Night Film(165)

Hopper had been listening to her with annoyed detachment, occasionally glaring at her over some specific detail she mentioned—the word incinerators, the glass vial labeled biohazard.

“What about you?” I asked him. “What happened?”

“Hopper got inside the mansion,” blurted Nora excitedly. “He found Ashley’s room—”

“I don’t know it was her room for sure,” Hopper countered.

“But—of course you do.” Clearly surprised by his sudden reticence, she turned to me, leaning in. “He found letters that he’d written Ashley, ones she’d never answered. They were kept safe, in order, right beside her bed. It looked like she’d read through them a million times. And there were pictures of them together on top of her desk. Then he found her practice room—”

“I don’t know it was her practice room—”

“But you found a piece on the piano she’d written, called Tiger Foot.”

“Tiger Foot?” I asked, puzzled.

“Hopper’s tribe name from Six Silver Lakes.”

Hopper looked livid. “I don’t know what I found up there, okay. I don’t know.”

“How did you get inside the house?” I asked him.

“Climbed up onto the roof. Found a window unlatched.”

“What was it like inside? Abandoned?”

“No. It was … nice.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes and seemed unwilling to elaborate, but, as I was waiting expectantly, he sighed. “It was a castle. Gigantic. Gloomy as f*ck. Mahogany walls. Tapestries with unicorns. Snarling bear heads. Paintings depicting floods and mayhem and people in pain. Wooden chairs, big as thrones. Knights’ swords hanging on the wall, and an iron chandelier with burned white candles covered in wax. Not that I had much time to browse. Someone let the dogs back in. I found a back staircase, headed to the basement, ducked inside the first room I found that was unlocked. I hid in there for hours.”

“It was filled with thousands of filing cabinets,” added Nora.

“Filing cabinets?” I asked. “Containing what?”

“Actors’ head shots. Millions of pictures and résumés with weird notes written on the back.” She waited for Hopper to explain it to me, but, again, he looked infuriated by her candor.

“What kind of notes?” I pressed when neither of them spoke.

“Personal details,” said Hopper.

“Such as?”

“Background. Phobias. Secrets.”

“They had to be actors Cordova had considered for roles,” said Nora. “It reminded me of the audition Olivia Endicott described. Remember how he asked her those weird personal questions?” She glanced at Hopper. “What was the one you told me about? That woman named Shell Baker?”

“Her picture looked like it dated back to the seventies,” he said. “Someone had written on the back of it, ‘No family except a brother in the Navy, hates cats, diabetic, doesn’t like to be alone, sexually inexperienced.’ Another was, like, ‘Raised in Texas, car accident as a five-year-old child, left her in a back brace for a year, painfully shy.’ ”

“Did you take anything with you?” I asked.

He seemed irritated by the question. “Why?”

“For evidence?”

“No. I put it back and got the hell out of there.”

“Then Hopper found a torture chamber,” Nora blurted.

“It wasn’t a torture chamber,” he countered angrily. He looked at me. “Another room in the basement just had a bunch of wooden stretchers and planks, metal bridles, antiques—I didn’t know what half the shit was. I slipped out, snuck upstairs to the third floor. I found what I think was Ashley’s room, was looking around when I accidentally knocked over a lamp. Someone must have heard me, because I could hear someone coming up the stairs. I darted into a closet while this person, it sounded like a woman, wandered around. She righted the lamp and then she left. Only she locked me in. I couldn’t unlock the door from the inside. I was going to unscrew the doorknob, but then I heard one of the dogs outside the door. He had to have known I was in there. But he didn’t bark. There were giant bay windows in the room, overlooking the hill and Graves Pond, but when I climbed out, there was a sheer drop. I stayed in the room all night, silent, waiting for the dog to leave. About five in the morning someone whistled and it ran downstairs. I unscrewed the doorknob, managed to get out of the house without encountering anyone. I made a beeline for the canoe, but naturally it was gone. So I just followed the same stream that we’d come in on. I got lost, though. I wandered deep into a swamp, ended up in mud chest-high. I came upon a group of campers who looked at me like they thought I was the Loch Ness Monster. They told me I was in a section called the Hitchins Pond Primitive Area, which is all the way east of Lows Lake. It was about six at night when I made it back to the Jeep.”

“Any sign of one of the Cordovas living at the house?” I asked.

“No. The top floor was where the family had their bedrooms. No one slept there all night. I think the other people with the dogs were caretakers. Not that I saw any of them up close.”

“You didn’t enter any other room in the basement?”

“No. They were all locked.”