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.