Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“You know I’ll always be on the sidelines,” I said, “cheering you on. You’re a powerful woman. And you’re going to go on being powerful, for miles. For years. I’d only slow you down.”

“Maybe I want to be slow. Why do people have to keep moving away from each other all the time?” She was on the verge of tears again. She wrenched her hand away. “Hopper’s right. You’re not attached to anyone. You love only yourself.”

She waited for me to disagree, but I didn’t. Maybe it was the effect of the last three days. I was spent, had no more will to exert on my own life. I could only keep watching it now, in all its gory glory, as it twisted and bucked in front of me.

“You’re going to ruin everything. Like Hopper said. You don’t care about me. Or Ashley. She means nothing to you. Even now. All you care about is the hunt.”

She struggled off the bed, white comet shooting through the room.

“Nora,” I called out.

But she was gone.

My alarm went off at seven. By seven-thirty, I was out the door.

I took the 1 train up the West Side to Barney Greengrass — the famed hundred-year-old Jewish deli — arriving when it opened, and then, bags of bagels and fresh lox in hand, I rode the M train to its very last stop, Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens. If I was going to pay an unannounced visit to Sharon Falcone on a Sunday morning, I could only come bearing gifts, and Sharon had a weak spot for poppy-seed bagels, Nova Scotia salmon, and a Yiddish delicacy called schmaltz herring, a cured whitefish that to me tasted like leather encrusted in salt. To Sharon, it was heaven.

She lived in a mug shot of a house: redbrick, sobered, bleary-eyed, square. More than a decade ago, I’d once dropped her off at home when we were working late on the same case — her father had just died, leaving her the house — and I’d quietly made note of her address, in the off chance I ever needed to find her.

There was no answer when I rang the bell, so I sat down on the leaf-strewn steps to wait, wondering if she’d already headed into the city to the station or if she’d moved. But then I noticed the empty dog’s water dish and the bald tennis ball in the yard under the single bush, and within fifteen minutes I spotted Sharon speed-walking down the sidewalk. She was wearing her maroon North Face jacket and carrying two large deli coffees. In true Falcone fashion, she wasn’t surprised to see me.

“If you’re selling Bibles, I got twelve already,” she said, skipping past me up the stairs.

“I’m peddling another powerful religion. Barney Greengrass.”

Thankfully, her gaze couldn’t help but dart curiously down to the plastic bag in my hands. But she said nothing and then, nimbly balancing one coffee cup atop the other, opened the screen, unlocked her door, and, fast as a burrowing mole, darted inside. She was furious I’d shown up, that was clear, but she also didn’t slam the door and bolt it.

“Some girl left me a voicemail the other day, claiming you were in mortal danger.” She was shrugging off her jacket, hanging it on a hook.

“That’d be my assistant, Nora. She can be dramatic —”

“I don’t know why she thought that’d be anything other than wonderful news.”

“I’m sorry,” I said through the screen, Sharon quickly disappearing down a hallway. “I’m sorry I’m here. But I need your advice, and if I didn’t think that you would absolutely care, I wouldn’t bother you. Just hear me out. Then throw me out. And as far as we’re concerned, we never met.”

This must have had its satisfying prospects, because not a minute later, she was escorting me into her dining room, or perhaps her living room. Whatever it was, it was empty, apart from a yellow carpet, a wobbly folding table, two chairs, and a pillow bed in the corner covered in dog hair.

I unzipped my pockets and pulled out two plastic bags, one containing the child’s blood-soaked shirt, the other the bones. Obviously I didn’t volunteer where I’d stumbled upon them, though based on Sharon’s silently fuming face, she had her suspicions. But the moment she saw the shirt on the table, her demeanor changed. And I knew then that I wasn’t off-base or crazy, because if that shirt could take Sharon Falcone by surprise, even if it was simply a prop, it was a realistic one. Without taking her eyes off it, she set aside her two coffees — it was clear now both were hers — examining the shirt through the plastic. She zeroed in on it like a microscope, squarely considering it, going very still.

“Is it blood?” I asked.

“Hard to say. If it is, it’s an old stain. Ten years at least. Must have been kept somewhere dry or the cotton fibers would have degraded. Or there’s an inorganic blend in the shirt. It acts like blood, though, because of the stiffness. Another substance wouldn’t cause such rigidity.”

“What about the bones?”

She removed them from the plastic bag, testing the weight in her hands.

“No idea. I’d have to have an anthropologist take a look.”

“Could it be part of a child’s foot?”

“The human foot is long and narrow, weight largely borne on the heel. A nonhuman foot is broader, weight borne on the toes. But it gets more confusing the younger the bones, as they’re not fully developed. Infant ribs can look like a small creature’s even at a macrostructural level. Cranial bones of children often resemble turtle shells.”

Saying nothing more, she set aside the bag and, grabbing one of her coffees, took a sip, watching me closely.

“Some heads are rolling, by the way, over that suicide you’re so interested in.”

She meant Ashley. “Whose head?”

“You remember a lawyer was lobbying against an autopsy, the Jewish faith against desecration of the body and so on. The ME can overrule it. And he was planning to. Only her body disappeared in the middle of the night. It’s also why those pictures were missing. Someone was paid off.”

“Pictures?” I repeated, not following her.

“I told you. Some body shots were missing from her file. They never appeared on record. There’s a departmental witch hunt going on, trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing. It’s a mess. And I’m sure they’ll come up empty-handed. Those types of tracks tend to dissolve before they’re even laid. The girl’s family’s got power.”

I remembered, then, Sharon mentioning the missing pictures in the file, Ashley’s front and back torso.

“Our phone call the other day,” I said, after a moment, “about the child services case. It wasn’t the best connection—”

“There was no certificate of occupancy for the building. No sign of anyone living there.”

“Any idea who owns the building?”

“It was registered to an LLC. Something Chinese. I have it in my notes. I’ll call you with it. And I will quietly look into this”—she picked up the plastic bags off the table, shooting me a penetrating look—“even though I should have you booked for being a royal pain in my ass. It’ll take a month to process, at least. Lab’s backed up. Don’t ever show up here again. You look like crap, by the way.”

She slipped out of the room with the bags.

“Thank you,” I called after her.

“You need to get that right hand checked out,” she shouted from the depths of her house. “You got something lodged in there, and it’s about to turn into staph.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, until I stared down at my hand. She was absolutely right. The swelling and redness had gotten worse. What I’d thought to be encrusted dirt in the palm appeared to be a splinter embedded deep in the skin under my thumb. Seeing it gave me a sudden stab of paranoia. Had those people in black cloaks marked me? Put another curse on me? Was it a dart steeped in poison? A rusted, tetanus-yielding nail?