The American Girl (14 page)

AUGUST 4, 2015

W
hen I arrived at the hospital after my strange, drunken lunch, I found Quinn in an edgy mood. She barely looked up when I came in, except to cast a look of exquisite disdain at the bag of pastries I dropped on her over-bed table.

“Hey,” I said. “Feeling okay?”

She did a grunt-snarl combo, the corners of her mouth turning down.

“I'll take that as a yes,” I said.

She shrugged.

We sat in silence for a while. A thought struck me. What if those iPhone photos
had
jogged her memory, perhaps throwing up some childhood memory or other without me in it? I'd been planning to ask her to show her phone to Valentin. He didn't know about what was on it. In fact, he seemed too unobservant to have even noticed it. You'd think it would have been his first
port of call when they found it on the scene. Though I suppose a phone with a smashed screen and a dead battery would have appeared as far beyond hope as Quinn did. Since she woke, she'd been hiding it under her bed or in her pillows, almost as if there was some secret on there she didn't want found. Whatever it was, I felt sure it could help the case. But I didn't dare push her about it, not when she was in this state of mind. Instead, I stared out at the blue day sheared in tender sushi slices by the plastic blinds. My hands twitched in my lap. I had to do something, not just sit here feeling nervous.

“Well, I better get going.” I started up, avoiding her eyes.

“Wait,” she said. “I need to . . . show you something.” She beckoned me near and with a strained look she pulled the phone out from under the sheets, flicking it past the smiling picture to the videos section. She tapped on a file and it opened up.

It wasn't easy to see with the light streaming in the windows behind us, but as far as I could discern, there was dancing, laughter, loud music, some sort of wild party in a dark place that was hard to make out because the quality was so grainy. The perspective swiveled around. I saw a pale flash of Quinn's grinning face, looking utterly different from what I'd become used to. Wild and confident and happy, she planted a kiss on the gleaming, tanned face of the man beside her. Raphael. The camera swung around again, this time showing the slim frame of Noémie Blavette. She wasn't dancing or laughing, just standing and looking fearfully in their direction. The video ended.

Quinn gulped audibly. “I think it has something to do with
what happened that night, the night they went missing. I know we were in the woods or something. I remember . . . flashes of it. I . . . maybe if I went back there, I might remember more.”

I looked at her uncertainly. “When you're stronger, Quinn. But right now, I think maybe we should just tell Inspector Valentin what you remember so far? Has he seen this phone even?”

“No,” she snapped, and shoved the phone under the covers, as if that was a great way of hiding it.

“Quinn,” I said gently, “that could be evidence. I mean, it must have phone calls, photos. It could be their best chance of finding . . .”

“Are you on my side?” she asked sharply. “I mean, sometimes I wonder if you're even really my aunt. After all, I have amnesia, you could be anyone. You could be an imposter. And if I screamed loud enough . . .”

The hate in her eyes shocked me. I got up off the bed. “Jesus, Quinn.”

As suddenly as it appeared, her hateful look vanished. She shook her head. I remembered what the therapist said, about how her condition might make her aggressive at times, even violent.

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking droopy again. “I'm just . . . going crazy here. I have to get out of here before I lose it.”

I perched on the edge of the bed a little nervously. “You've been through a terrible trauma. I mean, you're supposed to have doctors around, and nurses, around-the-clock medical care or whatever.”

Her eyes got that defiant look again. “I've already spoken to
the doctor and the therapist. I can walk and I can talk and I can piss straight, can't I? They say if you take me, I could go. They say it's only you and the police keeping me here.”

“What the . . . what . . . ?” I didn't know what to believe, or where she even came up with all this.
Paranoia
, the therapist said. Maybe this was it.

“Please, Aunt Molly,” she said. “Please get me away, take me back to your hotel. I can't sleep. I hate it here.” She whined the words, like an upset toddler.

The cogs in my head jammed fast. I was in this up to my neck as it was. I couldn't imagine getting any deeper, looking after a sick teenager, taking responsibility for all this. “It's dangerous,” I protested. “There won't be police to protect you like there are here. Sweetheart, you should just show the police the video and let them—”

“No!” Quinn said. “I thought I could trust you. But now I'm not sure.”

“Quinn . . .” I said pleadingly. I felt I'd drawn on all my child and teen knowledge, used up all my experience, and now I was hitting the bumpers.

She took hold of my arms, pulling them around her, burying her head in my shirt. “If you get me out, if you take me to your hotel, I'll show the inspector my phone. I'll be good, I promise. But I have to get out of here. I have to.”

Patting her head, I let out a sigh. “I'll do what I can.”

AUGUST 4, 2015

I
returned to the Napoléon feeling thoroughly guilty about Quinn, and more than that, really weirded out by her odd behavior at the hospital, the way she'd blackmailed and bullied me. As little as I wanted to give in to her, I felt that I had to do something to help her. It seemed like the wrong kind of coincidence that my next date was with Valentin.

I walked into the hotel bar feeling a shameful little thrill of reassurance to see the barman's eyes swivel to look at me. Well, not at me exactly—at my tits cantilevered in a tight red bandage dress my sister gave me for my thirtieth birthday because, in her subtle way, she's working against my certain future as a lonely, single freak who embarrasses her at family gatherings. Valentin was already propped on the bar, double Jack Daniel's in hand, straight up, one ice cube. He looked mussed and a little bit lost, even from the back: his hunched shoulders in yesterday's shirt, his thinning blond hair a rumpled haystack. I knew that
he knew: that he was losing, that everyone thought the Blavettes were past all hope. My heart—as they say—went out to him.

I sat down and said I wanted one of what Valentin had. The barman laughed and winked. I watched the reflections of the media circus behind us in the mirrored bar until Valentin turned to look at me. His face was pouchy and red, his eyes tired, his breath positively intoxicating. He was so far gone he was barely able to stay on the barstool. The dress, the lipstick, was wasted on him.

“Ça va, Molly?”
He shot me a sad half smile.

“Ouais, ç
a va.”

Valentin chuckled. “
Bon.
You are picking up a better French.”

“You think so?”

“
Vraiment.
You even say
ouais
, like yeah, like you're a spotty teenager or something.”

“When you do compliments, you really go to town.” I lifted my glass.

He lifted his.
“Ouais, c'est ça. Bon santé.
To mother tongues!”

“To mother tongues,” I said, laughing and clinking glasses with him, aware out of the corner of my eye of the other hacks watching us like hawks. The fact that we were laughing and toasting wouldn't be lost on them. They would be thinking that either there was a break in the case they didn't know about or that we were a couple of delusional psychos. The latter, clearly, was true.

We drank, the laugh dying away just a bit too soon.

Valentin sighed and rubbed his hand over his nose, a now familiar gesture.

“You okay?” I patted him on the back as I said it, trying not to feel too ashamed of myself for playing the seductress so obviously.

He shrugged. “It's just . . . for all the talk and press conferences and paperwork and forensics . . . in the end it is real people who are affected by our work. If we succeed. If we fail. Real lives. It's hard to sleep at night, you know?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, wishing I had a solid lead I could anonymously slip him.

He touched my shoulder gently. “Apologies, Molly. Of course you know. You must have lost nights of sleep worrying over Quinn. Truly, I apologize.”

“No, don't.” I smiled, not minding that he was groping me this time. But then it reminded me of the last time someone touched my arm: Quinn's desperate pleas, her mad promises. “No one's lost as much sleep as Quinn, you know. She's trying so hard to remember something . . . anything. I worry she'll get worse.”

I had his whole attention now. “And has she . . . remembered anything more?”

I swallowed hard, thinking about the phone, the deal we cut. “Little bits . . . about the woods. It's coming back to her in fragments.”

“Yes.” His hand was on my arm again, whether prompting me or holding on for steadiness, it was hard to tell.

“I think that she might remember more if she was out of the hospital.”

He shrugged, frowned. “But I mean . . . her head injuries . . .”

“Are minor . . . are healing.”

“And her other contusions.”

“Scrapes and bruises.”

“But her psychological state—”

“Is best when she's with me. It's hard for her when we're apart.”

Valentin closed his eyes, as if trying to clear his mind and think straight. When he opened them again, their bloodshot blueness surprised me. “Okay, Molly. If the hospital agrees, I agree. On the condition that one of my men watches over your hotel door. Be warned, Molly, you may both be at risk now.”

I nodded, swallowing nervously, less about the risk than about the enormity of it all. From fake aunt to real au pair.

He raised an eyebrow. “Remember the break-in to your car? That could be the tip of the iceberg. We still have no clue who is behind all this.”

I thought that deserved another kiss on the cheek, and he didn't seem to mind.

JULY 18, 2015

Blog Entry

I stare at the blank eyes of the caves, remembering the book on my bed, the horrible pictures and the morbid passages underlined in red. Did Raphael put it there? Gazing into the gloom barely visible from where we stand, I hear the drip of water coming from the cave roof. “It's a bit
Blair Witch Project
,” I say, trying to sound cool.

“Oh, it's much better than that,” he breathes, and there's something new in his face, a ripple. “The stories about this place go back to the Middle Ages. Witch hunts. Bad things.”

Another shiver, that anticipation, the opening credits of a horror movie, the ghost story told around a campfire before bed. “What kind of things?”

He leans close, hamming it up. “A man lived in St. Roch in the 1600s, during the great witch hunts. He killed many and the
king honored him, made him Witchfinder General. He heard a story that there were dark rituals happening in the caves, prayers to Satan, sacrifices, murders even. And so he came here with a group of men and they searched the chambers with torches, and found that his wife and children were inside one of them.”

The image he creates of claustrophobia—worse, of familial anger—is so stifling I turn my eyes to the ground. “What were they doing there?”

I hear the flick of his lighter, the gasp of his inhale. “Who can say? Blavette did not pause to find out.”

“Blavette . . . like your Blavette?”

“Yup.” He exhales smoke, which hangs around my face. “My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather or something.”

“So what did he do with his wife and kids?”

“He ordered his men to block up the entrance to the chamber they were in, so there was no way for them to get out. And soon afterwards he married the young girl who was his mistress.”

I shiver again, feeling the force of the story rattle my bones. “Your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother or something like that?”

Raphael nods. “
Exactement.
Come on, let's go.”

In the cave, the shock of the sudden temperature change makes me dizzy. I can hear Raphael, smell him, but the light is so low now I can no longer see him. I start to panic a little, my hands out in front of me, feeling for walls, for cobwebs that might catch my face, ears straining at every drip-drip, every whisper of wind through the dark tunnels I cannot see. My fingers brush something warm. Before I can stop myself I let out a little shriek.

A hand grabs my wrist. “Shhh. It's me.”

I hear the flint-grind of a lighter, smell fuel. A flame casts shadows on the ragged walls around us, glinting off fleshy chandeliers of stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Raphael stares at me across the bluish flame, his eyes black in the dim light. “Some say that the mother and children suffocated in the next chamber to this one. On a still day you can hear them scream to be freed, their nails scraping at the walls.” He crosses to the wall, his light making shadow beasts on the yellow stone. “Some say that the children ate the mother. That they lived, bred, stayed in the caves, that they remain here . . .” He turns around slowly, holding the lighter under his chin like a kid with a flashlight spinning ghost tales at camp. “Your face is so funny.”

I laugh uncertainly. “So if we get eaten in here, it'll be by your cousins a few times removed?”

Raphael shrugs, shucks an American Spirit from the pack, and cups the lighter to his face. “These are stories made up to frighten children. Who knows what is true. Except one thing perhaps . . .”

“What's that?”

“Blavette was an evil man. And I do not believe his evil has died out in our family. Its stain is on us like a curse, maybe, to make us forever unhappy.”

The way he says it is sad. I go over to touch his arm. “I'm sure that's not true. Not really.”

“Who can say?”

He touches his nose to my nose, his eyelashes to my cheek. The lighter clatters down, its light guttering. I switch off my
brain and listen to our breathing echo through the maze of corridors and chambers we cannot see. I don't know how long we are in there, only that I forget time and the world. All I am is lips, hands, skin.

It's only outside in the daylight that I come to, dazed and not myself, as if we'd dropped acid in there or channeled a ghost. We smoke, descending the hill in silence, swapping shy smiles. By the time we find the bike, it is dusk.

“Fuck,” says Raphael.

The loudness of this word makes me jump. “What?”

“I forgot to show you the best part.” He play-slaps his own cheeks, then catches my wrists and pins them behind my head, kissing my neck. “Beyond that chamber is a door to another chamber. Inside are natural gases, ones that can kill people. It is like a gas chamber carved in the rock, a place of execution. People who have tried to go in there have disappeared . . .”

“Disappeared? What the fuck? We were just in there.”

“I know those caves, Quinn. My father took me there all the time, exploring. But other kids, you know, they would go in for a dare or drunk. People started to call Les Yeux ‘a keeper.'” He lets my hands drop.

“‘A keeper'? Like it kept the people who got lost in there?”

He turns around to face the handlebars. “Every last one.”