The sagging green couch along the far wall was covered with an old blue comforter where someone had recently crashed — maybe literally. In a plate on the coffee table there was an outbreak of cigarette butts; next to that, rolling papers, a packet of Golden Virginia tobacco, an open package of Chips Ahoy! a mangled copy of Interview, some emaciated starlet on the cover. His green HAS-BEEN T-shirt from last night was flung on the floor along with a white sweatshirt and some other clothes. (As if to expressly avoid this pile, a woman’s pair of black pantyhose clung for dear life to the back of the other beach chair.) A girl had kissed one wall while wearing black lipstick. An acoustic guitar was propped in the corner beside an old hiker’s backpack, the faded red nylon covered with handwriting.
I stepped over to read some of it: If this gets lost return it with all contents to Hopper C. Cole, 90 Todd Street, Mission, South Dakota 57555.
Hopper Cole from South Dakota. He was a hell of a long way from home.
Scribbled above that, beside a woman named Jade’s 310 phone number and a hand-drawn Egyptian eye, were the words: “But now I smell the rain, and with it pain, and it’s heading my way. Sometimes I grow so tired. But I know I’ve got one thing I got to do. Ramble on.”
So he was a Led Zeppelin fan.
Hopper emerged from the bedroom carrying a manila envelope. With a wary glance, he handed it to me.
It was addressed to: HOPPER COLE, 165 LUDLOW STREET, 3B—the address scribbled in all caps in black permanent marker. It had been stamped and mailed from New York, NY, on October 10 of this year. I recognized it as the last day Ashley Cordova had been seen alive by the girl in the Four Seasons coat check. The return address featured no name, reading simply 9 MOTT STREET—the address of the warehouse where Ashley’s body had been found.
Surprised, I looked at Hopper, but he said nothing, only watched me intently, as if it were some sort of test.
I pulled out what was inside. It was a stuffed monkey, old, with matted brown fur, stitching coming out of its eyes, a red felt mouth half gone, its neck limp, probably from some child’s hand clamped around it. The whole thing was encrusted with dried red mud.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You’ve never seen it before?” he asked.
“No. Whose is it?”
“No clue.” He moved away, yanking aside the blue comforter and sitting on the couch.
“Who sent it?”
“She did.”
“Ashley.”
He nodded and then, hunching forward, grabbed the package of rolling papers off the table, pulled one out.
“Why?” I asked.
“Some kinda sick joke.”
“Then you were friends with her.”
“Not exactly,” he said, reaching across the table for his gray coat, fumbling in the pockets for the pack of Marlboros. “Not friends. More like acquaintances. But even that’s a stretch.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
He sat back down, tapping out a cigarette. “Camp.”
“Camp?”
“Yeah.”
“What camp?”
“Six Silver Lakes Wilderness Therapy in Utah.” He glanced at me, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he began to dissect the cigarette, peeling the filter away from the paper. “You’ve heard of this first-class institution.”
“No.”
“Then you’re missing out. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. Especially if you want your kid to grow up to be a great American maniac.”
I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “You met Ashley there?”
He nodded.
“When?”
“I was seventeen. She was, like, sixteen. Summer of ’03.”
That made Hopper twenty-five.
“It’s one of these juvenile therapy scams,” he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. “They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ Instead, it’s a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I’ve ever seen in my life — bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went on.” He shook his head. “Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That’d be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive.”
He said this with such pissed-off defiance, I gathered he wasn’t talking about any of the campers but about himself. I stepped around the white sweatshirt on the floor to one of the beach chairs — the one with pantyhose climbing up the back — and sat down.
“Who knows where they found the counselors,” Hopper went on, tucking the filter into the end, leaning down to lick the paper. “Rikers Island, probably. There was this one fat Asian kid, Orlando? They tortured him. He was some kind of born-again Baptist, so he was always talking about Jesus. They made him go without eating. Kid had never gone ten minutes without a Twinkie in his life. He couldn’t keep up, got heat stroke. Still, they kept telling him to find his inner strength, ask God for help. God was busy. Didn’t have anything for him. The whole thing was Lord of the Flies on steroids. I still get nightmares.”
“Why were you there?” I asked.
He sat back against the couch, amused. He stuck the hand-rolled cigarette into the side of his mouth, lighting it. He inhaled, wincing, and exhaled in a long stream of smoke.
“My uncle,” he said, stretching his legs out. “I’d been traveling with my mom in South America for this missionary cult shit she was into. I ran the fuck away. My uncle lives in New Mexico. Hired some goon to track me down. I was crashing at a friend’s in Atlanta. One morning I’m eating Cheerios. This brown van pulls up. If the Grim Reaper had wheels it’d be this thing. No windows except two in the back door, behind which you just knew some innocent kid had been kidnapped and, like, decapitated. Next thing I know I’m in the back with a male nurse.” He shook his head. “If that dude was a licensed nurse, I’m a fucking congressman.”
He paused to take another drag of his cigarette.
“They took me to base camp in Springdale. Zion National Park. You train there for two weeks with your fellow fucked-up campers, making Native American dream catchers and learning how to scrub a toilet with your spit—real vital life skills, you know. Then the group sets off on a ten-week trek through the wilderness, camping at six different lakes. With every lake you’re supposed to be inching closer to God and self-worth, only the reality is you’re inching closer to becoming a psychopath ’cuz of all the mind-fucking shit you’ve been exposed to.”
“And Ashley was one of the campers,” I said.
He nodded.
“Why was she there?”
“No clue. That was the big mystery. She didn’t show up till the day we were setting out on the ten-week hike. The night before, counselors announced there was a last-minute arrival. Everyone was pissed because that meant whoever it was had been able to bypass basic training, which made Full Metal Jacket look like Sesame Street.” He paused, shaking his head, then, eyeing me, he smiled faintly. “When we saw her though, we were down.”