Chapter 53 1966
James takes me inside the crumbling walls, pointing out where not to walk.
We take the staff staircase, the one where I first bumped into Theo, up to the seventh floor.
Somehow, it’s still intact. Then we walk through the part of the building that remains, stopping at the suite—just half a room now—next to the penthouse.
The kitchen is incinerated. The dressing table not even scorched. Two of the walls are missing.
“Fire’s a funny thing,” James says. “Devours some things, doesn’t even lick another.”
On the dressing table is the photo of me, Calliope, and Flitter that was taken at Schwab’s on my sixteenth birthday. “Was this Calliope’s room?”
James nods.
“What about her usual suite?”
“Maisie told me she asked for this one when she got back from Europe.” Then he points. “That’s the weird thing.”
Untouched by the fire is a projector. It’s a very specific type of projector: one that can play film that’s had sound printed magnetically onto it by something like an RCA Sound Camera.
Once upon a time when I was fourteen years old, I used that projector to show a crowd of people a film that I’d recorded on an RCA Sound Camera.
Why is it in Calliope’s room?
“Not that. This.”
James directs my eyes lower, to the cavity that the Murphy bed folds into. Inside is a length of piping that’s been fitted into a hole in the wall adjoining the penthouse. The pipe runs across to the sound speaker of the projector.
“Someone carved a hole through the wall,” James says. “It’s thinner there because it’s the bed cavity. It’s right behind Bob Ashenhurst’s bed too. That’s why he didn’t notice the hole on his side.”
Whatever was playing on the projector was being piped straight into the penthouse. Bob would never have known where the sound was coming from.
It would have seemed like it was in his dreams—or in his nightmares.
I walk over to the projector. The reel of film loaded into it is labeled: Toni Ashenhurst. Audition Tape For Frightened Victim in The Spiral Staircase.
I remember Maisie telling me about Bob’s sister, Toni. She’d gone to auditions, but it had never come to anything.
I turn the projector on.
There’s no footage, because there’s no wall left to project onto. But the sound plays, turned up to full volume.
“No!” a young woman screams, giving her all to get a part that had no name besides “Frightened Victim.” “You devil! You belong in hell! Nooooo-ooooo-oo!”
I switch the projector off.
You devil. You belong in hell.
No.
The words echo, the Marmont magnifying the sound so it’s all the more terrifying.
Calliope was playing, directly into Bob’s room, a soundtrack of Bob’s dead sister screaming out that he was a devil.
Which he was. And she knew it better than anyone.
Now he’s dead.
What’s in this room isn’t weird. It’s revenge.
“Shall we put everything back in the storeroom?” I ask James.
He nods, relieved to have had the decision made for him. “I wouldn’t want Miss Calliope to get into trouble. Even if she is dead.” His face crumples. A tough policeman who’s seen death and terror is about to cry for Calliope Burns.
I think I am too.
My next stop is the Beverly Wilshire, where my aunt has decamped while she waits for her Chateau Marmont home to be rebuilt. She greets me with an extravagant hug and I cling to her for so long that she eventually pushes me away.
“It’s very good to see you,” I say when I draw back. She’s alive and well and, my god, look at her—as radiant as any spotlight.
“You too. But that’s quite enough emotion for one morning.”
I smile as she ushers me inside. Not everything can change, I guess.
“I went to the Chateau Marmont,” I tell her once she’s arranged herself and her magnificent pink batwing sleeves in the seat opposite me.
“A tragedy.” Tears sparkle artfully in her eyes. Then she picks up a seltzer water and waves a hand, signaling that it’s time to move on.
“I went up to Calliope’s room.”
She chokes on her seltzer water, then continues to cough long past the point when she ought to have recovered. I interrupt her performance. “I saw the projector.”
Now Miss Devine Rey stops all pretense. She looks at me properly and says, “Calliope told me about the screams, the fire in Win’s room, the other things that happened at the Marmont. It sounded like somebody was trying—”
She cuts herself off, pulls out her compact, and re-powders her nose.
Hanging on a hook by the door is a silver cape. It looks gauzy and light. Ghostlike. The kind of thing that, if you were to wear it at night in the dimly lit halls of the Marmont and then out onto a roof with a man who’s heard his dead sister screaming in the night, might make somebody go mad.
But all I really know for sure is that Bob is dead and nobody will weep over that.
“Throw away the cape,” I say.
“Oops.” She smiles, her soul unbothered by her part in whatever happened a few nights ago. Nor should it be.
But some things are still too ambiguous. “There’s something we need to do for Calliope,” I say.
Aria Jones and the legendary Miss Devine Rey walk through the doors of Schwab’s. Lois, the reporter from Photoplay, notices us—she always has her eyes on the door. I wave to Jim, who calls out, “A Schwab’s Special, Miss Aria?”
“Yes, please.”
While we wait for my sundae, Miss Devine signs napkins for all the customers. Then we let ourselves be collared by Lois.
“Aria Jones, you dark horse,” she says. “What a book. And Miss Devine Rey,” she breathes, staring at my aunt as if she’s Joan of Arc and Cleopatra rolled into one saintly and enchanting bundle.
“We can’t talk right now,” my aunt says with a palpable sense of drama. “My niece has just heard the news about Calliope Burns and is so distressed to lose her best friend that she needs something for her headache.”
“Lost?” Lois gasps, her fingers itching to pick up her pen and write down the quote, word for word. “You mean they’ve confirmed that she died in the fire?”
“Hush now, dear.” My aunt pats my back and I dutifully pretend to sob.
Miss Devine leans in close to Lois, tears brimming in her eyes.
“You know the police. Always needing quadruple verification. They won’t confirm anything officially.
But you heard it from me—my niece found a ring in the grounds of the Chateau Marmont near where those bones were unearthed.
Calliope Burns will shine her light from our screens no more. ”
“My deepest condolences.” Lois manages another thirty seconds of small talk before she dashes off, not wanting to waste any time in writing her scoop.
I smile at my aunt. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to acting?”
She straightens into the queenly posture I remember from my earliest days at the Marmont.
“My business cards are waiting for me on my desk in the offices of Aria Jones: Talent Management Agency. But first,” she says, raising her hand into the air, fingers curved around an imaginary glass, “To Calliope Burns. Who’s just been given the end she wanted. ”
The tears I had to pretend I was weeping moments ago soak my eyes now. I thought I’d have the chance to say goodbye. But all I can do is raise my sundae in the air too.
“To Calliope,” I say.
The world will believe she went out in a blaze of glory. But I know she’s out there somewhere, dying.