Looking up from the collar, Pogo said, “You think it could be?”
“Bibi doesn’t believe in coincidences.”
“Yeah. I know. But could it be?”
“I don’t believe in them, either.”
Putting down the collar, with the name revealed—JASPER—Pogo said, “Then what the hell? Why did she never tell us?”
Pax didn’t know what to make of this development. He was pretty sure, however, that although the shared name seemed like a small if freaky detail, Jasper the fictional mongrel and Jasper the golden retriever who became Olaf were of considerable importance. Intuition, the knowledge that comes before all reasoning and teaching, raised the hairs on the nape of his neck and lowered the temperature of his spine.
Instead of answering Pogo’s question, he said, “Let’s see what else is in this box,” as he picked up a small Ziploc plastic bag of the kind that people often used to hold the day’s vitamin pills or prescription medications. It contained a withered scrap of scalp with an attached lock of hair, the lower third of which was matted and crusted with what must have been dried blood.
Armed and anxious, Bibi argued silently with herself about the necessity and the wisdom of venturing uninvited to a house as strange as the one that stood like a massive gravestone in a desolate plot of the Mojave Desert. She approached the residence overland rather than along the county highway, through sand and loose shale and parched vegetation, all vaguely phosphorescent under the moon, which deceived as much as it illuminated. She was noisier than she would have liked, especially as she had imagined herself whidding through the arid landscape with the grace of a coyote. At least the night was chilly enough that she didn’t have to worry about rattlesnakes, though she thought that scorpions might be scuttling through the darkness.
The house faced north, and she arrived at the east wall, along which she made her way, cautiously looking in the lighted windows, which were curtained only with sheers. The rooms were furnished, but quiet and without occupants.
As at the front, the house at its south side lacked a porch. Only a six-foot-square pad of bricks presented the back door, which had been broken down as if with a battering ram that had torn it off its hinges. The breached door lay cracked and splintered on the limestone floor of a hallway lit by frosted-glass sconces. The evidence of violence should have turned her away. She went inside.
She had never seen the house before, and yet it felt familiar. She had a fragment memory of Ashley Bell standing in a front window, in this place. The voice issuing from the electronic map, telling her that she would want to stop here, had been that of a young girl, perhaps that of Ashley. Bibi could not retreat. Impossible. She had been spared from cancer TO SAVE A LIFE, and only she stood between Death and a girl of twelve or thirteen.
The fallen door rocked underfoot, an unavoidable clatter, though she got quickly off it. No one called out or came to see who might be responsible for the noise. The residence stood in silence.
Upon entering the house, Bibi had also entered a peculiar state of simultaneous knowing and not knowing. It wasn’t quite déjà vu, the illusion of having experienced something before that in fact one was encountering for the first time; she not only recognized things as she encountered them, but also had continuous presentiments of what lay ahead. A laundry room to the right of the hall. Yes. A walk-in pantry to the left. Yes. And ahead, yes, the kitchen. But though she could predict what room came next, she could not recall having been there before.
The kitchen was rather primitive by twenty-first-century standards. No microwave. No dishwasher. The gas range and undersized refrigerator—bearing the name Electrolux on its door—were many decades old, and yet looked new or at least well maintained.
In the other rooms, the furniture was oversized but sleek and modern, Art Deco pieces of Amboina wood, others of polished black lacquer, all of it expensive in its day and far more expensive now, having become über-collectible. Here and there, a chair or a desk had been overturned; but most things were as they should be. The glass in a breakfront had been smashed but not the contents that the cabinet displayed. The destruction wasn’t systematic, instead almost casual, as though whoever did it had come here on a more important task than vandalism and had committed this damage only in passing.
As Bibi returned from the drawing room to the front hall, she glimpsed swift movement to her left, a dark and darting form. Tall, thin, stoop-shouldered. She pivoted toward it, pistol in a two-hand grip, but no one was there. If the presence had been real, surely it would have made some sound—swift footsteps, a creaking of mahogany floorboards, a ragged inhalation—but the uncanny silence was not disturbed. Besides, the figure seemed to have moved with inhuman speed, crossing the hallway from room to room in a fraction of a second.
The window from the fragment of memory, in which she had seen Ashley standing in a white dress with pale-blue lace collar, was on the third floor. She climbed stairs to a landing, and then another flight. As she neared the second floor, an inky form, so swift and fluid that Bibi had only the impression—not the conviction—that it was human, appeared above her and plunged past her. Although the figure did not brush against her, a coldness prickled across her in its passing, and she almost lost her balance. She fell against the railing, remained upright, and turned to look down, in time to see a shadow disappear off the landing, onto the first flight of stairs.
She couldn’t know if it might be the same spirit—if spirit was the word for it—that she had seen in the ground-floor hall, but she sensed that it was not flinging itself through the house in a rage, that it was instead a spirit in extreme torment, sustained here by anguish, vigorous with the energized despair called desperation.
When she got to the second floor, she found a dead man lying faceup on the carpet runner. He appeared to have been beaten to death with truncheons wielded by a man or men for whom physical violence was an intoxicant. His clothes were a blood-soaked shroud, his face and skull a cratered terrain from which she had to look at once away.
His crime had been resistance. He had dared to protect his own. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew.
If Ashley Bell was still here, perhaps she would be on the third floor, in the room with the window seen in the fragment of memory.
Heart racing, feeling as might a deep-sea diver in a pressurized suit struggling toward the surface countless fathoms overhead, Bibi went up more stairs. The pistol was strangely heavy, and her wrists ached with the weight of it.
Sitting in Bibi’s kitchen, Paxton repeatedly thought that they needed candlelight, that he should put half a dozen or more votives on the table, though it was only 2:15 in the afternoon, with sunlight strong at the windows, and though the occasion certainly didn’t call for a romantic atmosphere. And several times he detected the rich fragrance of roses, although there were no roses in the apartment, nor any air freshener, as far as he could see, that might explain the phantom scent. These odd sensations felt akin to those moments in the hospital room when Bibi’s voice had come to him.
The perfume of roses wafted over him again when he stared in puzzlement at the tiny plastic bag that contained a desiccated scrap of human scalp from which sprouted a lock of thick white hair matted, around the roots, with dry rust-red blood.
“Well, if we’re looking for unBibi,” he said, “this seems about as un as it gets.”
“In a way, yeah, and in a way, no,” Pogo said. “The day of her grandfather’s funeral—”
“Captain, you mean?”
“Yeah. Everyone came from the cemetery to the bungalow for the usual get-together. You know—food, booze, memories. Like seventy or eighty people. It was a crowd, it got noisy. I realized Beebs wasn’t there anymore. She was torn up. She loved the guy. I figured if she’d go anywhere, she’d go to the ocean. So I walked down to Inspiration Point, and there she was, sitting on a bench. She didn’t see me until I sat beside her—and she was holding that little plastic bag in both hands.”
> Pax said, “This is the captain’s hair?”
“Yeah. Seems when the aneurysm broke, he must’ve shot to his feet before he fell. He was a tall guy. On the way down, he hit the edge of the table hard, right at the sharp corner. Left behind that piece of skin and the hair stuck to it. Bibi took it after she found him, kept it.”
“Why would she do that? Seems too macabre for her.”
“She didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask. We’ve always been totally open with each other about most things, you know, but there’s always been this need-to-know clause, too, and neither of us ever violates it. She made me promise not to tell anyone, and I didn’t—until you. Anyway, I was just eight, she was ten, she was teaching me to move from a bellyboard to a shortboard, and she was a goddess to me. She still is. Always will be. You expect a goddess to have secrets, it’s part of their mystery, and you don’t want to learn their secrets, because if you learn them, you die.”
Pax considered the contents of the plastic bag for a moment, but then put it aside to examine the remaining four items in the metal box.
In the third-floor hallway, beyond the topmost of the stairs, a dead woman lay as further testament to the savagery of those who had invaded the house. Perhaps the corpse on the second floor had been her husband, and she had stood here as a last defense against the invaders, because not far from her lay, of all things, a pitchfork that would have no purpose in this elegant and stylishly furnished residence. The tines of that rustic weapon were not wet with blood, so Bibi could only assume that this poor woman, who lacked the effective defense of a gun, had no chance to wound the murderers of her husband. She didn’t want to examine the corpse, but she felt obliged to have a quick look at it, as if she owned a portion of the responsibility for what had happened here and must answer for it, though of course she was not accountable for what Terezin and his followers might do to anyone. They would do the same—or worse—to her if they got the chance. The woman had been shot more than once. In stomach, chest, and face. Bibi looked away, less in horror than in pity, as if to conduct even one more second in autopsy would somehow make her complicit in the murder.
She didn’t think that she would find a third dead body, but she proceeded along the hallway in dread of precisely such a discovery. If Ashley had hidden in her room, they would have found her and taken her away. According to Terezin himself, he wanted the girl for his upcoming birthday. Most likely, on that day, she would be raped in imaginative ways, later tortured, and then murdered in a ceremonial manner, as in his madness he set out to launch once more the Final Solution of what Hitler called “the Jewish problem.” But if the cultists, Terezin’s followers, had not taken the girl from the house, if she had resisted, as her father on the second floor and her mother on the third had resisted, their intention of taking her alive might have been foiled.
When she came to the room on the left, at the end of the hall, where the door stood half open, Bibi knew what else she would find in addition to either a dead girl or no girl at all: horses. Pistol in her right hand, aimed at the floor, no longer concerned that any of the fascist murderers remained in the house, Bibi crossed the threshold.
Her premonition was fulfilled: paintings of horses, bronzes of horses, porcelains of horses, books about horses. This house was one more thing that Bibi had forgotten, apparently by using Captain’s memory trick. She had been here before, but she didn’t know when or for what purpose. Hour by hour, she found more memories that had been burned, fragments of which survived in ashen form: this house, this room, the fact that Ashley Bell loved horses, might ride them as well as admire them. She thought, I must know Ashley, I must at least have met her once! Why else would this residence be familiar to her? How else could she have known about the horse motif in this bedroom?
The doors of a tall built-in armoire stood open. The clothes that had hung within it had been taken out and thrown on the floor.
She approached it with trepidation, although she did not raise the pistol. The secret panel in the back of the armoire, which Bibi had somehow known would be there, had been slid aside. The closet-size space thus revealed was unoccupied. If the girl had hidden there, Terezin and his men had found her.
Suddenly Paxton felt that they were running out of time. The sensation came out of nowhere, for no apparent cause, an impression of a brink looming, a void beyond. He became certain that Bibi was receding from him, captured by someone sinister and being carried away at high speed, in what direction and to what destination he couldn’t know. Which made no sense. She was comatose in the hospital. Nobody could abduct her from a secure medical facility. And if her condition had changed, Nancy or Murphy would have been on the phone to him.
The fourth item in the black metal box was a small recorder. It contained a microcassette, but they couldn’t listen to it because the batteries were dead.
While Pogo searched pantry shelves and kitchen drawers for spare batteries, Pax examined the fifth item, a twice-folded sheet of lined yellow paper on which were written a number of quotations and the attributions of their sources. The handwriting wasn’t Bibi’s, neither her precise adult script nor the decorative girlhood variant. The strong, slanted cursive seemed to suggest that a man had composed the list. The cheap paper was deteriorating at the corners, foxed by time and skin oil; and it had been opened and closed so many times that, at some point, the folds had been reinforced with Scotch tape.
Pax began reading the quotations aloud for Pogo’s benefit. “ ‘This world is but canvas to our imaginations.’ That’s from something by Henry David Thoreau.”
Pogo said, “The Walden Pond guy.”
“So you paid attention in school, after all.”
“No matter how much you try to keep that stuff out of your head, some of it gets in.”
“The next one’s also from Thoreau. ‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’ ”
Having found a package of Duracell AAA batteries, Pogo brought two of them to the table. “Was Thoreau the Walden Pond guy and the power-of-positive-thinking guy?”
“No. That was Norman Vincent Peale. This next one’s by someone named Anatole France. ‘To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.’ ”
“Maybe I’m seeing a theme,” Pogo said as he removed the dead batteries from the recorder.
“Me, too. Imaginations, imagined, imagine. Here’s one from Joseph Conrad.”
Pogo said, “The Heart of Darkness guy.”
“Kid, you are such a fraud.” Pax cleared his throat and then read, “ ‘Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.’ ”
“That’s heavy, dude.”
The sense of time running out, of some catastrophe looming over Bibi, grew stronger. Pax glanced from his watch to the wall clock, where the second hand swept smoothly around the face but where the minute hand twitched from 2:19 to 2:20, clicked like a trigger.
“Here’s another one. Kenneth Grahame wrote—”
Pogo interrupted. “He’s the Wind in the Willows guy. Mr. Toad, Mole, Badger, Ratty, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and all that.”
“So he wrote, ‘As a rule, indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.’ You know who Wallace Stevens was?”
“A poet guy. New batteries don’t help. The recorder is biffed.”
“Biffed?”
“Biffed, totally thrashed, broke, whatever. But I know someone who can fix it.”
“So this Wallace Stevens poet guy wrote, ‘In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.’ There’s one more. You might have heard of him. Shakespeare. ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A
local habitation and a name.’ ”
Pogo considered Shakespeare, and then shook his head. “It’ll give me a migraine. What do you figure the list means?”
“Whatever it means, I think her grandfather wrote it.”
“Captain. Yeah. And I think she’s the one who opened it and read it so often, she wore out the creases.”
Pax glanced from his wristwatch to the digital time readout on the microwave, to the digital readout on the conventional oven, to the window, where the afternoon light had not begun to wane to any appreciable degree. Nevertheless, within him, a clock spring of worry wound tighter, tighter.
“You got a dance to go to?” Pogo asked.
“Bibi’s talking to me again,” Pax decided.
“What’s she saying?”
“It’s not words this time. It’s a feeling. That time’s running out. That someone bad is coming after her, and fast.”
Pogo looked grim. “The brain cancer.”
“Not something bad—someone.”
“Nancy and Murph are with her, one or the other, usually both, and not just them.”
“It’s not something that’ll happen in the hospital. It’s going to happen…wherever else she is.”
Pogo said, “I know we’re in the Twilight Zone. I accept that. But it still sounds nuts when you say things like that.”
Pax took the sixth item from the document box, a children’s picture book with a story told in short sentences and simple words. Cookie’s Big Adventure.
“That’s been in print forever,” Pogo said. “It was Nancy’s favorite when she was little. She gave me a copy when I was five.”
“Didn’t Bibi like it?”
“Yeah, I guess. When she was little. Personally, I didn’t think it was such deathless literature.”
“If she liked it,” Pax said, “why isn’t it on a shelf in the living room or in her office?”
“Beats me.” As Pax leafed through Cookie’s Big Adventure, Pogo took the final item from the lockbox. “The saint bitch.”