Night Film

58

The afternoon Peg Martin had described at The Peak sounded almost too idyllic to be real. But she’d been only seventeen at the time, doubtlessly insecure and impressionable, so it was possible she’d taken creative liberties with the memory without even realizing it. Given Cordova’s terrifying subject matter, for his home and workplace to be such a blissful paradise seemed unlikely. How close was an artist’s real life to his work? Doctoral students wrote dissertations on the subject. Yet when Peg had described Ashley leading her down to the lake where the trolls lived — there was something undeniably honest about the episode, also when she’d described Cordova as a surgeon harvesting organs, leaving his actors for dead.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

I let myself into my apartment, noticing music coming from the living room. I threw my coat on the chair, striding into the living room, finding Nora curled up in the leather club chair, Septimus the parakeet perched on her knee. Hopper was slouched on the couch, looking over some papers. The three reversing candles Cleo had given us at Enchantments were burning on the coffee table in front of him beside a pizza box.

“You’re home!” Nora announced brightly.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You both lost your cellphones and gale-force winds uprooted every landline on the East Coast.”

“We’re sorry. But we had a good reason to go MIA.” She looked meaningfully at Hopper and he smiled, some shared excitement between them.

He held out the papers, and I took them. It was fifteen pages, about two thousand names. Many were LLCs or bizarre aliases like Marquis de Roche.

“It’s the Oubliette membership list,” said Nora excitedly.

“I can see that. How did you get this?”

“It wasn’t easy,” said Hopper proudly, stretching his hands behind his head. “The place turned into the Gaza Strip after you took off. But I was in the waiter uniform, so no one glanced at me twice. I talked to one of the girls, ’least I think she was a girl. She told me how to get down to the basement where the offices are. I found one empty, got on the computer, searched the hard drive for membership. Some Excel files came up. I logged on to my email, sent the files to myself, cleared the cache, and got out. Only they’d apparently reviewed the security footage and saw me saving your ass, so, two guards chased me outside onto a neighbor’s property. I had to break into the house, called Nora to come pick me up. I managed to describe to her where the hell I was.”

“It was a real getaway,” Nora chimed in. “Tires screeching. I felt like Thelma and Louise.”

“I thought you were Bernstein,” I said.

“Nora pulled up, headlights off,” Hopper went on. “I climbed out a window, booked it across the yard, and we got the fuck out of there.”

“What time was this?”

Nora glanced at Hopper uncertainly. “Four?”

“I waited at the diner until nine. What’d you do for five hours?”

“We went back to Oubliette because I wanted a look,” she blurted. “We hid next door, hoping to talk to some of the guests when they left, ask them if they recognized Ashley, but we couldn’t approach any of them. They all looked exhausted, shuttled away by housekeepers in expensive cars and limos. One guy in a wheelchair looked dead. There were too many guards, anyway.”

“You didn’t think to call? You abandoned the boss, El Jefe, in the field without a single communication?”

Hopper stood up, yawning and stretching. “I’ll see you guys bright and early tomorrow.”

“Bright and early?” I asked.

Nora nodded. “Tomorrow we’re posting missing-person signs for Ashley around 83 Henry Street.” She handed me a flier with the scanned photo of Ashley that Nora had found at Briarwood.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? SERIOUS REWARD OFFERED FOR REAL INFORMATION. PLEASE CALL ASAP.

“We’ll weed through the phony reports by asking what color coat Ashley was wearing.”

Hopper took off, and I headed into my office, leaving Nora scribbling in her notebook. Hopper obtaining a copy of the guest list was stellar investigative work, much better than anything I’d come up with lately—not that I was going to admit this. I spent the next few hours cross-referencing the Oubliette guest list with a list of Cordova’s actors, anyone associated with his world, in the off chance one name appeared on both—to no avail. But it did rule out one possibility: The person Ashley had gone to Oubliette to find—this Spider—was probably not associated with her father’s work. Was he a friend of hers? A stranger? Someone connected to her death?

I switched out the lamp, rubbing my eyes, heading back down the hall.

The apartment was quiet. Nora had blown out the reversing candles before going upstairs, but oddly enough, I noticed the wicks were still smoldering orange, as if they refused to be extinguished, three orange pinpricks in the dark. I grabbed them and dumped them in the kitchen sink, running the tap until I was certain they were out, then headed to bed.