Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(104)
“She won’t,” Pax said, and got out of the car.
The voice of a stern but caring woman, who might have been a nurse or an elementary-school teacher before recording directions for a GPS system, encouraged Bibi through fog and darkness. She drove south along the coast to Laguna Canyon Road, then inland along that twisty route, which had its dangerous stretches even in the best of weather.
She indulged no superstition regarding the world after midnight, didn’t believe that she had entered the witching hour when broomstick riders filled the sky, but she had a sense of impending occult menace on this particular night, as on no other. Justified paranoia plucked the harpstrings of her nerves until she half expected that, behind the cataracts of fog, the world was being rearranged like a vast stage undergoing set changes. Balancing that irrational fear was an intuitive feeling that Pax must be coming home to her, that in fact he was already nearby. From time to time, she glanced to her right, with the peculiar expectation that he rode in the passenger seat, but of course he was never there.
As the canyon road wound among the folded foothills, the fog that slowly tumbled like great masses of dripping white laundry gradually gave way to sheer curtains and then to isolated tattered scraps. By the time she passed under the first freeway and turned off the canyon road onto a state route, no shred of mist remained, and a while later, after she passed under the last of the county’s freeways, she came to lonely territory, low hills and arid meadows of scraggly grass, bleak in the moon-chilled night.
Her virtual companion, whose succinct guidance had thus far been flawless, spoke for the first time out of character, as should not have been possible. The voice sounded like that of a young girl. “In two hundred yards, you will want to stop at a house on the left.”
The highway topped a low rise and turned to the right as it descended, and ahead stood the promised house, soft light in its curtained windows. Two things about the three-story residence caused Bibi to take her foot off the accelerator and let the car coast down the gentle slope. First, it seemed to belong not merely in another state than California but on another continent, not here in open country but on a city street, with other houses crowded against it. Although lacking porch or portico, with no grand steps leading up to the front door, the house looked stately, its brick walls enhanced with limestone quoins at the corners and limestone surrounds at each window. Four chimneys pierced the steeply pitched roof, which might have been of slate. In addition to the strangeness of such a house in such a place, a feeling of familiarity caused Bibi to bring the coasting car almost to a stop. She had never traveled this highway before, had never seen this house. She could not recall having seen one very like it anywhere else, and yet moment by moment it seemed more familiar to her, until she was gripped by full-blown déjà vu.
As she eased past the place, a sudden memory flashed into her mind’s eye: Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, standing at a third-floor window, gazing out from this very house. She could recall nothing else, neither the occasion nor the date, but the memory was so clear and so poignant that she knew it must be real. The feeling of kindredness between Bibi and this girl, which had overcome her upon first seeing the photograph in Calida’s office, the sense of an equivalence between them, a sisterhood, rose in her once more, even more intense than previously. Ashley Bell in a white dress with pale-blue collar, standing at a third-floor window…If Bibi had known this child, then here was another incidence of self-deception, another part of her life edited out and burned away with the use of Captain’s memory trick.
She didn’t dare swing the Honda into the dirt driveway and approach the house boldly. There were countless foolish ways to die, but she hoped to avoid the egregiously stupid ones. She accelerated, drove over another low rise, out of sight of the residence, and parked on the shoulder of the highway. She sat contemplating her next move, trying to decide whether it might be egregiously stupid or just stupid. But in the end, there was nothing else she could do other than investigate the house.
The young girl’s voice that had issued from the GPS might have been that of Ashley Bell. Who else could it have been? There was no other child in this affair. After an absence of some hours, the supernatural forces that Calida had let into Bibi’s life seemed to have returned.
Bibi’s apartment was tastefully furnished in mid-century modern with Art Deco accents, simple and clean and welcoming and, in these circumstances, mysterious. Paxton dropped his duffel bag inside the front door. He stood with Pogo, surveying the living room, the dining area, the open kitchen beyond, listening warily, as though something unknown and unpleasant might materialize at any moment.
“What’re we looking for?” Pogo asked.
“Anything that doesn’t seem like our girl.”
“That’s kind of vague, don’t you think?”
“It’s as clear as could be. If someone laid out three hats and said one of them was Bibi’s, you’d know which it was—wouldn’t you?”
“She doesn’t like hats.”
“Exactly. If you see a hat, it’s suspicious.”
“So a hat is just like a metaphor for anything unBibi.”
“We’ll know it when we see it.”
“We will, huh?”
“If we’re expecting to see it, yes. People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren’t expecting to see them.”