Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(54)
The masseuse-diviner’s house stood on a lot and a half, a well-maintained two-story bungalow with touches of Craftsman style. Bibi had been watching the place less than five minutes when the segmented garage door rose and a silver Range Rover rolled down the driveway, turned east into the street, and motored away, roiling the low fog in its wake. She had never before seen what Calida drove and didn’t know if this might be it. Distance and the vehicle’s tinted windows prevented her from identifying the occupants.
She hadn’t been sure if she’d come here to have a face-to-face with Calida or to nose around. The departure of the Rover helped her make up her mind. Nose around.
Preferring not to be encumbered by a purse, she tucked it under the driver’s seat. She locked the doors of the Honda and boldly crossed the street to the house, the small oval leaves of the live oak, dead and dry, crunching underfoot like beetle shells. When no one answered the doorbell, she rang it again, with the same result.
Without any furtive behavior, as though she had every right to be there, Bibi went around the side of the house, through a gate that stood ajar, past a patio shaded by a wisteria-entwined arbor, into the backyard, where a property wall screened her from the neighbors.
Her attention was drawn at once to an unexpected structure: a quaint decorative greenhouse of white-painted wood and glass, about twenty feet by thirty, set at the back of the property. This was such an unlikely discovery that she felt compelled to investigate it.
Four statues cast in terra-cotta, representing the four seasons, stood on plinths, two on each side of the approach to the building. The entire quartet—not just winter—looked threatening, as if they had been crafted in a place and a century that had never known a day of good weather.
There wasn’t much point in locking a house of glass containing nothing of value, and Bibi found the south door open. She stepped into a warm and moist enclave of exotic plants, most of them growing in trays of fecund-smelling soil set upon tall tables flanking narrow work aisles. There were no orchids or anthuriums or other species grown solely for their flowers. All appeared to be herbs. But only a few were the herbs that people used in their kitchens. She recognized basil, mint, chicory, fennel, rosemary, tarragon, and thyme. But there must have been a double score of other thriving varieties unknown to her. Some of the tables featured a bottom tier, where sunlight never directly reached, and in those still pools of wine-dark shadows were fungi—toadstools and puffballs and molds—that looked unhealthy, maybe even lethal.
Wandering through the greenhouse, Bibi thought of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the hookah-smoking caterpillar that had offered Alice pieces of this mushroom and that. Although she had accepted the reality of the events in her kitchen the previous night—the sudden plunge in the room temperature, the strange behavior of the candle flames and clocks, the stench of rotting roses where the only roses were in fact fresh and fragrant—perhaps she should consider the possibility that a part of what she had experienced might have been related to the effects of some hallucinogen distilled from one of these plants. It could have been slipped into her glass of chardonnay when she wasn’t looking.
She turned a corner and, on one of the tables, discovered a wire cage about a yard long and two feet wide, occupied by fifteen or twenty mice in various shades of brown and gray. The rodents were busy feasting at small bowls of food and water, coming and going from shallow burrows in coagulated masses of damp shredded newsprint, grooming, defecating, and copulating. Granted that mice were by nature nervous creatures, this community nonetheless seemed unusually jittery, fidgeting from end to end of the cage, twitching in alarm when others of their kind unintentionally stepped on their tails, ceaselessly surveying their domain with eyes as dark and liquid as beads of motor oil.
Movement drew Bibi’s attention to the concrete floor, where a possible explanation for the mice’s agitation slithered to her feet: a snake, and then another, and a third.
Bibi saw at once that the squirming serpents on the greenhouse floor were not rattlesnakes and that each was different from the others. Never having had the slightest interest in herpetology, she could neither identify them nor tell if they were deadly. She assumed they couldn’t be venomous, because Calida wouldn’t let them roam free if they were dangerous.
Of course, with what they believed to be cold and unassailable logic, people made assumptions all the time that got them killed. And Bibi had so recently promised Pogo that she would not give him another reason to cry. So she backed slowly away from the sinuous trio, dreading that she might step on a fourth behind her, ready to turn and sprint if one of them began coiling to strike.
Perhaps the snakes had been interested in her only because she might have been Calida come to feed them mice. As she retreated, they did not follow. Two glided silently beneath the table on which stood the cage of rodents. The third twined around a table leg and oozed upward to inspect the various nervous entrées that might be selected for dinner.
Bibi’s breath escaped her in a sigh of relief when she stepped outside and closed the greenhouse door.
At least she had learned something in return for the risk she had taken: Calida’s occult interests exceeded Scrabblemancy. Whether the murdered mother, too, had been a woman with numerous cabalistic pursuits or whether Calida had added new lines of business to her mom’s basic enterprise, the masseuse seemed to be seriously twisted, maybe fully wacked.