Night Film

103

I’d tried Cynthia countless times, hoping for an update on Sam, but I’d still heard nothing. As much as her stonewalling drove me crazy, I did sense it meant that Sam was okay; if anything was seriously wrong, she’d phone me. At least, this was what I told myself.

As Sharon Falcone had explained, it was going to take at least a month until I knew if those were human bones I’d found up at The Peak, so in the meantime, there were a few critical leads to follow up on.

I logged on to the Blackboards, checking out rumors about the real-world fates of Rachel Dempsey and Fernando Ponti, the actors who’d played Leigh and Popcorn in the Cordova films. Cross-checking the Blackboards, I was surprised to learn that The Natural Huntsman—some kind of macho pro-NRA hunting newsletter — was accurate regarding Rachel Dempsey.

Dempsey, who played Leigh in La Douleur when she was only twenty, was never seen or heard from again after vanishing in Nepal on April 2, 2007. There were two articles about the disappearance in her hometown newspaper, though there were no further developments and no record of any husband or children she’d left behind. I did find on the Internet existence of a Marion Dempsey living in Woonsocket — Rachel’s mother or sister, I hoped. I called the public directory, found the number, and after it rang interminably, an exasperated woman who curtly identified herself as “Mrs. Dempsey’s nurse” picked up. When I asked if her employer had a daughter named Rachel, I was told, “Mrs. Dempsey doesn’t trouble with that anymore”—which I took as a yes—and the woman hung up.

Fernando Ponti, on the other hand — the charismatic elderly Cuban man who’d played Popcorn — had been spotted by three different individuals on three different occasions around Crowthorpe Falls between October 1994 (a year after Wait for Me Here was released) and August 1999. When I’d been inside the greenhouse, I’d had the distinct feeling that Popcorn was somehow still there, tending his plants and fish, and these three sightings seemed to suggest that I was right.

Had the man never left? Had he loved his time at The Peak so much — or been so brainwashed — that he’d chosen to stay on as Popcorn, preferring his character to real life? Was he dead now, eternally buried in his fictitious gardens? I couldn’t find any records of Ponti’s family or where he’d come from beyond Cuba—which was mentioned only by the Blackboards. However, I was even more startled by the posting that detailed his disappearance inside Trophy Washing Machines, a store on the outskirts of Crowthorpe Falls.

I’d come across the word Trophy back at The Peak. It’d been scrawled above one of the entrances to the underground tunnels.

Had that particular corridor led to Trophy Washing Machines, clandestinely linking Crowthorpe Falls to the estate? It was too specific a word to be a coincidence. And it explained how Popcorn could have evaporated into thin air. He’d disappeared through a hidden hatch inside the store and headed home along this passage.

I checked up on quite a few more actors on the Blackboards, those with the largest parts who’d probably resided at The Peak during shooting. I uncovered only one true constant: After working with Cordova, they all entered new phases of their lives, which tended to scatter them to the outer reaches of the globe.

In not one case did the person remain the same, take up where they’d left off, go back to where they began.

Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh, had become an international hunter, which, oddly enough, made perfect sense; after playing the gullible and vulnerable Leigh, gagged and hog-tied in that buried bus, upon leaving The Peak, she appeared to have transformed herself from prey to predator. The rumor about Lulu Swallow, the woman who played Emily Jackson in Thumbscrew, was that she ended up living in a remote part of Nova Scotia and penning a series of dark-themed children’s books — the Lucy Straye orphan series — using the pen name E. Q. Nightingale. The debonair man who played Axel in La Douleur—Diane’s mysterious husband, with whom Leigh falls in love as she shadows him — ended up going to veterinary school and becoming a prominent Thoroughbred horse doctor; it was he who euthanized Eight Belles at the 2008 Kentucky Derby. The actor who played Brad Jackson — originally from England — supposedly moved to Thailand, where he was spotted by a Cordovite in 2002 in the red-light district Soi Cowboy with a teenage girl on the back of his motorbike.

These people had scattered into the wind like ashes tossed in the air, all around the globe — one traveling as far as Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. I couldn’t tell if they were fleeing something by disappearing into new lives. Had they uncovered the truth about Cordova, seen the man up close, and that horror was what made them run? Or was it the opposite — had they been set free? Had they slaughtered the lamb, as they called it on the Blackboards — no longer restrained by anything; after working with Cordova, were they able to design the wildest life they could fathom for themselves and set about fiercely living it?

From my vantage point, it was impossible to know if it was freedom or fear that drove them — or perhaps it was neither of these things and they’d been unleashed by Cordova onto the world, his devoted disciples, sent out to do his bidding, his work, which was God knew what.

Whatever their motivations, I wondered if they felt anything similar to what I was feeling — the exhaustion, the nightmares, the sense of dislocation — as if somehow I’d swollen beyond ordinary life and could no longer fit back down into it.

I was looking into this, searching the Blackboards not so facetiously for “aftereffects of Cordova” and “known symptoms,” when I was abruptly ejected from the site.

No matter how many times I unplugged my laptop, restarted the settings, got a new IP address, tried a new user name — it resulted in the same exit page. Had I been banned, shut out — or found out?