Night Film(38)

He paused, visibly uneasy.

“What did it say?” I asked.

“Morgan!”

A screen door slammed.

“What’re you still doin’ out here?”

Stace was on the front porch, cradling the baby against her chest, shading her eyes in the glare of the light. Stepping after her was another child, a little girl of about four, wearing a white nightgown covered with what appeared to be cherries.

“They’re not gone yet?”

“Everything’s fine!” Morgan shouted. He turned to us, whispering, “Drive down the driveway and wait for me there, okay?”

He hurried back across the lawn.

“Oh my God. I told you to get rid of them!”

“They’re from Human Resources. Doing a survey. Hey. Look what I found.”

“But we’re not supposed to—what is that?”

“Baby. I just rescued her from the pool.”

“Are you insane?”

The little girl screamed, no doubt upon taking a look at that doll. Nora and Hopper were already making their way across the grass. I headed after them, and when we climbed back into my car the Devolds had returned inside, though their shouting could still be heard above the wind.





21


“It’s obvious Morgan fell in love with Ashley,” Nora said.

“Can you blame him?” I asked. “He is married to It. I’m referencing the Stephen King book.”

“He’s a freak is what he is,” said Hopper.

I turned around to him in the backseat. “You remember Ashley having nyctophobia at Six Silver Lakes?”

Glaring at me, he exhaled cigarette smoke out the window. “No way.”

We were in my car, sitting at the end of Devold’s driveway. We’d been waiting for him to reappear for forty-five minutes. Apart from my headlights illuminating the unmarked road, which twisted around the dense shrubs in front of us, it was pitch black out here, totally deserted. The wind had picked up. It whistled insistently against the car, making the branches nervously tap the windshield.

“He’s probably not coming back,” I muttered. “Stace put the guy’s muzzle back on and returned him to his cage in the basement.”

“She wasn’t that bad,” said Nora, shooting me a look.

“Let me bear witness as the only person in this car who’s been to the dark side of marriage and survived. She’s bad. She makes my ex-wife look like Mother Teresa.”

“He’s coming back,” muttered Hopper. “He has to.”

“Why?”

“He’s dying to talk about her.”

He ground out the cigarette on the window, flicking the butt outside.

Suddenly, Nora gasped as the man himself stepped into the headlights.

I didn’t know how we’d managed not to hear his footsteps. There was something odd in the way he stood there in his faded blue flannel shirt, blinking at us uneasily, his head held down at a strange, shy angle. None of us said a word. Something was wrong. But again, Hopper and Nora were unlocking the doors, scrambling out. I held back to observe the guy for a few seconds longer. In spite of his sudden appearance, the ghostly pallor, he looked uncomfortable—wounded, even.

I climbed out, leaving the headlights on.

“I only got five minutes,” Morgan said nervously. “Otherwise Stace’ll get out the shotgun.”

It had to be a joke, yet he said it with unnerving seriousness.

Blinking, he held out a folded piece of paper.

Hopper immediately snatched it, shooting him a suspicious look as he opened it in the beam of light. When he finished reading, his face giving away nothing, he handed it to Nora, who read it with wide eyes and passed it to me.

It was torn from a legal pad.



“It took three weeks to plan,” Morgan said. “I’d use all prerecorded tapes. They’d play, not the live feed. The time code would be wrong, but no one ever checked. I went down into storage, where they keep all the patients’ personal belongings until they check out, and I got hers from her locker and kept it for her in a box in my house. All she had was a red-and-black coat. Real fancy.”

“That was it?” I asked, noting the odd, rather fastidious way he’d said it. I couldn’t help but imagine him silently slipping out of his bed in the middle of the night while Stace slept, creeping down into his own dark basement to open up the cardboard box, staring in at her red coat—that coat.

“Yeah,” he said. “She didn’t have anything else.”

“No cellphone? No handbag?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What about clothing?”

“Nothing. See, her father’s famous. He makes Hollywood movies. I figured she’d want some nice clothes, so I left her a note asking for her sizes. Then I took a day off, went up to Liberty, bought her some jeans, black boots, and a pretty black T-shirt with an angel on the front.”

Ashley was wearing the same clothing when she died.

“Once I had the details worked out,” he went on, “I went to the music room and left Ashley a note tucked between the piano strings right where she did. It said when she was ready, she should play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ That’d be my green light. It’d mean the very next night I’d come for her at two A.M. when her nurse and the guard were gettin’ it on in the boiler room.”