The American Girl (18 page)

JULY 20, 2015

Blog Entry

I'm in Raphael's room again. This is becoming a habit. Prickling with the icky ant bites of my raw nerves, I hunt down a pack of Gauloises he keeps in his sock drawer and light the first in a chain of many intended cigarettes.

Snapchat ate the video again, but I can't get it out of my head: that weird, grainy handheld
Blair Witch Project
shit haunts me. I feel like I should have screen-captured it somehow so I can look more closely. Maybe if I did I would spot some clue, some hint I missed the first time around, and I would be able to work out who keeps texting and what they want from me.

Out of the window, I smoke, hand shaking. In the abandoned sports field the burned grass looks pink. The pines that fringe the house are trembling shadows. Further beyond lie older trees, primeval woods that have lain far longer than the land has been peopled. I know because Raphael told me when he took me
there to walk under the darkness of leaves, my feet cracking tree bones under me.

I took off first my shirt, then my skirt, in the belly of that cave and he filmed me smiling and naked. He talked to me so charmingly, teasing me to strip off just a little bit more to show just a little more skin for the camera. I know I should never have done it, but if it happened again, I'd do the same.

I stub out the cigarette and drop the burning tab end onto the patio below, where Émilie will find it later and tut about the fat American girl polluting her household. I turn to the desk, where Raphael's college books and DVDs and cast-off boxers are strewn, picking things up randomly: a Bic pen with a chewed end, a cheapo fake Swiss Army knife, a half-written note on squared paper (a quick glance reveals it to be the first verse of a Wu Tang Clan song, not a love note to me), a textbook on lighting, course notes about François Truffaut in his round French hand. Wherever he's gone, there must be a note, a clue. He'll have his phone with him. So why isn't he answering his texts? There could be something on his computer, maybe. The hard drive blinks on and off, its little blue light strobing as it chats to itself, saving things, updating things. I switch the monitor on. The black screen resolves to blue. Password protected.

I start typing band names, names of loved ones, trying to guess his password like some hacker chick in a cyberpunk film. And then what? I think. Read his private emails, run his college essays through Google Translate for clues? Him not being here doesn't make that seem any better. It makes it seem worse. I reach for the Gauloises, tap out another round of cancer bingo.

I'm just about to give up when a random word pops into my head. Or rather two random words:
Les Yeux.
I type them in and the beach ball spins for a moment before letting me in.

The desktop opens like a treasure chest. A half-finished email sits waiting to be sent. Scanning it, I discover it's an email Raphael was writing to a friend complaining about needing money now that he's been kicked out of uni and lost his scholarship. Looking further, I find more—that nobody knows he's been kicked out yet. That he's lost his Paris digs and doesn't even live where he said. That he's desperate and doesn't know what to do.

As the mystery of where he's disappeared to deepens, I can't help but feel sorry for him. I close the emails I've been reading, carefully covering my tracks by leaving the one that was open exactly where it was, though then I start to worry that when he comes back he'll see the last time the computer was opened. I'm just about to get up when a stray folder on the desktop catches my eye. “Girls,” it says. I double-click. It's locked. I try the Les Yeux password. No luck. I try another. Nope. Probably just his porn collection.

A cough makes me turn around.

In the doorway stands Noémie. I wonder how long she's been there, watching me snooping through her brother's things.

A staring contest ensues. Noé is probably thinking that I'm obsessed with her brother (and she'd be right). I'm just hoping she won't run and tell Maman. So far, so standoff.

I start to fidget with my shirt. Then she says, “Wanna go to the pool?”

This surprises me more than anything. It's like she hasn't even noticed I'm in her brother's room, breaking into his computer, like she doesn't remember Émilie designating this house a nuclear test zone yesterday. Maybe she's finally cracked, or maybe Walt Disney came in the night and swapped her with a robot.

“It's kind of a gloomy evening,” I say, squinting at the dingy clouds.

She shrugs. “I'm bored and I said I would meet friends there. But if you want to stay here with Maman . . .”

I let out a hard little laugh. “Smooth-talker.”

W
E CYCLE ALONG
the fickle road, oily with rain. Under a darkening sky, the abandoned pool looks sad. I see things I haven't noticed before: the rust on the fence, so far gone that it's a wonder the spikes haven't broken in half; the skin of green algae crusting the water. With no bare-chested boys to loll on it, the burned grass just looks sick.

When we get closer, I see that the gates are shut, a padlock hanging from them on a heavy chain. “Um, I don't think we can get in there,” I say.

Noémie shoots me a mischievous look.

“Hey, I'm not trespassing,” I say. “I'm in enough trouble and . . .”

But before I can finish my sentence, a busted pickup with a tarp pulled over the back pulls up and a boy leans out, his tanned, pimply face half hidden by aviators. I recognize Romuald, the lifeguard.

“
Salut, Noé!”

“Hé là.”
Noémie leans in the window of the truck and slips him some tongue.

I look away.

“Come on, Quinn,” she says, beckoning.

“I don't think I should go . . .” I begin.

“Need to go back and look at my brother's emails again?” she says with a giggle.

We sling our bikes in the truck bed and squeeze in the front. Noémie sits in the middle, a long tanned leg straddling either side of the stick shift, Romuald's arm draped over her shoulders.

“Didn't know you two were an item,” I say.

“We're not,” says Noémie with a bored shrug. “But it's something to do.”

“De quoi parles-tu?”
Romuald scowls.

“Rien,
”
hisses Noémie, turning to me. “He does speak bad English because he is an idiot.” She slaps her forehead—
Doh!
—and laughs and pushes the car lighter button down with her big toe. It's that other side of her again, that wild Jekyll and Hyde side, the one that got us into trouble at La Gorda. “Let's go fast, really fast. Like the wind!” She repeats the words in French, her voice squeaky with excitement.

Romuald shrugs and floors the gas. The pickup lurches into action. Soon we're speeding out of St. Roch, along the dark road through the woods. My stomach flips with each bump of the worn tires over the road. The whole thing feels unreal and I can't work out what devil has slipped inside Noémie, making her whoop with joy as we go faster and faster.

Cars that pass blare their horns in warning.

“Let's go back, Noé. I feel weird,” I say, reaching forward to touch her shoulder.

She shrugs off my touch.
“Plus vite alors!”
she shrieks.

Blindly, I hunt for a seat belt and, finding one, disentangle it from the crummy old seat and strap myself in. When the buckle clicks shut, Noé flicks a disgusted look at me in the rearview mirror. Her eyes narrow, as if she's disappointed in my cowardice, my lack of cool. She leans over to Romuald, in one smooth movement nipping his ear with her teeth and flicking the headlights off. I don't know how long we coast like that for: blind and in free-fall. All I know is that, for some reason, I let go of everything. Fear. Desire. Thoughts of home . . . and Raphael.

The squeal of the brakes and Romuald's panicked shout break the silence. I smell burned rubber as the pickup slows and makes a sharp turn down.
One of those ditches
, I think,
or a cliff edge.
Noé screams. I squeeze my eyes tight shut, though in the darkness it makes no difference. We come to a stop. Not the crash I'd feared, though my neck jerks painfully against the edge of the belt.

“Merde!”
Romuald shouts. “
Putain quoi!
This truck, he is my brother's.” He flicks on the headlights, illuminating the disaster. The truck has fallen face-first into a muddy ditch, the windshield cracked, the back tires suspended in midair. When we get out and stand staring at the wreck, Noé starts to laugh and won't stop until Romuald kicks her shin and says something angry in French I don't catch. Then she cries pitifully into her hands like a child and I have no choice but to gulp back my anger and hug her until she stops shaking.

AUGUST 6, 2015

I
parked as far into the trees as I could manage, my flashlight gripped between my teeth. The first thing I saw was police tape slung between birches, as if the woods had been festooned for some macabre local police investigation festival—signs that Valentin's people had already been here, though how recently it was hard to tell. Under the tape, you could see the deep gouges where tires had plowed through the mud. The rain now falling filled them in dingy puddles.

I was five steps through the rough dirt parking lot when my flashlight faltered, flickering on and off in a panicky semaphore. I stopped still, hearing the shrill nagging of cicadas, the sarcasm of passing owls. A moth fluttered up into the flashlight, batting at the intermittent light, looking as incompetent as I felt right about then. I banged the flashlight a few times against a tree until the flickering stopped. There, good as new. The sound
of voices murmuring low somewhere ahead in the trees made me switch it off again.

I groped my way towards the sound, barely able to see my hand in front of my face. I didn't have to wait long to be illuminated, though. A few steps further and the sweep of a white light blinded me. When my eyes adjusted, I saw the white gleam of a police cruiser. Before I'd even taken in the police van and two local news vans parked next to it, I started to feel sick. They'd found something. Was it related to the “sighting” Valentin had mentioned? I didn't pause long enough to start worrying what that might mean, but plunged on towards the floodlights, the yellow tent, only to be tripped over by the knotty stump of a fallen tree.

I scrabbled up, squinting down at the harsh halogen bulbs. Moving inaudibly and mysterious in their spotlit circle, the police looked tiny. I could just make Valentin out by the outline of his panama hat. The moment I thought that, he looked up at me. I crouched behind the fallen tree, noting where the trail I was on swooped steeply down into the hollow the police were searching.

I inched along the footpath until there were enough trees between me and the crime scene to hide me from view, but there was still no way to go down other than at a run. So I gunned it, speeding through crackling leaves and over the stray roots of trees before grabbing a tree trunk to slow myself. From there, I could see that the discovery was a Renault that had smashed into a tree. The hood had crumpled back like a snarling lip and the
windows were smashed, but it was impossible to tell if there was anyone inside it from where I stood.

The doors and trunk were open and forensics people were combing the car and the ground around for evidence. I didn't see any body bags and there was no ambulance, so that was a relief. Maybe it was just a car they'd found and nothing to do with Quinn, after all. As I rubbernecked, a male voice behind me said, “Molly. What are you doing here?”

I turned around to see Freddie. Freddie-the-stalker.

“Fuck,” I said. “You scared the . . . anyway, yeah, I was out for a walk and I saw all this. Looks crazy. What d'you think is happening?”

“A night walk . . . in the woods?” His eyebrows beetled together as if he didn't quite believe me. “Got a cigarette?”

“Sure.” I fumbled inside my jacket for one, flicking a wary look at him. I didn't like the way he had just appeared here, right in the middle of the fray. “So how'd you hear about this?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

Another boy appeared behind Freddie, joint in mouth.

“This is Romuald.” Freddie shucked a thumb in his direction. “We were just hanging here. There's a place in the woods where the kids all go.”

“What for?” I asked, creeped out by the way the two of them stood there, staring.

Freddie cracked up. “To get high, of course. It's over there.” He pointed back through the trees.

“What is all the confusion there?” Romuald pointed down at the crime scene with his joint, looking nonplussed.

“Looks like a woman driver has been here,” Freddie said with a smirk.

“Recognize the car?” I asked nonchalantly.

Freddie craned his neck, cupping his hand over his eyes and squinting against the police lights. “Yeah . . . it looks like . . . Émilie Blavette's. That is weird, man. I have been in that car so many times.”

“What is this, Raffi's family,
quoi
?” Romuald asked, his voice throaty with pot. “Are they dead in there or what?”

“Or what,” I said, chilled by their unconcern. I looked past his head to where a woman in a white coverall was swabbing the edge of the car door. “Would it bum you out if they
were
dead in there?”

“Yeah,” whispered Romuald, looking behind himself as if he was afraid someone would hear us. “It would make me shit on myself.”

Freddie wheezed a stoned laugh. “
Putain.
Don't do it.” He leaned on Romuald but Romuald pushed him away.

“I mean it, man,” said Romuald, sounding annoyed. “Too many bad things happen in St. Roch already. It is killing my high.” As if on cue, his joint went out.

“I guess there is a lot of bad shit going down around here.” I nodded, giving Romuald a light. “The Blavette family, that chick that died in the caves.”

“She didn't . . .” Freddie piped up, his long face suddenly pale. “It was . . . we went in the caves that day and she just went crazy, man. Les Yeux gets inside your head. And so many people they go in there thinking it is cool,
hein
, and they are lost, then.
Monsieur and Madame Blavette, they should not have taken us that day when . . . Those kids only got out safe because me and Raffi knew the way back. The school board should have been thanking us, not discipline and closing the school.” He dropped his cigarette and ground it out angrily with his heel.

I thought about Quinn heading to the caves alone, not knowing the way. I had to help her. I held out my pack of cigarettes to them. “Maybe you could take me to the caves, show me around? There's twenty euros in it—” I smiled at them “—for each of you.”

Romuald's eyes bugged. “
Jamais!
Only someone fucked inside the head would go there now.” He eyeballed Freddie, who was looking more than shaky—sick. “Ever since that girl and Marc Blavette, other people are disappearing in those caves.”

“I haven't seen anything about that.” I was starting to feel annoyed. “I think you're making this shit up, like,
ooh ghosts in the caves
, because it's dark and you're chicken.”

“Bah!” Romuald took the bait, tweaking his jacket on his shoulders to make himself look bigger and tougher. “Ghosts do not scare us. Anyway, there is no ghost at Les Yeux, just some
salauds
who like to hurt people.”

“Yeah, everyone knows they use that place,” Freddie said darkly. “When Marc Blavette went away, everybody thought it was those guys. That Sicilian boss-man Séverin had everything to gain from him going, since he took over Marc's clubs after that. And Raphael was mixed up with them, just like his father, doing jobs for them. The Séverin gang probably made the Blavette family crash there and took them, too. You are
idiote
if you go.”

“Know what?” I said, taking a step closer to Freddie. “I don't believe you, but what I do believe is that you stalked Quinn and saw how that poor girl died. I think you're nothing but a tall bully, but you don't scare me. I'm brave enough to go to those caves, anyway, and soon I'm going to find out exactly what you know.”

“Hey, fuck you,” said Freddie, glaring down at me. “Go into Les Yeux. See it for yourself. You are such a crazy
salope
probably the caves will make no difference.”