Marisha Pessl - Night Film

The following day, the New York Daily News and Albany’s Times Union reported that Mrs. Cordova had been in a car accident driving home from a friend’s birthday party and suffered minor injuries. The fact that The Peak is an hour’s drive from Bainville (a lengthy drive to begin at 5:00 AM) failed to alert police, though it was unclear if this was Astrid’s story or simply a case of lazy reportage.

Three weeks after the accident, Miller re-contacted police. She’d read about Astrid and her famous husband in the intervening period—"I’m not into horror movies,” she explained, when I asked her why, initially, the names meant nothing to her — and she now identified the person she’d seen in the car as Stanislas Cordova.

The Bainville Police Department took her statement and showed her the door.

Miller’s claim was never investigated further.

Page 7 of 9

S. McGrath

The Drive up — April 13, 2006 2:14 P.M.

Obviously, I was due to pay my own visit to The Peak.

I climbed into my car and made the left turn that was the entrance to 1014 Country Road 112—according to the GPS-accelerating down the unmarked drive.

It started out scarred with tire ruts and mud, but about six yards in, it flattened into a surprisingly meticulous gravel road. Some sort of caretaker must regularly attend the path; not a stray limb, shrub, or weed marred the way. On more than a few tree trunks, lower, offending branches had been visibly sawed off.

On my right I passed a small but conspicuous red-and-white sign: Private Drive, No Trespassing . It was a warm, unthreatening spring afternoon — overhead, sunlight drooled through the trees; the day had an idle, drowsy feel.

I accelerated around a bend. I was deep in the woods now. The foliage overhead was so dense it felt like I was inside a wool sweater: heavy, knotty, and only now and then a tiny gap where you could see through to the blue sky. The air suddenly reeked of gasoline — my car in need of a tune-up, probably — but something else, too: burning .

I accelerated past a bizarre tree, three voluptuous trunks writhed around each other in pleasure or in pain. They looked pornographic. My God , I asked myself, could it be this easy?

I only made it a few more yards.

I rounded a curve, and directly in front of me loomed a gatehouse, seemingly deserted, overrun with ivy. There was no way around it, either in the car or on foot. Beyond the wrought-iron gate, a massive military fence cut through the forest in either direction. I inched the car closer. Two surveillance cameras hung like wasps’ nests at opposite corners of the gate. I rolled down the window, staring up at one. I swore I saw the lens move, that little Cyclops eye focusing in on me.

“Any chance I could come up for a cup of coffee?”

My words sounded lame, flat, in the warm, poised afternoon.

How did he live up there? Was the property his version of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Elvis’s Graceland, Walt’s Magic Kingdom? Were the rumors about his lunacy all simply part of the myth and he was no dark prince, but simply an old man who hoped to live the remainder of his life in peace and solitude?

Maybe the truth was something else entirely . Maybe Kate Miller was right; maybe she had seen Cordova in the backseat of the car in the early morning of May 28, 2003. Maybe he was critically injured from an accident up at The Peak, maybe even killed. Kate Miller, the lone witness, was manipulated to leave the scene. Astrid probably did have a cellphone and immediately called someone — a friend or one of Cordova’s children, Theo or Ashley — and in the intervening minutes, they extracted Cordova from the car and drove him away. Is Cordova alive at The Peak? Is he bedridden, unconscious, confined to a wheelchair? It would explain the series of medical deliveries received by Nelson Garcia more than a year later.

I climbed out of my car, took a photo of the gatehouse, then took off, speeding back down the driveway and out onto Country Road 112, passing

Page 8 of 9

S. McGrath

The Drive up — April 13, 2006 2:14 P.M.

Garcia’s trailer and the garbage disposal site. My foot didn’t let up from the gas until I was back in the gridlocked traffic of the FDR in Manhattan.

Whatever the truth about Cordova, within fifteen horrifying films, he taught us how our eyes and minds perpetually deceive us — that what we know to be certain never is.

Now we can only hope one day he might return — so we can see, once again, how blind we’ve been.

Nelson Garcia

Phone # (518) 555-1493

Page 9 of 9

“The number’s been disconnected,” said Nora, hanging up. She’d tried calling the old man, Nelson Garcia, using the phone number in my notes.

“He’s probably dead,” I said. “When I talked to him he could barely get up off the sofa.”

Nora said nothing, only picked up the transcript of the anonymous caller, John, squinting as she read through it.

It was after eight-thirty. I’d just returned from an early dinner down the street at Café Sant Ambroeus with an old friend — Hal Keegan, a photojournalist from Insider I used to work with, though we’d seen little of each other in the past few years. I’d opted not to tell him what I was working on. I trusted Hal, but despite getting caught by security at Briarwood, I hoped to keep my investigation quiet. For all their hard-nosed rationale, journalists were a superstitious bunch. There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold. It was usually just a matter of time before your competitors had all the same inklings about a case that you did. I was under no delusions that I was the sole journalist looking into Ashley Cordova’s death. But there was no glory in being the second or third to crack a case. There was only first.

When I returned home, Nora was in the same place I’d left her, still at work organizing my papers. I’d brought her some pesto linguini, but after saying, “Gosh, thanks, that looks tasty,” she’d barely touched it, and instead continued scouring with complete absorption Beckman’s syllabus for his obsolete Cordova class. I was surprised by her focus. She’d been in my office for twelve hours straight, stopping her reading only to lavish attention on that prehistoric parakeet, Septimus, whose cage she’d set on the bookshelf by the window—“He loves to people-watch,” she’d said.

Though she’d said nothing specific, I was gathering Nora had been raised by a pack of free-spirited geriatrics at this place she was always peppering her conversations with: Terra Hermosa. She seemed preternaturally wired to the elderly’s barn-animal hours and feeding times. She’d asked what I was doing for dinner at 4:45 P.M. — the legendary hour of senior suppertime — and used some telling McCarthy-era expressions: gracious, jeepers, Holy Moses, and don’t flip your wig.

“How soon after you went up to Crowthorpe Falls did you receive the anonymous phone call?” Nora asked me, setting aside the transcript.

“A few weeks later.” I was on the leather couch typing up notes on my laptop, detailing our trip to Briarwood and the Waldorf.