by Ava Barry
Outside my window, expensive designer brick-and-mortars yielded to apartments, then cute bungalows with small gardens. The houses suddenly evolved into mansions, austere mock Tudors and Spanish colonials fringed by palm trees and perfect lawns. I drove up to a stoplight across from the Beverly Hills Hotel, then the light changed and I drove across Sunset, up into one of the wealthiest and strangest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
It’s notoriously difficult to trespass in Beverly Hills, unless you’re a marathon walker or an ace on roller skates: “No Parking” signs are posted every ten feet for almost two square miles, which makes unexpected visitors extremely unlikely. Nobody who lives in this part of Los Angeles needs to leave their car on the street, anyway: they’ve all got long, luxurious driveways and three-car garages hidden behind thick hedges.
There are five parking spots—I’m not kidding, and you can believe I’ve done my research—where you won’t be ticketed, towed, or bullied by the neighbors. Three of them are next to a little public park that’s smaller than my yard, and the other two are on a dead-end lane guarded by a big weeping willow. Those two spots are a ten-minute walk from Windhall, and since I couldn’t park anywhere near the great house itself, I had parked under the tree whenever I wanted to see Theo’s house.
I was in luck: the dark little lane was empty, and I parked, then switched my phone to silent and tucked it in my pocket.
It was easier to sneak into Windhall over the back wall, but this time, I didn’t want to risk running into the man with the Southern accent, on the off chance that he had come back. I was going to have to risk going over the front wall.
The wall was topped with a row of gothic iron spikes, but the vines had grown over them in sections, making it possible to surmount the wall without stabbing a hand or leg in the process. I found a thick branch in one of the sections of ivy, then hoisted myself up slowly, grabbing other branches as I went. I reached the top of the wall and swung a leg over, and was nearly across when my leg caught and I felt an awful scrape. There was a tear and then a feeling of wet warmth, and then I fell headlong over the wall, into the garden.
I lay there for a moment, praying that I hadn’t broken a limb in the process, then gingerly patted myself down and decided that everything was fine. When I sat up, I realized that I was lying next to a pale statue of a young woman, who gazed down in blind consternation. Six inches to the left, and I might have paralyzed myself by falling on her. Sobered slightly by this fact, I sat up and took inventory of my surroundings.
The main house crouched in the garden as though it knew that I was coming. It was a sprawling, curious thing, with windows for eyes. I had landed just behind the gardener’s cottage, which was seated at the base of the drive, and just beyond it, I could see the three-car garage. The apartment above the garage had once held Theo’s household staff before he let them all go.
I started walking across the grounds, keeping my eyes on Windhall. The upper gables loomed against the night sky, a staggering dark form. The house looked the same as it did in the nightmares I used to have; the towers of Theo’s castle piercing a wounded sky, the leering doors, the broken paths. I imagined the night of the party, all those years ago, all the Hollywood royalty gathered beneath one roof, spilling out into the gardens below, toasting to their shared successes and never dreaming that one of their own would die before morning.
As I crossed the garden, I started to feel the tingling anticipation I always felt right before I sneaked into an abandoned property. The grounds had gone wild in the decades of solitude. Foxtails grew up to my chest, strange wild things that belonged on a foreign planet. Deep holes marred the ground around the path from the gardener’s cottage, as though someone had dug in, actually believing that Theo kept buried gold in his yard. It was one of the many rumors that had come out around the trial, adding to the public’s convictions against him. Windhall was one of the few places in Los Angeles that didn’t change every few years, which was a nice bit of relief in a constantly shifting city.
Beyond the carriage house lay the garage, which I could barely make out in the deepening gloom. It looked too austere to hold anything but ghosts, and I pictured a chauffeur rolling up the doors to let out an expensive car. When Theo still lived at Windhall, all the staff had worn crisp, customized uniforms; I had seen pictures from some of their gatherings. They always lurked in the background, hands folded in their laps or at their sides, mouths turned down in the suggestion of unease and propriety.
I lingered in the garden for a moment to make sure that nobody was watching me, then made my way toward the main house.
The front door was carved with the faces of angels, but the sun had done its damage, and their eyes had faded into blank, staring orbs. The wood bore deep gouges, as though someone had slashed the door repeatedly. They had wanted to draw blood. I thought of all the dazzling gods and starlets who had made their way across the threshold all those years before.
I made my way around the side of the house, through the weeds and bracken, toward the kitchen. The path was made of broken cobblestones, and I nearly tripped a few times before catching myself.
Last time I visited Windhall, I had sneaked into the house through a servant’s entrance, which stood at the end of the cobbled pathway. Besides the path, an overgrown kitchen garden had gone ragged in the abandoned decades, and only scraggly weeds remained in the dirt. The original stone perimeters were still in place, and I could see that the garden must have been large enough to feed a Victorian family of a modest size. I suddenly remembered that Windhall had been built as a rehabilitation facility for young women recovering from tuberculosis, a few years before Theo bought it and converted it into a dwelling.
I put my hand on the kitchen doorknob, expecting to find resistance, but it was unlocked. I stood there for a moment, contemplating all the implications of an open door. I thought of the man outside Windhall who had told me and Madeleine to leave. There was a chance that I would find someone waiting in the house for me. But that thought wasn’t enough to bar my entrance.
I opened the door and paused, then stepped inside.
A gust of warm air washed out. I coughed on the smell of mold and slow decay, then blinked into the dimness. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and passed it around the room. Last time I had visited, the cups and saucers had all been in their individual cupboards, hidden behind dusty panes of glass. Stacks of white plates had stood against the back counter, as though waiting for a Sunday afternoon lunch that would never come.
Now, however, I could see that changes had been made. All the dishes had been packed away in boxes, some of which sat on the floor and counters, flaps open. The dust had resettled. Someone has been here, and recently, too.
I lingered in the kitchen for a moment, wondering if the packed plates were a sign that I should leave.
I had once pored over a glowing editorial in Architectural Digest, published a year after Theo had first moved into the house and started to renovate. The article showed a dozen or more photographs of the host and his house, accompanied by staccato praise and flowery sentiments: Windhall’s grand foyer welcomes guests into Theodore Langley’s updated California Victorian, one caption read, while according to another, The ballroom summons up images of bejeweled maidens lingering at the edge of the room, waiting for a dance with their handsome beaux.
Unable to tear myself away, I moved forward, through a set of swinging doors that led into a long room lined with windows. Had it been daytime, the windows would have shown the garden, toward Westwood and Brentwood, and beyond that, out of sight, the ocean. This was the dining room.
The dining room had also been lavished with high praise, and photographs showed the long antique table holding court over the stately room. In the pictures, high-backed chairs stood at attention, carved from mahogany or some other dark wood. The room was illuminated from the west and north by banks of windows.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, and I could immediat
ely see that someone had been in this room, too. The chairs were set on the side of the room, and the great table had been cleaned with furniture polish. Last time I had visited, some poor creature had crawled atop the table and died, wearing its own collapsed skin like a mantle. The creature and its bones had been summarily cleared away, however, and all signs of death in the room had vanished.
I was about to move on when I noticed a stack of papers on a small bench at the edge of the room. The papers did not interest me as much as what sat atop them, and I let my eyes adjust to the gloom once more to be sure of what I saw. I was looking at a slim black iPhone. Whoever owned that phone was probably still inside the house.
A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes, and I jumped. The sounds of wind and branches prevented me from hearing anything else, but I hadn’t sensed that anyone else was inside the house. It was possible that whoever had cleaned up had simply forgotten their phone, but seeing the purged state of the kitchen and the dining room made me think twice. A change had happened, and for the first time in a long time, I felt afraid.
I waited for a few minutes to see if I could hear anyone moving around, but there were no voices or creaking floorboards. After deciding that I was alone, I crossed the room and picked up the iPhone. The battery was low but still had juice, low enough that it was possible that the man had left the phone the previous night. The phone was password protected, and the lock screen image was a generic photo of bamboo. I stuck the phone in my pocket and left the dining room.
Next to the dining room was the fabled grand foyer, and beyond that, a small, empty room. I pushed open the door and walked through a hallway that split off into three different directions, choosing to go down the path on the right. I shone my flashlight through the room to illuminate walls lined with bookshelves. I was in the library. The floorboards were still in good condition, but a thick green rug had been tossed aside and lay in a heap at the edge of the room. Discarded skin.
The light from my flashlight flickered over walls shot through with cracks, over the gilded ceiling and the furniture. Faces peered out of the woodwork, and seeing them gave me a nasty shock. They were carved into the mantel of the fireplace, their sunken eyes seeming to beg me to go no further. I stumbled over the carpet and then regained my footing, and shone the light across the crumbling silk curtains.
I stopped when I saw a painting resting against one of the shelves. I wouldn’t have recognized it if it weren’t for my grandmother, because she had always loved the painter. It was a Paul de Longpré print, roses sketched against a brown background. I had seen it before, because she had had a print hanging in her kitchen, and it was one of the things that I had kept when she gave me the house. I had always liked it because it looked like a work in progress, less refined than some of his other works, and yet still so effortless. I liked to imagine that Longpré had sat down to breakfast one morning and started etching something, and beauty came so naturally to him that the roses had simply bloomed out of his fingertips.
The painting was small, and before I could second-guess what I was doing, I tucked it inside my satchel. If the house was getting cleaned up to be sold, I wanted to claim a piece of it for myself.
The house still had a pulse, even after all this time. I could almost hear voices echoing down the hallway, laughing and moaning softly by turns. There was a round window on the stair landing, and panes of glass were missing. The night sky was trapped in the window spokes. Starlight spilled onto the walls and the floor, painting everything blue gold. Skeleton moon, devil moon. I see you.
I made my way upstairs, to the second floor, and followed the feeble light of my cell phone through the second-story hallway. The light illuminated the peeling wallpaper, dazzling and strange; twirling flowers against a red background. A door leaned open at the end of the hallway, and I headed toward it. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped forward and pushed the door open.
As soon as I stepped through, I felt like I was falling through empty space. A small light glowed in the corner of the room, and two silhouettes crouched beside it. I had been right in thinking that someone else was in the house, someone who had left the kitchen door open and forgotten their cell phone downstairs.
A brief moment collapsed in which it was still possible to turn and erase my steps, charge headlong back down the hallway, and crash out of the house before they realized that I had ever been there, but I hesitated. One of the figures turned, and then it was too late.
“Max Hailey,” he said, then stood and stretched his arms. “I thought you might come back.”
It was the man with the Southern accent. A freestanding plastic lantern stood on the floor of the room, projecting light against the wall. I could see now that they were working to patch up the fading wallpaper.
“Hello,” I said, hoping a confident voice would hide my trembling hands.
The other man stood from his position by the wall, then stuck his hands in his pockets and glanced between us. He was average height, somewhere in his late fifties, with the salt-and-pepper dark hair to prove it. His sweater looked expensive, maybe cashmere or angora.
“Who’s this?” he said to his companion.
“It’s a journalist,” said the man from the South. “He came here with his friend last night.”
It took me a moment to catch his meaning. He knew that I was a journalist: he had investigated me after our encounter the previous evening. I wasn’t too hard to find online, because some of my articles for the Lens had gone quasi-viral. I wondered how many Google pages he had gone through; if he had discovered my arrest record. Even though the light in the room wasn’t great, I had a much better view of his face than I had the night before. He had light eyes and a square nose, and the corners of his mouth turned up a little bit, as though he was on the verge of smiling.
“Call the police.” This was from the man with the dark hair. He cocked his head and looked at me. “You’re aware that you’re trespassing, aren’t you? Of course you are. The gates and doors were locked.”
“Someone forgot to lock the door downstairs.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Let’s not be pedantic, though. Who are you?”
The man gave me an indulgent smile. “Leland, where’s your phone?”
The Southern gentleman patted his pockets. “I must have left it downstairs,” he said.
I realized that the phone in my pocket belonged to the Southern gentleman, who now had a name. Leland.
“Look, Ben, I don’t think it’s necessary,” Leland went on. “I’m sure that Mr. Hailey was just leaving.”
I should have taken the opening, but I couldn’t resist. “I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” I said. “Tell me what you’re doing here. Are you going to tear this place down and turn it into a tacky apartment complex?”
Ben frowned at my satchel. “What do you have there?” he said.
I remembered the Longpré painting from the library with a sick little jolt. “My bag is my business,” I said.
“No, let me see that,” he said, crossing the distance between us.
“It’s nothing,” I said, stepping backward, even as Ben reached for my satchel. Clouds of dust rose up into the light from the lamp on the floor, and our shadows made crazy dancers against the wall.
Before I could stop him, Ben deftly reached into my open satchel and snatched the painting. His eyes narrowed when he saw what he was holding.
“This belongs to Windhall,” he said. “I’m calling the police.”
“Ben, wait,” Leland said. “We don’t need to make a big fuss over this. We’ve got the painting now, and there’s been no other harm done.”
“We don’t know that,” Ben said. “He should be arrested for breaking and entering.”
“Think about the press. Police reports mean journalists. We’re not ready to sell yet, and we could use the extra time.”
Ben gripped the painting, and I could see him deliberating over his choices.
“How do we know that he won’t
talk?” he said, keeping his eyes on me.
“Mr. Hailey already has a criminal record,” Leland said. “A fire, wasn’t it, Mr. Hailey? I can’t remember all the details, but it was somewhere in Covina.”
My jaw was tight. I hoped my face didn’t give anything away.
“Judges in Los Angeles have long memories,” Leland went on. “I’m sure you don’t want to come face-to-face with the same judge on a charge of breaking and entering. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hailey?”
I mulled over what he was saying.
“Fine,” I said. “I won’t say anything. I’m not entirely sure what I’m keeping secret, though.”
“It’s simple,” Leland said, giving me an easy smile. “Just don’t say anything at all.”
* * *
Leland escorted me all the way to the end of the drive, then unlocked the chains linking the gates together. He nodded his head as I slung my satchel over my shoulder and made an unhappy exodus down the drive.
Before I had reached the street, he called out to me.
“Mr. Hailey,” he said. “Don’t ever come back to Windhall. You’ve had two friendly warnings, but you won’t get a third.”
And with that, he withdrew behind the gates and locked the chain once more.
FOUR
I knew that I couldn’t hack into Leland’s phone at home, because if his Find My Phone feature was activated, it would lead him straight to my house. I turned the phone off and drove to Brite Spot, a little diner on Sunset Boulevard. When I got to the parking lot, I pulled out my own phone and glanced at the screen. I had put it on silent when I got to Windhall, and I now saw that there were four missed calls from Marty, the photographer from the Lens.
The events of the last two hours had taken me out of the present, and I had forgotten about the fact that I had blown off Brian’s assignment. Brian was going to be pissed when he found out that I had gone off to pursue a story he had rejected instead of writing about Rigor Mormon, which made it all the more important for me to actually produce something worth writing about.