Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(66)

The woman was dressed as always in a stylish but severe suit that would have served her well had she been a mortician. Graying hair pulled back tighter than ever and captured in a bun, skin paler than before, lips all but bloodless, she seemed to have been born of the fog that licked the lace-curtained windows.

Wary of the pistol but not intimidated, St. Croix came no closer to Bibi, but began slowly to circle her, as if waiting for an opening. Her intentions weren’t obvious, because she carried no weapon, though it would not have been a surprise if a knife had appeared magically from tailoring that seemed too severe to conceal one.

In a mutual strategic silence, the professor circled 360 degrees and Bibi turned in place to follow her. Which of them was the moon and which the planet, it was hard to say. St. Croix chewed on her lower lip as if biting back words, and throughout her revolution, she met her former student’s stare without looking away for an instant. Her blue eyes were two jewels of hatred.

As the professor began a second circling, bumping against the side table, rattling the art and curios upon it, she said, “And now another outrage. What are you doing here, Miss Blair? What did you come to steal? Or is it something other than theft that gets you off, something degenerate, something kinky?”

Instead of answering, Bibi said, “Why were you having breakfast with Chubb Coy?”

Squinting, eyes glittering through her lashes, St. Croix said, “So you still follow me, do you? After all these years?”

“The opposite is true, and you know it.”

“The opposite of what is what?”

“You’re the one who followed me. I was in the restaurant first.”

“You’re the same lying bitch you always were. A sick little lying bitch. But you’re not half as clever as you think you are.”

Although there was nothing cuddly about the woman, she had a feline quality, as intense and merciless as a cat on the hunt.

Bibi said, “What do you have to do with Terezin, with Bobby Faulkner?”

Still circling, perhaps calculating whether she could come in under the pistol, St. Croix said, “Is that someone I’m supposed to know in whatever fantasy or scheme you’re cooking up?”

“Seventeen years ago, he killed his mother in this house and nearly killed his father.”

The professor didn’t dispute that statement. She didn’t react to it at all. “Are you ready to admit what you have done, Miss Blair?”

“I broke in here to find something that might explain how you’re involved with the murderer, Robert Faulkner, with Terezin.”

St. Croix stopped circling. The image that she projected so forcefully to the world was one that she also cherished, which was why she made such an effort to suppress the evidence of her natural beauty, a little of which was always evident nonetheless. At this moment, however, her expression of contempt was so fierce that the last traces of loveliness were purged, and she was the very avatar of animosity, of pure detestation.

“I mean,” she said, “what you did then, the rotten damn thing that got you thrown out of the university.”

“I wasn’t thrown out. I quit.”

On the two previous occasions that she and the professor had a confrontation regarding Bibi’s unknown offense, St. Croix hadn’t been this over-the-top furious. But now she worked herself from rage to fury, too hot for the cool priestess of the written word.

“You quit. Yes, you quit. Because if you hadn’t, I would have seen that you were thrown out on your ass.”

Frustrated, of half a mind to shoot St. Croix in the foot to force her to stop being so enigmatic, Bibi said, “Okay, all right, so tell me what I did.”

“You know damn well what you did.” Her cold eyes were hot now, the gas-flame blue of the fire in a pet-cemetery cremator.

“Pretend I don’t know. Tell me. Spit it out and humiliate me. If it’s so bad, then make me feel like the shit you think I am.”

A man said, “Enough of this.”

Chubb Coy had opened the black-lacquered door and entered the third-floor suite. He wore a black suit, gray shirt, no tie. His pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor.

Bibi kept the P226 on the professor, who was nearer than the chief of hospital security (and whatever the hell else he might be).

Judging by her reaction, St. Croix was no less surprised by Coy’s arrival than was Bibi. “What are you doing here? You have no right. This is my home. First this sneaky little bitch and now you? I won’t tolerate—” She failed to finish the sentence before Coy shot her twice in the chest.





For an instant, Bibi thought that Chubb Coy had meant to shoot her, but, as a consequence of being a poor marksman, had killed the professor instead. However, when he declared, “She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life,” his intention was no longer in doubt.

Bibi had seen the terrible aftermath of murder but never the act committed. Whatever she might have imagined about such a moment, all that she had written or considered writing about a homicide, failed to capture the shock of it, the piercing and hollowing wound of being witness to a life ended prematurely, the immediate sense that a world ended and with it all the experiences of she whose world it had been. The horrible convulsive reflex of the body as each bullet impacted. The light of being at once extinguished in the eyes. A collapse so different from the fall of anyone with still a spark of life, the hard and undignified drop not of a person but of a thing. Solange St. Croix, no friend of Bibi’s, nevertheless evoked in her a pang of grief, not all or even most of it for the professor, but for herself, too, and for everyone born into this world of death.