Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(108)
She didn’t think that she would find a third dead body, but she proceeded along the hallway in dread of precisely such a discovery. If Ashley had hidden in her room, they would have found her and taken her away. According to Terezin himself, he wanted the girl for his upcoming birthday. Most likely, on that day, she would be raped in imaginative ways, later tortured, and then murdered in a ceremonial manner, as in his madness he set out to launch once more the Final Solution of what Hitler called “the Jewish problem.” But if the cultists, Terezin’s followers, had not taken the girl from the house, if she had resisted, as her father on the second floor and her mother on the third had resisted, their intention of taking her alive might have been foiled.
When she came to the room on the left, at the end of the hall, where the door stood half open, Bibi knew what else she would find in addition to either a dead girl or no girl at all: horses. Pistol in her right hand, aimed at the floor, no longer concerned that any of the fascist murderers remained in the house, Bibi crossed the threshold.
Her premonition was fulfilled: paintings of horses, bronzes of horses, porcelains of horses, books about horses. This house was one more thing that Bibi had forgotten, apparently by using Captain’s memory trick. She had been here before, but she didn’t know when or for what purpose. Hour by hour, she found more memories that had been burned, fragments of which survived in ashen form: this house, this room, the fact that Ashley Bell loved horses, might ride them as well as admire them. She thought, I must know Ashley, I must at least have met her once! Why else would this residence be familiar to her? How else could she have known about the horse motif in this bedroom?
The doors of a tall built-in armoire stood open. The clothes that had hung within it had been taken out and thrown on the floor.
She approached it with trepidation, although she did not raise the pistol. The secret panel in the back of the armoire, which Bibi had somehow known would be there, had been slid aside. The closet-size space thus revealed was unoccupied. If the girl had hidden there, Terezin and his men had found her.
Suddenly Paxton felt that they were running out of time. The sensation came out of nowhere, for no apparent cause, an impression of a brink looming, a void beyond. He became certain that Bibi was receding from him, captured by someone sinister and being carried away at high speed, in what direction and to what destination he couldn’t know. Which made no sense. She was comatose in the hospital. Nobody could abduct her from a secure medical facility. And if her condition had changed, Nancy or Murphy would have been on the phone to him.
The fourth item in the black metal box was a small recorder. It contained a microcassette, but they couldn’t listen to it because the batteries were dead.
While Pogo searched pantry shelves and kitchen drawers for spare batteries, Pax examined the fifth item, a twice-folded sheet of lined yellow paper on which were written a number of quotations and the attributions of their sources. The handwriting wasn’t Bibi’s, neither her precise adult script nor the decorative girlhood variant. The strong, slanted cursive seemed to suggest that a man had composed the list. The cheap paper was deteriorating at the corners, foxed by time and skin oil; and it had been opened and closed so many times that, at some point, the folds had been reinforced with Scotch tape.
Pax began reading the quotations aloud for Pogo’s benefit. “?‘This world is but canvas to our imaginations.’ That’s from something by Henry David Thoreau.”
Pogo said, “The Walden Pond guy.”
“So you paid attention in school, after all.”
“No matter how much you try to keep that stuff out of your head, some of it gets in.”
“The next one’s also from Thoreau. ‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’?”
Having found a package of Duracell AAA batteries, Pogo brought two of them to the table. “Was Thoreau the Walden Pond guy and the power-of-positive-thinking guy?”
“No. That was Norman Vincent Peale. This next one’s by someone named Anatole France. ‘To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.’?”
“Maybe I’m seeing a theme,” Pogo said as he removed the dead batteries from the recorder.
“Me, too. Imaginations, imagined, imagine. Here’s one from Joseph Conrad.”
Pogo said, “The Heart of Darkness guy.”
“Kid, you are such a fraud.” Pax cleared his throat and then read, “?‘Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’?”
“That’s heavy, dude.”
The sense of time running out, of some catastrophe looming over Bibi, grew stronger. Pax glanced from his watch to the wall clock, where the second hand swept smoothly around the face but where the minute hand twitched from 2:19 to 2:20, clicked like a trigger.
“Here’s another one. Kenneth Grahame wrote—”
Pogo interrupted. “He’s the Wind in the Willows guy. Mr. Toad, Mole, Badger, Ratty, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and all that.”
“So he wrote, ‘As a rule, indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.’ You know who Wallace Stevens was?”