Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(109)

“A poet guy. New batteries don’t help. The recorder is biffed.”

“Biffed?”

“Biffed, totally thrashed, broke, whatever. But I know someone who can fix it.”

“So this Wallace Stevens poet guy wrote, ‘In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.’ There’s one more. You might have heard of him. Shakespeare. ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.’?”

Pogo considered Shakespeare, and then shook his head. “It’ll give me a migraine. What do you figure the list means?”

“Whatever it means, I think her grandfather wrote it.”

“Captain. Yeah. And I think she’s the one who opened it and read it so often, she wore out the creases.”

Pax glanced from his wristwatch to the digital time readout on the microwave, to the digital readout on the conventional oven, to the window, where the afternoon light had not begun to wane to any appreciable degree. Nevertheless, within him, a clock spring of worry wound tighter, tighter.

“You got a dance to go to?” Pogo asked.

“Bibi’s talking to me again,” Pax decided.

“What’s she saying?”

“It’s not words this time. It’s a feeling. That time’s running out. That someone bad is coming after her, and fast.”

Pogo looked grim. “The brain cancer.”

“Not something bad—someone.”

“Nancy and Murph are with her, one or the other, usually both, and not just them.”

“It’s not something that’ll happen in the hospital. It’s going to happen…wherever else she is.”

Pogo said, “I know we’re in the Twilight Zone. I accept that. But it still sounds nuts when you say things like that.”

Pax took the sixth item from the document box, a children’s picture book with a story told in short sentences and simple words. Cookie’s Big Adventure.

“That’s been in print forever,” Pogo said. “It was Nancy’s favorite when she was little. She gave me a copy when I was five.”

“Didn’t Bibi like it?”

“Yeah, I guess. When she was little. Personally, I didn’t think it was such deathless literature.”

“If she liked it,” Pax said, “why isn’t it on a shelf in the living room or in her office?”

“Beats me.” As Pax leafed through Cookie’s Big Adventure, Pogo took the final item from the lockbox. “The saint bitch.”

“The who?”

Brandishing a few pages of typescript that were held together with a paper clip, Pogo said, “This is the piece Beebs wrote for the professor who made her bail out of the writing program.” He affected a snooty voice to pronounce her name: “Dr. Solange St. Croix.”

“In this case,” Pax said, “snarky doesn’t work when your name is Averell Beaumont Stanhope the Third.”

“Point taken. You ever read this?”

“She told me about it, but I never saw it.”

Pogo passed the four pages to him. “Read it. Maybe you’ll see what pissed off the great professor. Neither of us can figure it.”

Glancing from watch to clock to ovens, Pax said, “Maybe I should read it in the car, while we’re going wherever you’re getting the cassette recorder fixed.”

“It’s in the box with this other stuff, maybe it has something to do with what’s happening. Read it now.”

Relenting, Pax read the pages aloud, interrupting himself with laughter a few times, although the amusing lines were never mean. “Totally Bibi.”

“Vivid,” Pogo agreed.

“But I don’t see why it made the professor go ballistic.”

“Okay, then. Maybe that’s our best first lead.”

“How so?”

“Why don’t we visit Saint Bitch and ask her what made her blow like Vesuvius? I know where she lives.”

Pax no longer consulted the wall clock or the wristwatch, or the LED readouts on the ovens, because behind his face rather than upon it, unseen but sensed, a sweep hand swept away the seconds. He was as acutely aware of the passage of time as he’d been in certain moments of battle, felt time flowing as sand might feel as it slid through the pinched waist of an hourglass. They had found a trove of curious objects, but they had deduced little from them. Considered action was always better than considered inaction, even if talking to a college professor about her response to a student’s writing, five years earlier, didn’t seem to be enough action to amount to a damn.

“Okay,” he said, getting up from the table. “Let’s go see the professor.”

“You do the interrogation,” Pogo said.

“It’s not an interrogation. Just a chat.”

“The way she treated Beebs, I wouldn’t mind waterboarding her.”

“I never waterboarded anyone. Never used thumbscrews, electric shocks to the genitals, bamboo shoots under fingernails, never played loud disco music at anyone to break him—none of that Hollywood stuff. Psychology and a good shit detector are mostly all you need.”

Pax folded the sheet of handwritten quotations about imagination and paper-clipped it to the four pages of Bibi’s writing that had so incensed Dr. St. Croix. He tucked them into the panther-and-gazelle notebook that contained the stories about Jasper the dog. He didn’t see any reason to take the dog collar or the children’s book, or the little plastic bag with the lock of Captain’s hair, and Pogo had the tape recorder that needed to be repaired.