Night Film(173)

Unless that was just Cordova. Maybe he was a virus: contagious, destructive, mutating constantly so you never quite grasped what you were dealing with, silently sewing himself into your DNA. Those with even the barest exposure contracted a fascination and a fear that replicated to the point that it overtook your entire life.

There was no cure. You could only learn to live with it.

After three days of wandering my apartment, avoiding the box of the remaining Cordova research, taking antibiotics and steroids for my hand and rash, I realized that to try and relax was making me so uncomfortable, I had little choice but to let it remain murky.

At eleven o’clock on Wednesday night I hailed a taxi and told the driver to take me to 83 Henry. Falcone, unsurprisingly, was right. When I stepped across the street, staring at the shabby walk-up nestled by Manhattan Bridge, it appeared that every tenant, for whatever reason, had vacated. Now every window was dark, though I could make out the ruffled pink gauzy curtains on the fifth floor. I tried the front entrance. It was locked, of course; yet, staring through the small window, I noticed that the names had been removed from all the mailboxes.

I took off toward Market Street, and within two blocks, passed Hao Hair Salon, where I’d taped up Ashley’s flier in the window all those weeks ago. I was surprised to see that it was still there, only faded by the sun.

Ashley was little more than a ghostly face, the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? barely legible. Seeing it gave me a nagging feeling that time was running out—or maybe it was simply moving on.

Hopper and Nora were gone, and now, so was Ashley.





103


I’d tried Cynthia countless times, hoping for an update on Sam, but I’d still heard nothing. As much as her stonewalling drove me crazy, I did sense it meant that Sam was okay; if anything was seriously wrong, she’d phone me. At least, this was what I told myself.

As Sharon Falcone had explained, it was going to take at least a month until I knew if those were human bones I’d found up at The Peak, so in the meantime, there were a few critical leads to follow up on.

I logged on to the Blackboards, checking out rumors about the real-world fates of Rachel Dempsey and Fernando Ponti, the actors who’d played Leigh and Popcorn in the Cordova films. Cross-checking the Blackboards, I was surprised to learn that The Natural Huntsman—some kind of macho pro-NRA hunting newsletter—was accurate regarding Rachel Dempsey.

Dempsey, who played Leigh in La Douleur when she was only twenty, was never seen or heard from again after vanishing in Nepal on April 2, 2007. There were two articles about the disappearance in her hometown newspaper, though there were no further developments and no record of any husband or children she’d left behind. I did find on the Internet existence of a Marion Dempsey living in Woonsocket—Rachel’s mother or sister, I hoped. I called the public directory, found the number, and after it rang interminably, an exasperated woman who curtly identified herself as “Mrs. Dempsey’s nurse” picked up. When I asked if her employer had a daughter named Rachel, I was told, “Mrs. Dempsey doesn’t trouble with that anymore”—which I took as a yes—and the woman hung up.

Fernando Ponti, on the other hand—the charismatic elderly Cuban man who’d played Popcorn—had been spotted by three different individuals on three different occasions around Crowthorpe Falls between October 1994 (a year after Wait for Me Here was released) and August 1999. When I’d been inside the greenhouse, I’d had the distinct feeling that Popcorn was somehow still there, tending his plants and fish, and these three sightings seemed to suggest that I was right.

Had the man never left? Had he loved his time at The Peak so much—or been so brainwashed—that he’d chosen to stay on as Popcorn, preferring his character to real life? Was he dead now, eternally buried in his fictitious gardens? I couldn’t find any records of Ponti’s family or where he’d come from beyond Cuba—which was mentioned only by the Blackboards. However, I was even more startled by the posting that detailed his disappearance inside Trophy Washing Machines, a store on the outskirts of Crowthorpe Falls.

I’d come across the word Trophy back at The Peak. It’d been scrawled above one of the entrances to the underground tunnels.

Had that particular corridor led to Trophy Washing Machines, clandestinely linking Crowthorpe Falls to the estate? It was too specific a word to be a coincidence. And it explained how Popcorn could have evaporated into thin air. He’d disappeared through a hidden hatch inside the store and headed home along this passage.

I checked up on quite a few more actors on the Blackboards, those with the largest parts who’d probably resided at The Peak during shooting. I uncovered only one true constant: After working with Cordova, they all entered new phases of their lives, which tended to scatter them to the outer reaches of the globe.

In not one case did the person remain the same, take up where they’d left off, go back to where they began.

Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh, had become an international hunter, which, oddly enough, made perfect sense; after playing the gullible and vulnerable Leigh, gagged and hog-tied in that buried bus, upon leaving The Peak, she appeared to have transformed herself from prey to predator. The rumor about Lulu Swallow, the woman who played Emily Jackson in Thumbscrew, was that she ended up living in a remote part of Nova Scotia and penning a series of dark-themed children’s books—the Lucy Straye orphan series—using the pen name E. Q. Nightingale. The debonair man who played Axel in La Douleur—Diane’s mysterious husband, with whom Leigh falls in love as she shadows him—ended up going to veterinary school and becoming a prominent Thoroughbred horse doctor; it was he who euthanized Eight Belles at the 2008 Kentucky Derby. The actor who played Brad Jackson—originally from England—supposedly moved to Thailand, where he was spotted by a Cordovite in 2002 in the red-light district Soi Cowboy with a teenage girl on the back of his motorbike.