Night Film(197)

Where the mermaids sing, I’d muttered.

Mermaids. There was something about that word that had bothered Gallo. And if it unnerved her, it could only mean one thing: It was too close for her comfort to the real Cordova.

It took me all night, all day, and one more night after that to find the connection. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t need to. I retyped the notes that had been stolen, detailing every witness we’d tracked down who’d encountered Ashley, everything I’d encountered at The Peak, every word I’d heard whispered about Cordova.

When I did see it, I realized, it had been right in front of me, all along.

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

The word had been scribbled above one of the thirteen blackened doorways down in the underground tunnels at The Peak.

Pincoya. It was a kind of mermaid.

“Long blond hair, incomparable beauty, luscious and sensual, she rises from the depths of the sea,” read the entry on Wikipedia. “She bestows riches or choking scarcity, and all of the mortals on land live in answer to her whims.” The creature had been spotted in one remote place on Earth and only one—an isolated island off the coast of South America called Chiloé.

La Pincoya was just one of a throng of mythical creatures that haunted the island’s land and shores, which remained shrouded in heavy mist and rain eleven months of the year. It was a bleak and inhospitable place, one of the remotest islands on Earth, an island with a legendary history of witchcraft.

I suddenly remembered, a detail Cleo had mentioned back at Enchantments the first time we’d gone to see her, when she was inspecting the materials we’d given her of Ashley’s Black Bone killing curse.

I see some dark brown sand in here, some seaweed, too, she’d told us. She must have picked this up someplace exotic.

There wasn’t much information about this island, Chiloé, but when I was reading a Spanish backpacker’s blog, I came across another connection.

Puerto Montt.

It was the last city on Chile’s mainland, before the country breaks up like a cookie into hundreds of crumbled islands. The backpacker had traveled from Puerto Montt to another town, Pargua, and from Pargua took the ferry to Chiloé. The only way to access the island was by boat, apart from a few rudimentary airfields.

I knew I’d recently read about the city and after an hour of searching, I found where: in The Natural Huntsman, the article posted on the Blackboards about Rachel Dempsey’s vanishing from Nepal—Rachel Dempsey, who’d played Leigh in La Douleur. Although there’d been no sign of her after she’d disappeared from her hunting expedition, nine days after she was reported missing, her satellite phone had been turned on in Santiago, Chile, and she’d made a brief phone call to a number that was traced to Puerto Montt.

I’d retyped the interview with Peg Martin in Washington Square Park and recalled Martin had mentioned that Theo Cordova had been carrying on an affair with a woman ten years older than he, a woman named Rachel who had appeared in one of Cordova’s films.

Checking the dates, I saw Rachel Dempsey would have been twenty-seven in the spring of 1993, the year Peg Martin attended the picnic. Theo would have been only sixteen, an eleven-year age difference.

It was close enough. So Rachel and Theo had seemingly been together. But what, exactly, had Rachel Dempsey planned for her hunting expedition in Nepal—to vanish off the face of the Earth? Disappear without a trace so she might resurface somewhere on that island in order to—what? Reunite in paradise with her lover, Theo? What was on that island?

The houses there had a singular style of architecture. Called palafitos, they were modest cottages built atop rickety stilts and painted vibrant pinks, blues, and reds, so they resembled long-legged water bugs swarming the coastline, which was not a tropical paradise, but thorny and gray, with sharp rocks and dark water that seeped across the beach.

I’d seen those stilt houses before.

It was when I’d been inside Wait for Me Here, in the Reinhart family greenhouse, in Popcorn’s work shed. I’d noticed a postcard tacked to a bulletin board—those very same stilt houses pictured on the front of it. Thankfully I’d the prescience to take it down and read the back, where someone had scribbled four words.

Someday soon you’ll come.

There was more: The churches on Chiloé looked like no others in the world, a combination of European Jesuit culture and the native traditions of the indigenous people on the island. They were austere, covered in wooden tiles like flaking dragon scales and jutting steeples topped with a spindly cross. Like the palafitos, they, too, were painted wild colors, though this brightness evoked not jubilation, but the sinister cheer of a clown’s face.

I’d seen one somewhere before. I raced back over to the floor, trawling the papers until I found it.

In the Vanity Fair article, Ashley’s freshman-year roommate had mentioned, when Ashley abruptly moved out with no word, all she’d left were three Polaroids, which had slipped, forgotten, behind her dresser. The snapshots had been included in the article—artifacts of Ashley’s lost existence, portholes into her world. I’d barely glanced at them.

Now, staring down at the first one, I felt light-headed with shock.

It featured a small, morose-looking church. It wasn’t an exact match, but it had the same architecture as all the others on the island.