At first it seemed that these three references were unlikely code because they would be too hard to work into conversation. But then she realized that if Coy had for some time intended to kill Dr. St. Croix, he would have known how he could use the O’Connor quote. And since he could be sure Bibi would at some point speak of Ashley Bell and Terezin, the conversation could easily be manipulated to use the Wilder and London excerpts.
But what message did he hope to convey by this elaborate ruse, by this maddeningly indirect communication? If he secretly wished to help her, couldn’t he have more easily slipped a note to her—or a twenty-page detailed report, for that matter? There could be no doubt that his references to the three authors were calculated, but did such an enigmatic form of communication suggest that he was clever and sincere—or that he was capricious and deranged? The longer she puzzled over the three allusions, the more they seemed to say only the obvious: that Coy was a nihilistic killer like The Misfit, that Terezin was a ruthless wolf with demented fantasies, that Ashley Bell’s murder would be an act committed by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. A code was not devised to convey secretly what both the sender and receiver already knew.
Frustrated, all but crackling with nervous energy, Bibi got up to pace the room, and the moment that she became more physical, her mind went into motion, too, shifting from the issue of the literary allusions to the possibility that she carried within herself some device that broadcast everything she said and heard. To whom? Not Terezin, for if he had such an intimate connection with her, he would already have found and killed her.
How would a transmitter be implanted? Surgery? But she had no scars. Injection? Microminiaturization, nanotechnology…There were experts who insisted that, one day soon, incredibly complex machines made of surprisingly few molecules could travel the bloodstream, reporting telemetrically on the patient’s health from an interior perspective, even removing plaque from arteries and performing other procedures on the microscopic level. If one day soon, why not now? If for medical purposes, why not for surveillance?
This was the road to madness. Kafka Land. She was suddenly afraid not because she believed that she had been injected with a tiny transmitter, but because for a minute she had seriously considered the possibility. Which was ridiculous. Lunatic.
She went into the bathroom and repeatedly splashed cold water in her face. She rubbed vigorously with the towel, as if needing to slough off some thick and clinging residue.
When she looked in the mirror, she knew the face but not its aspect, not the haunted quality, not the dread that paled the skin, not the foreboding that pinched the mouth.
“Go away,” she said to the woman in the mirror. “I don’t need you.” She had no use for the weak Bibi who might have been. She needed to be the Bibi she had always been.
She returned to the bedroom and sat at the table and studied Coy’s three allusions, comparing what he’d said to the sources he had not always precisely quoted. She considered them in the context of the ornate Victorian parlor in which he’d made them. She thought about the three stories, their plots and characters and themes and subtext. She brooded about the authors, recalling what she knew of their lives and interests beyond their writing.
A possibility occurred to Bibi, something that Coy might have been trying to say. If her mind had always been spinning when she was a girl, it had for years now been ceaselessly weaving, a tireless loom that issued an ever-changing fabric of impressions, sentiments, thoughts, ideas, concepts, theories. The possibility that occurred to her began as one frail thread, hardly noticed in the rush of thoughts and worries, but in seconds there were other threads feeding into the web, and with astonishing speed a pattern formed, a possibility so alarming that she erupted off her chair, knocking it over.
Doors in her mind, long closed, began to ease open, and once-forbidden rooms of memory welcomed her. She was all at once five years old and alone in her Mickey-lit bedroom with something evil, ten and hiding a dog collar, sixteen and struggling against a desire that could destroy her. Dizzy, weak in the knees, she stumbled to the second chair, grabbed the headrail with both hands to steady herself, closed her eyes, and in a voice stropped sharp with terror, she said, “No, no, no.”
A thin acrid odor.
Bibi opened her eyes and looked around at the toilet and the shower and the white towels on the chrome rack, not sure whose bathroom this was, but then she remembered the motel. Pogo’s car parked two blocks away. Hazel Weatherfield, the abused wife. Hazel’s daddy coming from Arizona in the morning. Cashews and crackers and apricots and aerosol cheese.
She felt strange. Neither good nor bad. Neither relaxed nor tense. Neither afraid nor confident. There was an emptiness in her. A hollowness. A drained feeling. She thought she had lost something, though she couldn’t recall what, so it must not have been important.