Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(124)
“By God, I will,” Bibi said. “I’ll shoot you.”
She didn’t know whether or not she meant the threat. Earlier she had stabbed the brute who beat her and tried to rape her, stabbed him to death, but that had been in desperation. And he’d been a stranger. It would be harder to kill someone she knew, even someone like this awful woman. Familiarity bred contempt, but it also bred civility, even if a reluctant civility.
Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was a nest of snaky emotions—venomous contempt, hatred, arrogance. She ventured no closer, although her posture was belligerent. “You want to know something, you silly little goob, you ignorant spleet?” Never before had the former teacher used surfer lingo. “You’ve got this all wrong. You aren’t putting it together right. If I was still teaching school and you were still in my class, I’d give you a D on this, and that would be a generous grade.”
Bibi took the pistol in a two-hand grip. “Where is Ashley Bell?”
“You think you understand Bobby Faulkner, the mother killer? You think you’ve got his psychology down pat, you have a handle on his Terezin ID and the cult he’s building? Gidget, you don’t know shit. You’re pathetic. It’s not a cult. It never was a cult, not anything as clichéd as a cult.” Bibi’s hair frizzed in the fog, but in the bubble of clear air that Hoffline-Vorshack occupied, her tumbling blond tresses looked worthy of a shampoo commercial. “Look around you, BeeeBeee”—she made the name sound positively cartoonish—“look around and maybe you’ll notice your cult has morphed into some kind of giant conglomerate that’s building an über-expensive headquarters in the campus style. Maybe you’ll realize there must be thousands of people involved in this operation, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Does that make any sense for a crackpot Nazi cult? We’re not crackpots, Gidget.”
“But you are fascists.”
“Everyone’s a fascist these days, sweetie. The word has no power to sting anymore. The country has embraced all the fascist dictators we once shunned. Kissed and made up. It’s respectable now. It’s the true and preferred way.”
Bibi raised the pistol, aiming it not at the woman’s chest any longer, but at her face, from a distance of six or seven feet. From Hoffline-Vorshack’s perspective, the muzzle must look like a black hole with planet-rending gravity. “Where are they holding the girl? I’m not going to ask again.”
“Good. You’re not going to ask again. I’m tired of listening to you ask.”
All of her life, Bibi had kept a governor on her anger, had consciously negotiated between the gracious, complaisant aspect of her nature and the darker part of herself that sometimes wanted to strike out, strike back. Her tendency to arbitrate herself into a courteous reaction, or at least one of quiet anger, was motivated not by a noble inclination, but by fear that she would lose control of herself. She suspected that, should she lose control, she had the capacity to do great damage out of proportion to the offense she had suffered, though no evidence, either internal or external, existed to support that suspicion.
“Where is Ashley?” she demanded.
A bark of laughter escaped Hoffline-Vorshack. “You just asked again. You said you wouldn’t ask again, and you just did. Listen, Gidget, you don’t need that little Jewess. You never have needed her. Don’t you know a red herring when you see one, when you have actually dragged it across the trail yourself?”
Bibi was building toward rage. She loathed this woman. Marissa Hoffline had been a bad teacher. She would never in a thousand years have won any organization’s teacher-of-the-year award. And now she was doing an equally bad job of being a wealthy wife, utterly without gratitude for the grace that had befallen her, transformed by money into an ogre of privilege and self-satisfaction. And she wouldn’t stop talking. If she kept talking, she was going to spoil everything. If she kept talking, talking, talking, she was going to say something that Bibi didn’t want to hear.
“You don’t need the little Jewess, Gidget. Just do what you need to do. Confront the terrible truth, accept what you need to accept about yourself, know yourself, and then do the deed that needs to be done.” Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was such a portrait of self-righteous satisfaction that Bibi wanted to hit her. Hard. Again and again. Shut her up. Kill her. But it would be murder, not killing. There was a difference.
The anger that Bibi had long dreaded to express, swollen now to rage, was a consequence of repressed fear. She understood that much at last. Captain’s memory trick didn’t in fact burn away traumatic experiences. It flushed them down a deep memory hole, where they—and the fear associated with them—festered in the dark. For seventeen years, the fear had been at a low boil, until it became a thick and bitter reduction of fear, became enduring terror, became a suppressed anxiety laced with helpless foreboding.
“Know yourself, Gidget,” Hoffline-Vorshack repeated.
“Shut up.”
“Learn your secrets.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
The former teacher said, “You know I’m right, Gidget. He asked you what you needed most, and you said to forget. But what you needed most back then wasn’t to forget. And it’s not what you need now.”
The Spanish Colonial Revival house with its many charms. The hallways and rooms fortified with books. The kitchen table around which more conversations had been held than meals had been eaten. Toba’s gentle and winsome face, her generous smile, her unfailing kindness. This was a pleasing place, comforting to mind and heart, but at this moment, Pax had neither the capacity to be comforted nor the time to allow the house and the singular old woman to work their magic.