Nora shoved a stack of shirts into the plastic bag. “If I take this job, you’re not allowed to ask me tons of questions. I’m none of your business.” She grabbed a pair of discarded gold sequined hot pants tossed in a ball in the corner, stuffing them inside the bag. “This is just till we find out about Ashley. After that I’m doing my own thing.”
“Fine.” I bent down to check out the birdcage. Inside, there was a live blue parakeet, though the thing was so still and faded it looked like taxidermy. Ornate toys were strewn all over the newspaper in front of him—colored balls, feathers and bells, a full-length mirror—but the bird seemed too exhausted to summon any interest in them.
“Who’s this guy?” I asked.
“Septimus,” she said. “He’s an heirloom.” She stepped over, smiling. “He’s been inherited so many times no one remembers where he came from. Grandma Eli got him from her next-door neighbor, Janine, when she died. And he was bequeathed to Janine from Glen when he died. And Glen inherited him from a man named Caesar who died of diabetes. Who he belonged to before Caesar, only God knows.”
“He’s not a bird, he’s a bad omen.”
“Some people think he’s got magical powers and he’s a hundred years old. Want to hold him?”
“No.”
But she was already unlatching the door. The bird hopped over and chucked himself into her hand. She took mine and slipped the bird into it.
He was not long for this world. He looked like he had cataracts. He was also trembling faintly like an electric toothbrush. I’d have assumed he was catatonic, if he didn’t suddenly jolt his head to one side, staring up at me with a cloudy yellow eye that looked like an old bead.
Nora put her face up to him.
“Promise not to tell anyone?” she asked quietly, glancing at me.
“About what?”
“This. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me.” Her eyes moved off of the bird and onto me, her gaze steady.
“I promise.”
She smiled, satisfied, and resumed packing, collecting every one of those salt and pepper packets, sprinkling them into the Duane Reade bags.
“I actually have condiments at my place,” I said.
She nodded—like I’d just reminded her to bring her pajamas—and set about pulling down black stockings and bras hung to dry along the top shelves, crazy leopard and zebra prints tacked down by Black & Decker drills and paint cans.
The girl was like one of those picture books with pages that unfold and unfold all the way out, which caused children’s eyes to grow wide. I suspected she’d never stop unfolding.
After Nora packed up her clothes, she set about peeling Jesus and Judy Garland off the wall. Jesus came off easily. Judy, predictably, took a bit of coaxing. She grabbed the Harmony High yearbook, opened it, carefully tucked the two pictures inside, and then returned Septimus to his cage.
I realized, staring at the army-green blob he’d left, the bird had taken a shit in my hand.
“It’s best if you let that dry first, then flick it off,” said Nora, glancing at it. I’m ready. Oh. Almost forgot.”
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 r
oads 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.
With the termination of his production deal with Warner Bros., Cordova started self-financing his films, turning The Peak into his official one-man studio—and only adding to the mystique of the director as an agoraphobic recluse and madman.
Source: Wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislas_Cordova
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Aerial Views of The Peak
The Peak mansion sits in dense wilderness atop a high ridge just north of Graves Pond, a smaller pond north of Lows Lake.
The entirety of the property—which extends north past Darning Needle Pond close to Cranberry Lake—is surrounded by a twenty-foot military fence.
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Interview with Nelson Garcia – April 3, 2006
December 2004
Medical Equip?
Garcia is Stanislas Cordova’s closest next-door neighbor, a seventy-eight-year-old retired apple farmer originally from Lafayette, New York. Since 1981, he has lived in the rust-colored single-wide trailer on a patch of land across from the overgrown driveway that leads to The Peak. He claims never to have met or even seen the Cordovas—due to his type 2 diabetes he rarely ventures into town, having a nurse visit and bring supplies three times a week. But he did have a few interesting incidents to tell me about his infamous neighbor.
“We used to have street signs all around here, but the mailman told me they removed them,” he said.
“Who do you mean by they?“ I asked.
“The people who live up there.”
“You mean the Cordova family?
He nodded.
“Why would they remove the road signs?” I asked.
“They don’t want people up there. They like to keep to themselves. That’s what I heard around town. I used to see all kinds of fancy cars driving in and out from midnight till all hours of the morning. Especially in the eighties and nineties. Limos. A Rolls-Royce once. A few times I heard helicopters landing in there. Music, too. But starting in early 2000, it’s been quiet. Never see a soul go in or out.”
According to Garcia, in early December 2004, he received a series of UPS deliveries that were intended for The Peak but, by mistake, were delivered to him. The first was a massive box stamped with a label reading Century Scientific.
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Interview with Nelson Garcia – April 3, 2006
Century Scientific, Inc., based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is a company that specializes in medical equipment. They vend beds, wheelchairs, stretchers, and other therapeutic devices to private hospitals.
“My daughter sometimes sends me packages, so I signed for it,” Garcia told me. “After the boy drove off, I realized it wasn’t mine.”
“Who was it addressed to?” I asked.
“Someone named Javlin Cross. And the address said 1014 Country Road 112. I’m 33 Country Road 112. I didn’t open it. But it was heavy. I could barely lift it. About four feet high. I guess it was some kind of chair—that was the shape of the box.”
Garcia called UPS and within the hour the package was picked up.
A week later, the driver delivered another box, again for Mr. Javlin Cross.
“The return address said something or other ‘Pharmaceuticals,’” Garcia said. “I told the boy he’d made a mistake. He apologized, said he was new on the job. And that was really the last of it. For a month or two, though, once a week in the afternoon, I’d see the truck drive by and turn in there, bringing them God knows what. I’d wait a few minutes and then I’d hear the real shrill scream of the iron electronic gate opening to let the truck drive up. A piercing hinge so shrill it hurt to listen to. You’d think it’d shatter the TV.” He shook his head. “My guess is someone was sick up there. Or injured.”
Garcia told me he’d probably have forgotten about the mix-up had he not noticed something else strange about a week after the accidental deliveries. He drove his garbage to the Dumpster at the end of the road and noticed a strange odor emitting from the other plastic bags.
“Never smelled anything like it. It was foul. Like burned plastic.”
Garcia said only he and the Cordovas used the disposal site. The week after this observation, he noticed no other trash bags had appeared, and to this day, he’s the lone user of the bin.
“Now they set fire to all their garbage,” he said. “You can smell it when it’s hot at night. Burning. And sometimes when the wind’s blowing southeast I can even see the smoke.”
I asked Garcia if he’s ever seen any of Cordova’s films. He shook his head.
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Trip to Crowthorpe Falls, NY, and The Peak Estate
S. McGrath
Interview with Nelson Garcia – April 3, 2006
“I’ll get nightmares,” he said.
“In his film Isolate 3,” I explained, “there’s a man being held in captivity against his will. A former convict that the main character has to hunt down and free. His name is Javlin Cross—the name on those packages you received.”
Garcia nodded, thinking this over.
“What’s the consensus in town about the Cordovas?” I asked.
“What d’you mean?”
“What do people say about him? About the property?”
“No one likes to talk about it. Don’t know why. But they don’t. See, how it works up here is, everyone minds their own business.”
He had nothing more to add and looked ready to settle in watching Wheel of Fortune, so I thanked him for his time and left.
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Kate Miller
May 28, 2003
5:30 am
On May 28, 2003, at 5:30 AM, sixty-two-year-old Kate Miller was walking along deserted Old Forge Road in Bainville, New York, a small resort town a hundred miles north of Albany and forty-five minutes from Crowthorpe Falls.
It was the end of a long night. Miller worked at the front desk during the all-night “witching shift” at Forest View Motel, a vacation resort south of town. Every morning, regardless of rain or snow, six days a week, Miller hiked the two miles from the motel to Bainville’s Main Street in order to catch the Trailways bus that took her twenty miles north to Danville, where she lived with her husband and twelve-year-old grandson.
Old Forge is a narrow two-lane road that heads toward town at a steep incline. Its hairpin curves are notorious spots for car accidents—mostly local teenagers or tourists. Miller told me she was two miles from town, walking on the left side of the street, facing oncoming traffic, when a silver sports sedan careened past her in the right-hand lane.
“I thought it was a drunk driver [because] he was all over the road,” she said. “He disappeared around the bend, there was silence, then a crash, glass shattering, and a cracking noise. The horn was going off, too.”
She hurried toward the accident, though the arthritis in her knees prevented her from running. Less than a minute later she saw what had happened: Miscalculating a turn, the driver had lost control of the car and collided with a hemlock standing at an eight-foot drop off the road.
The car was severely smashed, and a blond woman in her fifties was crawling on her hands and knees up the dirt bank to the street. She was badly shaken, but didn’t appear to be injured apart from scrapes on her face and arms.
�
��She was crying. And shaking all over. I asked if she had her phone on her but she said she’d left it at home. I’ve never had a cellphone.
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Kate Miller
So I said I’d go straight into town and call an ambulance. I asked if there was anyone else with her, and she shook her head.”
Miller continued down Old Forge, but not before she stepped to the road’s edge and looked inside the car again.
“This time I noticed there was someone lying in the backseat,” she said. “A large man all in black, unconscious, covered in bandages. They were all over his arms and face. They looked bloody. But I didn’t stop to argue–she’d just been in a wreck after all and probably didn’t know what she was saying. I decided to get help as fast as I could.”
Fifty minutes elapsed between the time Miller walked the two miles, dialed 911 from a gas station, and an ambulance and police arrived at the scene. They found a woman who identified herself as Astrid Goncourt. The car, a silver 1989 Mercedes, was empty.
Goncourt admitted she’d been speeding, submitted to a Breathalyzer test, and passed. Police saw no sign anyone else had been with her in the car. She was treated at a local hospital for minor cuts and scrapes, and hours later, discharged.
The following day, the New York Daily News and Albany’s Times Union reported that Mrs. Cordova had been in a car accident driving home from a friend’s birthday party and suffered minor injuries. The fact that The Peak is an hour’s drive from Bainville (a lengthy drive to begin at 5:00 AM) failed to alert police, though it was unclear if this was Astrid’s story or simply a case of lazy reportage.
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