Night Film

by Marisha Pessl

  Poole stopped abruptly beside a dark alcove and, after a pause, switched on an overhead light. The walls were covered in bulletin boards decked with sign-up sheets and photos of activities at Briarwood.

  “As you can see,” Poole said, gesturing inside, “people are really quite happy. We keep everyone busy, physically and mentally.”

  Scowling, Nora stepped inside. “When were these pictures taken?” she asked.

  “The last few months,” said Poole.

  Nora glared skeptically, then inspected the pictures, her arms crossed over her stomach. I figured she’d really lost it, decided to do an imitation of Angie in Girl, Interrupted, when I realized what she was doing.

  She was looking for Ashley.

  It wasn’t a bad idea. I moved past Poole to take a look. The photos were of patients involved in relay races, nature hikes. A few looked legitimately happy, though most appeared too thin and fatigued. Ashley would be obvious, wouldn’t she? The dark-haired girl a little bit alone, with a challenging gaze. I scanned photos of a music recital, but seated at the piano was a man with dreadlocks. There were quite a few shots of a summer barbecue on the main lawn, patients crowded around picnic tables, eating burgers—no sign of Ashley anywhere.

  I glanced back at the doorway and realized Poole was looking at us, faintly alarmed. We must have been inspecting a little too intently.

  “Everyone looks so happy,” I said.

  She coolly stared back. “Why don’t we move along?”

  I stepped out of the alcove, that little doily of a dog twirling in circles as it stared up at me, panting as if I had beef jerky in my pocket. Nora was flipping through the pages of a sign-up sheet for Briarwood Book Club, noticeably reading all the names.

  “Lisa,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Poole led us back outside, across the lawn to Straffen Hall, where we headed straight to the second floor—devoted to music, painting, and yoga. It was clear from Poole’s clipped descriptions and tightened tone that she really didn’t care for me or my huffy daughter. I tried to fawn over the facilities, but she only smiled stiffly.

  As we passed the reflection room—candles, photos of meadows and sky—a two-note chime sounded over a loudspeaker. It was shrill and reverberating, the musical equivalent of a stubbed toe.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Nora announced petulantly.

  “Certainly,” said Poole, stopping beside a water fountain, pointing at the door marked WOMEN in the middle of the corridor. “We’ll wait for you here.”

  Nora rolled her eyes and took off. The corridor walls were bright, painted half white, half kitten-nose pink, but the place felt clinical and claustrophobic, like a train compartment. The Disoriented Express headed toward Crazytown. All aboard.

  Patients started to flood out of classrooms. They wore jeans and baggy cotton shirts—no belts or shoelaces, I noticed—a surprisingly wide range of ages. One guy with spiky gray hair staggered out of an art room—he looked about eighty. Most avoided eye contact as they walked past me. Various eggheads and shrinks milled about, too, conferring, nodding, looking constructive. They were easy to spot because they were all dressed in L.L.Bean fleeces and barn jackets, wool sweaters in earth tones—probably so patients would mistake the place for Vail.

  Poole was fussing with the barrette in Sweetie’s hair.

  “I’ve heard very good things about Dr. Annika Angley,” I said.

  She stood up, holding the dog in her arms.

  Annika Angley was the psychologist who’d completed Ashley’s new-patient assessment, which had been included in the NYPD file.

  “A friend of mine recommended her,” I went on. “She’s apparently very good with young women who have depressive disorders. Is there any way I could speak to her?”

  “Her office is on the third floor. That area isn’t open to visitors. And discussion of Dr. Angley or any physician at this stage is premature. If Lisa comes, she’ll be assigned a team of health professionals that suits her needs. Which reminds me. I’m going to go check on her.”

  She put Sweetie down, smiling at me, the implication of which was Don’t you dare move, and marched down the hall, her black orthopedic shoes squishing on the linoleum.

  When she appeared a minute later, her face was beet red.

  “She’s not in there,” she announced.

  I blankly stared back.

  “Lisa is missing. Did you see her?”

  “No.”

  Poole spun on her heel and stomped down the hallway.

  “She must have exited the other end.”

  Sweetie and I—mutually stunned by this recent development—took off after her, though as I passed the ladies’ room I couldn’t help but open the door and call out: “Lisa? Honey?”

  Poole shot me a look over her shoulder. “She’s not there. Really.”

  She barged past patients, thrusting open the door at the end and storming into the stairwell. I followed close behind. She paused, squinting up at the next flight—sectioned off by a metal gate and a sign that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—then turned, stomping down the stairs. We blasted out onto the ground floor, jostling a man carrying a stack of folders, Sweetie’s paws skidding on the slick wood floors as she rounded the sharp turn. We followed Poole into an office marked DRUG AND ALCOHOL EXTENSION PROGRAM.

  “Beth, did you see a five-forty-six wandering around? Skinny blonde? Micro-mini? Hair in Heidi braids?” She eyed me icily. “Feathers?”

  “No, Liz.”

  Poole, muttering to herself, marched back down the hall.

  “What’s a five-forty-six?” I asked.

  “A prospective. I’ll have to review the security monitors. She likes to run away, does she? Any idea where she might go?”

  “If she makes it to the main road she might try to hitchhike.”

  “Unless she has wings and can fly over a thirty-foot electrified fence, that girl’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m terribly sorry about this.”

  We exited through the glass doors. Outside, across the lawn, patients—quite a few escorted by nurses—streamed down the sidewalks, heading to lunch. There was no sign of Nora anywhere. With the getup she was wearing, she’d be easy to spot. I had no idea where she was; this wasn’t part of the orders I’d given her. She’d gone rogue.

  A minute later, Poole deposited me on the floral couch in her office.

  “You wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back with your daughter.”

  “Thank you.”

  She only glared at me and slammed the door behind her.

  16

  I was alone with Sweetie. The dog had gone over to her pillow bed by the potted plants and returned with a squeaking hotdog.

  The chime dinged over the loudspeakers for the second time.

  I studied the ceiling. No visible camera.

  I stood up and moved over to Poole’s desk.

  There was a screensaver on her computer monitor. Unsurprisingly, it featured floating shots of Sweetie, though every now and then there was the presence in the background of a thin bald man who looked baffled. Mr. Poole.

  I tapped the keyboard and was prompted for a password.

  I tried Sweetie. It didn’t work.

  On the corner of the desk were stacks of papers in IN and OUT trays. I flipped through them: thank-you notes, admission applications, a signed confidentiality statement, an email from Dr. Robert Paul announcing his retirement. Surely, there had to be some kind of internal administrative memo about Ashley Cordova. It’d be written by some hospital head, filled with phrases like This is a very delicate matter and It’s critical to the reputation of this hospital—and so on.

  I opened the desk drawers.

  They were filled with office supplies, a Pottery Barn catalog, and strewn with wrapped hard mint candies. I moved to the row of filing cabinets along the back wall. They were all locked and no sign anywhere of the keys.

  I moved back over to the door, opened it, and looked out
.

  The hallway was empty, except for two nurses standing about halfway down in front of Dycon’s main entrance.

  Nora is getting me thrown out anyway. I might as well go down like a kamikaze. Suddenly, Sweetie was gnawing the hotdog on my foot. A nurse stopped talking to glance curiously in our direction.

  I reached down, launched the toy across the room—it lodged in the leaves of a giant potted corn plant by the window; Sweetie would have to scale the six-foot stalk to reach it—and checked outside again.

  The nurses had quietly resumed talking. I slipped out, walking straight through the side door.

  Outside, I headed toward Straffen.

  The grounds were quiet again, a few stragglers making their way toward the dining hall. I hurried across the lawn, heading up the front steps, where patients were chatting and smoking cigarettes. They only glanced at me idly as I entered the building and headed straight for the elevator banks.

  Stepping inside one, I pressed 3. But the number didn’t light.

  I needed some type of code. I was about to exit when a gray-haired woman stepped in, her eyes glued to her BlackBerry. Without acknowledging me, she pressed a four-digit code into the panel. It didn’t work, clearly because I’d pressed a button. Frowning, she pressed reset, typed the code again, and the doors closed. We began to rise. She’d pressed 6. I stepped forward, tried 3 again. This time it lit up.

  She turned to me, curiously looking me over.

  The doors opened on 3. I exited, sensing the woman was now wondering who the hell I was, but before she could react, the doors closed.

  I was alone.

  The third floor of Straffen looked identical to the second, except the overhead neon lights were pinker, the linoleum shinier, the walls painted spearmint green. Black doors spanned the hall in both directions. They were doctors’ offices. I moved along them, outside each one, a plaque printed with a name. I could hear low voices and bamboo-whistling music, the kind you hear at a spa while getting a massage. Midway down the hall, there was a small windowed sitting area where two young men sat stretched out on couches, writing in notebooks.

  They didn’t notice me as I walked past.

  I spotted the plaque, ANNIKA ANGLEY PH.D. I knocked lightly and, hearing nothing, tried the knob. Locked. I strolled back to the young men.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  They looked up, startled. One was blond with a soft, uncertain face. The other had brown curly hair, his skin red and pockmarked.

  “Maybe you can help me,” I said. “Did either of you know a former resident who was here recently named Ashley Cordova?”

  The blond kid glanced hesitantly at the other boy. “No. But I just got here.”

  I turned to him. “What about you?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I heard about her.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Just that Cordova’s daughter was here.”

  “Did you ever meet her or see her?”

  He shook his head. “She was Code Silver.”

  “What’s Code Silver?”

  “The acute-care unit. They all live in Maudsley.”

  “Excuse me,” a male voice called out behind me. “Can I help you?”

  I turned. A short, portly man with a dense brown beard was in the hallway, staring at me.

  “Hopefully,” I said. “I’m looking for my daughter, Lisa.”

  “Come with me.” He held out his arm, beckoning me to step away from the boys with a rigidly pissed-off smile. I nodded my thanks to them and followed the man around the corner.

  “This floor is prohibited to everyone but residents and physicians. How did you get up here?”

  I explained as confusedly as I could that I’d been on a campus tour with Poole and had lost my daughter.

  Looking me over with great distaste—though seemingly buying into my stupidity—he stepped toward an office, fumbling with his keys. He shoved the door open, switching on the lights.

  “Please wait with me in here until I speak with Elizabeth.”

  “Actually, I know the way. I’ll just head back myself.”

  “Sir, get in here now or I’ll call security.”

  He was Jason Elroy-Martin, M.D., according to his plaque. I entered, sitting on his leather couch as he, with increasing frustration, dialed phone numbers off a contact sheet taped to the wall beside his medical diploma from the University of Miami. After leaving two messages for Poole, he finally reached her, and swiftly his face—what was left of it; his beard had overrun his cheeks—was flushed with outrage.

  “He’s in front of me,” he said, staring me down. “He approached two one-seventeens. They were free-writing in their journals. Yes. Yes.” He paused, listening. “No problem.”

  He hung up the phone and sat back in his swivel chair, interlacing his fingers.

  “Am I dismissed?” I asked.

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  He continued to frown at me until there was a knock on the door.

  It opened, revealing two large uniformed security guards.

  “Scott B. McGrath,” one of them said, “you’ll have to come with us.”

  The fact that he’d said “B”—which stood for my middle name, Bartley—was not promising.

  17

  They escorted me across the grounds to the Security Center, a boxy cinder-block bunker away from the other buildings at the edge of the woods. We entered a stark lobby, where a toad-faced guard sat behind glass. I was led down a hall past rooms buzzing with monitors, each displaying jumpy black-and-white shots of corridors and classrooms.

  “Is this the part where I get waterboarded?” I asked.

  They ignored me, stopping beside the open doorway at the end.

  Nora was there, hunched on a metal folding chair at the center of a yellow-carpeted room with plywood walls. Thankfully, she appeared to be out of character, biting her nails, staring wide-eyed up at Elizabeth Poole—now so red-faced she appeared to be radiating thermonuclear heat. Beside her, perched on the edge of a desk, was a tall man with salt-and-pepper hair. He was wearing ironed khaki slacks and a bright Easter egg–blue sweater.

  “Scott,” he said, rising and extending his hand. “I’m Allan Cunningham. President of Briarwood Hall. Very nice to meet you.”

  “Pleasure’s all mine.”

  He smiled. He was one of those beaming men not merely clean-cut but spick-and-span, with the unblemished complexion one usually finds on babies and nuns.

  “So, Nora,” he said, looking down at her and smiling—she actually smiled back—“whose pseudonym today I understand has been Lisa. She’s been explaining that you guys aren’t potential guests, as you claimed, but here to dig illegally for information on a former patient.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ashley Cordova. She escaped from your care and died ten days later. We’re trying to determine if there was misconduct on the part of the hospital, which directly resulted in her death.”

  “There was no misconduct.”

  “You admit, then, Ashley Cordova was a patient here.”

  “Absolutely not.” It was taking considerable effort for Cunningham to keep that broad grin on his face. “But I will say there have been no breaches in patient safety.”

  “If Ashley was authorized to leave with an unidentified male in the middle of the night, why did the hospital file a missing-person’s report the next day?”

  He looked incensed, but didn’t answer.

  “She was Code Silver. The acute-care unit. They’re not authorized to leave without a guardian. So someone at the hospital must have been asleep at the wheel.”

  He took a deep breath. “Mr. McGrath, this is not a public hospital. You’re subject to trespass laws. I could have you both taken straight to jail.”

  “Actually, you can’t.” I unzipped my pocket, handing him a folded brochure. “You’ll find that, in addition to our concerns about Ashley, Nora and I are here to distribute materials about our religion, as we a
re legally allowed to do under Marsh versus Alabama, the Supreme Court ruling that upholds, under constitutional Amendments One and Fourteen, state trespass statutes do not apply to those involved in the distribution of religious literature, even if it takes place on private grounds.”

  Cunningham surveyed my old Jehovah’s Witness brochure.

  “Cute. Very cute,” he said. “You’ll be escorted off the premises. I’ll file a complaint with police. If I hear you or your friends—including the person sleeping in your car—try to enter our grounds again, you’ll be arrested.”

  He crumpled up the brochure, making a nice rim-shot with it in the trashcan by the door. I was about to thank him for his time, when sudden movement in the window behind him caught my attention.

  A woman was racing through the woods along the dirt path encircling a deserted construction site, her red hair flashing in the sun. She was wearing pink nurse’s scrubs with a white cardigan and appeared to be in a serious hurry, heading straight for our building.

  Cunningham glanced over his shoulder out the window, but then turned back, nonchalant.

  “Do I make myself clear, Mr. McGrath?”

  “Crystal.”

  Cunningham nodded at the guards, and they escorted us outside.

  We filed down the sidewalk around the construction site. Lisa, for all her bad-girl scowling, certainly looked docile now. As we walked between the two guards she shot me countless freaked-out, what-are-we-going-to-do-now? looks—all of which suggested she was relishing this clash with authority. If you could even call these security officers authority. They looked like La-Z-Boys.

  Farther down the path, I noticed that nurse again—the same redhead I’d spotted out the window. She’d just stepped out of nowhere and was rushing toward us, staring emphatically at the ground. But when we were just a few yards away, she jerked her head up, staring agitatedly right at me.

  I stopped in surprise.

  She only picked up her pace, veering onto another route leading around the back of a dormitory.

  “Mr. McGrath. Let’s go.”

  When we reached the parking lot, news of a security breach appeared to have traveled around the hospital, because we had a handful of onlookers—nurses, administrators, shrinks—standing on the front steps of Dycon, watching our procession.