Night Film(34)

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, Bugles, 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.”