He fell silent for a moment, gazing out into the room.
“After that, he left us alone. And Orlando?” He paused, swallowing. “He made it. His sunburn healed. He stopped crying. He became, like, this hero.” He sniffed, wiping his nose. “When we finally made it back to base camp, we were supposed to have one night all together where we held hands and marveled at our accomplishments — which was more like thanking God we hadn’t died. ’cause that was the thing, the whole time, death was a possibility. Like, it was always waiting for us beyond the rocks. And the person that prevented it was Ashley.”
I couldn’t see his expression — he was now staring at the floor, hair in his eyes. “About an hour before dinner,” he went on, “I looked out the cabin window and saw her climbing into a black SUV. She was leaving early. I was disappointed. I’d wanted to try and talk to her. But it was too late. A driver collected her stuff, put it in the back, and they drove off. It was the last time I saw her.”
He lifted his head, staring at me challengingly, yet saying nothing.
“You never heard from her again?”
He shook his head, pointing the cigarette at the envelope in my hand.
“Not until that.”
“How do you know she sent it?”
“It’s her handwriting. And the return address is where …” He shrugged. “I thought she was messing with my head. I broke in a couple of nights ago, wondering if there was some kind of message or sign in there. But I haven’t found anything.”
I held up the monkey. “What’s the significance?”
“I’ve never seen it before. I told you.” He stubbed out his cigarette.
“You have no theory as to why she’d send it?”
He glared at me. “I was kinda hoping you would. You’re the reporter.”
The red mud encrusting the stuffed animal looked like the kind found out west, certainly throughout Utah, which made me wonder if perhaps it had belonged to one of the kids at the camp — maybe Hopper himself. But he looked more apt to carry around a worn-out copy of On the Road as a security blanket.
It was helpful, his insight into Ashley’s character. It had allowed her to come briefly into focus, revealing her to be a kind of ferocious avenging angel, a persona entirely in keeping with the way she played music. I couldn’t fathom why she mailed Hopper the monkey on the day she died — if it had been she.
Hopper appeared to have fallen into an irritated mood, slumped way down on the couch, arms crossed, his faded white T-shirt — gifford’s famous ice cream, it read — twisted around him. He reminded me of a teenage hitchhiker I’d once met in El Paso; we were the only two at a diner counter at the crack of dawn. After we got to talking, swapping stories, he said goodbye, hitching a ride with the driver of a BP oil truck. Later, I got up to pay my bill only to realize he’d stolen my wallet. Never trust a charismatic drifter.
“Maybe there’s something inside,” I said, turning the stuffed animal over. I took out my switchblade, cutting an incision down the back of the monkey. I pulled out the stuffing, yellowed and crusty, feeling around the inside. There was nothing.
I realized my cell was buzzing, the number a 407 area code.
“Hello?”
“May I please speak to Mr. Scott McGrath?”
It was a woman, her voice crisp and musical.
“This is he.”
“It’s Nora Halliday. From the coat check? I’m at Forty-fifth and Eleventh Avenue. The Pom Pom Diner. Can you come? We need to talk.”
“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.” She hung up. Shaking my head, I stood up.
“Who was that?” Hopper asked me.
“A coat-check girl, last person to see Ashley alive. Yesterday she nearly had me arrested. Today? She wants to talk. I have to go. In the meantime, I’ll hold on to the monkey.”
“That’s okay.” He snatched it back, giving me a wary look, before shoving it back into the envelope and disappearing with the package into the bedroom.
“Thanks for your time,” I called over my shoulder. “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything.” But suddenly Hopper was slipping out into the hall right behind me, shrugging on his gray coat.
“Cool,” he said. He locked the door and took off down the stairs.
“Where are you off to?”
“Forty-fifth and Eleventh. Gotta go meet a coat-check girl.”
As his footsteps echoed through the stairwell, I berated myself for mentioning where I was headed. I worked solo, always had.
But then — I started down the stairs — maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea to team up with him, this once. There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women. And in my experience with that thorny subject — which included decades of trial and error, throwing out countless years’ worth of shoddy results (Cynthia), the sad realization I’d never be a leader in the field, just another middling scientist — they really had only one identifiable constant: Around guys like Hopper, icebergs turned to puddles.
“Fine,” I shouted. “But I’m doing the talking.”
13
The Pom Pom was an old-school diner, narrow as a railroad car.
Nora Halliday sat in the back by a wall-sized photo of Manhattan. She was slumped way, way down on the seat, her skinny legs stretched out in front of her. Yet she wasn’t just sitting in the booth. She looked like she’d put down first and last month’s rent, plus a security deposit, plus an exorbitant broker’s fee, signed a lease, and moved into the booth.
On one side of her were two giant Duane Reade shopping bags, on the other a brown paper Whole Foods bag and a large gray leather purse, unzipped and sagging open like a gutted reef shark, inside of which you could see all it had ingested that morning: Vogue, a green sweater still attached to knitting needles, a sneaker, a pair of white Apple earphones wrapped around not an iPod but a Discman. It might as well have been a gramophone.
She didn’t notice us walking toward her because her eyes were closed and she was whispering to herself — apparently trying to memorize the block of highlighted text from the play in her hands. On the table in front of her was a plate of half-finished French toast floating like a houseboat on the Mississippi in a pool of syrup.
She glanced up at me, then Hopper. Instantly — probably from the jolt of his good looks — she jerked upright.
“This is Hopper,” I said. “Hope it’s okay he joins.”
Hopper said nothing, only slid into the booth across from her.
She was wearing a strange outfit: stonewashed jeans straight from an eighties movie, a wool sweater so hot-pink it scalded the eyes, black wool fingerless gloves, lipstick a livid shade of red. Unlike last night, her pale blond hair was down, parted in the middle and surprisingly long, hanging all the way to her elbows, stringy on the ends.