Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“Any sign of one of the Cordovas living at the house?” I asked.

“No. The top floor was where the family had their bedrooms. No one slept there all night. I think the other people with the dogs were caretakers. Not that I saw any of them up close.”

“You didn’t enter any other room in the basement?”

“No. They were all locked.”

“What about upstairs? Anything unusual?”

He nodded, his face somber. “I found a closed-off wing toward the back of the house. Up a flight of spiral stairs into this tower was a bedroom suite. Half of it was brand-new. Brand-new beams of wood on the floors. You could see where the old met the new. I wondered if it’d been remodeled after a fire. And maybe that had been the Spider’s room. There was nothing there, though. Not a photograph, not a clerical collar. Nothing.”

“What about this Pontiac you saw in the Evening View parking lot?”

“I think it’s one of the caretakers. I had to leave Ashley’s doorknob unbolted, so they know someone entered her room.”

“Any sign she’d been there in the days before her death?”

“Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “I don’t know how, but …” A smile flickered across his face, went out. “She was still in the air.”

Expressly avoiding eye contact, he took a sip of coffee.

“Now it’s your turn,” Nora whispered eagerly, leaning in.

What had happened to me? Did I even know?

I told them everything I remembered, beginning with the dogs chasing me all the way to my return to the Evening View Motel. I didn’t consciously choose to tell them in such detail — Nora looked stricken, Hopper slightly infuriated, which made me wonder if it was wise to be so uncensored — but each word I uttered seemed to wrench loose the next, until all the confusion and horror came tumbling out in a landslide.

When I’d finished, they said nothing for a moment, speechless. And I was relieved. I don’t think in all of my days of reporting, I’d ever so much needed to tell someone exactly what had happened, as if to do so was to finally walk out of there, pull myself out of those tunnels and shadows, once and for all.

“What do you mean you found something you didn’t remember taking in Brad’s coat pockets?” Nora whispered.

Before answering, I looked around to make sure our waitress was still back inside the kitchen. We were the only ones left in the restaurant. Even the elderly man who’d been seated at the counter was now shuffling out the door, leaning heavily on his cane, his every step an effort.

Brad Jackson’s mud-soaked coat sat folded on the seat beside me.

I pulled it over and, object by object, emptied the pockets, placing each item on the table in front of us. Popcorn’s compass. The child’s blood-soaked shirt. They looked odd here in the neon lights, out of place, souvenirs from a nightmare.

“ These I remember taking,” I said. “But not this. ”

I fumbled in the pocket and pulled out the final object lying at the bottom. It was a three-jointed set of bones, weathered and dirty, about five inches long.

“What is that?” asked Nora.

“It looks to me like a portion of a child’s foot. But I don’t know.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I’m guessing I came across it somewhere and took it, thinking it could be evidence. But I really don’t remember.”

Nora’s alarmed gaze left the bones on the table and moved to me. “You don’t remember if those people did anything to you, or …”

“No.”

“What about how you got into that hexagon?”

I shook my head.

“It’s obvious you were drugged,” said Hopper.

Nora anxiously bit her lip. “Now what do we do?”

“We’ll have some of this analyzed,” I said. “Find out if it’s human blood on the shirt or human bones. If it is, we need to find out whom they belong to. Was the Spider correct in his suspicions? Is there a mother out there, waiting for news of her missing child? I can’t prove what I saw up there was real, but I can prove Cordova believed in the curse. How far did he go in his work and in his hope to save Ashley? The man blurred fiction and fact. His art and his life were the same.”

“That’s not what we decided,” Hopper muttered. “We made a deal before we broke into The Peak all three of us would decide what to do with the information. Not just you. ”

“But we don’t know what we have yet.”

“What do you want to gain from all of this?” He stared at me accusingly. “Your name in friggin’ lights ? The glory of stripping the great Cordova naked so you can parade him on a leash in front of the world for everyone to look at? So you can gloat that this is really what he is? And he wasn’t so great ? You think that’s what Ash would’ve wanted?”

“I don’t know what she wanted.”

“This isn’t your lottery ticket. This is her life. I’m not going to let you turn it into some cheap tabloid story—”

“No one’s suggesting that—”

“We know what she went through,” he went on angrily. “We know the kind of madhouse she grew up in, what sort of family she had. How she lived her life. We know why she climbed to the top of that elevator shaft by herself in the middle of the night and jumped. It was to put an end to it. We know. You even saw that ditch filled with the shoes and gloves. So, when is it enough? How much more truth do you need to suck down until you’re fucking full ?” He furiously shoved back his plate, fork clattering to the floor, and stalked out of the restaurant, the door slamming behind him.

“He saw something up there,” whispered Nora. “Don’t know what. He’ll probably never tell anyone.”

It had started to rain, and Hopper, zipping up his jacket, gazing at the ground, ducked away from the window, out of sight.

“Whatever he was looking for,” she said, “whatever he wanted from her, he found it.”

The drive back to the city was tense and mostly silent. I stopped at River Rentals Inc. in Pine Lake to pay in full for the missing Souris River canoe, explaining to the kid with dreadlocks behind the counter that it’d been destroyed.

“ Seriously? What happened, man?”

I could only hand him a credit card. He definitely didn’t want to know.

We pulled onto the highway, and immediately Nora fell sound asleep in the seat beside me. I thought Hopper had, too, but every time I glanced in the rearview mirror, he was only staring out the window, his face unreadable, his thoughts probably somewhere back at The Peak.

Nora was absolutely right. Hopper had admitted he’d spent the night in Ashley’s room, and I couldn’t help but suspect something he’d seen there or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he’d let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love he’d been keeping in a cage. What was it like for him, every day standing outside in the wind and rain to stare at the ocean, yearning for some sign of her, never giving up hope? At The Peak perhaps she’d finally come into view, a ship coming neither toward him nor away, only riding that perfect line between heaven and earth, long enough for him to know that she had loved him, that what they had was real, before slipping out of sight, probably forever.

I certainly understood his anger toward me and his desire to protect Ashley. I’d even anticipated it, that the deeper we got into the investigation, the more disturbing the truth about her family, Hopper and I would inevitably clash over what to do with the information. But for me to let it rest here, not to go all the way, was not an option.