Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(95)
She waited for the furtive tapping at the window to come again. Nothing.
The door featured a deadbolt in the mortise lock, a second and independent deadbolt above that first assembly, and a stainless-steel security chain.
By comparison, the windows could be easily breached.
When nothing further occurred, Bibi sipped the vodka-spiked Coca-Cola. Pax, whatever mess you’ve been sent to clean up, you damn well better stay alive. I need you here, big guy, I need you.
Now that she had rejected lane and settled on WAY, the remaining fourteen letters could not be formed into a single sensible word. Nor two words that were likely to be a street name.
She decided that the number, ELEVEN, might also be correct and that only MOONRISE must be wrong. Calida had found the word because it was obvious, and perhaps she had stuck with it because it appealed to her exotic nature.
The abbreviations for south and north—So. and No.—had to be considered. Bibi started with the former and began making a list in her spiral-bound notebook: So. Remino, So. Mirone, So. Inmore, So. Emorin….If the street bore somebody’s surname and had been meant to honor a local family or a valued person, there would be perhaps a score of possibilities.
Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum. At the nearer window. Two feet from where she sat. The heavy blackout draperies prevented anyone from knowing her precise location.
After straining from the soup of letters as many possibilities as she could for the south and north lists, she quickly made another—and shorter—list using all eight letters in MOONRISE but without specifying a direction. She switched on the electronic map and began inputting the addresses, starting with the shortest list.
Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum. Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum. The sound came from both windows simultaneously. So feeble. If not moths, imagination. No reason to react until glass broke.
11 OMNI ROSE WAY.
NOT FOUND.
11 ROSE OMNI WAY.
NOT FOUND.
Tum-tum-tum-tum-tum. Then more insistent though still quiet. Tumtumtum, tumtumtum, tumtumtum.
11 ROSE MINO WAY.
NOT FOUND.
11 SIMEROON WAY.
NOT FOUND.
11 MORISOEN WAY.
NOT FOUND.
A scratching noise at the door. Like a dog standing on its hind legs and digging at the wood with its forepaws. Whatever it might be, if she opened the door, it would not be a dog.
11 SONOMIRE WAY.
On the screen of the electronic map appeared a cartographic spread of Orange County. A blinking red indicator drew her attention to Sonomire Way in the southeast quadrant, in unincorporated land under the county’s jurisdiction rather than that of any city. She summoned a full-screen view of the quadrant, and then of the fourth of the quadrant in which the street was located.
Sonomire Way was one in a grid of sixteen three-lane streets named this Way and that Way. The distance between streets and the lack of alleys resulted in blocks too large to serve as residential neighborhoods. She assumed it must be a business or industrial park, although no legend on the screen identified it by name.
When the scratching at the door ceased, someone insistently tried the doorknob, rattling it back and forth. There was no chance that this was an imagined noise or the work of a fog-loving moth, because she could see the light purling along the curve of the knob as it turned back and forth.
The knocking, the tapping at the window, the scratching, and now the testing of the lock didn’t seem to be the actions of someone who seriously wanted to get at Bibi right away. The entire performance felt like an attempt to distract her from finding a new word in MOONRISE, from the electronic map and the search for Sonomire Way.
The doorknob stopped turning. No one knocked or scratched.
As she switched off and unplugged the map, Bibi thought about the moment earlier in the evening when she had turned traitor against herself. Because of that self-betrayal, she had not purchased another butane lighter. If she became aware of tearing a sheet of paper into small pieces, with the intention of flushing it down the toilet, she would hope to be able to turn away from that intention, puzzle together the fragments, and read what she had meant to commit to a memory hole. That she had been a reluctant—even unaware—treasonist did not mean she had reformed or was ineffectual.
If she had been the one trying to distract herself from the search for Sonomire Way, however, the noises at the door and the windows should have been imaginary; yet she was certain she’d heard them. And she definitely saw the doorknob turning back and forth. If the sounds and the testing of the lock were real and if also she was the perpetrator of those distractions, then she must possess some paranormal power that she used unconsciously, like the living equivalent of a poltergeist.
The prospect of having such a power didn’t please her. If that was part of what she’d long hidden from herself by using Captain’s memory trick, she would prefer that the knowledge remained scattered ashes. If she managed to save Ashley Bell, all she wanted thereafter was to return to the tracks of a normal existence, to the life that cancer—and this obsession with the threatened girl—had derailed. Ordinary daily life, which so many people thought had no flash or filigree, was to Bibi at all times extraordinary; so much magic and wonder were at work in the world, so much mystery in its depths, that she didn’t want—and couldn’t cope with—any more than what it offered to anyone who was willing to see.
After shrugging into her blazer, she carried the electronic map in her left hand, the pistol in her right, and paused to put an eye to the peephole. If the scratcher at the door waited for her, it was not immediately in view. The two-block walk to the Honda through fog and threat, as well as the events to come on Sonomire Way, promised to be a daunting test of her daring and courage. But whatever happened, even if this proved to be a test to destruction, the night ahead had two virtues: first, the much desired end of this ordeal was coming fast; second, she doubted that it would be dull.