Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(79)
In Laguna Beach, the atmosphere was apocalyptic, fog seething like the smoke from a world afire. The unseen sun was so exhausted that the last light of the day had neither force nor color, a bleak and eerie radiance that might have been intended not to illuminate but to penetrate the bones and print X-ray images of her skeleton on the sidewalk, fossil proof that humanity had once existed.
Every third store seemed to be a gallery. Fortunately, there were as many clothing stores as art merchants, and Bibi was able to buy a change of clothes. She purchased a soft-sided suitcase with wheels, and in a market she bought a junk-food dinner, among other items.
On her way back to the car, she passed the Bark Boutique, which sold toys and other gear for dogs. One of the items in the window was a leather collar that arrested her attention because it reminded her of Olaf’s collar before he was Olaf, when he had come to her out of the rain, though his had been worn and cracked and caked with mud.
The memory that troubled her now, however, was not of the day the dog arrived, but of an incident that occurred three years after his death, when she was nineteen and moving out of her parents’ bungalow into an apartment. By then, instead of a single carton of books stored in the back of her closet, there were four filled with overflow volumes from her shelves. She sat on the floor, sorting the contents, putting aside titles that had lost meaning for her. In the last box, she discovered that she’d packed the books so as to create, at the center, a hollow in which were several objects, including a chamois cloth wrapped around Olaf’s old collar. She had forgotten that she’d kept it. If she once had a sentimental attachment to it, she felt none now. The loop of leather was cracked, filthy, mottled with long-dormant mold, the buckle bent and rusted. There was no reason to keep it. But again she did not throw it away. In fact…What had she done? Hadn’t she gone to a business-supply store and bought a fire-resistant metal document box? Yes. Twenty inches square and ten inches deep, with a piano-hinge lid and a simple lock and a brass key, for the storage of grant deeds, wills, insurance polices, and the like. Hadn’t she put the chamois-wrapped neckband in that box, as well as the other items she had found with it? Yes, but…
Now, at the display window in downtown Laguna, staring at a similar leather collar, Bibi could not recall what other items she had found in the secret hollow within the carton of books. And what had she done with the metal document box? Where was it now?
As the tires of passing vehicles swished and fizzled on the wet pavement, as fog laid a shine of dew on her face, as trees dripped, as great moths of vapor throbbed wings against the panes of the streetlamps, Bibi felt like a stranger to herself.
With her latest round of purchases, she returned to the Honda, which was parked near the east end of Forest Avenue. Minutes later, on Coast Highway, she began looking for a motel on the north side of town, someplace where no one would find her but where she might begin to find herself.
The motel deserved neither a five-nor a four-nor perhaps even a three-star rating, but it looked clean and proudly kept and, most important from Bibi’s perspective, anonymous. She parked on a side street two blocks away and walked, pulling the wheeled suitcase.
A lone woman manned the front desk in an office painted pale Caribbean blue and yellow. The counter was a free-form slab of koa, either genuine driftwood or sculpted to suggest a heroic history of shipwreck and travail, red and lustrous and with a watery depth.
These small motels were often owned by a couple, and the clerk was as gracious as if welcoming a guest into her home. The badge on her blouse identified her as Doris. She was pleased to accept cash, but their policy required a credit card and a driver’s license for ID, which was probably in case the guest trashed the room.
“He didn’t let me have credit cards,” Bibi said. “He cut up my driver’s license.” She surprised herself when her mouth trembled and her voice conveyed fear, bitterness, and anguish. She was no actress. Her true condition, anxiety and loneliness, provided the emotion with which she sold her story of spousal abuse. “I came in a cab partway and walked till I saw this place.” Her vision blurred with tears. “He won’t come here to make a scene. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone.”
Doris hesitated only a moment before making an exception to the rules. “Do you have family, dear? Someone to turn to?”
“My folks are in Arizona. My dad’s coming for me tomorrow.”
Wanting to avoid seeming either nosy or unconcerned, Doris said, “If he hit you, girl, then you should report him.”
“He more than hit me.” Bibi put one hand to her stomach, as if with the memory of a punch. “A lot more than hit.”
She signed the register as Hazel Weatherfield, with no idea where she got that from. She said it was her maiden name.
Three rooms were available, all in a row, and she took Room 6, farthest from the street. It was simply furnished but cozy.
Sitting in one of the two chairs at a small round table, she ate a dinner of cashews, dried apricots, and aerosol cheese squirted on crackers, washed down with a Coke from a motel vending machine.
While she ate, she studied the photo of Ashley Bell, and heard in memory Terezin’s voice, when she had spoken to him on St. Croix’s phone: Too bad you can’t come to the party. Ashley will be there. My guest of honor. It’ll be the last chance you’ll have to find her alive. It all begins again. The little Jewess’s role is historic.