by Ava Barry
For Marsh
PROLOGUE
I dreamed of that night a hundred times. The gates of Windhall thrown open to greet a procession of ghostly cars, dazzling apparitions gliding up the drive. The garden, filled with deadly flowers and orange blossoms, the night sky a bowl of stars. And Windhall itself, blazing with light, all the windows thrown open to the summer air.
Most of all, I dreamed of Eleanor. She arrived late to the party that night, hours after the band had switched from lively swing to something sweet and melancholy. There wouldn’t be very many details of that night that the papers missed, since the host was one of the most famous people in Hollywood. Reporters would obsess over the attire, the music, the guest list. I had seen hundreds of pictures of the attendees, the giddy starlets and men in their tuxedos, eyes bright with alcohol and opportunity. They had always reminded me of the doomed aristocrats in some wicked fairy tale, all those gods gathered in one place, unaware that one of their own would shortly be killed.
There were no neighbors around Windhall that year. A decade before, in the 1930s, that part of Los Angeles was still sleepy orchards and farmland dotted with health clinics. Pale young women had wandered in the dusty California sunlight, bruises blooming against their milky skin. There had been more invalids than movie stars, with tuberculosis and polio patients coming out to the West Coast to strengthen their bones with sunshine and calcium. In the last decade, however, the land had been claimed by the Los Angeles elite. The orchards had yielded to wild, secretive mansions with deep windows and heavy doors. Windhall was one of the biggest.
I knew the script for the evening by heart. At seven, shortly after sunset, the first of the guests arrived. Men had been hired for the evening to park the expensive cars in the orchards that surrounded Windhall. That month was filled with garden parties that lasted until daybreak, beautiful women with ebony hair and alabaster skin traipsing down the garden paths, weaving poisonous flowers in their hair. The glittering actors and actresses of the silver screen would pile into cars, draped in furs and diamonds, then drive up Benedict Canyon and arrive at the gates of Windhall.
The evening continued. Twilight gave way to night, a collision of stars against a black landscape. The band began to play, something hopeful. The host of the party, Theodore Langley, had not yet made an appearance. There had been rumors about his latest film, trouble with one of the producers. Still, Theo was not one to be deterred by a little trouble at work. His name commanded respect, and it wasn’t just because of his legendary skills as a host. Theodore Langley was a talented director, one of the best.
More guests arrived. On that night, they were invincible, the rulers of a young kingdom. Their names and faces claimed every marquee in Hollywood and beyond, into the vast gray hinterland of unknown Middle America, dusty hamlets with little more than a main street and two stop signs.
The band continued to play. Nine o’clock. The night was a masquerade, filled with men accompanied by dates in silk dresses, all dark eyes and bright smiles. They drifted inside the house in a haze of cigarette smoke and expensive perfume, gliding down the halls of Windhall and trailing their fingers along the walls.
And finally, she arrived. Eleanor Hayes, queen of the silver screen, the type of femme fatale to be described by poets and yet never captured. She eluded description. That evening, she wore a green silk dress with a black sash; after her death, it would become emblematic. Her graceful throat was draped in pearls. The weekend before, she could be found pilfering hand-rolled cigarettes on the beach, but on this night, she was elegant.
There were stories about what went on behind the scenes, of course, but most of it remained unsubstantiated. There were stories of dark-eyed beauties who dipped their hands in rosewater and made animal sacrifices, then drank the blood. Chambers and death rooms beneath those big, crazy houses. Nighttime parades, swimming pools filled with champagne and drops of human blood. It was the golden age of Hollywood, after all, where the sins of a few went pardoned, if they were wealthy enough.
Ten o’clock. Someone suggested a game of hide-and-seek. All the guests ran to find a hidden space in that sprawling, somber house. Too many doors, too many windows, so many places to hide. One of the men began to count while the other guests vanished. One, two, three… eighty… one hundred…
The first guests were picked off quickly, hiding behind the grand piano. Some of them had hidden in the hedges of the garden, the night swollen with the scent of magnolia and jasmine. Greer Garson, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb; each returned to the house and poured themselves another drink.
It was mid-May, coming up on the scalp of summer. Heat lingered in the bones of the valley, malignant and cruel. Coyotes had left the hills and wandered through the streets like crooked phantoms, looking for something to eat. Nothing was sacred, nothing was safe. The air was sweet with the smell of eucalyptus, burning oleander, salty earth, and chaparral. That late at night, the city took on a magical glow, wavering between black magic and a spell of sleep.
Two hours passed, and nearly every guest had been found. The only ones missing were Theo and Eleanor. Titters, rumors, and gossip: perhaps the pair had found something better to do with their time. There had always been rumors about Theo and Eleanor, working so closely on all those famous movies. If there was something going on behind the scenes, nobody would be surprised.
A waiter made another round with a tray of drinks, and talk idled. The first guests peeled off, heading home. Still no sign of the host and his leading lady. Three women remained, and two men. One of them made a lewd comment, a suggestion for how to fill the rest of the evening. Another guest complained about the heat.
And then Theo finally reappeared, standing in the door of the living room. His face was ashen, his hands shaking.
“There’s been an accident,” he said. “She’s in the garden.”
Later, after everything that happened, these words would become so famous that they were nearly always misquoted. They became a cliché, synonymous with broken Hollywood dreams and failed romances.
They found Eleanor in the bed of trampled rosebushes, lying in a dish of concave dirt. There’s been a fall. Even in the darkness of the garden, shadows collapsed all around the cast of characters, they could see it had not been a simple fall. A bloody star upon Eleanor’s chest, a badge of misplaced honor. The fabric had been torn.
One guest knelt beside her and tried to take a pulse.
“I can’t feel anything,” he said. “God, she looks awful. What happened?”
“It was an accident,” Theo repeated.
Eleanor’s head rolled upon her neck. A woman in a silk dress knelt in the dewy grass. “There’s blood on her chest,” she said, then gasped. “Eleanor!”
“Theo,” the man said softly. “I think she’s dead.”
At some point, the police arrived, but nobody was quite sure who had called them. The guests were questioned, but politely, of course; the police knew all their faces. There were no accusations, not that night; the accusations against Theo would begin to leak out the next day. It was the stuff of movies, after all: a famous Hollywood starlet, all dark eyes and long lashes, killed by her strange lover.
That year would raise questions without very many answers. Theo’s trial stretched on for the better part of a year. Private lives were thrown into question, and the members of Hollywood’s upper crust were forced to descend from their secret world to take part in the trial. Alliances were tested, secrets revealed.
The first policemen to arrive on the scene said that the cause of death was immediately apparent; even though the medical examiner was called for, his presence was almost unnecessary. Eleanor had been stabbed through the back. Her heart had been impaled; she had probably died right away. The garden was searched for weeks, but ul
timately, the search was abandoned. They never found the murder weapon.
* * *
Eleanor Hayes, dead at twenty-six, never to age another day. I came to know her face by heart, the famous dark eyes and bowed lips, which were her trademark, the languorous gaze she cast upon her victims. At the peak of her career, she was the wealthiest woman in California, but this distinction did little to raise her social habits: weekends found her dancing barefoot in dim little bars of downtown Los Angeles, between smoky ghosts and Philip Marlowe types, or else up in the hills, riding bareback through the gorse and sagebrush. At night, they pitched tents and fell asleep to the sound of coyotes calling, waking up to see a glorious sunrise break over the dusty hamlets of Los Angeles.
And Theo. As the years faded away and the murder went unsolved, Eleanor became the woman in a myth, the details of her life blurred. Theo was released, in the end; the case fell apart. He was a secretive man with too many stories to tell, someone for whom the past and future could be rewritten. Still alive, all these decades later, but unseen since the trial.
As the years passed, Theo joined the ranks of true-crime lore, a cabal of wife-killers and opulent eccentrics whose names were tossed around as gossip rather than injunction. The ’60s passed, and then the ’70s; his legend was replaced first by the death of Marilyn Monroe and then the Manson killings, the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon. Home televisions replaced the fanaticism of classic movie theaters. Fans became caged by domesticity and the Internet. Celebrities shrank to fit the size of a mobile phone, easily tucked away for cigarette breaks at work. Theo was forgotten, mostly, relegated to a past of black-and-white movie screens; the grand old days. And then, late one autumn, he came back to me.
ONE
I had been staring at my computer screen for hours in frustration. A nasty bitch of a storm had knocked out the power a few hours before, and I’d only been able to get back online in the last twenty minutes, siphoning off my neighbor’s Internet. I was an expert at guessing passwords: they were usually obvious number combinations, boring monikers, sexual innuendos, or anatomical terms spelled out with zeroes and eights. My neighbor had used his cat’s name.
I hadn’t written so much as a paragraph when Madeleine called.
“Have you seen pictures of the dead girl?”
“Which dead girl are you talking about?” I cradled the phone against my shoulder and feigned ignorance.
“The girl who was killed Tuesday.” She waited. “It’s Eleanor all over again.”
I knew who she was talking about, of course; the girl had been all over the news for the last two days. A dark little slip of a thing, probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Details about the girl and her life came filtering out in the aftermath of her murder: an art student, barely twenty, scientist father and philanthropist mother. Nobody cared about the rest. The only thing anyone could see was the dark green silk dress, the puncture wound through the left chest cavity, the wilted hair. She’d been found laid out in a patch of wildflowers, her left arm draped across her brow. Just like Eleanor.
To make matters worse, the girl’s body had been found a stone’s throw from Theo’s house. A jogger had found the girl’s body on a derelict fire trail that wound up behind the mansions, where you could still see wild scratches of California. I had been to the trail myself, dozens of times, because it offered the best view of Windhall.
I hadn’t read the story when it first came out. There had been splashy headlines all over Facebook and the New York Times, so I was aware of what was going on. But instead of reading the news, I had laced up my running shoes and plugged in my headphones, blasted early Led Zeppelin, and pounded the pavement so hard that I knew I’d have muscle spasms the next day.
These murders always unfolded the same way. Headlines were inundated with salacious details about the victim’s circumstances, doe-eyed photographs from happier times accompanied articles, and then, later, came the stories about the impact on the family.
Her parents were absolutely shattered, the newspapers would say, or They had no idea how she earned her money, until the call came.
Everyone loves a beautiful dead girl. The rest of the murders go unacknowledged by the media or the world at large: the stories of old women, for example, living with their killers for the last fifty years, subjected every day to countless untold horrors.
“Max?” Madeleine’s voice brought me back to reality. “You okay?”
“Sorry, Mad,” I said. “You know I hate these stories.”
I had known Madeleine for so long that I didn’t have to explain myself to her. She knew that the anniversary of my grandmother’s murder was coming up and that these stories were more upsetting to me than usual this time of year. It had only been seven years, but it felt like a minor eternity since my gran had been killed by her ex-husband. She had left him when I was ten years old, after he hit her one time too many. We considered ourselves lucky when he got locked up for something unrelated, a failure to pay a back balance of taxes. Once he got out, freshly paroled, he headed straight to Gran’s. The irony is that I had just sewn up some legal troubles of my own, and we thought we had some peaceful times coming to us.
No matter how long I put it off, though, I always ended up reading the stories, devouring them alongside the rest of the general public; in the end, I was no better than anyone else. The fact that Theodore Langley had been looped into this particular story made it irresistible, even though I knew he hadn’t had anything to do with it.
There hadn’t been any photos of the dead girl until early that morning. The photos hadn’t been of the body, but of the girl in the year leading up to the murder, just as the formula demanded. Pretty young thing, dead too young, so much wasted promise. Everyone pretended to mourn even as they ate up the details. My attention, however, was riveted more on the connection with Theo and Eleanor Hayes. Most of the bloggers and Internet trolls who had filled the comments section of the New York Times probably had no idea that this was a re-creation, an homage, some might say, to something that had happened sixty-nine years before.
Madeleine must have known what I was thinking.
“Sloppy tribute,” she said. “If someone was going to pay homage to Eleanor, shouldn’t they have killed this girl on the same date? I mean, Eleanor was killed in May, and it’s October.”
“No,” I said, and I suddenly felt filled with dread. The date had just clicked in my mind, and I knew it wasn’t an accident: whoever had done this had planned it exactly, and what’s more, they had known more about the case than the commonly acknowledged date of Eleanor’s murder. “It wasn’t a tribute to Eleanor. It was a tribute to Theo. October third is when Theo was released from all charges. It’s also when he disappeared.”
As much as I hated myself for doing it, I had followed reports of Theo throughout the years. I’d kept track of all the sightings, no matter how loony and desperate they sounded. There were claims by people who had seen Theo in supermarket checkout lines, windsurfing in Monterey, hiking in Canada, and even one improbable story about Theo snatching someone’s child from a secluded picnic area. The claims were sporadic, and there was never any concrete evidence that Theo was still alive. Sometimes there were photographs, sometimes not, but the question lingered in the back of a lot of minds: How did someone so prominent manage to stay completely off the grid for more than six decades?
The stories grew wilder as the years continued to unfold. After Eleanor’s murder, the accusations, and the prosecutor’s failure to convict Theo, had vanished. To all known accounts, he hadn’t set foot in Los Angeles since. The case against him had been summarily dismissed, due to evidence tampering. He had been allowed to leave the city and, in addition to everything else, this made people very angry.
For one, there was the fact that Windhall was allowed to remain standing, despite all the protests over the years from the neighbors who wanted to see it torn down. After someone finally threatened to take matters into their own hands, Theo�
�s lawyers produced documents that stated that Windhall was a historic building and therefore protected from demolition. There was the fact that Theo’s friends, the elite and wealthy of Hollywood, had been treated with kid gloves. Some left the city to avoid testifying in the murder trial, and they weren’t so much as reprimanded.
The parties at Windhall dried up after Eleanor was murdered, of course, and after Theo left Los Angeles, the great house sat collecting dust. While the manors and secretive estates of the other great old stars gently faded away and disappeared, Windhall endured. The bougainvillea and roses shriveled up and died, replaced by spiky plants and weeds that grew ten feet high. The fig trees in the garden became wild things, like nightmare plants. Yet Windhall remained intact.
With the passing years, the truth about Theo faded away, replaced with what he came to represent: a wild misanthrope with too much money, a creative fiend who had killed and gotten away with it. Decades of feminists saw something else, a theme much more transparent with the evolution of Western society: a man killed a woman and got away with it. As a lifelong feminist myself, I hated Theo, but I couldn’t help obsessing over him. I hid my fascination behind contempt: Trust the fucking system to protect a predator.
What I didn’t say: I’d give anything to see inside Windhall.
“There’s something else,” Madeleine said. “About Windhall. My boss said that someone was arrested for breaking in.”
“When?” My heart jumped. “Who was it?”
“Some vandals. It’s not important; I just thought you should know.”
“Did they take anything?”
“I heard the story secondhand, Hailey, I don’t have details. It’ll probably happen again, though. This story has renewed interest in Windhall.”
Windhall. Unoccupied for six decades, virtually untouched since Theo’s departure in the ’50s. The house was a vacant ruin, presiding over the Beverly Glen neighborhood above lower Sunset. From the fire trail where the girl had died, you could see the upper spires of the Victorian gables, the sun glinting off the windows.