Ashley Bell: A Novel (62 page)

The shingled bungalow had not been torn down by the people who bought it from Bibi’s parents. She had imagined its destruction to facilitate the plot, themes, and atmospherics of her life-or-death quest. The house stood much as it had been in her childhood. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, less than forty-eight hours after Bibi had been released from the hospital, she rang the doorbell, but no one responded.

The new owners were nice people, not the suspicious Gillenhocks who claimed to be retired investment bankers in the alternate world of Bibi’s fancy. They wouldn’t mind if she enjoyed their porch for a while. The rocking chairs were gone, but she sat in one of the patio chairs, looking out at the street, where the tresses of the palm trees rustled in a shifting breeze and the ficuses seemed to twinkle as their leaves—dark green on one side, pale green on the other—flickered this way and that in the changeable air.

In the weeks after Captain died, she had sat here to write some of her stories about Jasper, and here on a rainy day, a Jasper had come to her. As much as she loved her parents, they had not been able to understand her the way that Captain had understood her, and if she hadn’t eventually imagined sweet Jasper into her life, she might have imagined the captain alive again. She had desperately needed a dog, a dog suitably mysterious. To her, nature wasn’t merely a beautiful engine that powered fate. She didn’t believe in coincidence. Neither did Captain. Neither did dogs. In their constant joy and bottomless capacity for love, dogs were in tune with a more complex truth.

This place would always be home to her, and perhaps one day she and Pax would own it.
Home is where the heart is.
No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.

On Wednesday, she and Pax sat on a bench at Inspiration Point, watching the sea as it carried to shore millions of fragments of the sun and cast them, cooled and foaming, on the sand.

With only three months to go on his current re-up, he had arranged to spend them stateside, assisting in the training of new recruits. He had given the Navy SEALs ten good years, and he would give to Bibi what years remained.

As pelicans flew in formation low along the coast and sandpipers worked the wet beach for lunch and a couple of hundred yards offshore schooling dolphins arced in and out of the water, she and Pax talked about how cautious she must be in the exercise of her imagination. This was not her world to change even if she thought that she could change it for the better. Considering how disastrous might be the unintended consequences of her actions, her greatest flights of fancy were best kept to the pages of books. If they had children—and they would—and if one terrible day cancer or some other hateful ailment threatened to cut short a precious life, she would have to risk those unintended consequences, as she might have to do as well in other extreme circumstances. Valiant girls, however, were always judicious and prudent. Pax wondered if she might be unique in all the world or if perhaps everyone possessed latent powers of imagination equal to hers. She thought the latter must be true, because she didn’t believe that she was special. She said, “If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline,” and out in the sun-spangled sea, the dolphins danced.

On Saturday, Bibi had a lunch date with Pogo at Five Crowns in Corona del Mar. She arrived half an hour early and left her car in the restaurant parking lot.

At the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Poppy Avenue, she stood remembering the two teenage girls as she had last seen them, Hermione and Hermione, one blond and one brunette, walking south to the corner and then west, not yet grown into their grace, leaning against each other, perhaps laughing, so alive. Bibi had known them only a short while, yet she had felt a remarkable affection for them because of their gameness and vulnerability, their combination of knowingness and innocence. That day, as they had faded out of sight in the fog, she had said to herself,
There go two dead girls,
and had been distressed by that surprising thought.

Now she understood the full meaning of those words. Hermione and Hermione, daughters of Harry Potter faniacs, had not been walking toward their murderer or anything as dramatic as that. They were two dead girls because they had never been living. They had been citizens of Bibi’s imagination, who had never drawn one breath or laughed one laugh that anyone could hear.

Now she walked the length of tree-shaded Poppy to the sea, and back again, past houses that she’d seen a thousand times. She studied each dwelling with greater interest than before, half hoping that she would glimpse those girls passing a window, discover them lounging on a deck, coming out a door. This casual search could end only as had the search for Ashley Bell: an encounter with no one other than herself. Nevertheless, she entertained a little hope anyway, as an antidote to the sadness that shadows every writer’s heart. For all the effort of creation, for all the hours at the keyboard and the intellectual exercise and the emotion expended, all of a writer’s creations are but a ghost of the Truth, as ephemeral as are all the works of humanity in this world within time.

Later, over lunch, when she shared that thought with Pogo, he said, “Yeah, but just like me, you’ve got today. You’ve got today, and there’s all of time and all the world in today. Walk the board, dudette.”

At sunset he came to the shop on Balboa Peninsula, near the second of the two piers. It was not a jewelry store named Silver Fantasies; and of course it never had been. Newport Beach had never been home to a silversmith named Kelsey Faulkner, and no child named Robert Warren Faulkner had ever murdered his mother here. The space was occupied by a souvenir shop that sold items made of seashells and driftwood and chunks of driftglass smoothed into sinuous shapes by the ceaseless action of the sea.

He had no past except the one that she had invented for him, but it was a past he liked, and it portended a future that excited him. He could document a past for himself with ease, one that would be without blemish, designed to withstand scrutiny. He didn’t even mind starting from scratch, so to speak. He had only the black suit he was wearing and the cash he’d had on him when last he had seen her. He possessed certain strengths and talents, however, and would surely make rapid progress.

As the sky caught flame across the west and purpled in the east, he returned to the car that he had stolen that afternoon. He drove to the head of the peninsula, and then a short distance south on Coast Highway, finally turning inland, abandoning the vehicle on a side street that he had selected earlier.

This was such a rich world, with so many prospects for a man of his good looks, charm, sharpness of mind, and determination. With all due respect for her extraordinary powers of imagination, the woman’s world was a thin soup compared to the thick stew of this reality. Her mistake had been to craft a narrative in which he had become aware of her true nature in the imagined world that they had both left behind; he had then realized the existential danger that he faced—and the opportunity.

In the ruby and sapphire twilight, as he walked to the nearby high-end supper club that he had scoped out earlier, he cautioned himself not to underestimate the spunky Ms. Blair. Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg. Sooner or later, she might wonder if she had opened a door for him by imagining her entire quest for Ashley Bell onto her computers in this world. Once that thought rooted in her, she would be forever on the watch for him and, if she recognized him, dogged in pursuit. He would need to change his appearance, lose the current haircut for starters; the homage to Adolf was a childish touch, anyway.

When he built a power base—when, not if—and when the time came to move boldly and publicly against his enemies, which were the same in this world as in the previous one, he would start by burning the books. Those of lovely Bibi would be in the first pyre. She would appreciate the irony. She had created him with a hatred for books and bookish people, and she would reap the consequences of that hatred. Just as her books would be among the first set ablaze, she would be on the first train to the first death camp.

Overlooking Newport Harbor, the supper club was elegant in the extreme, luxurious, sensuous, decorated in shades of blue and gray, with black and silver accents. Large windows offered views of yachts at anchor and smaller boats cruising the twilight as dock lamps and house glow began to glimmer romantically across the darkening water.

The bar was large and well attended, clearly a gathering place for the well-to-do, especially singles of all conditions—divorced, widowed, never married, and single for the night only—hoping to hook up with those just a step below or above their station. He ordered a martini, pretending not to notice the women who were interested in him even as he surreptitiously cataloged and evaluated the qualities of each.

The quickest way to acquire a fortune, a network of valuable social contacts, and a respectable position in society would be to marry a woman who already possessed those things. In the other world, Bibi imagined him a cult leader, then a young high-tech billionaire. But with money and position, he would more quickly achieve his goals through politics, whether he was the golden-boy candidate himself or the manipulator of such a one; he didn’t care which.

The woman would need to be beautiful but not too sexy. Not flashy. Elegant. Stylish. Cultured. Ideally, she would be several years older than he was and not quite as attractive, so that she would be flattered by—and grateful for—his interest in her. He spotted her across from him at the horseshoe bar. A cool blonde who might have been forty, forty-two. A single exquisite diamond pendant and a forefinger ring of the highest caliber were all she needed to declare her unmarried status and the depth of her wealth.

Their eyes met a few times. When the barstool next to hers became available, she looked boldly at him and, with a coquettish glance, indicated the empty seat. Carrying his martini, he moved with self-assurance to her side. Her name was Elizabeth Barret Radcliffe, but friends called her Beth.

If he were to avoid drawing Bibi Blair’s attention in the years ahead, as he became an increasingly prominent person, he could not, of course, call himself Robert Faulkner or Birk Terezin. He needed a simple but solid name, a name of substance; and one had occurred to him earlier. Quite a lot of time would pass before he would realize that this name had been a literary allusion that Bibi made in her first novel, which she had imagined him reading after she had come to his attention in that other world of her invention. He introduced himself to Beth, but it was not then, at that early stage when he might have avoided the error, that he discovered the trap into which he had stepped. Beth was not a bookish person, and as her elevated social circle was not very bookish, either, the former Birk Terezin established his new identity with impeccable forged papers.

A few years later, he was fast on the rise with that new name before he discovered it was also the name of a sociopathic murderer in five novels by Patricia Highsmith: Thomas Ripley. By then his picture had been in many admiring newspaper articles, his name in headlines, and he could only suppose that she had become aware of him, had recognized him even with his new look, as she might not have done if he had been named Bob Smith. He could not decide how worried he should be until that same night he woke in terror from a dream involving assassins. After leaving bed and hurrying to his home office, he searched the Internet for a photograph of Bibi Blair’s husband, who had been a Navy SEAL. Ripley could not help but be alarmed to discover that the spouse of such a famous author seemed never to have been photographed. Paxton Thorpe’s photo was also missing from the public archives of former SEALs. And what of the men with whom he had served, all of them special ops veterans? What did they look like?

Without quite knowing how he’d gotten there, Thomas Ripley found himself at a window, peering out at Newport Harbor, at his private dock, past his impressive yacht, to where reflections of the moon trembled on black water. Only the moonlight, rippling. Nothing else. All seemed as it should be. As it would until…He stood there waiting in a torment of imagination.