Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(116)
Pax dared to say, “What if she was never in your house? What if she only accurately imagined your…private interests?”
Looking up from the tart shell, St. Croix regarded him with the pity of the intellectually anointed for those doomed by genes or by circumstance to ignorance. “No one has an imagination of such power, of such intuitive genius, to know with accuracy what occupies a place in which she’s never set foot. Her rich description of my third floor was as reportorial as what she wrote about the first two, not fiction but sleazy journalism, ninety-five percent on the mark. Hell, ninety-eight! The little bitch was there. She must have taken notes. That is a part of my life that I treasure to the extent that I rarely share it. The bed I sleep in most nights is on the third floor, not in my bedroom on the second. Only a trusted few have ever shared it with me, and none of them would have risked his relationship with me to conspire with that brazen, grasping little slut.”
Without being consciously aware of what she was doing, the professor had formed the seventh tart and then had torn it apart as if she were rending her former student’s throat. She threw down the mangled dough in disgust, wiped her hands on the dish towel, and resorted to her glass of Scotch and cream. If her equilibrium wasn’t restored by the drink, at least she realized that in her ranting she had not given them a clue as to the nature of the secret enthusiasm she indulged on the third floor. She couldn’t know that they had read Bibi’s writing assignment, so she could only suppose that they were imagining every perversion from bondage with violent flagellation to animal sacrifice. Their wonderment appeared to amuse the professor, for her face let go of the anger that stiffened it, grew soft with coquettish intent. She licked a milky smear from her lips and said, “If you would like to verify my accusations against Ms. Blair, I’ll let you read a copy of her piece and then take you up to the third floor to see for yourselves.”
Spitting out wordless expressions of malevolent determination, the unseen creature seemed to have squirmed under the front passenger seat, trying to negotiate the adjustment tracks and the substructure, intent upon making its way into the forward footwell, from which it might more easily spring upon her.
Unwilling to abandon the car to proceed on foot through this strange and hostile night, Bibi pulled the pistol from under her blazer and drove with only her left hand, which required her to let the Honda’s speed drop.
If not cast back in time to that fearful night before her sixth birthday, she was at least cast back in spirit. There is no adult terror equivalent to what an innocent child experiences when first confronted with the truth that evil is not merely a figment of fairy tales, that it walks the world in countless forms, and that what it seeks most aggressively is the destruction of the innocent. With such an experience, childhood ends, regardless of the age at which that awful discovery is made. Bibi tasted again the metallic flavor of the first knowledge of evil, felt the childhood terror thrumming in her veins, her heart slamming as if it would either break the breastbone that armored it or hammer itself apart. The sense of helplessness that she had endured on that long-ago night was intolerable now, a condition to which she would not—would not!—allow herself to be subjected, not after all these years of striving to put behind her the primal—forgotten—horrors of her youth in favor of the ordinary fears and threats of a normal life.
“No,” she said, “hell, no, no, this cannot happen, will not happen, is not happening.”
Even though the writhing, twitching, wretchedly graceless thing had been real in the bungalow bedroom, it was not real here. She had killed it that night, whatever it had been, killed it by a means that she could not remember. Seventeen years later, it could not return to torment her. It was of another place and time, it could not possibly materialize like a ghost to haunt her now. The thing thrashing under the passenger seat, calling to her in phlegmy knotted syllables with less meaning than the cries of any animal, was only another variation of the thing that had knocked on the motel door, tapped on the motel window, a distraction like the fog and the spirits in the house from which the girl had been kidnapped, like the man in the hoodie and the golden retriever that had tried to lure her away from the search for Ashley Bell.
Like Chubb Coy. The chief of hospital security. What did he have to do with any of this except to serve as a distraction, to thwart her by misdirection? He showed up at Norm’s, at breakfast with St. Croix, later popped into the professor’s Victorian retreat to kill her when she might have been about to make an important revelation, alluding to Flannery O’Connor and Thornton Wilder and Jack London, with whose work he was no more likely to be familiar than he was likely to be a master of particle physics.
Suddenly a truth about Chubb Coy circled Bibi, circled like a night bird gliding the darkness with a keen eye on its prey, the same truth from which she had recoiled earlier, the truth that she had burned with the memory trick. She drove with her left hand, the pistol clutched in her right, weaving along the lonely highway, her heart seeming to jump-jump-jump rather than merely beat, frenzied convulsions in her chest, and she thought, He didn’t quote those books because he wanted to, he quoted them because I made him do it. That was not the truth that she rendered ashes in the motel sink, but it was somehow a funhouse-mirror reflection of that truth. She didn’t understand how she could make Chubb Coy do anything. That made no sense. She kept replaying the curious thought, trying to understand it, but instead of gaining clarity with repetition, it lost coherence—until she abruptly realized that the thing under the passenger seat, the unwanted passenger, had been silent for some time.