Night Film(47)

She rummaged through her purse and handed me a colored photograph. I assumed she was showing me a member of her family, but then realized with surprise it was a photo of Ashley.

Her gray eyes, hollowed by dark circles, seemed to fasten onto me.

“When I disappeared from the tour at Briarwood and got in trouble? That’s what I went back to get. I saw it on those bulletin boards by the dining hall under ‘Weekly Picnic.’ It’s her, isn’t it?”

La cara de la muerte, the Waldorf maid had said. The face of death.

I understood what she meant.





27


The next morning, I was woken at 5:42 A.M. by creaks outside my bedroom door. Footsteps retreated down the hall, followed by the sound of water pipes shrieking, more creeping back into Sam’s room, and then downstairs, where plates and glasses clattered in the kitchen as if someone were starting preparations for a dinner party of twenty-five.

In spite of my wondering if, when I did wake up, I’d find my apartment stripped of all valuables, I fell back to sleep, only to be woken again by a soft knock on the door.

“Yeah,” I mumbled.

“Oh. Did I wake you?”

The door creaked open, followed by silence. I cracked open an eye. The clock read 7:24. Nora was peering at me through the doorway.

“I was wondering when we were going to get started.”

“I’ll be right down.”

“Cool.”

Sweet Jesus.

I groggily pulled on a bathrobe and shuffled downstairs, where I found Nora curled up on my living-room couch wearing a Marcel Marceau striped black-and-white shirt and black leggings. She was picking at the shell of a hard-boiled egg and scribbling in a leather-bound journal, which I realized, after a dazed moment of recognition, was mine. I’d found it in a bookbinding shop in Naples. An eighty-year-old Italian named Liberatore had crafted it with his arthritic, trembling hands over the course of a year. It was the very last of its kind because he was now dead, his shop replaced by a Fiat dealership. I’d been saving it for the day when I had something substantial and profound to write inside it.

“You like to sleep in, huh?” She stopped writing to smile up at me. I saw she’d scribbled ASHLEY CORDOVA CASE NOTES at the top of the page, followed by indecipherable handwriting.

“It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning. That’s early.”

“If Grandma Eli was here she’d say the whole day was wasted. I made you breakfast.”

With slight trepidation, I stepped into the kitchen.

There was a plate of scrambled eggs and toast on the counter. She’d cleaned, too. Not a dirty dish or glass in the sink.

I stepped out of the kitchen. “Don’t cook for me. Or clean. This is a black-and-white working relationship.”

“It’s just eggs.”

“I’m forty-three. I don’t need help feeding myself.”

“Not yet. There was this man, Cody Johnson, at Terra Hermosa? He showed signs of dementia around thirty-nine.”

“I think I’ve heard this story before. He died alone?”

“Everyone dies alone.”

There was little to add to that. Whenever the girl brought up Terra Hermosa it was like spraying DDT on the conversation—an instant killer.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and motioned for Nora to follow me.

“Inside this box is everything I know about Cordova,” I told her as we stepped into my office. “Organize it by published date and subject matter. Keep all information on his films together. Pull out anything you think might help us understand Ashley’s personality, music, hobbies, her background—any mention of family life or the Adirondack compound, The Peak.”

I noticed a thin set of papers sticking out, a photo of The Peak I’d found from an old National Geographic, printed and clipped to the front. I yanked it loose, handing it to Nora.

“You can start by reading this. When I began investigating Cordova five years ago, I went up to Crowthorpe Falls, wandered around, asked locals what they’d heard. Everything I found is in there.”

I moved to the door, leaving Nora sitting Indian-style on the sofa, studiously tucking her hair behind her ears as she settled in to read.





Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate

S. McGrath

April 3 – 13, 2006



The Peak, c. 1912

The Peak


The estate known as The Peak, once a Rockefeller vacation property and designed by the architects Harrison, Taylor, & Woods, sits north of Lows Lake in the wilderness of the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

The nearest town is Crowthorpe Falls, one of the poorest in the region. Mobile home parks, abandoned barns and parking lots, motels, roadhouse saloons, and topless bars comprise the town proper (nicknamed Crow by locals). To make one’s way through Crow to The Peak one must know the area well: Almost all of the roads are unpaved and unmarked.

Stanislas Cordova and his first wife, Genevra, a descendant of the Italian Castagnello family, purchased the property in foreclosure from British aristocrats, Lord and Lady Sludely of Sussex. Shortly after moving in to the estate in 1976, Cordova began the construction of massive soundstages throughout the 300-acre grounds where he could shoot, edit, and sound mix his films without ever leaving the property.