Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(107)
The window from the fragment of memory, in which she had seen Ashley standing in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, was on the third floor. She climbed stairs to a landing, and then another flight. As she neared the second floor, an inky form, so swift and fluid that Bibi had only the impression—not the conviction—that it was human, appeared above her and plunged past her. Although the figure did not brush against her, a coldness prickled across her in its passing, and she almost lost her balance. She fell against the railing, remained upright, and turned to look down, in time to see a shadow disappear off the landing, onto the first flight of stairs.
She couldn’t know if it might be the same spirit—if spirit was the word for it—that she had seen in the ground-floor hall, but she sensed that it was not flinging itself through the house in a rage, that it was instead a spirit in extreme torment, sustained here by anguish, vigorous with the energized despair called desperation.
When she got to the second floor, she found a dead man lying faceup on the carpet runner. He appeared to have been beaten to death with truncheons wielded by a man or men for whom physical violence was an intoxicant. His clothes were a blood-soaked shroud, his face and skull a cratered terrain from which she had to look at once away.
His crime had been resistance. He had dared to protect his own. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew.
If Ashley Bell was still here, perhaps she would be on the third floor, in the room with the window seen in the fragment of memory.
Heart racing, feeling as might a deep-sea diver in a pressurized suit struggling toward the surface countless fathoms overhead, Bibi went up more stairs. The pistol was strangely heavy, and her wrists ached with the weight of it.
Sitting in Bibi’s kitchen, Paxton repeatedly thought that they needed candlelight, that he should put half a dozen or more votives on the table, though it was only 2:15 in the afternoon, with sunlight strong at the windows, and though the occasion certainly didn’t call for a romantic atmosphere. And several times he detected the rich fragrance of roses, although there were no roses in the apartment, nor any air freshener, as far as he could see, that might explain the phantom scent. These odd sensations felt akin to those moments in the hospital room when Bibi’s voice had come to him.
The perfume of roses wafted over him again when he stared in puzzlement at the tiny plastic bag that contained a desiccated scrap of human scalp from which sprouted a lock of thick white hair matted, around the roots, with dry rust-red blood.
“Well, if we’re looking for unBibi,” he said, “this seems about as un as it gets.”
“In a way, yeah, and in a way, no,” Pogo said. “The day of her grandfather’s funeral—”
“Captain, you mean?”
“Yeah. Everyone came from the cemetery to the bungalow for the usual get-together. You know—food, booze, memories. Like seventy or eighty people. It was a crowd, it got noisy. I realized Beebs wasn’t there anymore. She was torn up. She loved the guy. I figured if she’d go anywhere, she’d go to the ocean. So I walked down to Inspiration Point, and there she was, sitting on a bench. She didn’t see me until I sat beside her—and she was holding that little plastic bag in both hands.”
Pax said, “This is the captain’s hair?”
“Yeah. Seems when the aneurysm broke, he must’ve shot to his feet before he fell. He was a tall guy. On the way down, he hit the edge of the table hard, right at the sharp corner. Left behind that piece of skin and the hair stuck to it. Bibi took it after she found him, kept it.”
“Why would she do that? Seems too macabre for her.”
“She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. We’ve always been totally open with each other about most things, you know, but there’s always been this need-to-know clause, too, and neither of us ever violates it. She made me promise not to tell anyone, and I didn’t—until you. Anyway, I was just eight, she was ten, she was teaching me to move from a bellyboard to a shortboard, and she was a goddess to me. She still is. Always will be. You expect a goddess to have secrets, it’s part of their mystery, and you don’t want to learn their secrets, because if you learn them, you die.”
Pax considered the contents of the plastic bag for a moment, but then put it aside to examine the remaining four items in the metal box.
In the third-floor hallway, beyond the topmost of the stairs, a dead woman lay as further testament to the savagery of those who had invaded the house. Perhaps the corpse on the second floor had been her husband, and she had stood here as a last defense against the invaders, because not far from her lay, of all things, a pitchfork that would have no purpose in this elegant and stylishly furnished residence. The tines of that rustic weapon were not wet with blood, so Bibi could only assume that this poor woman, who lacked the effective defense of a gun, had no chance to wound the murderers of her husband. She didn’t want to examine the corpse, but she felt obliged to have a quick look at it, as if she owned a portion of the responsibility for what had happened here and must answer for it, though of course she was not accountable for what Terezin and his followers might do to anyone. They would do the same—or worse—to her if they got the chance. The woman had been shot more than once. In stomach, chest, and face. Bibi looked away, less in horror than in pity, as if to conduct even one more second in autopsy would somehow make her complicit in the murder.