“Is still my enemy. Accept the inevitable, girl. You’re easy prey. As a boy, Terezin was a dog, and now he has gone back to the wild. He’s a wolf now, like and yet unlike all other wolves, always running at the head of the pack. He dreams of turning the world backward, of a younger world, which is the world of the pack. They’ll drag you down sooner than later. You think it’s a cult, and it is, but it’s bigger than you think. There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources.”
He walked out of the Victorian suite. She started after him, but then stopped, halted by a suspicion that at some point in the past few minutes, he had given her a clue that she had missed, had left for her the frayed end of a thread that, if she were to wind it on a spool, would unravel the mystery in which she found herself, revealing every warp and weft of this intricately woven conspiracy. She stood there in the company of the corpse, in the colorful riot of Victoriana, looking but perhaps not seeing, listening in memory to their conversation but perhaps not hearing.
If Chubb Coy had left a thread for her, a clue, Bibi could not find it in the third-floor parlor or remember their conversation vividly enough to tweeze out that frayed end. Baffled, exasperated with herself, she pocketed Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade. She snatched up a decorative pillow from the sofa, unzipped the fringed cover, stripped it off, and slipped it over her right hand as if it were a glove. As she made her way down through the house, she tried to recall everything that she had touched, and she paused to wipe each item clean of any fingerprints she might have left.
If she was charged with the murder of Solange St. Croix, that would bring an end to her search for Ashley Bell as certainly as if Terezin murdered her. And if it happened that the arresting officer was one of the Wrong People, he might claim that she had resisted arrest, whether she had or not, justifying a bullet in the head.
She wondered what she would be like if she got through this alive. Paranoia was now in her blood, like a viral infection, and there might not be a cure for it. She could envision herself in the grip of agoraphobia and social phobia, afraid of open spaces and of people, unable to leave her apartment, living behind a locked door and blinds closed tight.
“Screw that,” she said as she crossed the living room.
In the kitchen, on the island, stood a large designer purse that had not been there when Bibi had first entered the house. It must be St. Croix’s, left when the woman came through the ruined door from the garage. Whatever else might be said about the professor, no one could deny that she had guts, seeking out the intruder on her own, although she had most likely somehow known the identity of her quarry. Bibi took the purse and continued wiping away fingerprints into the garage, where the dead woman’s Mercedes still ticked and pinged as the engine cooled.
There she paused to open St. Croix’s handbag, in which she found, as expected, a smartphone. She used it to call her father’s cell number, which wouldn’t compromise her disposable model if the Wrong People were monitoring Murphy’s phone traffic.
He answered on the second ring. “You got Murph.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Bibi! We’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
“I’ve been dodging calls.”
“Dodging even your own parents? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”
“Don’t flow me a load of feel-good.”
“Relax, old man. It’s just that I was dying two days ago, and I need a little me time to get a handle on that.”
“Tell me! All morning, I’m one minute grinning like a dog and the next minute all verklempt.”
Hearing the strong emotion in his voice, Bibi said, “Don’t get verklempt on me, Dad.”
“I just love you so much, honey.”
“I love you, too. But, you know, I want to keep this quick. I’m going down the coast a little, find a cool place to hang out for a couple days.”
“A little time to chill.”
“Exactly. Maybe Carlsbad. Or La Jolla. I’ll let you know when I have a motel. I’m sorry I didn’t bring back Mom’s BMW this morning.”
“That’s when we started to worry. But don’t you worry, kiddo. We’ll hustle over there and fetch it ourselves. Hey, last night, how was Calida?”
“Memorable,” Bibi said. “We’ll talk about it in a couple days, when I see you.”
She almost asked about the silver bowl and lettered tiles in his office, about the packet of needles and the white-cotton rag with the bloodstains. But she didn’t know where that question would lead, and she didn’t want to know. She wouldn’t doubt her parents. Couldn’t. In times as turbulent as these, but also in the seeming humdrum of daily life, which always proved to be more meaningful and consequential in retrospect, each of us needed to rely on people of constant character and truths that were immutable. She knew her parents’ weaknesses, which were minor and easily forgiven, and she believed, based on long experience, that they were as reliable as anything in this world. If she ever discovered that they were not what they seemed, she would be devastated, and the word heartbroken, made trite by overuse, would have fresh and poignant meaning for her.
“Tell Mom I love her.”
“She’ll worry anyway. So will I.”
“I’m walkin’ the board, Dad.”
“If you say so. Nobody walks it better.”