Night Film(164)

I also noticed uneasily, glancing around, that Dixie’s Diner, so cheery and bustling only minutes ago, had unexpectedly cleared out.

It was just the three of us now and, hunched over the counter, an elderly man in a green-and-black checked flannel shirt, who looked as gnarled and spindly as the walking stick propped beside him. It was as if whispers of what we were about to tell one another, about The Peak, were already suffused in the air here, already drifting out of our mouths, darkening the place, and any innocent soul or carefree person couldn’t help but subconsciously sense that the time had come to leave.

“Let’s start with the canoe,” I said.





95


“We don’t know what happened to it,” Nora answered. “We think they took it.”

“They?”

“Those people living there.”

She glanced uncertainly at Hopper. He added nothing to this, only hooked his index finger through the handle of his coffee mug, frowning.

“I told you to wait for me at the pond,” I said to her.

“I meant to. But when I ran down the hill, I got mixed up, and went too far north. When I backtracked, I was heading toward the canoe, when someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. I screamed, sprayed him with the pepper spray, and then I just ran.”

“Did you see the man’s face?” That scream I’d heard, it had been Nora.

She shook her head. “He had a flashlight. Blinded me with it. I kept running and running, until I realized there was no one behind me. After an hour I came to this dirt road winding through the woods. I took off down it, hoping it’d lead me off the property and I’d be able to go for help.”

Abruptly she fell silent, glancing apprehensively at Hopper again.

“Did it lead you off the property?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Where did it lead you?” I prompted, when she didn’t go on.

“To this concrete lot. An old-fashioned truck was parked there. At the center were these gigantic metal boxes. Five in a row. At first I thought it had to be an electrical plant used for powering the estate. Or maybe they were traps for wild animals. They looked cruel. But then I smelled smoke. I got closer and, shining my flashlight on them, I saw each one had a rusty door and a chimney sticking up into the air. Strewn all over the ground was a pale gray powder. I didn’t realize until I’d walked through it that it was ashes. The boxes were incinerators. And they’d been used recently, because I could still feel heat coming off them.”

Incinerators.

The word made me suddenly recall those tunnels originating from the underground alcove, those blackened entryways and the rudimentary words scrawled above the openings in white paint. I couldn’t believe it and I didn’t know how, but I remembered every one, as if they were the refrain of a nursery rhyme I’d sung as a child, the lyrics lodged in my head forever.

Gatehouse. Mansion. Lake. Stables. Workshop. Lookout. Trophy. Pincoya Negro. Cemetery. Mrs. Peabody’s. Laboratory. The Z. Crossroads.

Nora frowned. “I remembered the next-door neighbor in the trailer that you’d interviewed, Nelson Garcia, how he told you the Cordovas set fire to all their garbage. I went up to one and unlatched the door. There was nothing but black walls, piles and piles of ashes. The smell was awful. Synthetic, but sweet. I opened the other doors, raked a tree branch through the ashes to see if there was anything left. There was nothing, not one hair. I started combing the ground, trying to find some piece of evidence of what they were going to so much trouble to destroy. It wasn’t until I inspected the truck that I found something.”

“What?”

“A glass vial used for drawing blood at a doctor’s office. It was wedged along the side in the rear bed. It looked empty, but there was a tiny pink label on the side with a biohazard symbol. They must use the truck to transport medical waste or toxic garbage from somewhere at The Peak to burn in those ovens. The vial must have accidentally fallen out.”

She took a breath. “It made me wonder if the whole area was contaminated. I began to feel sick, so I ran.” She stared at the table in front of her. “I had the feeling someone was following me, but every time I looked around, there was no one. When I reached the fence, I didn’t even think about it, I went right over it. I didn’t care if I died or got electrocuted or cut up. I climbed right through the razor wire, didn’t feel a thing. I just wanted to get out, and nothing would stop me.”

“How’d you get back to the motel?”

“I reached this paved road—this was about four in the morning—and a red station wagon pulled up, a tiny old lady behind the wheel. She offered me a ride. I was petrified. I thought for sure she was one of the townspeople. She even looked like a witch, with a green blouse and all these rings on her fingers. But I was so tired and she looked so fragile, I got in. She drove me straight back to the motel and said, ‘Take care of yourself, girl.’ And that was it. Nothing happened. I staggered into the room and slept for thirteen hours.”

I stared at her. I could feel the outskirts of another headache coming on, but I tried to focus, to think. A glass vial used for drawing blood? Medical waste? Why would Cordova have such things—for use in another film?

Her mention of Nelson Garcia made me remember the other incident he’d told me about, the UPS delivery of medical equipment intended for The Peak, but accidentally arriving at his own trailer. Nothing we’d learned over the course of the investigation, no one we’d interviewed had mentioned a detail that validated this story or Garcia’s suspicion, that there was someone injured or ill up at The Peak—except perhaps now, Nora and these incinerators she’d just described.