death camp, where her father perished. Decades after marrying Max Klein and emigrating to the U.S., she’d written a series of young-adult novels about a school for girls, Valiant Academy, where the multitalented headmistress was an adventurer and master of martial arts who not only educated her charges, but also led them on thrilling missions against villains who represented one face or another of the hydra-headed evil that was totalitarianism.

Pax knew all that because he knew Toba Ringelbaum. He had met her twice in Bibi’s company. Pogo knew the old woman even better, having visited her often with Bibi.

Bibi had found the Valiant Girl series when she was ten and had read and reread the novels through her teens.

In the notebook, her handwriting seemed almost to glow:
When I saw her yesterday, why didn’t I ask Halina Berg if she’d heard of Robert Warren Faulkner—is he a known neo-Nazi?

That question gave rise to another one in Paxton’s mind: Why would she refer to her friend and mentor Toba Ringelbaum by the writer’s pen name?

“I’ll call Toba,” said Pogo, “if you want to go there.”

“Oh, I want to go there, all right,” Pax said. “But come on. Let’s roll. I’ll call her from the car.”