Night Film

102

I’d decided it’d be wise to take a few days to recover from The Peak and clear my head before organizing my thoughts, wrapping up the investigation. I had that persistent sense again of having swum through leagues of blackened water, my insides still leaden, my mind streaked with mud.

Yet real life was calling. I had unpaid bills, voicemails, month-old emails I hadn’t bothered to open, quite a few from friends who’d written I’m worried and You OK and WTF??? in the subject lines. I wrote them all back — I’d bought a replacement HP laptop a week before we left for The Peak — but to do even this simple task seemed pointless and irritating.

I began to realize, with a sort of morbid fascination, that I hadn’t actually left The Peak — not entirely. Because the moment I was in bed, lights off, I needed only to close my eyes and I was back there. That property, maybe it was an unrequited time I’d always be returning to now, the way others returned in their dreams to golden childhood dances or battlefields, weekends at a lake house with some girl in a red bikini. Half awake, half dreaming, I plunged back inside that estate, wandering its dark gardens and statues hacked to pieces, past the dogs, the blinding flashlights manned by shadows. I backtracked through the tunnels, no longer searching for evidence to incriminate Cordova, but some crucial part of myself I’d accidentally lost up there — like an arm, or my soul.

And that fear I’d felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world — watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar — made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who’d sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells.

Why did I assume that I’d be fine, be able to process The Peak as if it were a trip to Egypt or the time in Mitú I’d been held for eleven days in a jail cell — a harrowing experience to digest and get over? Not this thing. No, The Peak and the truth about what the man had done were still sitting in my stomach very much alive, pulsing and drooling and intact, making me increasingly sick, maybe even killing me.

This restlessness was made all the more worse by the fact that I was alone. Everyone was gone. Nora was right. Hopper was as finished as she was. I called him twice, heard nothing. I didn’t understand it — that they could both be done with the case and me, simple as that, that they could so ignorantly conclude that it all ended here. Didn’t they want to know if those were real human bones I’d found up there, that there were no other children hurt in Cordova’s mad attempts to save Ashley’s life? Weren’t they curious about the obvious remaining question — where was Cordova now?

I drew all sorts of scathing conclusions — that they’d finally shown me their true colors; they were young and shallow; it was a larger indicator of the problems of today’s youth; raised by the Internet, they flitted from one fixation to the next with all the gravity of a mouse-click — but the truth was, I missed them. And I was furious I cared.

It made me remember Cleo’s pronouncement all those weeks ago when she’d found the killing curse on the soles of our shoes.

It pulls apart the closest friends, isolates you, pits you against the world so you’re driven to the margins, the periphery of life. It’ll drive you mad, which in some ways is worse than death.

I hadn’t taken it seriously. Now I couldn’t help but note how accurate it was turning out to be, the isolation and fractured friendships, the sense of being pushed to the outer margins of life.

Unless that was just Cordova. Maybe he was a virus: contagious, destructive, mutating constantly so you never quite grasped what you were dealing with, silently sewing himself into your DNA. Those with even the barest exposure contracted a fascination and a fear that replicated to the point that it overtook your entire life.

There was no cure. You could only learn to live with it.

After three days of wandering my apartment, avoiding the box of the remaining Cordova research, taking antibiotics and steroids for my hand and rash, I realized that to try and relax was making me so uncomfortable, I had little choice but to let it remain murky.

At eleven o’clock on Wednesday night I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to 83 Henry. Falcone, unsurprisingly, was right. When I stepped across the street, staring at the shabby walk-up nestled by Manhattan Bridge, it appeared that every tenant, for whatever reason, had vacated. Now every window was dark, though I could make out the ruffled pink gauzy curtains on the fifth floor. I tried the front entrance. It was locked, of course; yet, staring through the small window, I noticed that the names had been removed from all the mailboxes.

I took off toward Market Street, and within two blocks, passed Hao Hair Salon, where I’d taped up Ashley’s flier in the window all those weeks ago. I was surprised to see that it was still there, only faded by the sun.

Ashley was little more than a ghostly face, the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? barely legible. Seeing it gave me a nagging feeling that time was running out — or maybe it was simply moving on.

Hopper and Nora were gone, and now, so was Ashley.