Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(62)

“Robert Warren Faulkner. Bobby. Our only child. Sixteen years old at the time.”

“My God.”

At that moment, the ruined face didn’t trouble Bibi. The man’s eyes were what she found distressing, yet she could not easily look away from them.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked away.

The central element of the sketch on the drawing board was a stylized rising bird, wings spread. It might have been a phoenix.

“Your face,” Bibi said. “It could be made…much better.”

“Yes. Surgery. Reconstruction. Some radiation and corticosteroid injections to prevent new scars from forming where the old ones were removed. But to what purpose? Beth will still be dead.”

Bibi could think of no response, and if she found the words, she knew that she should not speak them.

“You see,” the silversmith continued, “the boy was obsessed with Nazis, the war, the death camps.”

“Auschwitz-Birkenau. Terezin,” she said.

“Dachau, Treblinka, all of them. And because this animal Hitler was interested in the occult, Robert developed an interest as well. Beth became concerned, wanted to consult a therapist. I said, no, at that age, many boys are fascinated by horrors of one kind or another. It is part of growing up. Nazis. The walking dead. Vampires. One thing or another. He will outgrow it, I said. I had no clue what was happening in his head. Beth had a suspicion, intuition, but I had no clue. Until…”

Fog seeking blindly at the high windows. The soft rumble-roar of an airliner, fresh from John Wayne Airport and gaining altitude over the sea.

Out in the salesroom, Rita greeted a customer. Muffled voices.

Bibi said, “What happened to him?”

“They never found him. He took our money, some things of value. He had a plan. But I think he is dead.”

“Why do you think so?”

“In all this time, he would have called to torment me. Toward the end, he had become arrogant, verbally abusive. He enjoyed my reaction to his insolence.”

“How long ago did it happen?”

“Seventeen years.”

“He’d be thirty-three now.”

In the other room, conversation and soft laughter. Business as usual. Outside, the voice of the airliner fading toward Japan.

The silversmith said, “Why are you here, Miss Blair?”

She surveyed the studio. “Are you afraid he might come back?”

“No. His cruelty is such, he would rather I live…and suffer.”

She met his eyes. “But if he did come back? What then?”

From the shelf under the tilted drawing board, Kelsey Faulkner drew a pistol. Evidently, he kept it with him at all times.

Bibi wasn’t convinced. “After all, he is your son.”

“He was my son. I do not know what he became.” He regarded the pistol with a solemn longing before returning it to the shelf. “It will never happen. Because I do not deserve the satisfaction.”

Bibi didn’t believe that her last question was germane, that silver was a meaningful link, but she needed to ask it nonetheless. With the tiles spelling ASHLEY BELL aligned in her mind’s eye, she said, “Have you ever made bowls, Mr. Faulkner? Silver bowls?”

“Only jewelry. My talent is limited. I am no Georg Jensen.” His smile was not truly a smile, for its mother was melancholy. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why are you here, Miss Blair?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Faulkner. I hope you get that satisfaction.”





In the parking lot, behind the wheel of the Honda, Bibi got her money’s worth from the quarters that earlier she’d fed to the meter. She spent a few minutes studying the photo of Ashley Bell, though she didn’t know why and didn’t see anything in the face that she hadn’t seen previously. No less than before, she felt a poignant kindredness and a compelling desire to give everything she had to the search. No, that was not quite right. She wasn’t compelled, wasn’t driven by some exterior force, not by any conventional motive that she could name. Rather, she was impelled to find the imprisoned girl, pressed forward by an urgent inner prompting, not by mere desire but by need, as though she had been born and had lived twenty-two years for one purpose, which was to spare Ashley Bell from whatever outrage her captors intended to perpetrate upon her.

She put aside the photograph, opened her laptop, and dared to go online for a brief monster hunt. She quickly found the story, a sensation at the time, when she had been only five and oblivious of what occurred beyond the sphere of her family. In those days, the Faulkners had lived farther down the coast, in Laguna Beach. Bibi already knew more than she cared to know about the savage details of Robert’s attack on his parents. She wanted photographs of him, and on different sites she located seven, six of them apparently provided to the authorities by people other than his father.

Two snapshots showed him at ages too young to be useful for her purpose, and in the other five, he was between fourteen and sixteen. A handsome boy, even striking, he stared directly into the camera, solemn in every instance except one, when he was fourteen and smiling broadly, posed against a backdrop of palm trees bracketing an ocean view. Bibi resisted the temptation to read wickedness in the tilt of his smile or derangement in the sheen and squint of his eyes; he looked like any other boy and, instead of a future murderer, could as easily have been a saint in the making.