Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“How old were you when you moved in?”

“Fourteen.”

“What about your parents?”

She fiddled with the frilly sleeves of her nightgown. “My mom died when I was three. She had a heart problem. My dad had been put away for twenty years by then.”

“What was he put away for?”

“Mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, credit cards. He was real hardworking at being illegal. Eli used to say if my dad put half the energy he did into cutting corners into just driving around the corner, he’d be a billionaire.”

I nodded. I’d known such men, had investigated more than a few.

“For a while I’d spend the day there, leave, then sneak back in at night. But after I got caught, I was all set to go into foster care. But Eli got together with the other seniors on her floor, and they made a big stink. The president ended up surprising everyone, because she didn’t want a senior uprising. She said if I stayed out of sight when the state evaluators came I could live there till I finished high school. There was always a room coming available, because someone was always dead. When Eli died of cancer I left without saying goodbye to anyone. I figured if I didn’t do it then, I never would.”

She paused, clearing her throat. “She died in the hospital on a Sunday, and I went back to her room to collect her things. There’s a waiting list, so I knew someone was going to be moving in. If the family doesn’t take away the personal items they just chuck them, and within seconds the room looks like you were never there in the first place. Just an old bed and chair, a window waiting to be stared out of by the next person. I was getting her stuff together when all of a sudden Old Grubby Bill who lived right across the hall whistled at me through his teeth.”

“ Old Grubby Bill? You haven’t mentioned him.”

“Everyone called him Grubby Bill because he always had black dirt under his fingernails. He’d fought in World War Two, and he bragged to everyone he was right beside Hitler’s bunker when it exploded. So, people used to whisper some of the debris from that bunker was still under his fingernails, which was why they were so filthy.”

She paused, sniffing. “He whistled at me to come into his room. He was always whistling at people. I was scared to go in there. Nobody ever did, because it smelled. But he dug under his bed and pulled out a Rockport shoebox. He told me he’d been saving up money for my dreams. It had six hundred dollars in it. He handed it to me and said, ‘ Now’s your chance to make something of yourself. Scram, kid. ’ So I scrammed. I walked to the Kissimmee station and got on a bus to New York. People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

She fell silent. For a while, neither of us spoke, letting her story drift like a raft between us.

“I was lucky, ” she went on. “Most people just get one mom and dad. I got a whole crowd.”

“You were very lucky.”

She seemed pleased, tucking her hands inside the long white sleeves.

“It’s easy to be yourself in the dark. Ever noticed that? Guess we should probably get some sleep.” The bed shook as she hopped off and darted out of the room. “ ’Night, Woodward.”

“ ’Night, Bernstein.”

I closed the Vanity Fair article on my BlackBerry. It was after ten A.M., and we were in a taxi speeding down Avenue A.

I was actually reassured by the piece — published on the website early this morning. The reporter hadn’t made much headway in her investigation, thank Christ, and a Google search of news for Ashley Cordova revealed no other reporter had uncovered the critical lead, that Ashley had been admitted to Briarwood — which meant we were still ahead of the game. At least for now.

I made quick note of one odd detail: Ashley’s unexpected leave from Amherst during her freshman year.

“There it is,” Nora said suddenly, and the driver pulled over.

We’d turned down East Ninth Street, and Nora was indicating a narrow storefront sunken some five feet down from the sidewalk, a black front gate and a beat-up red metal awning, a single word painted across it in purple letters:

On its website, Enchantments called itself New York City’s Oldest and Largest Witchcraft and Goddess Supply Store.

We climbed out of the cab, heading down front steps encrusted with dead leaves and cigarette butts, stepping inside.

Immediately, a tall, freckle-faced orange-haired kid moved out from behind the cash register, shouting, “ Zero, come back here!”—Zero being a white Persian cat that had run toward the open door, though I closed the door before it could escape.

“Thanks, man,” said the kid.

There was an overpowering smell of incense, the ceiling low, narrow brick walls slanting inward like a corridor in an M. C. Escher print. They were lined with wooden shelves crammed with mystical knickknacks. In Enchantments it seemed all holy items were created equal. The store was arranged as if Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Vishnu — plus a couple of random pagans — had gotten together to hold a garage sale.

Mini witch cauldrons (in Tall, Grande, and Venti) were brazenly stacked next to Saint Francis, Mary, and a few Catholic saints. Beside them was a much-paged-through paperback on display, Jewish Kabbal Magic, which sat next to a Bible, which was beside tarot cards, sachets of potpourri called Luck & Happiness Ouanga Bags, a basket of carved wax crucifixes, ceramic frogs, and plastic vials of Holy Water (on sale for $5.95).

Apparently many New Yorkers had given up on shrinks and yoga and thought, Hell, let’s try magic, because the store was crowded. Toward the back, a group of thirtysomething women was swarming around a tall bookcase crammed with hundreds of colored candles, choosing them with a frantic intensity. A tired middle-aged man in a blue button-down — he looked alarmingly like my stockbroker — was carefully reading the directions on the back of a Ouija board.

I stepped around Nora and a solemn boy with stringy brown hair paging through a pamphlet — I glanced at the title over his shoulder: Guide to Planetary and Magical Significance —and walked over to the display case. Inside were silver necklaces, pendants, and charms carved with hieroglyphics and other symbols I didn’t recognize. Hanging from the ceiling above the cash register was a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, a pentagram — the symbol for Satanists, if I remembered correctly from my college days. Beyond that on the back wall were framed 8 × 10 black-and-white headshots of men and women who had the severe expressions and dead raisin eyes of serial killers — legendary witches and warlocks, no doubt.