Ashley Bell: A Novel (55 page)

In the west, the sun settled toward the sea, and there were just enough clouds of varied textures to ensure, a quarter of an hour from now, the day would come to its end with a burning sky. As if melting, shadows elongated in the golden light, which would soon be red.

At the window in Room 456, Nancy looked down at the hospital parking lot and didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like it at all, and turned away. The rows of parked cars reminded her of caskets lined up the way that she had seen them on the news when men killed in war were sent home by the planeload.

Murph had gone downstairs to the cafeteria to get sandwiches and pasta salads for dinner, which they would eat together in this room. Neither of them wanted to leave until visiting hours were over, and perhaps not even then.

While Murph was getting their dinner, Nancy had decided to bail out of the real-estate business, depending on what happened next. She loved selling houses, helping people who needed new homes, and she was good at it, better at being a Realtor than Murph was at selling surfboards, and he was pretty darned good. But if something happened to Bibi—not just the undefined
something,
face it, if she died—every property in the world would be, to Nancy, haunted. Every house she showed to every prospective buyer would have been a house where Bibi might have lived one day and raised a family with Pax. Every bare lot, waiting for an architect to finish the house design, would be a gravesite waiting for a headstone. Wrung like a rag in the hands of anxiety, that is what she told herself as she paced the room.

Although it sounded as if she might be making a bargain with fate, she wasn’t promising to give up her career if only Bibi were allowed to live. There was no point in such dickering. That kind of sentimental gesture made you feel a little better if you were feeling like crap, gave you a sense of control when in fact you had none, but it was meaningless. What would happen would happen. Fate was a bitch; she made no bargains. What Nancy was really saying to herself, by planning to give up real-estate sales, was that losing her daughter so young would surely drain the meaning from her work, her life. But you had to face reality even when reality sucked.

She was standing at the foot of the bed, watching the comatose girl, when dried blood and fresh blood
flew
from Bibi’s damaged ear, spattered across the pillowcase, the sheets. As though an invisible presence had clawed open the crusted abrasions, blood dribbled from them again.

For a hundred feet or so, Bibi made her way through a white-out worthy of an arctic blizzard, a white-out without wind or polar cold, but nonetheless disorienting and fearsome. When the lights of the construction-trailer windows were hardly brighter than the phantom phosphorescence on a just-switched-off TV screen, she took her flashlight from an inside jacket pocket and dared to switch it on.

If they had roaming security guards, she might be seen, but she could not worry about that. Intuition told her, the threats she faced from this point would not be as mundane as rent-a-cops. Since Pogo had brought the Honda to Pet the Cat, since she had set out on this quest, she had gone much farther than the miles on the odometer would attest. She felt as if she had traveled to an unknown country on an undiscovered continent, to the brink of a nameless abyss. There was the known world and the supernatural world that shadowed it, and the veil that had been deteriorating between them now began to dissolve entirely.

Or maybe it was another veil rotting by the moment, a veil between her life as she believed it to have been and her life as it truly had been, between what she was and what she could be. The abyss on the brink of which she stood was the truth.

Her body ached from the beating she had taken at the hands of the man she had killed, and her ear felt as if it were afire. She had left the Tylenol in the car. Didn’t matter. The pain would not incapacitate her. It focused her instead, sharpened her senses.

The thick fog resisted the power of light, and the flashlight beam proved a feeble tool. The fog did not only pool and eddy and creep, but also clung to surfaces in a way not foglike. Within the general murk, thicker shrouds grew like moss on tool-storage sheds, on pallets of concrete blocks and stacked crates of cobblestones. It draped backhoes and forklifts and other equipment like sheets thrown over furniture in a house closed for the season.

She became aware of—or imagined—low swift shapes paralleling her in the cloaking mist. They were pale-gray and featureless, as low as dogs or bobcats, but they were neither of those animals, slinkier than dogs and larger than bobcats, larger also than coyotes, wolfish and elusive. She saw no eye shine, and if they were more than shadows of a threat conjured by her mind, they were as silent as spirits.

The property would feel huge in broad daylight; but at night and in this murk, it seemed to be even more immense, a county unto itself. Bibi more sensed than saw the swooping forms of completed and half-finished buildings akin to those in the scale model in the construction trailer. Twice she came upon enormous cranes balanced by massive counterweights, their girdered booms vanishing high into the mist, like fossilized upright carcasses from the Jurassic period.

She moved at a turtle’s pace, and the farther east she went toward the back of the property, the more finished the project seemed to be, as if they had begun construction there and worked westward. At times the compacted earth gave way to cobblestone paths, to plazas paved with limestone inlaid with patterns in quartzite and granite, glimpsed through the turbid shifting mist. She circled the raised base of a fountain with a currently dry pool that must have been fifty feet in diameter, from the center of which rose what might have been, had the fog relented, a school of bronze dolphins leaping together, perhaps to spout water when the pool was filled and the pumps were started.

Bibi began to feel as if she had lost her way in an amorphous maze that foiled her by continually altering the route that would allow it to be successfully navigated, but then she saw lights ahead. They were faint at first, and curious, two measured series of large spheres, the first row perhaps fifteen feet above the ground, the second row about fifteen feet above the first. As they grew slowly brighter, she suspected that they weren’t floating spheres, but were instead windows formed like portholes, each six or seven feet in diameter. Her suspicion was confirmed when she drew close enough to make out the muntins that radiated from the center of each window and held the pie-shaped panes in place.

Although she could at first perceive the structure’s shape only by inference from the size and placement of the portholes, it had the feeling of a gargantuan vessel. She approached it with a shiver of wonder, as perhaps anyone in 1912 would have, from dockside, looked up with awe at the towering
Titanic.
Even within a few yards of the place, when she determined that it was not a vessel but a building, she could not discern more than a fraction of its details, though she sensed that it was longer than a football field, domed like an airplane hangar, and without windows on the ground floor. Walking alongside the structure, sliding a hand over the curved wall, she decided that it was skinned in metal, and she felt large, regularly placed exterior ribs forged of steel.

By the time she reached one end of the building and found a flat wall, the wolfish stalkers, real or imagined, attended her in greater numbers, as though they had been trained especially to protect this special edifice to which Bibi now sought an entrance. They were shadows of shadows. Surely immaterial. Except, now she heard subtle panting and the tick-click of claws on paving stones. She had the pistol in hand, wet with condensed fog and perhaps with Hoffline-Vorshack’s blood, but she had little faith that it would prove effective against the shadow horde—or even against one of them.

A fuzzy reflection of the flashlight flared in a matte-finished steel door, about five feet wide and eight tall, rounded at the top and protected by an overhanging cowl, medieval in spite of the material from which it had been crafted. There was no door handle or anything like a conventional keyhole, nor a slot into which she might insert a key card. The only possible lock release was a large oval hole in the wide steel frame encircling the door.

Bibi stood defeated for a moment but then remembered. From a pocket of her blazer, she withdrew the electronic key attached by a chain to the Lucite fob in which a dead wasp took wing forever.

The house in Cameo Highlands was to music what Toba Ringelbaum’s house was to books. Ganesh Patel, surf legend and audio-video god, had designed, manufactured, and sold a lot of through-house music systems; but in his own home, he had a standalone system in every room. The issues were volume, clarity, and ideal reverberation, and he was always making improvements to his equipment setups.

When Pax and Pogo stopped by to get the repaired tape recorder, the living room boomed with music Pax had never heard before. It was Hawaiian sway and steel guitar, it was rockin’ piano, it was tied together by backup harmony worthy of Motown, and the lead singer sounded like Elton John if Elton had been born in Nashville and grown up listening to Johnny Cash. But it was good. Their host turned the music down just far enough that they didn’t have to shout to hear one another.

“
This
little puppy,” Ganesh said, presenting the cassette recorder on the palm of his hand, “was sweet for its time. Plus it made you feel as sly and cool as a spy, how you could conceal it, a microphone that pulled from across the room. Even if you interviewed someone openly, with this puppy on the table, it felt
clandestine.
”

“Could we turn the music down a little more?” Pogo asked.

Ganesh smiled and shook his head. “Not really.”

He was thin and dark and intense, perhaps as intense as his paternal grandfather, who as a New Delhi street performer had tamed cobras with the usual flute, but also sometimes with just his hands, caressing them into a stupor at the risk of a lethal bite. Grandpa might or might not have been a snake charmer. He might or might not have stroked and tickled cobras into a trance with his bare hands. There were those who said that Ganesh had been born and raised in Boston, into a family that had run restaurants for three generations, and that the closest he had gotten to India was watching Bollywood musicals in his twelve-seat home theater. With his thick black hair and lean good looks and large, expressive eyes, Ganesh had all the success with women that he could handle, but he was not above tapping his cultural heritage—real and imagined—when he felt that the new beauty who attracted him would respond to an extra layer of exotic personal history. No one, not even the women, took offense at or disapproved of Ganesh’s biographical elaborations, because he was unfailingly ebullient and entertaining and likable.

“This old dude on the tape,” he said, “was he Bibi’s uncle or something?”

“Her grandfather,” Pax said. “Nancy’s dad.”

“Wow. More like Grandpa Munster than Grandpa Walton. Was he an alky or a serious mushroom-eater, or what?”

“He was a retired Marine,” Pax said. “Never met him. He died before I showed up. But Bibi loved him. The music is really loud.”

“Isn’t it great? You can’t help moving to it,” Ganesh said, jiving in place. “You didn’t say not to listen to the tape, so I listened.”

“That’s all right,” Pogo said.

“I thought if it was a little damaged, I could do a transfer and clean up the sound. But it was clear. Clear and crazy. The old dude was flyin’ on something, man, higher than Jet Blue could ever take him. He totally creeped me out. I had to put on this music to stop the centipedes crawling through my blood. He must’ve creeped out Bibi, too. Although it doesn’t seem to have screwed her up any. How is our radiant Kaha Huna, by the way?”

Kaha Huna was the mythological Hawaiian goddess of surfing, sand, and sun. Ganesh wasn’t being jokey or ironic when he referred to Bibi as a surfing deity.

Pax and Pogo had agreed not to broadcast Bibi’s condition in the beach community. Perhaps in acknowledgment of the dread they would not otherwise discuss, they felt superstitiously that the more surfers who knew about her brain cancer and coma, the sooner she would die.

“She’s good,” Pax said, and Pogo said, “She’s cool.”

Bobbing his head in agreement but also to the music, Ganesh said, “She’s sacy, she’s stylin’. For a while I was in love with her from a distance. Maybe I still am. But I always knew I wasn’t good enough for her. Are
you
good enough for her, Pax?”

“I’m gonna try to be.”

“You better be.”

“Thanks for this,” Pax said, indicating the tape recorder in his hand. “Appreciate it.”

“De nada,”
Ganesh said. “It was fun taking it apart and putting it back together. Just a knack. I can fix anything.” He tapped the recorder. “Except I couldn’t have fixed Grandpa Marine. That old dude was a serious head case.”

In the Honda once more, putting the key in the ignition but letting the engine rest, Pogo said, “Grandpa Munster?”

“That’s just Ganesh being Ganesh.”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll know in a minute.” Pax switched on the tape recorder.

They had a good view of the sunset from Cameo Highlands. A magical Maxfield Parrish blue for the base color of the sky. Clouds on fire, orange and scarlet, blazing from San Clemente in the south to Long Beach in the north. The sun balanced on the sea, a fat round bead of blood.