Night Film by Marisha Pessl
I nodded. “The man was Hugo Villarde. The Spider. A sham priest.”
“It was my suggestion to send Ashley to that camp,” she announced.
“Six Silver Lakes.”
“The place came well recommended. When we were notified an accidental death had occurred there, some young boy drowning during a rainstorm, you can imagine how we felt. Yet when I picked up Ashley she was … different.” She shrugged, a faintly cynical expression on her face. “She’d met a boy. The loneliest boy in the world, she called him. She described him as a beautiful red maple leaf that had detached prematurely from its tree. And it floated through wind and rain, scuttled down drains and across fields, absolutely alone, connected to nothing. Yet there was something fundamentally good about him, she believed. Shortly afterward she tracked him down and they began whatever—a correspondence. I don’t know what they wrote or said to each other, only that she was vital and alive again. Her father was relieved. We all were. Ashley wanted to leave The Peak, be around ordinary people, an ordinary life. He bought this place for Ashley.”
She paused to glance tiredly around the room, as if recalling how warm and bustling it had once been, how alive with voices and music, before it had been buried like a lost civilization under the white sheets.
“It felt like the beginning of something. We enrolled her in school here. I prayed he’d return to his work.”
“Making another film.”
Gallo nodded, draining the rest of her drink.
“The prognosis for cancer gets worse after more relapses. The window for long-term survival begins to close. Toxicities have been building in the body, which is being demolished from the inside out. Early that May, Ashley was due for a checkup. She didn’t want to go. Because she knew the truth, of course. She always did. Her doctors recommended a treatment involving clinical trials, an experimental program in Houston. Shortly after that, Astrid discovered, hidden inside Ashley’s bedroom, a packed suitcase. And two one-way tickets to Brazil. When Astrid confronted Ashley, she said she was running away with Hopper and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. She didn’t want treatment. But, of course, her life was at stake. She was just a teenager. This boy she claimed was the love of her life, some juvenile delinquent—none of us took it seriously. Who really loves at that age?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” I said.
“And Hopper and Ashley. Ashley and her father fought horribly over it. He threw her into the car, locked the doors, and told her she was going to Houston whether she liked it or not. She could tell the boy the truth or not. But Ashley decided not to. She said to love someone who is dying is torture. She’d rather the boy hate her, because within that hate is the motivation to move on, to forget, to vanquish—better that than be gutted by loss, to long for something that can never be. And for that deep love to turn into something else, like pity or revulsion—Ashley couldn’t bear it. She cut all ties with the boy. And went to Houston. She almost died there, but it was more from a broken heart than the disease.”
Gallo fell silent, her hardened profile softened, ever so slightly.
“Ashley got better?” I asked, after a moment.
“Yes. She went to Amherst. She had to leave early spring semester due to dizzy spells and fatigue, but after she rested at The Peak she was able to return her sophomore year. And she was all right. She graduated. And then, six months ago, it began again.”
“Matilde.”
Gallo nodded thoughtfully, staring at the coffee table. My mind was spinning because two things she’d said struck me: First, the detail about Ashley leaving early her freshman year at Amherst. It had actually been mentioned in the Vanity Fair article. Reading it, I’d wondered about the reason behind her mysterious departure, and now here it was, explained.
Second, there was a question of timing.
“How long was Ashley treated at the University of Texas?” I asked.
“Eight months? Why?”
“And then she returned to The Peak?”
She nodded slowly, puzzled. “She did the maintenance therapy back in New York. Why?”
“Did the family order medical equipment for her? A wheelchair? Or something from a company called Century Scientific?”
“I ordered everything for her. The Peak was outfitted like the Mayo Clinic. Everything to keep Ashley comfortable, so she wouldn’t be needlessly disturbed. She had round-the-clock nurses monitoring her.”
“And the garbage at The Peak is burned at night?”
“Crowthorpe Falls is always swarming with Cordovites. It’s their Mecca. They migrate there from around the world, hoping for a sighting. The last thing he wanted was a fan trawling through his trash, discovering a prescription revealing that Ashley was sick and jabbering about it on the Internet. We had to protect her. Though in the end, protection is just another cage.”
It had all come together. The incinerators Nora had seen up at The Peak, the glass vial marked biohazard, Nelson Garcia’s accidental UPS delivery back in December 2004—it all made sense now, in light of Ashley’s illness. But the rush of solving these last few mysteries was almost immediately replaced with something else, a sense of hollowness, even grief.
I felt let down. I always did, slightly, when I’d come to the end of an investigation, when, looking around, I realized there were no more dark corners to plumb.
And yet—this was different. The desolation came from the realization that all of the kirin were dead. They’d never existed in the first place. Because, however much I might not want to face it, wanting something larger than life for Ashley, some other tempestuous reality that defied reason, alive with trolls and devils, shadows that had minds of their own, black magic as powerful as H-bombs—I knew Inez Gallo was telling me the truth.
And her truth razed everything, clear-cut that magical and dark jungle I’d wandered into following Ashley’s footprints, revealing that I was actually standing on flat dry land, which was blindingly lit, but barren.
110
“The business with you started because she was sick again,” Gallo blurted with evident contempt.
I drained my drink, feeling the scalding whiskey course down my throat.
“How’s that?” I muttered.
She turned to me, exasperated. “I told you. Ashley was a charismatic girl. Thanks to her inventive upbringing, her solitary life at The Peak, her sickness, she had trouble distinguishing made-up stories from real life. When Ashley was ten, Astrid made the mistake of inviting a witch doctor from Haiti to reside for four months at the house for fun. She didn’t realize it would permanently uproot Ashley’s imagination, like running along a coastline filled with quietly roosting flamingos, displacing them. Suddenly, everything in Ashley’s head became riotous and squawking and in motion, all pink feathers and screeching and flapping wings everywhere. She came to believe in it all, voodoo. Witchcraft.” She shook her head. “I found spells she’d laid for me in my own room, protection from evil, or so she claimed. She was certain she’d been marked by something evil, that the devil was causing her illness. It was heartbreaking. And delusional. Ashley was terrified to be in close physical proximity to people she cared about, because she believed she’d harm them. She claimed this darkness growing inside her due to her—I don’t even know how to put it—her soul slowly being overtaken by the devil—that it made her dangerous. Lethal. The idea was, of course, absurd.”
Gallo sighed. “Six months ago, when we learned she was sick again, her mental state became especially precarious. She had periods of not knowing where she was. Or who she was. Not that it was her fault, after what she’d withstood as a child, having those staring contests with Death, over and over again. She made it clear she didn’t want to be in a hospital bed anymore, plugged into tubes and monitors, weak with morphine. Astrid refused to accept it. She took Ashley, against her will, to a clinic, hoping it’d bring her to her senses, that she’d agree to another round of treatment.”
“And that clinic was Briarwood Hall
Gallo nodded. “She escaped, as you know, thanks to some horny half-wit working in security. Ashley was a master at manipulation, especially men. They melted and sweated and went weak in front of her like a bunch of idiot iced teas. She vanished into thin air. It was horrifying for all of us. We’d no clue where she’d gone. Theo and Boris searched everywhere for her, but she was clever. She knew how to remain invisible. We found out later she’d shacked up in a tenement slum on the Lower East Side.”
“Eighty-three Henry Street.”
“Astrid went out of her mind with worry. By then Ashley had grown quite sick. Astrid wanted her to die at home with her family around her. Still, we had a few inklings as to where she’d go. There wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about that boy. Hopper. She’d kept track of him over the years, knew he’d gotten into trouble with the law, was making a mess of his life. We sensed she’d seek him out in some way. The other option, of course, was you.”
“Me?”
“She’d been interested in you ever since her father dealt with you snooping into his life the only way he knew how. Fighting fire with fire.”
“Dealt with me? Is that what Cordova called it?”
A challenging look flickered across her face, but she remained silent.
“Was it a setup? Who in hell was the man who contacted me, then? John.”
She shrugged. “Someone paid to lead you astray.”
“But what he told me, Cordova visiting all of those schools in the middle of the night—”
“A juicy fabrication. And one just salacious enough for you to blurt it out and hang yourself by your own hubris. I’m sure it was a painful lesson for you to learn, Mr. McGrath, but an artist like him needs just one fundamental thing in order to thrive. And he’ll do anything to keep it.”
“And what’s that?”
“Darkness. I know it’s hard to fathom today, but a true artist needs darkness in order to create. It gives him his power. His invisibility. The less the world knows about him, his whereabouts, his origins and secret methods, the more strength he has. The more inanities about him the world eats, the smaller and drier his art until it shrinks and shrivels into a Lucky Charms marshmallow to be consumed in a little bowl with milk for breakfast. Did you really think he’d ever let that happen?”
As she said this, her still-very-much-alive reverence for Cordova took up in her voice, tossed it high into the air, made it swoop in figure-eights, trailing wild red ribbons—a voice otherwise limp, lying in a dull heap on the ground. I’d also noticed that during the entire conversation Inez Gallo hadn’t actually said the word Cordova, not a single time—referring to him only as he or Ashley’s father.
It had to be her private superstition or she didn’t like cavalierly intoning the word, as if it were akin to God.
As she stood up, stalking over to the bar and returning with the whiskey bottle, hastily splashing it into our glasses, I considered what she said. If there was no devil’s curse, there could be no reason for Cordova to obsess over an exchange, no reason to visit those schools at night, no pit filled with children’s belongings. Had I been hallucinating after all, thanks to the Mad Seeds?
“To comprehend the force that was Ashley,” Gallo said, sitting back against the couch, clutching her drink, “you must understand, she was her father’s daughter. The family’s favorite fairy tale was Rumpelstiltskin. That’s what they did, what they were, fantastical creatures spinning the ordinary, dreary straw around them into gold. They won’t stop until they’re dead. And so Ashley reconceived her illness to be a devil’s curse.”
“But it wasn’t just Ashley who believed it. Marlowe Hughes and Hugo Villarde were also pretty convinced.”
She scoffed. “Marlowe Hughes is a drug addict. She’d believe the sky was hot-pink polka dots if you told it to her. Especially if you wrote it in a fan letter. She spent time with Ashley. Became swept up in her tales. And Villarde, after what Ashley did to him? The man went out of his mind. He believed her to be the devil’s queen, trembling at the sight of a flea.”
I suddenly recalled how Villarde had described, without shame, crawling on his hands and knees across his shop to hide from Ashley, cowering in a wardrobe like a terrified child.
“What about how Cordova worked?” I asked. “The horrors on the screen—they were real, weren’t they? The actors aren’t acting.”
She looked me over, her stare challenging. “It was nothing they didn’t ask for.”
“I’ve heard serial killers say the same thing.”
“Everyone who stayed at The Peak knew full well what they were getting into. They were dying to work with him. But if you’re asking me if he ever crossed the line into pure insanity, if he jumped headfirst into hell, he didn’t. He knew his limits.”
“What are they, exactly?”
She narrowed her eyes. “He was never a murderer. He loves life. But believe what you want. You’ll never find any evidence.”
You’ll never find any evidence. It was an odd thing to say. It sounded almost like an admission—almost. I thought back to the boy’s tiny shriveled shirt, caked not in blood but corn syrup, according to Falcone. What Gallo was saying certainly backed up the results Sharon had given me, whether I wanted to accept it or not.
“Why has everyone I’ve talked to about Ashley disappeared?”
“I took care of them,” Inez said with a hint of pride.
“What does that mean? They’re all lying in an unmarked grave?”
She ignored this, sitting up stiffly. “I also took care of the coroner’s photos of Ashley’s body, and then the body itself—before she was cut open in front of strangers like a lab rat. I’ve paid everyone off handsomely and sent them on their merry way.”
“How did you know who I talked to?”
She looked surprised. “Why, your own notes, Mr. McGrath. Surely you remember the break-in at your apartment. They were very helpful for tying up loose ends.”
Of course: the break-in.
“We were desperate,” she went on. “We didn’t know where Ashley had gone, what had happened to her in the time she’d vanished from Briarwood and ended up in that warehouse dead. The only thing we did know was that she came here one night, broke in, took money from a safe. I suspected you’d know more. Briarwood, after all, informed us that you’d showed up there, snooping. We broke in to find out what you knew.”
“Any chance I can have my laptop back?”
“It’s been a costly enterprise, in the wake of her death, getting rid of each witness. But it’s all in keeping our promise to her, never letting anyone know the truth. It’s what he wanted. Ashley’s history will now forever remain where she wished it, where she believed in her heart it always was—beyond reason, between heaven and earth, land and sky, suspended much closer to legend than ordinary life—ordinary life where the rest of us, including you, Mr. McGrath, must remain.”
“Where the mermaids sing,” I added quietly, reminded of the Prufrock poem. As Hopper had explained it, the mermaids were the one thing the family was always seeking out, always fighting for—life’s most stunning and precarious razor edge. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now. Ashley said it was the only way to live.
Inez Gallo, I noticed, was staring at me, her mouth open in shock—seemingly surprised I knew such an intimate detail about the family. She decided not to delve further into it, however, taking a long sip of her drink.
“Marlowe Hughes suffered an overdose,” I said. “Did you have anything to do with that?”
“I asked her drug dealer to scare her a little. I didn’t expect him to nearly bump her off.”
“Your compassion is very moving.”
She glared at me. “It was the best thing that could happen. It got her out of that apartment. Right now she’s sitting in an oceanview suite at Promises in Malibu, climbing up onto that first, very high, very worn-out step of all twelve-step sobriety programs.”
“And wha
She shrugged. “Nothing. She’s out of the country. But I did speak to her secretary. I paid the girl a small fortune to avoid you like the plague and not to pass along any of your messages to her employer.”
“And Morgan Devold? Why did his house burn down?”
“He needed the insurance money. He was in dire financial straits, two kids, no job. When I explained who I was, that I was there to offer a helping hand, he was quite receptive. If you ever approach him again, he’ll swear he’s never seen you or Ashley before in his life.” She lifted her chin, satisfied. “Everyone in this world has a price, Mr. McGrath. Even you.”
“You’re wrong. Some of us aren’t for sale. Who set the house on fire?”
“Theo and Boris. Boris is a longtime friend of the family.”
“Who smokes Murad cigarettes?”
She was visibly irritated by the question. “Theo. It was his father’s favorite brand.”
Again, she deliberately said his father, rather than simply Cordova. She was taking the long way to avoid a certain hazardous stretch of road.
“Years ago,” she went on, “he cleaned out the world’s supply. Murad. The brand’s been discontinued since the mid-thirties. It’s very rare. But he bought up every last pack from every obscure tobacco collector across the globe. He liked the caramel smell, the gorgeous packaging, and the fact that it was the only detail he remembered about his natural born father, a Spaniard, whom he’d last seen when he was three. But he especially liked the way they burned. It’s like nothing else. There are hundreds of shots of it in the films. The smoke spirals through the air like it’s alive. ‘Like a swarm of white snakes were struggling to be free,’ he once said to me.”
She’d gone on with strange, unchecked fervor, her eyes bright and raised to the ceiling, her mouth twitching in excitement. But then, remembering me, she stopped herself.