Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“He’s probably not coming back,” I muttered. “ Stace put the guy’s muzzle back on and returned him to his cage in the basement.”

“She wasn’t that bad, ” said Nora, shooting me a look.

“Let me bear witness as the only person in this car who’s been to the dark side of marriage and survived. She’s bad. She makes my ex-wife look like Mother Teresa.”

“He’s coming back,” muttered Hopper. “He has to.”

“Why?”

“He’s dying to talk about her.”

He ground out the cigarette on the window, flicking the butt outside.

Suddenly, Nora gasped as the man himself stepped into the headlights.

I didn’t know how we’d managed not to hear his footsteps. There was something odd in the way he stood there in his faded blue flannel shirt, blinking at us uneasily, his head held down at a strange, shy angle. None of us said a word. Something was wrong. But again, Hopper and Nora were unlocking the doors, scrambling out. I held back to observe the guy for a few seconds longer. In spite of his sudden appearance, the ghostly pallor, he looked uncomfortable —wounded, even.

I climbed out, leaving the headlights on.

“I only got five minutes,” Morgan said nervously. “Otherwise Stace’ll get out the shotgun.”

It had to be a joke, yet he said it with unnerving seriousness.

Blinking, he held out a folded piece of paper.

Hopper immediately snatched it, shooting him a suspicious look as he opened it in the beam of light. When he finished reading, his face giving away nothing, he handed it to Nora, who read it with wide eyes and passed it to me.

It was torn from a legal pad.

“It took three weeks to plan,” Morgan said. “I’d use all prerecorded tapes. They’d play, not the live feed. The time code would be wrong, but no one ever checked. I went down into storage, where they keep all the patients’ personal belongings until they check out, and I got hers from her locker and kept it for her in a box in my house. All she had was a red-and-black coat. Real fancy.”

“That was it?” I asked, noting the odd, rather fastidious way he’d said it. I couldn’t help but imagine him silently slipping out of his bed in the middle of the night while Stace slept, creeping down into his own dark basement to open up the cardboard box, staring in at her red coat —that coat.

“Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t have anything else.”

“No cellphone? No handbag?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What about clothing?”

“Nothing. See, her father’s famous. He makes Hollywood movies. I figured she’d want some nice clothes, so I left her a note asking for her sizes. Then I took a day off, went up to Liberty, bought her some jeans, black boots, and a pretty black T-shirt with an angel on the front.”

Ashley was wearing the same clothing when she died.

“Once I had the details worked out,” he went on, “I went to the music room and left Ashley a note tucked between the piano strings right where she did. It said when she was ready, she should play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ That’d be my green light. It’d mean the very next night I’d come for her at two A.M. when her nurse and the guard were gettin’ it on in the boiler room.”

“Why that particular song?” I asked.

“She’d played it before.” He smiled. “It reminded me of her. That night, Stace ended up in the hospital and was put on bed rest. I had to transfer back to days. I didn’t see Ashley for a week. I was worried I missed her playin’ it. But the first night I was back on the night shift she darted into that music room and I was freaking out because I wasn’t sure she was going to play it. But then she did. Right at the end. I knew then we were on.”

He stared at us, flecks of light brightening his small eyes. He was newly animated, remembering it.

“The next night, around one, I get the prerecorded tapes going. Then I tell the officer on duty who sits out front, Stace’s having another pregnancy scare and I had to head home. I go straight to Maudsley, thinking I’m going to have to slip up to Ashley’s room to get her. But if she isn’t already standing out in front waiting for me in those white pajamas. My heart’s beating like crazy. I’m nervous as a goddamn schoolkid because, you know, it was the first time I was seeing her in the flesh. She just took my hand, and together we ran across the lawn, simple as that.” He grinned sheepishly. “It was like she was leading me. Like she’d planned it. I opened my trunk, she climbed in, and we drove out of there.”

“But wasn’t it dark inside the trunk?” Nora asked. “If Ashley had nyctophobia she wouldn’t have climbed in there.”

Morgan smiled proudly. “I took care of it. I had two flashlights in there for her so she wouldn’t be afraid.”

“Did they stop you at the gatehouse?” I asked.

“Sure. But I said my wife was having another emergency and he let me through. As soon as we were out of there I pulled over so Ashley could get out of the trunk. I brought her back here so she could shower and change. I also had to put my daughter to bed. Stace was still in the hospital, so our neighbor was watching the baby. I asked Ashley where she wanted to go and she said the train station because she had to get to New York City.”

“Did she say why?” I asked.

“I think she was meetin’ someone.”

“Who?” Hopper asked.

“Don’t know. She was shy. Didn’t talk much. Just looked at me. She liked my little girl, Mellie, though. Read her a bedtime story while I was on the phone with Stace at the hospital.”

“Where was Ashley going in the city?” I asked.

“Walford Towers? Somethin’ like that.”

“She told you this?”

He looked guilty. “No. She’d asked to use the Internet while she was here. When she was in the bathroom I checked the browser to see what she looked for online. It was a website for a hotel on Park Avenue.”

“The Wal dorf Towers?” I suggested.

Morgan nodded. “That sounds about right. When she was dressed, she put on that red coat and she looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I drove her to the station. We got there ’Bout four in the morning. I gave her some cash, then left her in the car while I went and bought two tickets to Grand Central.”

“ Two tickets?” I asked.

He nodded, embarrassed.

“You hoped to go with her.”

He stared down at the ground. “Seems crazy now. But I’m romantic. I thought we’d go together. She kept smiling at me. But when I got back to my car with the tickets, she was gone. I saw a train had pulled in. I ran up to the platform, but the doors had already shut. I moved down it, searching for her in every car, feelin’ sick about it until I found her. She was sitting right by the window. I knocked. And slowly, she turned to me, stared at me. I’ll never forget the look she gave me, not for the rest of my life.”

He said nothing for a moment, his shoulders hunched.

“She didn’t know me.”

He exhaled, his breathing unsteady.

“You were fired shortly afterward?” I asked quietly.

He nodded. “Soon as Ashley was found missing it was all traced back to me.”

“When did you find out that she’d died?”

He blinked. “Head of the hospital called me in.”

“Allan Cunningham?”

“Yeah. He said nothing would happen in terms of the law if I signed a confidentiality paper sayin’ I’d acted alone and never, ever talk about it—”