Marisha Pessl - Night Film

I couldn’t help but think of the killing curse. Technically, my life had grown more hazardous since we’d walked through it; I’d nearly drowned. It eats away at your mind without you even realizing it, Cleo had told us. It … isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. I could actually understand such a phenomenon happening to someone going after Cordova.

Olivia sighed. She looked tired, the intensity gone from her face, leaving it drained of color.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much more time,” she noted, glancing across the room at the doorway. I followed her gaze and realized I’d been listening so attentively I hadn’t noticed that the woman in the gray suit who’d greeted us — Olivia’s secretary, I assumed — had stuck her head into the doorway, silently alerting her mistress to her next pressing appointment.

“You mentioned Allan Cunningham,” I said. “Ashley was a patient at Briarwood prior to her death. I wanted to know the circumstances of her being admitted there, but Cunningham gave me a hard time. Any way you could help me out with him?”

Olivia smiled, bemused. “Allan assured me Ashley was never a patient there. But I’ll certainly ask again. We’ll be in Saint Moritz through March.” She sat forward, slipping her feet into her shoes. “The number you have reaches my secretary directly. Contact her if you need me for anything at all. She’ll be able to get me a message.”

“I appreciate that.”

She stood up from the couch — her three Pekingese plopping onto the carpet around her feet — and arranged the silk scarf around her immobile arm. As Nora and I rose, Olivia reached out and took my hand with a disarmingly warm smile, her brown eyes gleaming.

“It’s certainly been a pleasure, Mr. McGrath.”

“Pleasure’s been all mine.”

We started for the door.

“But one last thing,” I said.

She stopped, turning. “Of course.”

“If I wanted to speak with your sister, where might I find her?”

She looked irritated. “She can’t help you,” she said. “She can’t even help herself.”

“She was married to Cordova.”

“And the whole time she was addicted to barbiturates. I doubt she remembers a thing about the marriage — except maybe fucking Cordova a few times.”

There it was — beneath the flawless elegance —the scrappy army brat.

“It would still be invaluable to talk to her about what she saw up there, what the man was like, how he lived. She was an insider.”

Olivia stared me down imperiously, not accustomed to being disagreed with. Or perhaps it was exasperation that again, even after all these years, her sister’s name still came up in her presence.

“Even if I gave you the address, she’d never see you. She doesn’t see anyone except her maid and her drug dealer.”

“How do you know that?”

She took a deep breath. “Her maid comes here every week to give me her bills and an update on her health. My sister doesn’t know she’s bankrupt, that I’ve been paying for her care and drugs for the last twenty years. And if you’re wondering why I haven’t sent her away to Betty Ford or Promises or Briarwood, I assure you I have. Eleven times. It’s no use. Some people don’t want to be sober. They don’t want reality. After life trips them, they choose to stay facedown in the mud.”

“All right,” I said. “But if what you told us is true —”

“It is, ” she snapped.

“Marlowe might be able to give me even more. The most unreliable witness still has the truth inside them.”

Olivia surveyed me challengingly, then sighed.

“The Campanile. Beekman Place. Apartment 1102.” She turned, swiftly gliding to the door, her furry entourage panting to keep up. “Speak to the doorman, Harold,” she added over her shoulder. “I’ll phone him this afternoon. He’ll make the arrangements.”

“I appreciate that.”

“When you do see her, don’t mention me. For your own well-being.” I swore I caught a faint satisfied smile on her face as she said this.

“You have my word.”

She escorted us through the gallery to the entrance hall, the old codger already waiting with our coats. He looked so stiff I couldn’t help but imagine he’d been standing there for more than an hour.

“Thank you,” I said to Olivia, “for everything. It’s been invaluable.”

“Hopefully you can do something about it. Avenge that girl. She was special.”

Nora stepped inside the elevator, and though I entered behind her, I stuck out my hand to prevent the doors from closing.

“One more question, if you don’t mind, Mrs. du Pont.”

She turned, her head inclined at that artful angle between curiosity and superiority.

“How did you meet Mr. du Pont? I’ve always wondered.”

She stared me down. I thought she was going to icily pronounce it was none of my business. But to my surprise, after a moment, she smiled.

“Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles. We got into the same elevator. We were both on our way to visit Marlowe on the eighth floor. The elevator got stuck. Something to do with a bad fuse. When it got unstuck an hour later, Mike no longer wished to go up to the eighth floor to visit Marlowe.”

She met my eyes with a look of triumph.

“He wanted to come down to the lobby with me. ”

With a soft smile, Olivia turned coolly on her heel and vanished down the shadowy hall, her dogs at her feet.

When Nora and I stepped outside under the pale gray awning onto Park Avenue, I was surprised to find it raining quite hard. I hadn’t noticed it upstairs with Olivia, probably because I’d been so absorbed by what she was saying. Unless her apartment was so elegant it simply edited out bad weather as if it were a terrible faux pas.

The doorman handed me a golf umbrella and, opening one for himself, raced into the street to hail a taxi.

“She wasn’t what I expected,” I said to Nora. “She was frank and fairly convincing.”

Nora shook her head, breathless. “All I could think about was Larry.”

“The tattoo artist?”

She nodded vigorously. “Remember what happened to him?”

“He died.”

“ Of a brain aneurysm. Don’t you see? It’s a trend. Olivia had one, and Larry. Both after they’d encountered Ashley.”

“So, what are you saying, she’s the Angel of Death?” I meant it facetiously, though suddenly I recalled the incident Hopper had described at Six Silver Lakes — the rattlesnake found in the counselor’s sleeping bag, the widespread belief that Ashley had put it there. And, of course, her appearance at the Reservoir.

“Olivia described the same thing Peg Martin did,” I said. “A visit to The Peak. But their experiences were so different. One was petrifying. The other was some kind of childhood fantasy dream sequence.”

“Wonder which one’s true.”

“Maybe both. The incidents occurred almost twenty years apart. Olivia said she went in June 1977. That’s a year after Cordova had purchased The Peak with Genevra and a month before she drowned. Peg Martin’s picnic at the estate was in 1993.”

“It was scary how Olivia described Genevra, his first wife, don’t you think?”

“The prisoner too terrified to speak.”

She nodded. “And what about that witch-pricking needle?”

“It actually corroborates what Cleo back at Enchantments suggested, that Ashley comes from a dynasty of black-magic practitioners.”

Nora nibbled her fingernails, apprehensive. “I bet if we ever broke into The Peak, that’s what we’d find up there.”