Walking back to the checkpoint, I filled Porter in on what I’d found in the Larsens’ house, the ledger with the large deposits, and the projector in the basement, cued up to play Annika’s disturbing, deviant sex scene from The Girl and the Wolf. I omitted mention of the face in the window, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Maybe because I wasn’t certain anymore what I’d seen. Had my perception simply been distorted by distance? Had the person peering out at me really been wearing a wolf mask or holding a video camera? I’d glimpsed the face so briefly, it would have been easy to transpose a mask onto it in my mind.
And there was that instant of hyper-reality, of near-revelation, over so quickly it might simply have been the product of a rush of adrenaline.
Porter was quiet after I finished talking. He seemed to be having a hard time looking at me. I could tell he wasn’t happy about the position I’d put him in.
“Well,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses, as though he felt a headache coming on, “as far as the ledger goes I don’t know if there’s anything uncommon about small business owners occasionally paying themselves larger sums of money. I do that with the inn from time to time, usually just before the end of the year. It makes sense that the Larsens would pay themselves more before a pricey surgery.”
“And the projector? Do you find it strange that Niklas had a DVD cued up to the moment when Annika gets fucked in The Girl and the Wolf?”
Porter cringed at my use of the word fucked, which I found somewhat amusing, considering he’d seemed pretty interested in reenacting the scene in front of the wolf enclosures. Then I remembered that Porter had known Annika, had admitted he had a crush on her, and I felt like an insensitive asshole.
“It could mean something,” Porter admitted. “But it’s a provocative sex scene, and he’s a grown man, so maybe it’s nothing.”
“You mean maybe he was just down there beating off to the memory of a teenage girl who is probably dead?”
“That’s a very crass way to put it,” Porter said archly.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Fine,” I said, irritated by his prudishness, and at the same time finding it endearing. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to feel the same cognitive dissonance about my filthy mouth. He stared straight ahead, frowning.
We didn’t speak again until we reached the Dark Road, and found chaos.
* * *
There had to be fifty cars jammed bumper-to-bumper on the shoulders of the Dark Road. People from town and people who could only be from LA milled around the sheriff’s checkpoint. A constant stream of traffic snaked toward the town, a mix of hybrids and power cars that cost as much as a three-bedroom house in the Midwest. Film people. The festival attendees arriving en masse, slowing to rubberneck as they cruised past the checkpoint. A few stopped in the middle of the road to call out questions to Sheriff Lot and his deputies, or to take pictures with their phones. If they weren’t aware of Gemma’s disappearance before, they would be now. They were probably thrilled, the producers anxious to find cell service so they could start making calls, vying for exclusive rights to Gemma’s story, actors envisioning themselves in her tragic role. Who would they get to play me? Amanda Seyfried? No. Amy Schumer was more likely. Gemma would get Seyfried or Witherspoon or maybe even Lawrence if the script was good.
I wondered if Desiree was already fielding calls about the rights. And just as I wondered it, I saw her.
Her back was to me, clad in a camel coat that extended to the backs of her knees, but I knew her immediately in the way you can always recognize someone you dread seeing. She was talking to the sheriff, and as Porter and I approached she turned to point at the single search and rescue dog, a golden retriever, sitting patiently at its trainer’s feet. I stopped walking abruptly. Porter, behind me, ran into my back.
“What is it?” he asked.
I tried to find my voice, form words, but nothing came out. Desiree caught sight of me, lowered her arm. She gazed at me with no feeling. No warmth. I hadn’t seen her in person in years. I didn’t know until that moment that I hoped, after this extended absence from each other, she might have built up some sort of affection for me. But there was nothing, and it struck me how unnatural that was. How monstrous to feel no love for the life she’d created. I had lived inside this woman, and she acted like we’d never met.
The last thing Gemma had said to me before she went missing still echoed in my mind. Desiree had not been the same mother to her that she had been to me. She had seen me as the true talent, Gemma as the understudy. While I despised being shaped and molded and styled and whittled down to the bones, it was all Gemma had wanted. To be seen by our mother. To be valued.
Desiree folded her arms and waited for me to come to her. She would never come to me. I knew that. I didn’t want to go to her, either. I wanted to run in any direction but toward her. I couldn’t run from her, though. Not in front of Porter and Sheriff Lot and the paparazzi camped out along the road.
I waited for a break in traffic and then crossed the road. Desiree sized me up with unmistakable condemnation. I knew what she saw. The years on my face. The thirty pounds I’d put on since my heyday. The carelessly chosen clothes that made me look like a regular person. No one special. And if I wasn’t special, I was of no use to her. She was, above all things, pragmatic.
I wanted to look at her with the same appraisal, adding up her flaws. The tightness of her skin from too much Botox. The excess makeup for this hour of the morning. The loose skin at her neck, which was probably already scheduled for removal and tucking by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. The sun damage on her hands, where discolorations were starting to form, something else she would have lasered into oblivion. But when I looked at Desiree, what I saw most of all was her disapproval of the entirety of me. There was not a single thing about me she loved.
“I was just talking to the sheriff about his efforts to find Gemma,” Desiree said, without greeting, as though we spoke regularly and this encounter was nothing abnormal. “Apparently this search party has been going on for hours, and no one has found a trace of your sister. It’s unacceptable.”
“What about the dog?” I asked Lot, nodding at the golden retriever.
The sheriff shook his head. “She found Gemma’s scent, but the trail was from yesterday, and the rain confused it.”
“Then get more dogs,” Desiree said in the same sharp, clipped tone she used with an agent who tried to lowball her on the rental of one of her daughters. “I could make a single call and have a dozen superior animals here within the hour.”
“Ms. Hill, I assure you—”
“I’ve heard enough from you,” Desiree snapped. “As I understand it, four other women went missing on this road, and none were ever found. Don’t give me your false assurances.”
To his credit, Lot held his own against Desiree. But the second she turned her back to him, focusing all her attention on her phone, he let his confident posture sag. I felt sorry for him. I guessed, now that he’d met my mother, he felt sorry for me, too.
“There’s no service out here,” Desiree snarled at no one in particular. “How can there be no service? This is America, isn’t it?” Without another word, she marched to her pearl-white Lexus, got in, and screeched away.
I went limp when she was gone, my energy vacuumed into Desiree. For all her bravado, she didn’t actually seem worried about Gemma. More…inconvenienced.
“That was your mom?” Porter said, looking at me with pity in his eyes.
“Yep.”
A peal of thunder rumbled overhead. Out among the burnt trees, the searchers were making their way back toward the checkpoint, Wheeler and the other Bullshit Hunters among them.
“I called them back,” Lot said, reading the question on my face. “It’s about to pour, and I didn’t want people caught out there in the rain.”
“There’s really no trace of her?” I asked.
Lot shook his head, his expression grim, his mouth pulled down at the corners. The morning had aged him. “Just like the others.”
But this wasn’t like the others. Gemma was blond and beautiful like the rest of them (like Annika had been before she altered her look), but she was older than everyone but Annika—by over ten years—and her disappearance had come too soon after Annika’s.
Annika’s disappearance had broken the pattern.
Maybe that was because Annika had started it in the first place.