Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(88)
She grips the index card with the tongs.
From his chair across the table, Captain picks up one of the votives and holds it out to her.
The quivering flame stands as high as the rim of the glass.
Bibi turns the tongs so that one corner of the index card points into the votive, cleaves the flame, and is ignited.
In the jaws of the tongs, the burning object might be a cocoon, for from it arises a bright butterfly of fire that flexes its wings across the white cardstock, which peels away in gray ribbons. The butterfly appears about to leap free, to shake loose the remnants of the white chamber of resurrection that its larval form had woven for it and soar into luminous flight, but instead it collapses into a midge of flame.
Captain tells Bibi to open the tongs, so that the fragment of card trapped between its jaws will be consumed.
Bibi obeys, and the burning scrap falls to the red-Formica top of the dinette table, the same cool chrome table that one day will be in her first apartment, the table at which ten lettered tiles will years later spell the name ASHLEY BELL.
The final twist of combustible paper has its bright moment, and in two seconds dwindles into ashes.
The captain sweeps the ashes off the Formica, carries them to the trash compactor, and blows them off his hands, into the trash.
When he returns, he stands watching his young granddaughter for a moment before he asks, “What are you afraid of, Bibi?”
“Afraid of? I don’t know. Well, there’s this old dog, two blocks over, it’s not friendly. And I sure don’t like wasps at all.”
“Have you ever been alone at night in your bedroom and been afraid that something else was there with you?”
She frowns. “How could something be with me when I’m alone?”
Instead of answering her, he says, “I guess the night-light makes you feel safe.”
“Stupid silly Mickey Mouse,” she says, and makes a face that no one could mistake for anything other than exasperation. “I’m not a baby anymore. They shouldn’t treat me like a baby. I’m not a baby anymore, and I’m never gonna be a baby again—that’s how it works.”
“You’ve not even once been glad to have Mickey there?”
“Nope. I’d break him, you know, by accident, if that wouldn’t be wrong. I might do it anyway.” She notices the tongs still in her right hand. She sniffs the air. Her eyes widen. “We just did it, didn’t we?”
“Did what?”
“The voodoo Gypsy memory trick.”
“Yes, we did. How do you feel?”
“I’m okay. I feel good. Wow, that was cool, huh?”
“Do you have any idea what memories you burned?”
She tries to think, but then she shakes her head. “Nothing. I guess I didn’t need them. What did I forget?”
At the refrigerator, he opens the freezer compartment. “Are you ready for that Eskimo Pie?”
The memory is so vivid that when it wanes and leaves Bibi once more in a house prepared for demolition, she can for a moment smell the lingering scent of the burned index card.
For sixteen years, she had neither recalled the incident in her bedroom nor dreamed of it, until the previous night, when she’d fallen asleep in the armchair in her father’s office, above Pet the Cat. The architecture of forgetfulness was at last collapsing, but not quickly enough. She still could not recall the nature of the thing that had stalked her in this room, neither the how nor the why of it, only that the incident had occurred.
Although of low wattage, the glow from Mickey Mouse had been more diffuse than the brighter but narrow beam of the flashlight, which revealed less of the room than had the cartoon guardian. As Bibi probed here and there, she realized that she had gotten all she could—and less than she hoped—from this trespass.
She thought of something she had learned about the captain during a conversation with her mother, a month after his death. Psychological warfare, interrogation-resistance techniques…
Nancy had been estranged from her father for both justifiable and petty reasons. During his four-plus years in the apartment above the garage, the valley between them had been bridged; Nancy’s real father-inflicted wounds had healed, and she had come to recognize those that were imaginary. After his death, she had been struck hard by grief, and over the weeks following his burial, she had talked about him at greater length and in more depth than ever before.
He had remained a combat soldier and officer far past the age when other men needed to switch to desk work. A stint as a trainer of recruits did not give him satisfaction. For the last decade of his career, he’d become an intelligence officer, in part supervising the gathering and analysis of information about the nation’s enemies, but primarily committed to development of defenses against psychological warfare and to formulating interrogation-resistance techniques that soldiers, when captured and held as prisoners of war, could employ to deny crucial information to the enemy.
That detail hadn’t seemed relevant when Bibi was ten and first heard it from her mother. Of the thousands of things, both important and trivial, Nancy told her about her grandfather, that was one of the least interesting. But now she realized that one way to resist interrogation would be to have a memory trick, a way of forgetting those facts the enemy might most need to know.
Surely the other presence in the vacant bungalow must have made small noises as he worked his way toward her. She must have been too lost in memories to separate the telltale sounds of a stalker from the ticks and creaks of an old house easing toward the ruin that was wanted of it.