Night Film: A Novel

by Marisha Pessl

  “A going-away party,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Kindly make your way to your vehicle,” the guard ordered.

  I unlocked the car, and the two of us climbed in. Hopper was still passed out in the back. He looked like he hadn’t moved.

  “Why don’t you make sure he has a pulse?” I muttered, starting the engine.

  I eased out of the parking space, edging the car toward the exit. There were people still milling around Dycon, watching us, but no sign anywhere of that redhaired nurse. Had she wanted me to follow her? Surely she’d have seen with the security guards it was impossible.

  “He has a pulse,” chirped Nora happily, turning back. “That was a close call, huh?”

  “Close? No. I’d call that a bull’s-eye.”

  I made a right, accelerating out onto the main road that would get us the hell out of here, a dizzying two-minute drive through the woods.

  “You mad or something?” Nora asked.

  “Yes. I’m mad.”

  “How come?”

  “Your little Houdini act back there? You didn’t just draw attention to us. You drew a red circle around us and added a They are here arrow. Next time bring a mariachi band.”

  She huffed, fiddling with the radio.

  “Right now Cunningham’s on the phone with Ashley’s family—Cordova himself, probably—telling him a reporter named Scott McGrath accompanied by a white cracker Floridian is snooping around his daughter’s medical history. Any hope I had at keeping this investigation quiet is gone now, thanks to you, Bernstein. Which brings me to your acting. I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but you need to rethink your life purpose.”

  I checked the rearview mirror. A blue Lincoln had just appeared behind us—in the front seats, the unmistakable boxy forms of the security officers.

  “Now we’ve got Mumbo and Jumbo tailing us,” I muttered.

  Nora excitedly whipped around in the seat to look. The girl was about as stealthy as a semi hauling a wide load.

  We sped down the hill, rounding a grove of trees. I counted about fifteen seconds between the time our car rounded a curve and the blue sedan appeared behind us. I pressed harder on the gas, racing around another bend.

  “Bet I got more on Ashley than you,” Nora announced.

  “Oh, yeah? What’ve you got?”

  She only shrugged, smiling.

  “Bupkis. Exactly.”

  We sped around another turn, the road straightening and intersecting with a dirt service road. I paused at the stop sign and was just starting to floor it when suddenly Nora screamed.

  That woman—the redheaded nurse—was crashing out of the steep wooded bank just to our right, running directly in front of our car.

  I slammed on the brakes.

  She fell forward against the hood, red hair spilling everywhere. For a horrified moment I thought she was hurt, but then she lifted her head, racing around the car to my side, leaning in an inch from the window.

  She stared in at me—her brown eyes bloodshot, her freckled face desperate.

  “Morgan Devold,” she shouted. “Find him. He’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “What?”

  “Morgan. Devold.”

  She lurched back in front of the car and ran to the shoulder, scrambling up the steep embankment just as the blue sedan appeared behind us.

  Frantically she was crawling on her hands and knees up the hill, sliding in the leaves and dirt. She reached the summit and wrapped her cardigan around herself, pausing to stare down at our car.

  The guards had pulled up behind us and beeped.

  They hadn’t seen her.

  I took my foot off the brake and—still intoxicated with shock—we continued down the drive, though in the rearview mirror, just before we rounded the next bend, I saw the woman was still standing on the hill, a gust of wind whipping that red hair into her face, blotting it out.

  18

  A stone-faced guard opened the electronic gate and we accelerated through, the Lincoln behind us doing a U-turn, heading back to the hospital.

  “Oh my God,” said Nora, exhaling, pressing a hand to her chest.

  “What was the name she said?” I asked.

  “Morgan Devold?”

  “Write it down. D-E-V-O-L-D.”

  Nora hurriedly dug through her purse for a pen and bit off the cap, scribbling the name on the top of her hand.

  “I saw her before when we were in the Security Center,” she said. “And then she passed us on our way out. She wanted to talk to us.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “What’s going on?” mumbled a hoarse voice from the backseat.

  Hopper was up, yawning. He rubbed his eyes, staring out at the rural landscape speeding by, unsurprised.

  I handed Nora my phone. “Google Morgan Devold and New York. Tell me what you get.”

  It took a few minutes, due to the patchy cell service.

  “There’s nothing much,” she said. “Just one of those genealogy websites. A man named Morgan Devold lived in Sweden in 1836. He had a son named Henrik.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “The name turns up on a site called Lawless Legwear.”

  We accelerated past another road sign. BIG INDIAN 5.

  “Where the hell are we?” asked Hopper, rolling down the window.

  Nora turned around, eagerly filling him in on what had transpired in the last four hours.

  “We were about to be arrested,” she went on. “But Scott was a total rock star. He whipped out this brochure that read across the front, ‘The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived. Questions About Jesus Christ for Young People.’ ” She giggled. “It was classic.”

  As she explained what had just happened with the nurse, I spotted a Qwik Mart approaching on our right. I braked and made the turn.

  “Go inside,” I said to Nora, pulling up beside a gas tank and cutting the engine. “Ask if we can borrow a phone book. And pick up some snacks.” I handed her twenty bucks and set about filling the tank.

  Hopper emerged from the backseat, stretching.

  “What’d you find out about Ashley?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Not much. Apparently, she was a Code Silver patient, which is the most critical level of care.”

  “But you didn’t find out what was wrong with her.”

  “No.”

  He seemed about to ask me something else, but instead turned, strolling across the parking lot, pulling out his cigarettes.

  It was after four o’clock. The sun had loosened its grip on the world, letting the shadows get sloppy, the light, thawed and soft.

  Directly across the street, a white farmhouse stood in the middle of a wild lawn, the grass strewn with garbage. On a drooping telephone wire sat two black birds, too tiny and fat to be crows. The Qwik Mart door dinged behind me and I turned to see an old man in a green flannel shirt and workman’s boots, heading to a pickup, a brown mutt in the bed. The man climbed behind the wheel and they pulled out, swerving to make a right extremely close to Hopper, the muffler backfiring.

  Hopper didn’t react. He was staring in a sort of melancholic trance out at the middle of the road, oblivious to the cars speeding by.

  Maybe that was the point—he was imagining stepping in front of one. He looked like he was at a river’s edge, about to throw himself in. It was a melodramatic thought—probably residual paranoia from the appearance of that nurse. I could still see her anxious, freckled face staring at me, her lips chapped, the window clouding over from her breath, erasing her mouth.

  Hopper took a drag of his cigarette, brushing his hair from his eyes, and looked up at the sky, squinting at those birds on the telephone wires. More had appeared out of nowhere. Now there were seven—seven tiny black notes on an otherwise empty piece of sheet music, the lines and bars sagging, giving up as they stretched between poles and twisted on down the road.

  Another ding and Nora emerged, her arms laden with coffee cups, jelly beans, Bugl
es, and a phone book. She spread it all out on the hood.

  “I got Hopper some coffee,” she whispered, holding up the jumbo-sized cup and squinting worriedly across the parking lot at him. “He looks like he needs caffeine.”

  “He looks like he needs a hug.”

  She set the cup down, flipping through the phone book.

  “It’s here,” she whispered in amazement.

  I walked over, staring down at the page.

  19

  “It’s the next driveway,” said Nora, squinting at the phone.

  The drive to Livingston Manor was an hour and a half of snaking backcountry roads. It was already getting dark, the sky fading to a bruised blue. There were no street signs along Benton Hollow Road, no house numbers, no streetlights, not even any lines—just my car’s faded headlights, which didn’t so much push back the advancing dark as nervously rummage through it. To our left was a wall of solid shrubbery, barbed and impenetrable; to our right, vast black land stretched out, rumpled pastures and faded farmhouses, a lone porch light punctuating the night.

  “This is it,” whispered Nora excitedly, pointing at an opening in the shrubs.

  There was a metal mailbox, but no number and no name.

  I made the turn.

  It was a constricted gravel drive straight uphill through dense foliage, an opening barely wide enough for a man, much less a car. The incline grew steeper, so I had to floor it, the entire car shimmying uncontrollably like the space shuttle trying to break the sound barrier. Spindly branches slapped the windshield.

  After about a minute, we inched over the crest of the hill.

  Instantly, I hit the brakes.

  Far in front of us, across a scruffy lawn, wedged back between tall trees, sat a tiny wooden house so decrepit it rendered us mute.

  The white paint was cracked and flaking. Shingles were missing from the roof, exposing a raw black hole, windows along the attic floor punched out and charred black. Strewn across the yard among the dead leaves and a large fallen tree were a child’s toys—a wagon, a tricycle, and, farther off, along the edge of the yard where it was dark, an old plastic kiddie pool looking like a popped blister.

  There was something so inherently menacing about the house as it loomed there, poised in the shadows, I automatically turned off the engine and headlights. A lone lit bulb by the front door illuminated a porch swing half on the ground and an old air conditioner. Another light was on in one of the back rooms—a tiny rectangular window lit with mint-green curtains pulled tightly closed.

  It occurred to me we had no context whatsoever for this man—Morgan Devold. We were following the tip of a total stranger, a Briarwood nurse—who, recalling the way she’d thrown herself in front of the car, hadn’t appeared exactly rational.

  Parked beside the house in front of a wooden shed were a pickup truck and an old gray Buick, a plastic tarp hanging out of the trunk.

  “Now what?” Nora said nervously, biting her thumbnail.

  “Let’s go over the plan,” I said.

  “Plan?” Hopper said with a laugh, leaning forward between us. “It’s simple. We talk to Morgan Devold and find out what he knows. Let’s go.”

  Before I could say a word, he’d climbed out, slammed the door, and was making his way across the yard. His gray wool coat caught the wind, flapping out behind him, and with his head down, his walk deliberate as he headed straight for the house, he resembled some kind of moody comic-book character about to unleash brutal vengeance on the inhabitants.

  “He’s certainly come back from the dead,” I muttered. “What’d you put in his coffee?”

  Nora didn’t answer—she was too busy fumbling for the door handle like an eager kid sister who didn’t want to be left behind. Within seconds she scrambled out, dashing right after him.

  I held back, waiting. Let them be the scouts—the lowly privates who checked for land mines before the general arrived.

  Their footsteps were the only sounds—soft crunches through the leaves and grass strewn with sticks. Maybe it was the peeling paint, giving the house scaly skin, but the place looked reptilian and alive, poised beyond the trees, waiting—that lone lit window like an eye watching us.

  Somewhere far away, a dog barked.

  Hopper was already at the front porch, so I climbed out of the car. He stepped around the air conditioner, pulled open the screen, and knocked on the door.

  There was no answer.

  He knocked again, waiting, a blast of wind sending a cluster of leaves across the lawn.

  Still no answer. He let the screen bang closed and jumped down into the flower bed spiked with dead stalks and a tangled garden hose. Shading his eyes, he peered in one of the windows.

  “Someone’s home,” he whispered. “There’s a TV on in the kitchen.”

  “What are they watching?” I asked quietly, striding over the giant fallen tree trunk and then, past Nora, inspecting something lying facedown in the grass. It was an old teddy bear.

  “Why?” whispered Hopper, glancing back at me.

  “We’ll be able to tell what type of people we’re dealing with. If it’s hardcore Japanese anime, we’ve got problems. But if it’s a Barbara Walters special—”

  “It looks like a rerun of The Price Is Right.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  Hopper stepped gingerly back up onto the porch, this time noticing a dirt-encrusted doorbell. He pressed it twice.

  Suddenly there was the jumble of locks turning, a chain sliding, and the front door gasped open, revealing a middle-aged blond woman behind the screen. She was wearing baggy gray sweats, a stained blue T-shirt, her peroxide-streaked hair in a ponytail.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” Hopper said. “Sorry to disturb you during the dinner hour. But we’re looking for Morgan Devold.”

  She surveyed him suspiciously, then craned her neck to look at me.

  “What do you all want with Morgan?”

  “Just to chat,” Hopper said with a laid-back shrug. “It should only take a few minutes. We’re from Briarwood.”

  “He’s not home,” said the woman rudely.

  “Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  She squinted at him. “You all get off our property or I’m callin’ the cops.”

  She was about to slam the door, when a man materialized beside her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He had a soft, mild-mannered voice, in startling contrast to the woman, who appeared to be his wife. He was considerably shorter than she, and looked younger—early thirties—stocky, wearing a faded blue flannel button-down tucked neatly into his jeans, the sleeves rolled up. He had brown hair in a crew cut and broad, reddish features that were neither unattractive nor handsome, only ordinary. It was the face of a million other men.

  “Are you Morgan Devold?” asked Hopper.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Briarwood.”

  “You all got some nerve showin’ up here,” said the woman.

  “Stace. It’s all right.”

  “No more communication. You heard the lawyer—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine—”

  “Let me handle it.” He said it with a sharp, raised voice, and suddenly somewhere in a back room, a baby started to cry.

  The woman darted out of the doorway, though not before glaring at him.

  “Get rid of them,” she said.

  Morgan—it appeared this was Morgan—stepped forward with an apologetic smile. As the baby wailed, he said nothing, and the way he stood there, stranded behind the screen door, reminded me of my last visit to the Bronx Zoo with Sam; she’d pointed out with great concern a chimpanzee staring dolefully out at us from behind the glass—such profound sadness, such resignation.

  “You guys are from Briarwood?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Not exactly,” said Hopper.

  “Then what’s this really about?”

  Hopper stared at him for a second before a
nswering. “Ashley.”

  It was surprising, the knowing way he said her name. In fact, it was ingenious—implying Ashley was some incredible experience both of them had had, so memorable, any mention of a last name was unnecessary. She was a magnificent hidden island, a secret house on a rocky cliff, visited by only a privileged few. If it was a deliberate trap on Hopper’s part, it worked, because instantly a look of recognition appeared on the man’s face.

  Glancing furtively over his shoulder—where his wife had just disappeared to tend to the baby—he turned back to us. With a guilty smile, he extended his index finger and, careful not to make any noise, pushed it against the screen, quietly opening the door.

  “Out here,” he whispered.

  20

  We followed Morgan Devold to the edge of the yard, where there were dense trees, close to the children’s pool filled with black water and leaves. The baby was still crying, though away from the house now the wind acted as a balm on the sound, easing it, folding it into the cold shivers of the night.

  “How’d you find me?” Morgan asked rather resignedly, hooking his thumbs in his jean pockets.

  “Through a nurse at Briarwood,” said Hopper.

  “Which one?”

  “She didn’t tell us her name,” I said. “But she was young. Red hair and freckles.”

  He nodded. “Genevieve Wilson.”

  “Is she a friend of yours?”

  “Not really. But I heard she made a stink to administration when I got the ax.”

  “You used to work at Briarwood?”

  He nodded again.

  “Doing what?”

  “Security.”

  “For how long?”

  “ ’Bout seven years? Before that, I did security at Woodbourne. I was all set for a promotion at Briarwood. Thought I was going to be assistant head.” Smiling sadly, he looked up, staring past me to his own house. He looked bewildered, as if he didn’t recognize it or couldn’t remember how he’d come to live there.

  “Who are you guys?” he asked.