Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(19)
On this brighter morning, the kitchen seemed to be a benign if not entirely welcoming place, until Bibi noticed the one change since her previous visit. On the table, the spherical white vase, which had held no flowers before, not for months, now contained three withered roses. The once-green sepals of the flowers’ receptacles were brown, and the petals were mostly brown as well, with few remaining traces of red coloring. Some petals had fallen to the table, where they lay as curled and crisp as the shells of dead beetles.
The sere and shriveled roses looked as if they had been here longer than two weeks. They were so thoroughly dehydrated that they might have been in the vase since November.
She should have left the apartment; but she could not. Unlike many other ten-year-old girls, she did not dream of being a princess or a pop star. She wanted to be plucky, intrepid, and lionhearted. Stalwart. Valiant. Superman and Supergirl had no appeal for her; everything was too easy for them and other invulnerable superheroes, without genuine danger. Bibi knew that life could never be that way. Every surfer surfed with sharks unseen and swam with the risk of riptides. Death was real. You had to face that truth if you were ever to grow up. She wanted no caped costume with an S upon her chest. But she would have been proud to wear a sweater with a small embroidered V—a V for valiant—though only if by her actions she earned it.
Therefore, rather than retreat from the mystery of the roses, she moved past the table toward the living-room door, which stood open, as she had left it two weeks earlier. Someone—something—had pushed it inward before she’d fled. As on that day, the door blocked her view of the threshold, where someone had been standing.
She felt confident that no one would be standing there now.
As she approached the door, she heard footsteps on a creaking hardwood floor, as she had heard them on her other visit. She halted, listening, but then realized the footsteps were moving away from her.
Lionhearted girls seldom retreated when they were threatened, and they never turned tail and ran without good reason. When she passed the door and reached the threshold, trembling more than she would have liked, no one waited there.
She saw a door swinging shut at the farther end of the living room. It closed with a bang and rattle.
None of the furniture had been removed. After what had happened here, Nancy and Murphy didn’t want another tenant. Eventually they would dispose of the furniture, sell it or give it away to Goodwill.
Rather than proceed to the bedroom, Bibi considered sitting on the edge of an armchair to await developments. Sometimes, patiently waiting to see what happened next was much wiser than making it happen, which was one of the differences between truly smart girls in smart books and airheaded girls in witless books.
After a hesitation, as a weakness crept into her legs and her mouth went almost as dry as the flowers in the kitchen, shame made her cross the living room. You were either plucky or not, stalwart or not, and the lionhearted didn’t make excuses in the quick of things, when you either gave it or you didn’t.
She halted at the bedroom door. Trying not to hear the rapid knocking of her heart, she listened for what sounds might come from the next room. She cocked her head to the left, to the right, and when her gaze drifted lower, she saw the blood on the doorknob. Red. Glistening. Wet. A single drop slid off the knob and fell to the floorboards in what seemed like slow motion.
Valiant girls were more than spunky and resolute. They were also wary, heedful, and prudent. And they knew with clearheaded certainty when it was wise to act upon those virtues. She didn’t bolt, but she backed slowly away from the bedroom. She turned and walked across the living room, quietly through the kitchen, out of the apartment. After she locked the door, she needed to hold the handrail as she made her way down to the courtyard.
On the back porch of the bungalow, sitting on the wicker sofa, Bibi reviewed events, a thousand threads of thought spinning through the loom of her young mind, weaving a strange fabric. She wouldn’t tell her parents what had happened. They would find no flowers or blood in the apartment, just as her father had found no intruder two weeks earlier. Besides, Bibi sensed there was something she knew that she didn’t know she knew, an elusive understanding that, if she could arrive at it, would make sense of everything.
The morning grew mild, but Bibi remained cold to her bones.
Bibi realized she was awake when she heard the nurse talking with a nurses’ aide. She wasn’t able to open her eyes or speak. She could only listen. One said, “She’s exhausted, poor thing.” The other took her pulse, seemed to be satisfied, and let go of her wrist. Bibi realized that she was breathing shallowly, making a sound like a soft snore. They must think she was asleep. No one witnessed the violent seizure when it felled her earlier. They pulled the sheet and blanket up to her neck. She tried to tell them it wasn’t sleep that held her quiet, but something worse. The words formed in her mind, not in her mouth. She heard the nurse and the aide leaving, then a mortal silence.
She lay mute and blind and limp, unable to be sure whether she was lying on her back, on her chest, or on her side. No muscle in her body would respond to her command. A remembered fragment of verse came to her, its source for the moment forgotten: A condition of complete simplicity. She was indeed in a condition of complete simplicity, and although she should have been frightened, she was not. Valiant girl she would be, as she had been for so long, plucky and intrepid and stalwart. Lionhearted.