Because the silversmith seemed to invite the question, Bibi asked, “What happened?”
After a hesitation, he cocked his head and regarded her with greater interest than before. “You are not like the others, are you?”
“What others?”
He studied her for a moment, and then said, “Any others.”
“I’m just me. Like anyone.”
“Different,” he disagreed. “Yours is not just cheap curiosity.”
Sensing that he was analyzing her and not yet finished, Bibi said nothing, concerned that pressing him would silence him.
“You do not pity me. Compassion, yes, I see your compassion. But no pity, none of the quiet disgust or contempt that comes with pity.”
She waited.
Faulkner closed his eyes and, after a moment, nodded as if in response to some conversation with himself. When he opened his eyes, he said, “A young man clubbed me with a length of steel pipe. While I was unconscious, he raped my wife, my lovely Beth, and stabbed her twenty-three times. As I lay dying…” He corrected himself. “As she lay dying, he poured acid in her face. And then in mine. The burning acid, the fierce stinging, woke me as he was leaving. I lived. Beth did not.”
Bibi would have settled into a chair if one had been available. “Who was he?”
“Robert Warren Faulkner. Bobby. Our only child. Sixteen years old at the time.”
“My God.”
At that moment, the ruined face didn’t trouble Bibi. The man’s eyes were what she found distressing, yet she could not easily look away from them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked away.
The central element of the sketch on the drawing board was a stylized rising bird, wings spread. It might have been a phoenix.
“Your face,” Bibi said. “It could be made…much better.”
“Yes. Surgery. Reconstruction. Some radiation and corticosteroid injections to prevent new scars from forming where the old ones were removed. But to what purpose? Beth will still be dead.”
Bibi could think of no response, and if she found the words, she knew that she should not speak them.
“You see,” the silversmith continued, “the boy was obsessed with Nazis, the war, the death camps.”
“Auschwitz-Birkenau. Terezin,” she said.
“Dachau, Treblinka, all of them. And because this animal Hitler was interested in the occult, Robert developed an interest as well. Beth became concerned, wanted to consult a therapist. I said, no, at that age, many boys are fascinated by horrors of one kind or another. It is part of growing up. Nazis. The walking dead. Vampires. One thing or another. He will outgrow it, I said. I had no clue what was happening in his head. Beth had a suspicion, intuition, but I had no clue. Until…”
Fog seeking blindly at the high windows. The soft rumble-roar of an airliner, fresh from John Wayne Airport and gaining altitude over the sea.
Out in the salesroom, Rita greeted a customer. Muffled voices.
Bibi said, “What happened to him?”
“They never found him. He took our money, some things of value. He had a plan. But I think he is dead.”
“Why do you think so?”
“In all this time, he would have called to torment me. Toward the end, he had become arrogant, verbally abusive. He enjoyed my reaction to his insolence.”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“Seventeen years.”
“He’d be thirty-three now.”
In the other room, conversation and soft laughter. Business as usual. Outside, the voice of the airliner fading toward Japan.
The silversmith said, “Why are you here, Miss Blair?”
She surveyed the studio. “Are you afraid he might come back?”
“No. His cruelty is such, he would rather I live…and suffer.”
She met his eyes. “But if he did come back? What then?”
From the shelf under the tilted drawing board, Kelsey Faulkner drew a pistol. Evidently, he kept it with him at all times.
Bibi wasn’t convinced. “After all, he is your son.”
“He was my son. I do not know what he became.” He regarded the pistol with a solemn longing before returning it to the shelf. “It will never happen. Because I do not deserve the satisfaction.”
Bibi didn’t believe that her last question was germane, that silver was a meaningful link, but she needed to ask it nonetheless. With the tiles spelling ASHLEY BELL aligned in her mind’s eye, she said, “Have you ever made bowls, Mr. Faulkner? Silver bowls?”
“Only jewelry. My talent is limited. I am no Georg Jensen.” His smile was not truly a smile, for its mother was melancholy. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why are you here, Miss Blair?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Faulkner. I hope you get that satisfaction.”