Night Film

79

“Next day, we were due to leave,” he went on. “June the tenth. Ash was meeting me at six P.M. at Neil’s Coffee Shop. It’s a diner on Lex, a block from her house. Then, together we’d head to JFK. Six o’clock came and went. There was no word from her. Soon it was seven. Eight. I called her cellphone. No answer. I went to her house and rang the bell. Usually there were lights on. It was dark. I knocked. No one came to the door. I climbed up there, exactly the way Ash did, up the iron bars to the second-floor balcony and in the far-right window. The place was luxurious, a palace, but it’d been packed up. And in a hurry. Like a bunch of criminals had decided to run for their lives. The furniture was covered with sheets, randomly, so they were half on the floor. Beds stripped. Milk and fruit and bread tossed out on the sidewalk in piles of garbage bags. I found Ash’s room on the third floor. There were a few photographs, books, but a lot of her things had obviously been taken, thrown in bags really fast. The lamp was tipped over on her bedside table. But inside her closet, hidden beneath blankets on the top shelf, I found a small leather suitcase. I pulled it down, unzipped it. It was packed with her clothes, sundresses, T-shirts, cash, sheet music, a Lonely Planet guide to Brazil. She was planning to go. I knew then her parents had found out, and they’d taken her away, probably to that estate where she’d been homeschooled her entire life.”

He paused, anxiously twirling the end of the cigarette with his thumb.

“I was all set to go to the police, when I heard from her. She sent me an email. She was sorry, but she’d made a mistake. We were just a couple of delusional kids, caught up in the moment. She didn’t want to be tied down to anyone. She said she loved our time together, but it was over, simple as that. She told me to keep riding the waves seaward, keep searching for the goddamn chambers of the fucking sea, where the mermaids sang …”

He irritably cut himself off, taking a long drag on the cigarette.

“I was sure her parents had put her up to it,” he went on, exhaling smoke in a fast stream. “I wrote back, said I didn’t believe her. I was going to find her and she could say it to my face. She asked me not to contact her. I wrote back again. If this was my Ashley, what was the address of the stoop we’d sat on that first night, when the sun was rising over the block? She wrote the right answer back, in seconds. 131 East 19th. And I’m no one’s Ashley, she wrote. It was a dagger to the heart. A year later, I found out she was attending Amherst. So she was fine. It had been her decision.”

He brushed his hair out of his eyes, leaning back in the chair, his face calm, even slightly dazed.

“Did you ever hear from her again?” Nora softly asked him.

He nodded imperceptibly, his eyes shifting to her, but said nothing.

“What did she say?” Nora whispered.

“Nothing,” he answered tersely. “She sent me a stuffed monkey.”

Of course, the monkey—that faded toy with loose stitching, covered in dried mud. I’d almost forgotten about it.

“Why?” I asked.

He stared at me. “It was Orlando’s. He slept with it. I don’t know how Ash had it or where she’d found it. But when I pulled it out of that envelope, I was sick. She was sick, sending it, when she knew every day I thought about that kid, lived every day with the horror of this thing I’d done. I went to the return address she’d written on the envelope, thinking I’d find a reason why she did such a thing.” He looked at me. “That’s when I ran into you.”

“No wonder you didn’t trust me,” I said.

He shrugged. “I thought you might be working for her family.”

“How did you know to go to Klavierhaus?” asked Nora.

“I went there with Ash once. She used to practice there.”

Nora bit her fingernails, frowning. “And you didn’t come with us to Rising Dragon because …?”

“I was paranoid I’d be recognized. It was a long time ago, but … I didn’t want to take the chance. Or be reminded.” He stared with resentment down at the tattoo. “I used to have dreams about cutting off my foot so I wouldn’t have to look at that thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “At some point, you must have noticed we were just as ignorant as you were as to what was going on.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t recognize the Ashley I knew in any of this, this witch we’ve been tracking. Curses on the floor? Nyctophobia? Ashley wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“Maybe she didn’t send it,” Nora suggested.

“It’s her handwriting on the envelope.”

“Someone in her family might have copied it. Maybe they’re afraid of something she told you and they sent it to scare you off.”

“I’ve been racking my brain for weeks. Trying to think of something she told me. But I never met anyone in her family, and she rarely talked about them, though I definitely sensed, particularly from that one phone call, she and her dad did not get along.”

“Nothing about witchcraft?” I suggested.

He looked puzzled. “The idea Ash would be involved in something like that is crazy.”

“What about why she was sent to Six Silver Lakes?”

“She told me she’d lost her temper and burned herself on a candle. She had a bad burn scar on her left hand. That was it.”

“What about when you were inside the townhouse last night?”

He stared at me with evident unease before answering. “It was the same. Like no one had set foot there since I’d broken in seven years ago. Same exact sheets tossed randomly over the furniture. Same Chopin music on Ashley’s piano, the lid open. The same rugs rolled up, same books piled on top of the tables, same drinking glass on the mantel above the fireplace, only there was about three inches of dust on everything. And this mildewed smell like a tomb. I was heading up to Ashley’s bedroom to see if she’d ever come back. I honestly expected to find her suitcase still packed and hidden in the closet where I’d left it. That was when the doorbell rang and I had to turn back. I was almost at the window when the lights came on and I heard a woman ordering me to put my hands up. She was wielding a fucking shotgun.”

“Inez Gallo,” I said. “Had you ever seen her before?”

He frowned. “I thought for a second I recognized her as the driver who picked up Ashley back at Six Silver Lakes. But I’m not positive.”

“Ashley went back to Rising Dragon for the picture of you together,” said Nora. “She wanted to have it, even though it was lost.”

He stared at her. “It’s not.” Slowly he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, removing a paper from the billfold.

He handed it to me.

It was a photograph, crinkled and worn, taken out and stared at a thousand times.

Even now, after everything he told us, it was startling to see them together, as if two people from two different worlds had collided. They sat in one folding chair, hands clasped. It was a captured moment of youth, of joy — a moment so free the camera couldn’t even hold on to it. It rendered them in streaks and blurs, hinting that they were so new and light there were no words to describe them, their ankles forming that fighting creature on fire, leaping to its death or its life.