Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(106)
Still puzzling over the leather collar, Pogo said, “She told me Olaf was wearing a worn-out, muddy collar when he showed up in that rainstorm. But she never told me there was a name on it.”
“Jasper. The name of the dog in these stories. Maybe she knew someone who had a dog named Jasper and this was his collar.”
Pogo shook his head. “The dog in the stories is her invention. Entirely. And it was smaller than Olaf. A black-and-gray mongrel, not a golden retriever. This collar would’ve been too big for Jasper.”
Pogo turning the leather strap. The buckle softly clinking. Bits of dirt flaking through his fingers and onto the table.
He said, “What’re the odds that she’d write all those stories about an abandoned dog named Jasper, and one day an abandoned dog named Jasper would show up at her front door?”
“The best in Vegas couldn’t figure those odds,” Pax said. “Maybe what you’re wondering is…could it have been a coincidence?”
Looking up from the collar, Pogo said, “You think it could be?”
“Bibi doesn’t believe in coincidences.”
“Yeah. I know. But could it be?”
“I don’t believe in them, either.”
Putting down the collar, with the name revealed—JASPER—Pogo said, “Then what the hell? Why did she never tell us?”
Pax didn’t know what to make of this development. He was pretty sure, however, that although the shared name seemed like a small if freaky detail, Jasper the fictional mongrel and Jasper the golden retriever who became Olaf were of considerable importance. Intuition, the knowledge that comes before all reasoning and teaching, raised the hairs on the nape of his neck and lowered the temperature of his spine.
Instead of answering Pogo’s question, he said, “Let’s see what else is in this box,” as he picked up a small Ziploc plastic bag of the kind that people often used to hold the day’s vitamin pills or prescription medications. It contained a withered scrap of scalp with an attached lock of hair, the lower third of which was matted and crusted with what must have been dried blood.
Armed and anxious, Bibi argued silently with herself about the necessity and the wisdom of venturing uninvited to a house as strange as the one that stood like a massive gravestone in a desolate plot of the Mojave Desert. She approached the residence overland rather than along the county highway, through sand and loose shale and parched vegetation, all vaguely phosphorescent under the moon, which deceived as much as it illuminated. She was noisier than she would have liked, especially as she had imagined herself whidding through the arid landscape with the grace of a coyote. At least the night was chilly enough that she didn’t have to worry about rattlesnakes, though she thought that scorpions might be scuttling through the darkness.
The house faced north, and she arrived at the east wall, along which she made her way, cautiously looking in the lighted windows, which were curtained only with sheers. The rooms were furnished, but quiet and without occupants.
As at the front, the house at its south side lacked a porch. Only a six-foot-square pad of bricks presented the back door, which had been broken down as if with a battering ram that had torn it off its hinges. The breached door lay cracked and splintered on the limestone floor of a hallway lit by frosted-glass sconces. The evidence of violence should have turned her away. She went inside.
She had never seen the house before, and yet it felt familiar. She had a fragment memory of Ashley Bell standing in a front window, in this place. The voice issuing from the electronic map, telling her that she would want to stop here, had been that of a young girl, perhaps that of Ashley. Bibi could not retreat. Impossible. She had been spared from cancer TO SAVE A LIFE, and only she stood between Death and a girl of twelve or thirteen.
The fallen door rocked underfoot, an unavoidable clatter, though she got quickly off it. No one called out or came to see who might be responsible for the noise. The residence stood in silence.
Upon entering the house, Bibi had also entered a peculiar state of simultaneous knowing and not knowing. It wasn’t quite déjà vu, the illusion of having experienced something before that in fact one was encountering for the first time; she not only recognized things as she encountered them, but also had continuous presentiments of what lay ahead. A laundry room to the right of the hall. Yes. A walk-in pantry to the left. Yes. And ahead, yes, the kitchen. But though she could predict what room came next, she could not recall having been there before.
The kitchen was rather primitive by twenty-first-century standards. No microwave. No dishwasher. The gas range and undersized refrigerator—bearing the name Electrolux on its door—were many decades old, and yet looked new or at least well maintained.
In the other rooms, the furniture was oversized but sleek and modern, Art Deco pieces of Amboina wood, others of polished black lacquer, all of it expensive in its day and far more expensive now, having become über-collectible. Here and there, a chair or a desk had been overturned; but most things were as they should be. The glass in a breakfront had been smashed but not the contents that the cabinet displayed. The destruction wasn’t systematic, instead almost casual, as though whoever did it had come here on a more important task than vandalism and had committed this damage only in passing.
As Bibi returned from the drawing room to the front hall, she glimpsed swift movement to her left, a dark and darting form. Tall, thin, stoop-shouldered. She pivoted toward it, pistol in a two-hand grip, but no one was there. If the presence had been real, surely it would have made some sound—swift footsteps, a creaking of mahogany floorboards, a ragged inhalation—but the uncanny silence was not disturbed. Besides, the figure seemed to have moved with inhuman speed, crossing the hallway from room to room in a fraction of a second.