43.

Guests in cocktail dresses and dark suits congregated in the lobby, most of them already masked in anything from glittering, gilded, feathered masquerade masks like my own, to more elaborate porcelain or wood or papier-mâché masks. There were animal faces: birds and cats and bears, and a few wolves that looked like Niklas’s work. Some of the masks looked like they’d been purchased in other countries: Africa and Japan and the Middle East. One group of partygoers all wore World War II gas masks, which I thought they’d regret as the night wore on and they began to swelter.

I kept my head down, spoke to no one, determined not to draw attention to myself. I overheard someone saying that a shuttle service would deliver us to the Red House. I went outside and found three passenger vans idling in the lot.

I sat silently in the back of my van as we ascended into the foothills, trees obscuring our view until we crested a rise and the forest thinned to reveal the Red House, a sprawling, fairy-tale castle painted the color of dried blood. Surrounding the house were topiaries in the shapes of wolves. Two of them guarded the front door. The dream of Miranda surfaced in my mind like a murdered body dumped in a lake. A tremor started in my limbs, a shaking I could not control.

Say hello to the wolves for me.

The party had already started. Packs of masked guests roamed the gardens, carrying glasses of champagne, conversing with faces hidden. They could be anyone, and so could I, or I could pretend to be. It was what I had always done, my lifelong coping mechanism, pretending to be someone else. Even when I was playing “me” on Bullsh?t Hunters I was only a version of myself, a mask over a mask over a mask. Who or what was underneath all the disguises I’d worn, I had no idea. Maybe there was nothing at my core. Maybe I was no one, a vacuum devoid of personality beneath all the layers I donned.

I queued up to enter the Red House, standing between the topiary wolves. The doorman found my name on the guest list and waved me inside. Stepping into Kron’s house was disorienting, like falling asleep at noon and waking at midnight. The interior was lit only by candles and oil lamps, uncontaminated by the harsh blaze of artificial light. Only the warm, natural glow of open flames, such a blatant fire hazard it seemed deliberate. A bonfire in the waiting, as if this town hadn’t had enough fire. Masked strangers surrounded me, the roar of their voices filling the interior.

“Champagne?” a waiter asked, appearing at my elbow. Even he wore a mask, a featureless white egg with two round holes for the eyes and a dark dash for the mouth. Looking around, I saw that all of the waiters wore the same mask.

I plucked a glass from the tray, thanked the waiter, and finished the champagne in one continuous gulp. It was so good it would probably ruin all other champagne for the rest of my life. It was wasted on chugging, but when it hit my stomach I instantly felt looser, more comfortable in my skin. I snaked my arm over the waiter’s shoulder and deposited my empty on his tray, then helped myself to another glass, and drained that, too.

I moved farther into the house. Much of the furniture was antique, the wood dark and oily with history, not the bright, warm tones Scandinavians favored. Kron was all about the Old World. Chairs and curio cabinets and sideboards and sofas that had absorbed generations of life. The walls were crammed with art, collages of paintings in mismatched frames, ranging from the size of a deck of cards to the length and width of a child’s first mattress.

“Your first time in the Red House?” a woman’s voice purred into my ear, her face concealed behind an elaborate unicorn mask. She wore a body-skimming silver dress with a neckline that plunged to her sternum.

I turned to her, nodded. “It is. Yours, too?”

“Second,” she said. “I had a supporting role in Jonas’s last film. He invited me and some of the others to spend a weekend here with him.”

“He’s quite the entertainer,” I said, but she laughed at that.

“Not really. We barely saw him during our stay. He told us to make ourselves at home, and then he disappeared. I think he observed us, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know those old movies where someone watches you through the eyeholes in a painting? The actors walk past, and the eyes follow?”

I glanced at the paintings on the wall nearest us, and she shook her head. “He didn’t watch us through the paintings. At least, I don’t think he did. But that was the feeling we had, that eyes were following us. My guess is, he has hidden cameras installed all over the house.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked, my paranoia growing.

She shrugged. “I can only guess. To study our interaction? To get inspired? Or maybe he’s just an old pervert who gets a thrill from spying on people.”

“You don’t sound bothered by it.”

“It’s part of his artistic process,” she said. “Besides, I’m an actor. I’m used to being watched. It comes with the job.” She touched my arm, her fingers cool and slender, long nails painted the same metal as her dress. “And what or who are you?” she asked, her voice lowering, a husky tease.

“Nothing and no one,” I said.

“You’re not going to tell me your name?”

“Tonight I don’t have one,” I said, and she laughed again. I startled when her fingers stroked down my spine, unable to repress an involuntary shiver. I felt disconnected from myself. From my body. From reality. A girl with no past and no future. Something about the mask, the way it sheltered me, made me feel free. I was tired of Liv Hendricks, the way I’d been tired of Olivia Hill. I was tired of being seen. Tired of being judged and found wanting by everyone around me. Too pretty. Not pretty enough. Too skinny. Not skinny enough. Too young. Not young enough. Too real. Not real enough. Too slutty. Not slutty enough. Too drunk. Not drunk enough.

It was exhausting. I was exhausted.

“Jonas, hello,” the unicorn said, breaking me from my daze. “It’s nice to see you again.”

I turned and there was Jonas Kron, a knife-thin figure in a dark suit and maroon tie, a tiepin in the shape of a wolf’s head in the center. He was the only one at the party not wearing a mask. What, I wondered, was the significance of that? Was he trying to tell us that he was the only real person among us, that the rest of us were all characters in his living theater? He was the director, and we were the players?

He took my hand and gave a little bow. “May I steal you for a moment,” he asked in his quiet, musical accent.

“Yes,” I said absently. Did he recognize me? How could he?

Ignored by Kron, the unicorn drifted off into the crowd, looking for a new plaything.

Kron offered his elbow and I took it. “Would you like a tour of the house?”

I nodded, linked my arm through Kron’s, and he escorted me through the crowd, which parted for us as if he were a ship cutting through a school of fish.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked when we were clear of the crowd.

“Of course,” he said. “Ms. Hendricks. I asked the attendant at the door to notify me when you arrived.”

I nodded, relieved that I hadn’t been recognized so easily. “I was hoping to fly under the radar. My being here might seem inappropriate, considering the circumstances.”

“Yes. I was sorry to hear about your sister. I wish to take back the things I said about her last night. That was unfair.”

“You didn’t know she had disappeared.”

“Nevertheless, I was thoughtless. I apologize. And I understand that you’re here on business, but I hope you’re enjoying the party as much as one can.”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced,” I assured him.

“Good,” he said, nodding. “They say at the end of your life, you will only regret the things you did not do.”

“I might be the exception to that rule. I’ve done plenty of things I regret.”

“That’s good. You cast off your innocence. Innocence is for children,” Kron said matter-of-factly, as though his opinion were the only one that mattered. “You can only truly live through experience. Your life is your story, your most important work of art, and art must be fed like a hungry animal. Otherwise it will either die, or try to kill you. If something scares you and you look at it, you are either a pervert or an artist. If you are a pervert, you will take it in and seek more. If you are an artist, you will create.”

“What if you do both?”

He chuckled rustily. “Then you’re a genius.”

We broke free from the crowd and entered a less packed section of the house, a room set up as a kind of shrine to Kron’s films, display cases positioned throughout the floor, each of them containing a piece of Kron feature film memorabilia. It was a Kronophile’s holy temple of worship. I paused in front of one display case containing a lifelike wolf’s head mask, and I felt that queasy, roiling, sinking sensation again. The little rectangle of paper inside labeled this as having come from his first film, Anathema, the one that had inspired a homicide and postmortem mutilation. I averted my eyes and moved on quickly. Another, smaller case on the wall displayed the bone-handled hunting knife the killer in The Reddest Red used to slay his first victim. The white dress with the Peter Pan collar that Annika wore in The Girl and the Wolf and the nameless girl’s red-and-white swing dress from A Stranger Comes to Town were both displayed in glass cases on the wall. I paused to study them.

“You could have been the one to wear that dress,” Jonas said, standing close beside me. Too close. The wool sleeve of his jacket brushed my bare arm. “You were the one I wanted.”

I looked at him, inched slightly to the side so we were no longer touching. It was the first time he’d brought up the fact that I’d turned down the lead in The Girl and the Wolf. I felt a vague sense of guilt, like everything for Annika could have been different if only I’d accepted the part, saved her from what working with her uncle did to her. He could have broken me instead of her. Either way, I had ended up broken. If I’d undertaken the role of Joelle, perhaps I wouldn’t have been driving on Mulholland Drive the night Miranda disappeared. One yes instead of a no and everything in my life could have taken a different path.

“But then you wouldn’t have made the film you made,” I pointed out. “Some people say it’s your definitive work.”

“Most people, not some,” he said drily. “My best work is behind me. I accept that. I don’t like it, but I accept it.”

“I know how you feel. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. We both peaked at about the same time.”

He smiled, amusement in his eyes. “You’re still young. You may surprise yourself someday.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Come with me,” Jonas said, leading me from the room. “There’s something I want to show you.” He steered me toward a staircase and took hold of the polished banister.

I hesitated. “We’re going upstairs?”

He nodded and began to climb the stairs, not waiting to see if I followed.

But I did follow.

At the top, we turned down a long, wide corridor that seemed to stretch for eternity like a hallway in a dream, the kind in which you can run forever. The corridor was lined with closed doors, maybe a dozen of them. Kron walked to the last door on the left, opened it, and flipped a switch. A tapestry of twinkle lights blinked on overhead, just like the canopy of imitation stars I’d seen over Niklas’s bed.

“This is—was—Annika’s room,” Jonas said. “I haven’t changed a thing since she left. All these years, I hoped she might come back. I picture her as she was when I last saw her. Eighteen. Hair as long as her spine. Freckles in the summer. Chipped fingernail polish. Laughing one minute, brooding the next. She was like her mother that way. Unpredictable. Erratic. She was quite un-Norwegian, not at all stoic or reserved. She burned brighter than most. That was what made her shine on screen.”

And according to Porter, Jonas had stoked the fire in Annika until it consumed her. Until she nearly burned down the Wolf Wood, if Niklas was to be believed.

I turned in a circle, taking it in. There were few indications that this room had belonged to a young starlet in the making. Her accommodations were not glamorous. The bedroom could have belonged to any teenage girl in America. The twinkle lights overhead. The collection of photographs and postcards and drawings pinned to a corkboard near her desk. The books filling a small bookshelf were a mixture of pulp, literature, and classic children’s novels. I moved to the corkboard and looked at the photos, at a print of Annika and her friends back in Norway. A pretty girl with her life ahead of her. A girl just starting to take shape. Gemma and I had never been such girls. By the time we were sixteen, we had seen too much, lived too much. We had never been sixteen. We had been whatever we were told to be. I envied this Annika, but not the Annika in the photo next to it, a black-and-white production still from the set of The Girl and the Wolf. In it, Annika stood alone in front of the wolf enclosure, her right hand grasping her left elbow, her posture radiating fear. She wore her white dress and red knee socks. I guessed this photo had been taken before the famous sex scene was shot, or maybe just after. The scene that had been cued up to play in Niklas’s basement bedroom. Had Niklas been present when that scene was shot? Had he watched as Annika’s costar lifted her dress to fuck her from behind; as she crouched naked inside the wolf’s enclosure, pretending to rip it open, feed on it until blood painted her chin and chest?

How could Jonas, her uncle, a man who was supposed to love her and protect her, ask her to do what she did in that scene? Would he have asked the same of me, or worse?

“What did you think of Annika’s aspiration to be an actor?” I said, turning back to face him.

“I supported it, obviously,” Jonas said without hesitation. “It was her dream. I wanted to help her achieve it. She had the talent and the ambition. All she needed was an opportunity, and I gave her that.”

“I’ve heard you write the scripts for your movies as you film them,” I said.

He nodded. “Sometimes I write the day’s pages the night before. Sometimes the morning of.”

“So it wasn’t like the script for The Girl and the Wolf existed before you cast Annika. You wrote it for her.”

“No. I wrote it because it was the story that wanted to be told.”

I raised an eyebrow. “So you don’t think you have any control over what you end up filming? That the story simply exists, and you take it down like dictation.”

One corner of his mouth curled in a dry smile. “Something like that. I sense you don’t approve.”

“I don’t approve of the things you made her do.”

“I didn’t make her do anything. She could have said no.”

“She was barely an adult, and you were her uncle. She trusted you to look out for her best interests.”

“Like you and your sister trusted Desiree Hill to look out for yours? Annika didn’t want me to look out for her best interests. She wanted me to make her a star. I pushed her to take risks so she could grow.”

“And now she’s gone.”

Jonas held my gaze for a long moment before lowering his eyes. “Yes,” he said softly.

“Jonas, do you know what Annika was doing in the Wolf Woods the night of the fire?”

“What?” He blinked at me and shook his head minutely. “I don’t…who told you that?”

“Did Annika ever say anything to you to indicate someone was harassing her?”

“No. She never—”

“Did she ever tell you she believed in the Ulv Konge?”

“What? No, that’s ridiculous! Where did you hear this?”

“Is it any more ridiculous than turning an entire town into your set? Is it more ridiculous than improvising a film that turns your eighteen-year-old niece into a sex object and then claiming you had no choice in doing so? Is it more ridiculous than this house and this party, or than people who worship you coming to Stone’s Throw to pay homage, running around the woods in wolf masks and—”

“Jonas.” The director and I both startled, turning toward the open doorway, now filled by a figure nearly as tall and lean as the director, his face obscured by the mask of a white wolf. Soren Kron.

Say hello to the wolves for me.

I realized I wasn’t breathing, forced myself to inhale. Not to give in to the panic that wanted to take hold of me.

Soren cleared his throat. “You’re needed downstairs.”

“In a minute,” Jonas said.

“Sheriff Lot is here,” Soren insisted. “He says he needs to talk to you.”

“About what?” Jonas sounded annoyed.

Soren glanced at me, eyes so pale inside the holes in the wolf’s face that they seemed to emit their own icy light. “That is something you’ll want to speak to him about in private. We wouldn’t want this to end up on the Internet.”

I felt a jolt go through me, like a shock of electricity. Did he know about the body camera?

“Please excuse me,” Jonas said curtly. “I hope you enjoy the rest of the party.”