Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(38)

Twenty-four hours earlier, Bibi would not have taken any of this seriously, for she had been a highly efficient, driven autodidact who had taught herself at least two college degrees’ worth of knowledge, a levelheaded realist who enjoyed fantasizing, yes, but who always knew precisely where the borderline was between the real world and false interpretations of it. She’d had a keen eye for the too-bright, too-fuzzy worlds of idealists and for the too-dark, too-complicated versions of reality concocted by paranoids. Now the borders seemed to have been erased or at least blurred, and for the first time in her life, she felt that among things a modern woman needed, a gun was no less essential than a smartphone.

“I need a gun,” she declared, and though the words sounded alien to her nature, she knew that she spoke the truth.

Calida’s pistol lay on the table, but she pulled it closer to her, beyond Bibi’s reach, as if she didn’t rule out the possibility that her client meant to shoot her, the messenger.

“I don’t need yours. I have one,” Bibi said. “Paxton insisted on it. But I keep it in a box in the closet.”

When Bibi started to get up from her chair, Calida said sharply, “Sit down. We have to finish this, and quickly.”

With her right hand, the diviner stirred the loose tiles in the silver bowl. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” The air grew chillier. To Bibi, she said, “The name of the person you’re meant to save. How many letters?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. You just don’t know you know. How many letters?”

Bibi guessed, “Ten.”

After Calida plucked the tiles from the bowl, she placed them side by side in alphabetical order: A, B, E, E, H, L, L, L, S, Y.

Seeing names in that mess was harder than seeing words, but after a moment, the diviner spelled out SALLY BHEEL. “Know anyone with that name?”

“No.”

“It isn’t necessarily someone you know.”

Calida rearranged the tiles into SHELLY ABLE.

“This is ridiculous,” Bibi said, but she couldn’t deny the room had gone so cold that her breath and the diviner’s smoked from them.

As before, Bibi suddenly saw what Calida did not, moved the tiles around, and formed the name ASHLEY BELL. As she slid the last two letters into place, she heard the silver bell with the three tiny clappers that Captain had brought back from Vietnam, and although their ringing was clear and sweet and undeniable, she knew that she heard them only in memory.

As if Calida were a curious cat and Bibi were a ball of string in need of unraveling to reveal the wild secret at its center, the diviner watched her client intently, waiting for the best moment to snatch up a frayed end and run. “The name is familiar to you.”

Bibi shook her head. “No.”

“I can see it is.”

“No. But I’ll admit it resonates.”

“Resonates,” the diviner said, wanting something more specific.

“It’s so euphonic, it makes you want to know the person who goes by it, to see if she’s as pleasant as her name.”

“She or he. It could be either.”

“It’s a she,” Bibi said with immediate conviction.

“How can you be so sure?”

Bibi frowned. “I don’t know. I just am.”

“You not only have to find her. You have to save her.”

As Bibi stared at the name, it had half drawn her into a trance, as though each of the ten letters must be a syllable in a sorcerer’s spell. Now she shivered and looked up at the diviner and said, “Save her from what? Should you ask—and draw more letters?”

“No. We’re running out of time. We’ve been too long at this.”

Bibi realized that warmth had returned to the kitchen and that the clocks were working once more, as was her wristwatch. “I need to know why she’s in trouble—or will be. Where she lives. What she looks like. I have a thousand questions.”

A mewl as thin as a paper cut escaped Calida as she extracted the needle from her flesh. She pressed her bleeding thumb against the bloodstained cotton cloth. “We only get so many answers for free. And then they begin to cost us dearly, word by word. Now peel off a few three-inch strips of that adhesive tape for me.”

Producing the first strip with the dispenser’s built-in cutter, Bibi said, “Cost us what?”

Hurriedly winding the gauze around and around her thumb, keeping it tight to stanch the bleeding, Calida said, “Time. Our allotted time. Days, then weeks, then months, our lives melting away fast from the farther end—and then we pay with something worse.”

“What could be worse than losing part of your life?”

“Losing the capacity for passion and hope, being left alive but with no emotions other than bitterness and despair.” She held out her thumb so that Bibi could apply the length of tape. “No additional answers we might get would be worth the cost.”

The roses in the living room smelled sweet again. The flames had stopped leaping violently above the rims of the clear-glass cups. The fluttering reflections of candlelight on the tabletop and the walls no longer reminded her of swarming insects.

The air of impending violence should have diminished.

It had not.

While the diviner hastily used three more strips of tape to encase the gauze, Bibi came further to her senses, much as the once-cold room had returned to warmth. “I can’t do this.”