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.”