The Disappearing Act(79)

I’ve never been scared of heights but now, here, in the darkness, I am. Scared of the darkness beneath us, scared of Marla, but most of all scared of what she has to show me. But I need to know what Nick did, how bad it is, and how the hell I’m involved in all of this.

I slowly clamber up the slope to her starting ledge and shift into the same position. I try not to think of the six-foot drop if I can’t reach the rung and the immeasurable darkness of the canyon beyond that. I take a breath and plow forward, stretching out for the chipped white paintwork of the ladder. I feel the contents of my zipped pockets shift with the movement. For a moment I am untethered, the night air all around me, my empty hands grasping at nothing before a palm thwacks onto the rung, its cool metal hitting hard. I immediately twist my body and claw my other hand up to safety too, breathless.

Then with tight aching arms, I engage my core to heave up, desperate to get my feet onto something in order to distribute the weight.

Once my feet make contact I rest my hot hands, looking up to watch Marla carefully ascending. She turns back, sensing I’ve paused.

“You okay?” she calls back.

“Yeah.” I catch my breath and continue.

The wind grows in strength as we rise. I watch carefully as Marla sidesteps from the top of the ladder onto the strut-platform surrounding it.

Beneath me the ground is no longer visible in the darkness. Instead I focus only on the rungs in front of me, but as I reach the final rung my head crests the top of the letter and the glittering blanket of light that makes up Los Angeles comes into view. I catch my breath at the twinkling beauty of it laid out beneath the clear night sky. Beside me Marla shifts to make room on the thin platform, wedging her body between the waist-high metal of the sign and the support strut behind her. Once she’s comfortable she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes.

With incredible focus, my limbs completely reluctant, I shift my weight around the ladder, lodging myself between the strut and the corrugated metal of the letter to join her on the thin platform.

I rub my aching knuckles, clawed from clenching the rungs too tightly, and watch as Marla lights a cigarette, ridiculously at ease forty-five feet above the dark hillside. I pat my zipped pocket instinctively for reassurance as she slips her lighter back into her jeans and takes a deep drag, casting her eyes out across the Los Angeles skyline.

I take it in too, the brilliant fluorescence of civilization against an otherwise black landscape, the American street grid system glowing as far as the eye can see out across the horizon. I search for the distant glinting of the Downtown high-rise buildings, hoping to locate my own building among them. But a tendril of smoke floats past and I turn my attention back to Marla, who is watching me.

“Thank you by the way,” she says. “You kept looking for me, didn’t you? You didn’t know me but you kept looking for me. I appreciate it; that you were worried. It means a lot. You’re a nice person.” She offers me a cigarette from her packet; I shake my head. “Didn’t think so.” She smiles and slips the pack away.

“Where is Emily, Marla?” I ask.

She raises her arm, index finger pointing out across the darkness, like the ghost of Christmas future, off into the distance. I follow its trajectory. She’s pointing southwest from where we are to a patch of darkness on the otherwise twinkling horizon. I squint, slowly making out a glint of moonlight in the black. My brain struggles to make sense of it; it’s a body of water. A lake perhaps. “Is that Silver Lake?” I ask.

“Lake Hollywood,” she answers inscrutably in a puff of cigarette smoke. There’s an air of Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar about her. I study her angular features, catching a flash of her bone-white teeth as she lifts her cigarette to her full lips once more.

On second thought, she’s more Cheshire cat.

“Lake Hollywood used to be a reservoir. Drinking water,” she continues, a world-weary tour guide. “Now it’s just a backup reservoir for forest fires. But it’s deep. A hundred and eighty-three feet. I looked it up once. Nearly the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She’s somewhere under there.” Marla stops talking, her glassy eyes trained on the distance as she takes a final drag on her cigarette and tosses it into the darkness in front of us. I watch its burning tip sail through the air and bounce away into the unknown.

Silence hangs between us until she speaks again. “I followed the tracker signal there. The last place her signal registered was from the dam road.” She turns to me now. “I looked until it got dark. Found the phone in a bush near the banks. Dirty, out of battery, but fine. Whatever they did, they did in a hurry.”

Her eyes are glistening again. Before I can open my mouth she speaks.

“They killed her and dumped her in the lake, I know they did. Like trash. I went back to her place to charge the phone. To follow the trail, the tracker’s trail, to work out her last journey…to end up there. Under all that water.” She pauses to pull out her pack of cigarettes again. She lights one in that same fluid way I’ve come to recognize. “Emily went to meet Moon Finch, God knows what they told her, but when she left everything must have seemed fine. She stopped for lunch at a roadside diner near the studio. That’s where they took her. That’s where I found her abandoned car, days later, in the diner parking lot. I don’t know if there was a struggle or if she went with them willingly. I searched that diner, the parking lot, everything, for some clue to what happened, believe me. I looked for any trace of her, her hair, blood, anything. But I’ll never know.