Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(111)
Didn’t it?
Did it?
She stopped in the middle of the highway. Heart knocking in its cage of ribs. As if it would slip free and beat away into the night and leave her defeated, dead upon the blacktop. An immense, terrible, vaguely discerned secret—secret or lost memory—swelled darkly at the back of her mind. Bibi could sense its presence, its awesome size, and she knew that its revelation would be devastating. She stood waiting on the road. Waiting. The black sky and its moon, its planets, its infinite array of stars began to weigh on her, and a weakness came upon her, so that she thought her knees would fail. An eerie electronic whine, what she imagined tinnitus sounded like to those afflicted with it, rose from ear to ear, and she thought, It’s just the inner workings of the damn brain monitor, but had no idea what she meant by that, nor what she intended when she reached to her head to pull off the confining electro cap and found, of course, just the baseball cap. Her vision blurred. Or was it the world around her that blurred, that began to lose coherence, began to diffuse?
She closed her eyes.
In that instant, she knew what must be happening to her, and she rallied in anger and self-disgust. Fate. She was giving in to the illusion that fate dictated the possibilities of her life. Whatever will be will be. Que sera, sera. Screw that. She loved her parents, but she was not them. Fate did not rule her. She was the master of her fate, the captain of her soul. She would not quit. SURRENDER was not a word that could be made from the lettered tiles of her name. She had come this far, and she would not quit.
The trillions of stars weighed less heavily upon her, and the dark matter that constituted most of the universe lifted from her shoulders. And if the piercing whine had been the cry of planets rotating around their liquid cores or something ordinary, in either case it stopped. She opened her eyes, walked eastward, and the night that had begun to blur now clarified. When she topped a low rise, the Honda waited on the descending slope, where she had parked it.
Before she opened the driver’s door, she looked to the north, across the highway, where the raw land rose slightly, appearing softer in the night than it would in daylight, folding upward like gray blankets under which lay an army of sleepers. Whether a sound had alerted Bibi or her attention had been drawn by supernatural means, near the limit of vision she saw the tall figure in the hoodie, and then the dog, both faintly silvered by the moonwash.
Her initial impulse was to cross the road, call out, and hurry toward the pair, here where no fog could shroud them and foil her. But then she realized that they were alike to the fog, and to the ink-black spirits in the house, serving the same purpose as whatever had knocked-tapped-scratched at the motel-room door and windows. They were here to distract and delay her. That had been their purpose from the beginning. They had not healed her. By whatever singularity of her immune system or act of providence she had been made well, the cancer must have been cast out before the man and dog appeared in her hospital room. Whether they were flesh-and-blood or occult entities haunting her, she would learn nothing from them even if she managed to catch up with them and snared the tall man by a hoodie sleeve.
However ardently Bibi hoped to save Ashley Bell, no matter with what persistence she tracked the girl, there was someone—Terezin, but perhaps someone for whom Terezin was merely a front man—who was equally determined to thwart her. As she watched the ghostly man and dog walking at a distance precisely calculated to minimize their visibility and maximize their otherworldly quality, Bibi wondered if the murder of Ashley was not her enemy’s ultimate goal, if possibly the girl was only a lure with which they were drawing their most-desired victim, Bibi, to a place of no escape.
She turned away from man and dog, got into the car, and started the engine.
Stucco for bread, teak decks for meat, garnished with stainless-steel-and-glass railings: Dr. St. Croix’s house was stacked like what in another era would have been called a Dagwood sandwich, named for the hapless Dagwood Bumstead, a cartoon character once much loved by readers of newspaper funny pages but now largely forgotten. Paxton knew Dagwood from the Blondie comic strip, because his grandmother Sally May Colter had enjoyed it almost as much as her all-time favorite comic, L’il Abner. Books had been published, collecting many years of both strips, and Grandma had owned them all.
At the front door, Pax said, “Remember, honey works better than vinegar.”
“You’ve seen the photo in that magazine Bibi has? Yeah? Looks to me like the famous professor thrives on vinegar.”
“Maybe she’s not even home,” Pax said, and he rang the bell.
He almost didn’t recognize the woman who opened the door. Gone was the tailored, expensive, but drab suit. She wore an ao dai, a flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensemble, white with irregularly placed peacock-blue and ultramarine-blue and saffron-yellow flowers, classic Vietnamese apparel, a garment as feminine as any in the entire world of women’s fashions. Her hair was usually drawn back into a bun that looked as dense as stone, that gave her the severe appearance of a nineteenth-century pioneer woman who had been hardened by decades spent in a contest with the heat and cold and wind and Indians and innumerable hardships of the prairie; however, on this Sunday afternoon, she had let down her graying hair, which revealed itself as less gray than silver-blond, lustrous and thick, as silken as the ao dai. Her skin, always flawless in photographs and public-television appearances, was flawless now, but appeared more like flesh and less like quartz. Her eyes, which Bibi had once described as the blue of the chemical gel in a refreezable ice pack, were precisely that color, but there was nothing icy about her stare. Clearly, the professor had once been a head-turning boy-stunning all-American babe; at fifty-something, she still was, when she wasn’t being her public image.