by Dean Koontz
She hadn’t been sure if she’d come here to have a face-to-face with Calida or to nose around. The departure of the Rover helped her make up her mind. Nose around.
Preferring not to be encumbered by a purse, she tucked it under the driver’s seat. She locked the doors of the Honda and boldly crossed the street to the house, the small oval leaves of the live oak, dead and dry, crunching underfoot like beetle shells. When no one answered the doorbell, she rang it again, with the same result.
Without any furtive behavior, as though she had every right to be there, Bibi went around the side of the house, through a gate that stood ajar, past a patio shaded by a wisteria-entwined arbor, into the backyard, where a property wall screened her from the neighbors.
Her attention was drawn at once to an unexpected structure: a quaint decorative greenhouse of white-painted wood and glass, about twenty feet by thirty, set at the back of the property. This was such an unlikely discovery that she felt compelled to investigate it.
Four statues cast in terra-cotta, representing the four seasons, stood on plinths, two on each side of the approach to the building. The entire quartet—not just winter—looked threatening, as if they had been crafted in a place and a century that had never known a day of good weather.
There wasn’t much point in locking a house of glass containing nothing of value, and Bibi found the south door open. She stepped into a warm and moist enclave of exotic plants, most of them growing in trays of fecund-smelling soil set upon tall tables flanking narrow work aisles. There were no orchids or anthuriums or other species grown solely for their flowers. All appeared to be herbs. But only a few were the herbs that people used in their kitchens. She recognized basil, mint, chicory, fennel, rosemary, tarragon, and thyme. But there must have been a double score of other thriving varieties unknown to her. Some of the tables featured a bottom tier, where sunlight never directly reached, and in those still pools of wine-dark shadows were fungi—toadstools and puffballs and molds—that looked unhealthy, maybe even lethal.
Wandering through the greenhouse, Bibi thought of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the hookah-smoking caterpillar that had offered Alice pieces of this mushroom and that. Although she had accepted the reality of the events in her kitchen the previous night—the sudden plunge in the room temperature, the strange behavior of the candle flames and clocks, the stench of rotting roses where the only roses were in fact fresh and fragrant—perhaps she should consider the possibility that a part of what she had experienced might have been related to the effects of some hallucinogen distilled from one of these plants. It could have been slipped into her glass of chardonnay when she wasn’t looking.
She turned a corner and, on one of the tables, discovered a wire cage about a yard long and two feet wide, occupied by fifteen or twenty mice in various shades of brown and gray. The rodents were busy feasting at small bowls of food and water, coming and going from shallow burrows in coagulated masses of damp shredded newsprint, grooming, defecating, and copulating. Granted that mice were by nature nervous creatures, this community nonetheless seemed unusually jittery, fidgeting from end to end of the cage, twitching in alarm when others of their kind unintentionally stepped on their tails, ceaselessly surveying their domain with eyes as dark and liquid as beads of motor oil.
Movement drew Bibi’s attention to the concrete floor, where a possible explanation for the mice’s agitation slithered to her feet: a snake, and then another, and a third.
Bibi saw at once that the squirming serpents on the greenhouse floor were not rattlesnakes and that each was different from the others. Never having had the slightest interest in herpetology, she could neither identify them nor tell if they were deadly. She assumed they couldn’t be venomous, because Calida wouldn’t let them roam free if they were dangerous.
Of course, with what they believed to be cold and unassailable logic, people made assumptions all the time that got them killed. And Bibi had so recently promised Pogo that she would not give him another reason to cry. So she backed slowly away from the sinuous trio, dreading that she might step on a fourth behind her, ready to turn and sprint if one of them began coiling to strike.
Perhaps the snakes had been interested in her only because she might have been Calida come to feed them mice. As she retreated, they did not follow. Two glided silently beneath the table on which stood the cage of rodents. The third twined around a table leg and oozed upward to inspect the various nervous entrées that might be selected for dinner.
Bibi’s breath escaped her in a sigh of relief when she stepped outside and closed the greenhouse door.
At least she had learned something in return for the risk she had taken: Calida’s occult interests exceeded Scrabblemancy. Whether the murdered mother, too, had been a woman with numerous cabalistic pursuits or whether Calida had added new lines of business to her mom’s basic enterprise, the masseuse seemed to be seriously twisted, maybe fully wacked.
In either case, Bibi had to go into the main house. Considered as a preview, the greenhouse suggested that essential information would be found in the bungalow.
She tried the kitchen door, but it was locked. She hadn’t seen a sign warning that the house was protected by an alarm company. But she was loath to break a pane of glass. For the novel that she had been writing, she had researched burglary, speaking with detectives in the robbery detail and with a convicted criminal serving time for a score of offenses. She had learned that in some jurisdictions, you needed to force entry and steal something to be guilty of burglary. If you did neither, merely trespassed, you were at most guilty of the lesser charge of housebreaking.
That she should be calculating the legal consequences of her criminal activity, committing a crime rather than contemplating it, was disturbing. Well, screw it. She had no choice. The cops didn’t help you with complaints of supernatural harassment, and it was likely that some Wrong People were on the police force, too. The thing to keep in mind was that, two days earlier, Death had not just been on her doorstep but had been ringing her bell and knocking and calling for her to come out and play. Whatever trouble she got into now would be, by comparison, as sweet and smooth as pudding.
Among the many interesting things she learned when researching burglary was that a surprising number of people were diligent about locking potential points of entrance on the ground floor but were careless regarding second-story windows and sometimes even balcony doors.
At each end of the wisteria-entwined arbor that shaded the back patio, the vertical members were made of two-by-twos and appeared strong enough to serve as ladder rungs. She chose the end where the wisteria grew thinner. Assuring herself that this was less dangerous than surfing, since there were no sharks in the arbor, she climbed to the top with an agility that gratified her. She might have spent the last few years being more of a desk-bound writer than she would have preferred, but she hadn’t gone soft yet.
Four double-hung windows overlooked the arbor and the backyard. The third proved to be unlocked. Bibi slid up the lower sash. When no alarm sounded, she climbed over the sill, leaving the window open in case she needed to make a hasty exit.
Sneak thief, even minus the theft, still wasn’t a title that made her feel dashingly romantic, certainly not proud. She almost drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, to search the house at the ready, but that seemed stupid. She had no experience of a job like this. Her nerves were tripwire tight. If she turned a corner and encountered Calida—or, worse yet, a total innocent—she might squeeze the trigger in startled reaction. Instead, she went naked, or so it seemed, wondering why she had never thought it essential to earn a black belt in one martial art or another.
She had entered what seemed to be the master bedroom, which looked more ordinary than she might have expected. Neatly made bed with dust ruffle. Reproductions of California plein-air paintings. No zodiac carpet, no black candles in polished-bone holders, no weird totem hanging on the wall behind the bed. No snakes. The door to the walk-in closet stood o
pen, and the clothes were hung in an orderly fashion.
Although she had risked a housebreaking conviction to come here, Bibi had no intention of pawing through Calida’s dresser drawers in search of secrets, which would probably turn out to be about things that had nothing to do with her and that were in one way or another pathetic, as most bedroom-kept secrets were. She suspected that if anything important waited to be found in this house, it would be grotesque or at least singular. She would recognize it the instant she opened a door or crossed a threshold.
The maple floor of the upstairs hallway talked back underfoot. She could do nothing to silence it. Staying close to a wall didn’t lessen the noise. Proceeding quickly caused no greater disturbance than stepping slowly and cautiously.
Beyond the hall bath were two rooms, the first peculiar but not helpful. No furniture whatsoever. Nothing hanging on the walls. The windows had been blacked out by fitting them with mirrors. She glimpsed her reflection and didn’t like the way she looked. Anxious, small, uncertain. In the center of the pale maple floor, in neat black letters an inch high, had been painted THALIA. The name of Calida’s mother. If you could believe anything the diviner said, Thalia had been cruelly tortured and dismembered by the Wrong People, twelve years earlier. Most likely not in this house. Somewhere else. This room, with the name on the floor, didn’t feel like either a marker of the crime or a shrine to the victim. For reasons that Bibi couldn’t specify, the chamber felt as if it had been established for the purpose of communication, although with whom or what, she could not say.
Across the hall from the empty room lay an office. A corner desk held a computer and two printers, the second for color work, all the equipment dark and silent. More plein-air paintings. A rosewood sideboard along one wall. In the center of the space stood a round worktable attended by a single chair.
She had found the grotesque, the singular, the something.
On the table stood the silver bowl filled with lettered tiles. In addition, two lines of tiles had been arranged on the table, as though Calida had returned to the inquiry that had begun in Bibi’s kitchen the night before. The first line read ASHLEY BELL. The line below it was an address: ELEVEN MOONRISE WAY.
Beside the bowl lay a sheet of high-quality photographic paper of the kind used in a color printer. When Bibi turned it over, she was staring at a lovely girl of perhaps thirteen. Champagne-yellow hair. Wide-spaced violet eyes the shade of certain hyacinths. It was mostly a head shot, from the shoulders up. The girl wore a white blouse with a crisp white collar, and across that garment were written five words: Calida, this is Ashley Bell.
This girl. This Ashley Bell. Her face beautiful. Her expression serene. But in that serenity, Bibi saw a hard-won composure, a mask meant to deny the photographer his subject’s true emotions, which were fear and anger. She warned herself that she might be reading into the photo a scenario from her imagination. Maybe the girl was just bored or trying for one of those vacuous expressions that models were encouraged to assume for the haute-couture magazines these days. But no. For Bibi, the proof could be seen in that remarkable stare. If the colors in the picture were true to life, those enchanting reddish-blue eyes were as limpid as distilled water and revealed a profoundly observant and quick mind. They were wide-set eyes but also as wide open as they could be without furrowing her forehead, as if she meant to belie the apparent tranquillity of her face, or as though the photographer or something else beyond the camera disquieted her.
In addition, Bibi perceived in the girl a tenderness and vulnerability that inspired sympathy, a kindredness that she could not—or would not—explain to herself. This reaction, this sense of equivalence, hit her with such force that it changed everything.
Until now, the search for Ashley Bell, such as it was, had been to a degree unreal, a game without rules, a joke quest without many laughs. It might even be a hoax involving a cleverly staged, phony divination session enhanced by hallucinogens, perpetrated by a group of crazies whose motivation was likely forever to elude a sane person. To this point, Bibi had played this dangerous game as though she exclusively stood at the center of it, focus and sole target. Because of the girl’s appearance and demeanor, which were at once radiantly ethereal and as real as stone, Bibi’s perception changed. She was the paladin, the white knight, and a secondary target only because she would act to save the girl. Ashley Bell was the primary target of the Wrong People and the focus of all that would happen hereafter. In surfing terms, Ashley was the grommet, the trainee surf mongrel, and Bibi was the stylin’ waverider who had to save her from being mortally prosecuted by a series of storm-generated behemoths.
Reality had finally resolved out of the chaos of the last twelve hours. It had bitten hard, infecting Bibi with conviction.
Ashley Bell was real. And in desperate trouble. The people who threatened her were in some way weirdly gifted and beyond the reach of the law. Also well organized. Also homicidal.
Calida had printed out a picture of Ashley that someone had emailed to her as an attached JPEG. It would be helpful to know the source of the photograph. Maybe she had printed the email, too.
Like any house, this one produced noises separate from those its people generated. Creaks and ticks and soft groans of expansion, contraction, and subsidence. A series of these caused Bibi to freeze and listen intently, but silence and a guarded sense of safety settled after the building finished complaining about gravity.
She looked through desk drawers for the email. Nothing. An electric shredder fed the waste can, which contained mostly quarter-inch-wide ribbons of paper suitable for celebrating a welcome-home parade of astronauts returning from the moon, but otherwise useless. The remaining contents did not include the email.
She suspected that she’d already spent too much time in the house. Exploring Calida’s computer might be interesting, but it would also require a reckless delay.
Carrying the photograph in her left hand, keeping her right free to reach beneath her blazer to the pistol, Bibi descended the stairs through a stillness that no tread disrupted. She passed also through a lens of morning gold admitted by a skylight, in which particles of dust not evident elsewhere were revealed revolving around one another, as though she had been given a glimpse of the otherwise invisible atomic structure of the world.
The ground-floor rooms were without eccentricity, furnished as normally as those in any house. But when she got to the kitchen, she found the aftermath of a visit by the Wrong People. The dinette table had been jammed into one corner; the chairs stood upon it. A heavy-duty white-plastic tarp, fixed to the floor with blue painter’s tape, protected the glazed Mexican tiles. A few stained rags had been left on the tarp; but there was not much blood. Apparently, they killed her in such a way as to avoid a mess, possibly by strangulation. Then the amputations had been performed postmortem, both to minimize the need for cleanup and to ensure there would be no shrill screams to alarm the neighbors. The body had been removed, perhaps in the Range Rover and for disposal, but the ten fingers, each sporting a flashy ring, were on a counter near the refrigerator, lined up neatly on a plate, as if they were petits fours to be served with afternoon tea.
Human cruelty could disgust Bibi, but not shock her. She wasted no time reeling from the hideous sight or wondering for what purpose the fingers had been kept. She understood at once the urgent message the scene conveyed: The cleanup was not finished; either those who had left in the Range Rover would return or another crew would soon arrive to complete the job.
As she started across the kitchen, she heard a vehicle in the driveway and the muffled clatter of the rising garage door.
When she heard the roll-up door rising in the garage, Bibi reached under her blazer, to the holstered pistol, wondering if she would be able to get the drop on whoever might be coming, disarm and restrain and interrogate them. If there was only one of them, the answer was probably not. If two, the answer was definitely not. If more than two, they would butcher her into more pieces than t
hey evidently had rendered Calida. Courage and steadfastness were not enough when you were up against a crew of sociopaths and you weighed 110 pounds on a fat day and your gun had only a ten-round magazine and you weren’t self-deluded. She didn’t hesitate even long enough for the garage door to finish its ascent, fled the kitchen, went directly to the living room and out the front door.
She stayed away from the east end of the porch, where the driveway led past the house to the garage. Avoiding the steps as well, she hurried to the west end of the porch, vaulted over the railing, and landed on her feet. She raced across the front lawn, across the street, and took refuge in Pogo’s Honda, in the deep shadows under the live oak.
She put the photograph of Ashley on the dashboard and extracted her purse from under the driver’s seat. If she could sound genuinely horrified and panicked, which shouldn’t be a problem, a call to 911 might bring the police to Calida’s house while someone remained there to be arrested. Bloody rags. Severed fingers. Murder. If that wasn’t enough to bring out Costa Mesa’s finest, they must be busy filming a reality-TV show. Only as she zippered open the handbag did she recall that she no longer had her phone. She had abandoned it—and its GPS—with her Explorer, the previous night.
If she got out of the car and screamed, trying to rouse the neighbors, she would accomplish nothing except to alert the murderers to her presence and provide them an opportunity to see what she was driving these days. She sat stewing in frustration for a minute or two, but she gained nothing from that, either. When she drove away, she hung a U-turn, heading west, to avoid passing the house.