by Dean Koontz
In Laguna Beach, the murder house stood three stories tall on a steep street, inland of Coast Highway, where the residences faced either north or south, in both cases lacking ocean views but still expensive. There were enormous old trees, shallow front yards, and an eclectic mix of architectural styles, some poorly conceived. The house where Beth Faulkner had died was moderne, slabs of stucco and smooth teak decks piled like the layers of a wedding cake baked for a bloodless bride and groom as romantic as carrots.
At that hour of a weekday, Dr. Solange St. Croix would most likely be at the university, guarding the standards of contemporary American fiction and dispiriting young writers. Bibi parked across the street and watched the house for half an hour. No one appeared on any of the decks or in any of the rooms beyond the expansive windows.
The fog was somewhat thinner than it had been in Newport, though still thick enough to backdrop an urban version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. And of hounds there was no shortage, a parade of Lagunans walking a dog show’s worth of breeds uphill and down. No one seemed to find it odd that a woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses should be slouching in a junker, conducting surveillance. Laguna prided itself on being an artist’s colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them.
After taking off the cap and sunglasses, Bibi proceeded boldly to St. Croix’s front door. When no one responded to the bell, she moseyed to the back of the residence with the practiced nonchalance of an experienced housebreaker. The doors and windows were locked, though the rear door to the garage was secured by a flimsy lockset. Even if the house had an alarm, the garage was not likely to be on the system. She could have slipped the latch by sliding a credit card between door and jamb; but she had left her purse in the car.
When she considered returning to the Honda to get her Visa card, something snapped in Bibi. Not a big snap. Not like the thick trunk of her psychology splitting all the way through and toppling. But not the subtle crack of a twig, either. Her resentment at the disruption of her life, the anxiety and frustration and bewilderment arising from the frightening events of the past eighteen hours, had stressed her to the point that something had to give. Just one branch broke, one branch in the elaborate tree that was Bibi, and it was labeled CAUTION. To hell with her Visa card. She didn’t need no stinkin’ Visa card. She kicked the door. She didn’t regret the noise. She liked the noise. She was accomplishing something at last. She kicked again. With the third kick, the latch gave. The dark garage welcomed her.
She found the light switch. No vehicles. She pulled shut the door behind her.
The interior door, between the garage and house, had a solid core and a serious deadbolt. She could kick it until she dropped of exhaustion, without effect. A credit card would be useless, too.
Gardening implements hung on a wall. Nearby stood a workbench with drawers flanking the knee space. She found a variety of tools tumbled in the drawers, including a screwdriver and hammer.
At the lowest of four door hinges, she inserted the blade of the screwdriver between the head and the shank of the pivot pin, and pried it half an inch out of the hinge barrel. She tapped the bottom of the screwdriver with the hammer until the pin came free. Soon all four were extracted, tossed aside, ringing across the concrete floor.
Each hinge barrel was formed by five knuckles; two were part of the frame leaf, three were part of the center leaf. Without pins to hold the knuckles together, they separated slightly, but the door remained in place. “No quitters,” she muttered. With the screwdriver, then with the claw hammer, she pried open a crack between door and jamb, big enough to hook her fingers through. She wrenched on the barrier until—scraping, screaking—the hinge knuckles parted and the door stuttered outward maybe two inches, arcing across the threshold. No alarm. Sweet. It was now held only by the deadbolt, which wouldn’t swivel like a hinge. As she struggled, the wood began to crack around the screws that secured the mortise lock. The engaged bolt rattled against the striker plate. She grunted and cursed and put everything she had into the battle until, after more splintering of wood, the door came open just wide enough to allow her to squeeze through into the kitchen, where she stood listening to the house and wiping sweat off her brow with the sleeve of her jacket.
Sometimes Bibi wished she was Paxton. He would have used a packet of C-4 explosive to blow open the door and take out a portion of the wall with it. Neighbors were tolerant in Laguna. They probably wouldn’t complain until the second or third explosion.
Filtered by the marine layer that swaddled the town, morning light floated through, rather than pierced, the floor-to-ceiling windows, leaving shadows in places, providing an adequate though mysterious somber radiance like that of a late-afternoon snowscape.
As she moved through the ground floor, one chamber opening to the next with minimal space given to hallways, she thought that the construction must be far better than the exterior architecture. The sounds of the busy world didn’t intrude. Pale limestone floors, the sparest possible use of area carpets, no draperies whatsoever, marble fireplace surrounds, mirrors of remarkable depth, steel-and-leather furniture so acutely angled and forbidding that it seemed to have been designed by an insect consciousness: Every hard surface should have rung with brittle echoes of every noise that Bibi made, but she walked in silence, like a spirit, as if this were a temple buried for centuries under a hundred feet of desert sand.
There were moments when she felt as alone as she had ever been, but other moments when she paused to listen intently, more than half convinced that someone waited here for her, like a trapdoor spider anticipating her fatal step.
The ground floor clearly was intended for entertaining, for the cocktail parties and literary soirees that were legendary among Dr. St. Croix’s fellow faculty members, guest lecturers, and students. Bibi had not lasted long enough in the writing program to have been invited here; yet room by room, detail by detail, everything upon which she turned her gaze seemed familiar. With uncanny accuracy, she could predict what waited around every corner, beyond every doorway.
In those cold and sparely furnished spaces, nothing explained the professor’s role in recent events or confirmed that she was in some way connected to Terezin. If there was a study or home office where some clue was most likely to be found, it must be on the second floor.
Bibi climbed an open spiral staircase of glass and steel, past large windows where the fog pressed a legion of half-formed faces.
The second floor was alike to the first, with a glitz-free home theater, a lightly equipped gym, and finally the study that Bibi had hoped to find. A Spartan room in the vein of St. Croix’s on-campus office. Two black-and-white abstract paintings. Bookshelves largely empty. A forbidding couch. A black Herman Miller office chair, the only comfortable-looking furniture in the house, stood behind a desk of brushed steel and gray-enameled panels.
All this, too, was disturbingly familiar.
Only the desk offered possibilities, though not many. The study lacked a computer. Not a single object stood on the desktop. There were four drawers, in which Bibi found nothing of interest.
In the southwest corner of the study, a single flight of stairs led to the third floor. For the first time, she had to switch on a light. At the top, she arrived at a black-lacquered door.
Bibi suspected that when there were guests in the house, this door would be locked, for it and the stairs that led to it felt like a fateful passage to a forbidden realm. The lock was not now engaged.
As she gripped the doorknob, she knew what she would surely find beyond, not the precise details but the essence: rooms that were in stark contrast to everything on the first two floors.
When she stepped across the threshold and, with a wall switch, turned on several artfully positioned stained-glass and blown-glass lamps, she passed from stark modernism to high Victorian. The door opened onto a parlor with hand-printed wallpaper in a colorful floral pattern. Delicate lace curtains overlaid wit
h maroon-velvet tasseled-and-fringed draperies. Two étagères full of porcelain collectibles. Chesterfield sofa. Studded-leather armchair. A large circular side table, covered with fabric that itself was covered with a crocheted overlay, accommodated portrait busts and enameled ornaments and small framed drawings.
Bibi felt akin to the children who discovered Narnia, as though she’d passed into another world, but also as if she had returned to a place she’d visited before. The contrasting sumptuous fabrics and the extreme clutter were, even for the period, evidence less of a passion for Victoriana than of a troubling obsession.
Beyond the parlor, a master-bedroom suite offered more of the same. The centerpiece was a bed with an elaborate layered canopy, its four posts carved with twining vines and gilded flowers.
Bibi stood just inside the bedroom, both enchanted and filled with misgiving, wondering if anything of interest might be found in the nightstands. Before she could explore further, the black-lacquered door at the head of the stairs slammed shut.
As Bibi turned toward the door between the bedroom and the parlor, the time seemed to have come for her to draw the Sig Sauer from her shoulder rig.
Pax had given her a few days of instruction at a shooting range, and in his company she had fired hundreds of rounds at paper targets in the form of human silhouettes. She had been concerned that in a crisis she would make a wrong decision, shoot when she should hold her fire, accidentally take down someone other than her target. Her defense had always been words, and if she shot off the wrong ones, an explanation and an apology had remedied her mistake. But apologies didn’t heal a mortal chest wound.
When no one appeared in the portion of the parlor that Bibi could see through the doorway, when the silence became so attenuated that she began to feel she was being tested, perhaps mocked, she overcame her lingering inhibition and drew the pistol. She held it in her right hand, with the muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
She glanced at a window, wondering if beyond it lay one of the teak decks to which she could flee if necessary. Her journey through the house had disoriented her. She didn’t know in what direction this window faced, and the fog that cloistered the coast prevented her from getting her bearings by the intensity and angle of sunlight.
Silence could be an effective strategy. It frayed the nerves and encouraged the imagination to invent one anxious-making scenario after another, until you mistook every smallest and most innocent sound for the start of the expected assault, and were at a fateful moment distracted from the true threat. With every step that Bibi had taken in this house, her apprehension had been whetted, until now it was razor-sharp.
In movies, the silence-tortured character asked, Is someone there? Who’s there? Hello? What do you want? The answer to that last question would always be a variation of Terezin’s response when Bibi, on the phone, had inquired of him what he wanted from her: Only to kill you. Therefore, silence should be met with silence—and with well-considered action.
She brought the pistol down into a two-hand grip, arms extended, as Pax had taught her. She cleared the open doorway fast, bedroom to parlor, staying low, sweeping the gun left to right, right to left.
No one crouched behind the Chesterfield or the armchair. No one sheltered behind the voluminous draperies.
Bibi stood alone, wondering if the door had been slammed by a draft. But the tight construction of the house disfavored drafts no less than it fostered silence. She did not believe in dramatically timed currents of air any more than she believed in coincidences.
Silence now lay deeper than any ordinary hush, as deep as though commanded by a sorcerer’s spell. She could not hear her own breathing or the knocking of her heart, and therefore it was a weak odor, faded almost beyond detection, that alerted her. Not a perfume. More subtle than the most diluted and refined product of flowers or spices. It might have been the smell of clean hair rinsed free of the slightest trace of a shampoo’s fragrance, or skin likewise scrubbed of all sweat and soap. Neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant scent, it was as disturbing as it was faint, suggesting a cold, implacable presence.
When Bibi turned, pistol still in a two-hand grip, Solange St. Croix halted only seven or eight feet away. The professor seemed to have resolved out of thin air, until Bibi saw beyond her the entrance to a bathroom with pedestal sink and claw-foot tub. In the interest of perfecting the Victorian décor, the door was integrated seamlessly into its surroundings, the lower portion stained and trimmed with molding to match the wainscoting, the upper section wallpapered.
The woman was dressed as always in a stylish but severe suit that would have served her well had she been a mortician. Graying hair pulled back tighter than ever and captured in a bun, skin paler than before, lips all but bloodless, she seemed to have been born of the fog that licked the lace-curtained windows.
Wary of the pistol but not intimidated, St. Croix came no closer to Bibi, but began slowly to circle her, as if waiting for an opening. Her intentions weren’t obvious, because she carried no weapon, though it would not have been a surprise if a knife had appeared magically from tailoring that seemed too severe to conceal one.
In a mutual strategic silence, the professor circled 360 degrees and Bibi turned in place to follow her. Which of them was the moon and which the planet, it was hard to say. St. Croix chewed on her lower lip as if biting back words, and throughout her revolution, she met her former student’s stare without looking away for an instant. Her blue eyes were two jewels of hatred.
As the professor began a second circling, bumping against the side table, rattling the art and curios upon it, she said, “And now another outrage. What are you doing here, Miss Blair? What did you come to steal? Or is it something other than theft that gets you off, something degenerate, something kinky?”
Instead of answering, Bibi said, “Why were you having breakfast with Chubb Coy?”
Squinting, eyes glittering through her lashes, St. Croix said, “So you still follow me, do you? After all these years?”
“The opposite is true, and you know it.”
“The opposite of what is what?”
“You’re the one who followed me. I was in the restaurant first.”
“You’re the same lying bitch you always were. A sick little lying bitch. But you’re not half as clever as you think you are.”
Although there was nothing cuddly about the woman, she had a feline quality, as intense and merciless as a cat on the hunt.
Bibi said, “What do you have to do with Terezin, with Bobby Faulkner?”
Still circling, perhaps calculating whether she could come in under the pistol, St. Croix said, “Is that someone I’m supposed to know in whatever fantasy or scheme you’re cooking up?”
“Seventeen years ago, he killed his mother in this house and nearly killed his father.”
The professor didn’t dispute that statement. She didn’t react to it at all. “Are you ready to admit what you have done, Miss Blair?”
“I broke in here to find something that might explain how you’re involved with the murderer, Robert Faulkner, with Terezin.”
St. Croix stopped circling. The image that she projected so forcefully to the world was one that she also cherished, which was why she made such an effort to suppress the evidence of her natural beauty, a little of which was always evident nonetheless. At this moment, however, her expression of contempt was so fierce that the last traces of loveliness were purged, and she was the very avatar of animosity, of pure detestation.
“I mean,” she said, “what you did then, the rotten damn thing that got you thrown out of the university.”
“I wasn’t thrown out. I quit.”
On the two previous occasions that she and the professor had a confrontation regarding Bibi’s unknown offense, St. Croix hadn’t been this over-the-top furious. But now she worked herself from rage to fury, too hot for the cool priestess of the written word.
“You quit. Yes, you quit. Because if you hadn’t, I would have seen that you
were thrown out on your ass.”
Frustrated, of half a mind to shoot St. Croix in the foot to force her to stop being so enigmatic, Bibi said, “Okay, all right, so tell me what I did.”
“You know damn well what you did.” Her cold eyes were hot now, the gas-flame blue of the fire in a pet-cemetery cremator.
“Pretend I don’t know. Tell me. Spit it out and humiliate me. If it’s so bad, then make me feel like the shit you think I am.”
A man said, “Enough of this.”
Chubb Coy had opened the black-lacquered door and entered the third-floor suite. He wore a black suit, gray shirt, no tie. His pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor.
Bibi kept the P226 on the professor, who was nearer than the chief of hospital security (and whatever the hell else he might be).
Judging by her reaction, St. Croix was no less surprised by Coy’s arrival than was Bibi. “What are you doing here? You have no right. This is my home. First this sneaky little bitch and now you? I won’t tolerate—” She failed to finish the sentence before Coy shot her twice in the chest.
For an instant, Bibi thought that Chubb Coy had meant to shoot her, but, as a consequence of being a poor marksman, had killed the professor instead. However, when he declared, “She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life,” his intention was no longer in doubt.
Bibi had seen the terrible aftermath of murder but never the act committed. Whatever she might have imagined about such a moment, all that she had written or considered writing about a homicide, failed to capture the shock of it, the piercing and hollowing wound of being witness to a life ended prematurely, the immediate sense that a world ended and with it all the experiences of she whose world it had been. The horrible convulsive reflex of the body as each bullet impacted. The light of being at once extinguished in the eyes. A collapse so different from the fall of anyone with still a spark of life, the hard and undignified drop not of a person but of a thing. Solange St. Croix, no friend of Bibi’s, nevertheless evoked in her a pang of grief, not all or even most of it for the professor, but for herself, too, and for everyone born into this world of death.