Read an extract from The Chateau on Sunset, the new novel from bestselling author Natasha Lester.

Prologue

CHATEAU MARMONT, LOS ANGELES 1957

At 8221 Sunset Boulevard stands a French chateau, as incongruous as an escargot in a burger shack. It watches from its limestone haunches as its rooms fill with unknowns who become well-knowns, with stars who implode as well as those who shine—at least until the next twinkly young thing arrives. Oh, the things it sees! The Chateau Marmont could write the definitive Hollywood novel— except that it keeps secrets the way Alcatraz keeps prisoners. Nothing escapes.

As studio boss Harry Cohn once said, If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont.

And perhaps everything would have stayed a secret, but for a brownhaired, green-eyed, almost fourteen-year-old girl who arrives in a cab in September 1957 carrying a blue suitcase that’s thumped purple bruises over her shins. She steps onto the sidewalk and glares so ferociously at the castle turret—as if she knows what’s hiding there—that the Marmont shrinks back and everyone thinks it’s another earthquake when the ground moves sideways beneath their feet.

Then the hotel reminds itself that it’s in charge and it does what it always has to new arrivals—it looks into this girl’s heart to see what has brought her to 8221 Sunset Boulevard and what will take her away in the years to come. And despite having witnessed the arrival of many women over the years, each carrying more tragedies than the complete works of Shakespeare, what it sees this time makes a drop of water splash out of the swimming pool and roll like a tear over the red-brick paving.

Never has it seen one so young as this. Never one who’s here so emphatically against her will.

Just two weeks ago, she was standing beside a window in a Manhattan apartment, chanting with her parents, Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish tonight.

Mrs. Jones’s wish had been that her family would always stand hand in hand and make wishes. Mr. Jones’s was that his fledgling photography studio would capture enough smiles that they could afford to vacation out of state once a year. Their daughter Aria’s was …

Nothing. Aria couldn’t imagine being happier than she was right then.

And Aria’s childhood would have continued to be so idyllic that wishes were unnecessary except that her parents stopped for gas on their way home from the Copacabana. At the same time, an elderly gentleman backed his Cadillac into a gas pump. Fuel spilled over the ground.

If only the elderly gentleman hadn’t been smoking.

From the depths of sleep, Aria heard night break apart like a bone. She crept down to the living room and saw Tina the babysitter sobbing on the sofa. The book they’d been reading, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, about teeny people who lived beneath the floor and could never be seen by humans or else they vanished, lay open beside her.

A man dressed in a policeman’s uniform was saying, “Calm down, miss.”

Tina pulled Aria into her arms. “You poor orphan girl,” Tina wept. “You poor orphan girl.”

While the poor orphan girl—who’s flown by herself from New York to Los Angeles—stands at the foot of this place she’s been delivered to like a piece of junk mail, the Chateau Marmont looks beyond her past to her future. Then it exhales so far down into its ground-floor rooms that the curtains fly out the windows like voile birds. For it sees a life in which every woman Aria meets is either mad or mean or poor or dead. The mad and mean ones are the bad guys, of course. The poor and dead ones are the angels.

But what kind of story is that?

So the Marmont does what it’s never done before. It reassigns the roles.

It nudges a young woman called Flitter and one called Calliope (yes, their names are ridiculous, but they’re actresses, so what do you expect?) into the lobby. It makes Aria wear the kind of vulnerable expression on her face that both Flitter and Calliope once vowed they’d never again wear on theirs. It creates that connection so they can all come together in a story where there are women who are mad and mean and poor and dead—but it’s not quite that simple.

The madwoman deserves more than an attic. The mean ones deserve more than forgiveness. The poor ones deserve more than to say they’re a bird and then to let the net ensnare them anyway. And the dead ones …

You’ll see.