Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(64)
After taking off the cap and sunglasses, Bibi proceeded boldly to St. Croix’s front door. When no one responded to the bell, she moseyed to the back of the residence with the practiced nonchalance of an experienced housebreaker. The doors and windows were locked, though the rear door to the garage was secured by a flimsy lockset. Even if the house had an alarm, the garage was not likely to be on the system. She could have slipped the latch by sliding a credit card between door and jamb; but she had left her purse in the car.
When she considered returning to the Honda to get her Visa card, something snapped in Bibi. Not a big snap. Not like the thick trunk of her psychology splitting all the way through and toppling. But not the subtle crack of a twig, either. Her resentment at the disruption of her life, the anxiety and frustration and bewilderment arising from the frightening events of the past eighteen hours, had stressed her to the point that something had to give. Just one branch broke, one branch in the elaborate tree that was Bibi, and it was labeled CAUTION. To hell with her Visa card. She didn’t need no stinkin’ Visa card. She kicked the door. She didn’t regret the noise. She liked the noise. She was accomplishing something at last. She kicked again. With the third kick, the latch gave. The dark garage welcomed her.
She found the light switch. No vehicles. She pulled shut the door behind her.
The interior door, between the garage and house, had a solid core and a serious deadbolt. She could kick it until she dropped of exhaustion, without effect. A credit card would be useless, too.
Gardening implements hung on a wall. Nearby stood a workbench with drawers flanking the knee space. She found a variety of tools tumbled in the drawers, including a screwdriver and hammer.
At the lowest of four door hinges, she inserted the blade of the screwdriver between the head and the shank of the pivot pin, and pried it half an inch out of the hinge barrel. She tapped the bottom of the screwdriver with the hammer until the pin came free. Soon all four were extracted, tossed aside, ringing across the concrete floor.
Each hinge barrel was formed by five knuckles; two were part of the frame leaf, three were part of the center leaf. Without pins to hold the knuckles together, they separated slightly, but the door remained in place. “No quitters,” she muttered. With the screwdriver, then with the claw hammer, she pried open a crack between door and jamb, big enough to hook her fingers through. She wrenched on the barrier until—scraping, screaking—the hinge knuckles parted and the door stuttered outward maybe two inches, arcing across the threshold. No alarm. Sweet. It was now held only by the deadbolt, which wouldn’t swivel like a hinge. As she struggled, the wood began to crack around the screws that secured the mortise lock. The engaged bolt rattled against the striker plate. She grunted and cursed and put everything she had into the battle until, after more splintering of wood, the door came open just wide enough to allow her to squeeze through into the kitchen, where she stood listening to the house and wiping sweat off her brow with the sleeve of her jacket.
Sometimes Bibi wished she was Paxton. He would have used a packet of C-4 explosive to blow open the door and take out a portion of the wall with it. Neighbors were tolerant in Laguna. They probably wouldn’t complain until the second or third explosion.
Filtered by the marine layer that swaddled the town, morning light floated through, rather than pierced, the floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving shadows in places, providing an adequate though mysterious somber radiance like that of a late-afternoon snowscape.
As she moved through the ground floor, one chamber opening to the next with minimal space given to hallways, she thought that the construction must be far better than the exterior architecture. The sounds of the busy world didn’t intrude. Pale limestone floors, the sparest possible use of area carpets, no draperies whatsoever, marble fireplace surrounds, mirrors of remarkable depth, steel-and-leather furniture so acutely angled and forbidding that it seemed to have been designed by an insect consciousness: Every hard surface should have rung with brittle echoes of every noise that Bibi made, but she walked in silence, like a spirit, as if this were a temple buried for centuries under a hundred feet of desert sand.
There were moments when she felt as alone as she had ever been, but other moments when she paused to listen intently, more than half convinced that someone waited here for her, like a trapdoor spider anticipating her fatal step.
The ground floor clearly was intended for entertaining, for the cocktail parties and literary soirees that were legendary among Dr. St. Croix’s fellow faculty members, guest lecturers, and students. Bibi had not lasted long enough in the writing program to have been invited here; yet room by room, detail by detail, everything upon which she turned her gaze seemed familiar. With uncanny accuracy, she could predict what waited around every corner, beyond every doorway.
In those cold and sparely furnished spaces, nothing explained the professor’s role in recent events or confirmed that she was in some way connected to Terezin. If there was a study or home office where some clue was most likely to be found, it must be on the second floor.
Bibi climbed an open spiral staircase of glass and steel, past large windows where the fog pressed a legion of half-formed faces.
The second floor was alike to the first, with a glitz-free home theater, a lightly equipped gym, and finally the study that Bibi had hoped to find. A Spartan room in the vein of St. Croix’s on-campus office. Two black-and-white abstract paintings. Bookshelves largely empty. A forbidding couch. A black Herman Miller office chair, the only comfortable-looking furniture in the house, stood behind a desk of brushed steel and gray-enameled panels.