Night Film(67)

Somehow, around three in the morning, I must have fallen asleep because I was awakened by soft knocking on my door.

I cracked open an eye. The clock read 3:46 A.M.

“Can I come in?” whispered Nora.

Without waiting for an answer—thank Christ I had on pajama bottoms—she crept inside. I couldn’t see much of her in the dark, but she appeared to be wearing a white long-sleeved nightgown, which made her look like a ghost that had just wafted into my room, now hovering at the end of my bed, sizing me up, trying to decide if I was worth haunting.

“I was just thinking …” she began, but didn’t continue.

“Why are you thinking at four in the morning?” I asked, bunching the pillows underneath me and leaning back against the headboard. “This better be good.”

“It’s Hopper. Before I couldn’t put my finger on it, but …” She propped her feet on the railing of the bed, slipping the nightgown over her knees. “How did he know to go to that piano store? Out of the whole city he found the one place she went to? It’s too incredible.”

I agreed with her. It’d been such a stroke of luck, Hopper chancing upon an eyewitness for Ashley at Klavierhaus. When something appeared to be a wild coincidence, nine times out of ten it wasn’t.

“And when I suggested that Ashley put that stuff under her bed, he got so mad.”

“I noticed.”

She bit her thumbnail. “You think he’s responsible in some way for what happened to her?”

“Not sure yet. But he’s definitely hiding something.”

“I don’t think he likes us, either.”

“A terrible flaw. There’s also the chain-smoking, the morose scowling, the bad-boy hair. It’s like he thinks he’s the rebel in a John Hughes movie.”

She giggled.

“We’ll pull a choice move from the McGrath playbook. The Corleone. We keep him close. Eventually he’ll reveal himself. Works every time.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears, making the bed shake, but said nothing.

“May I ask you something?” I asked.

She turned to me, her face a milky blur in the dark.

“Terra Hermosa. How were you allowed to live there? Surely there was some kind of age requirement.”

“Oh. It was illegal. But I couldn’t leave Eli. She raised me. The worst day of my life up till then was when she fell in the parking lot of Bonnie Lee’s Fried Chicken and the doctors said she had to go into a home.”

“How old were you when you moved in?”

“Fourteen.”

“What about your parents?”

She fiddled with the frilly sleeves of her nightgown. “My mom died when I was three. She had a heart problem. My dad had been put away for twenty years by then.”

“What was he put away for?”

“Mail fraud, wire fraud, identity theft, credit cards. He was real hardworking at being illegal. Eli used to say if my dad put half the energy he did into cutting corners into just driving around the corner, he’d be a billionaire.”

I nodded. I’d known such men, had investigated more than a few.

“For a while I’d spend the day there, leave, then sneak back in at night. But after I got caught, I was all set to go into foster care. But Eli got together with the other seniors on her floor, and they made a big stink. The president ended up surprising everyone, because she didn’t want a senior uprising. She said if I stayed out of sight when the state evaluators came I could live there till I finished high school. There was always a room coming available, because someone was always dead. When Eli died of cancer I left without saying goodbye to anyone. I figured if I didn’t do it then, I never would.”

She paused, clearing her throat. “She died in the hospital on a Sunday, and I went back to her room to collect her things. There’s a waiting list, so I knew someone was going to be moving in. If the family doesn’t take away the personal items they just chuck them, and within seconds the room looks like you were never there in the first place. Just an old bed and chair, a window waiting to be stared out of by the next person. I was getting her stuff together when all of a sudden Old Grubby Bill who lived right across the hall whistled at me through his teeth.”

“Old Grubby Bill? You haven’t mentioned him.”

“Everyone called him Grubby Bill because he always had black dirt under his fingernails. He’d fought in World War Two, and he bragged to everyone he was right beside Hitler’s bunker when it exploded. So, people used to whisper some of the debris from that bunker was still under his fingernails, which was why they were so filthy.”

She paused, sniffing. “He whistled at me to come into his room. He was always whistling at people. I was scared to go in there. Nobody ever did, because it smelled. But he dug under his bed and pulled out a Rockport shoebox. He told me he’d been saving up money for my dreams. It had six hundred dollars in it. He handed it to me and said, ‘Now’s your chance to make something of yourself. Scram, kid.’ So I scrammed. I walked to the Kissimmee station and got on a bus to New York. People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

She fell silent. For a while, neither of us spoke, letting her story drift like a raft between us.

“I was lucky,” she went on. “Most people just get one mom and dad. I got a whole crowd.”