The American Girl (28 page)

JULY 27, 2015

Draft Blog Entry

U left passport
, says the text from Noémie that wakes me.
Come 2day.

Weird
, I think . . . I cast my mind back to the house, my room, clean and neat and swept of all my stuff.
Weird
, I think again, sneaking out of bed to rummage in my suitcase in the gloom of the scabby bedsit that's become our temporary home.

I scrabble around, frantic, trying to be quiet. I check under the mattress, in Raphael's jean pocket in case he took it. It's gross here. There are pictures of girls on the walls. Naked ones. It stinks of weed and urine. Feels like the cops might raid it at any moment. Shit! The passport is nowhere.

I have a paranoid thought. Could Noémie have stolen it so that I wouldn't pack it, so that I'd have to come back? But why?

I talk Raphael into dropping me there to pick it up. It's not that hard. He has stuff to do and doesn't seem to want me with him, anyway. He drops me a few minutes down the road and tells me he'll come get me in an hour or so.

When I reach the Blavette house, I knock, but there's no answer, so I try the front door handle. The door swings open easily. I creep through the house, up the stairs.

Noémie's in her pink princess bedroom, sitting on the edge of her neatly made bed. She's dressed in black, skinny jeans and black sneakers, a black Metallica T-shirt that must have been Raphael's or her dad's. I have the ridiculous thought that she's dressed like a ninja.

As I come closer and the sun moves out of my eyes, I see that she has a black eye to match her outfit.

I sit on the bed next to her, my hand on hers. “Who did this to you?”

She presses her finger to her lips, reaches into her back pocket, and pulls out my passport, handing it to me. Then she says, “There is something I need to show you.”

On soft feet, we cross the hallway. Downstairs, Émilie's shoe leather squeaks as she moves around. We pause, listen to the rush of water pouring from the faucet, the clink of cups. Noémie flinches at each noise. I can almost feel the knobs of her spine drawing tight. We come to it, then, the forbidden door, the one Émilie said I am never to open.

Noémie pulls out an old key, dark with age. She slips it in the lock, which clicks open too loud. She cocks her head, listening,
then her hand grasps the handle, slipping around because of the sweat on it. It doesn't turn. She jiggles it. The metal squeaks, stiff from underuse. My heart beats faster, louder, more insistently than a biblical plague of cicadas. It's all I can hear in the silence of the house.

I hear a noise coming from the floor below, like the sound of shoe leather squeaking, moving from the kitchen to the stairs. My calm New Quinn self takes over. The one that steals and lies. I move Noémie aside and turn the handle all the way to the right. The door gives way onto thick darkness. The stairs creak below us, the noise moving closer. We slip through the door and I close it behind me, wondering how long it will take Émilie to work out which door we went through. Despite the gloom of the Blavette house, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness of the Old Schoolhouse.

“Keep moving,” says Noémie, pulling on my sleeve.

We stumble on along the corridor, where the shutters are closed against the summer light. I listen for the door opening behind me, but hear nothing. My phone buzzes in my pocket and I duck into a classroom to silence it.

Raphael:
Done here. Where are u?

One sec
, I text, and stuff the phone back in my pocket, knocking my hip on a desk as I head out of the classroom.

From the dark gape of an open door at the far end of the corridor, Noé's eyes meet mine.

“Vite,”
she whispers.

I sprint to her, hitting a race stride—“using the fear,” as
Coach used to say. When I reach her I take her hand and squeeze it. Let Émilie come after us. We will run.

So we go, through the beige doors with their graph paper glass that whip up a dust cloud in our wake. In the dark stairwell, I grip onto the banister, feeling my way down. We are on the ground floor now, pushing forward on autopilot. From where we stand, I see big double doors where the daylight streams in, where the graph paper glass slices squares of sun onto the dusty floor.

It's padlocked. No way out.

A clock ticks on the wall above us, marking down the minutes. I look at Noémie. She looks back at me and I see how swollen and red her eye is, how broken she looks. She takes my hand and guides me towards a half-open door. She smoothly unfastens it and shimmies through the door. I follow. Inside is a computer room, a bank of dusty PCs that must have been abandoned when the school was closed.

“What's this?” I say, panicked. “There's no way out.”

She puts her finger to her lips again. “Shhh, come sit.” She pulls out one of the wheeled office chairs and sits down.

My ears strain towards the door, ready to hear footsteps in the corridor outside. She pulls me down onto the chair next to her and switches on the Jurassic era PC. It boots up noisily, all flashing lights and humming hard drive.

“Noémie, we don't have time for this.”

She says nothing. The PC blinks and judders to life. Noémie takes out her phone, scrolling through the apps until she gets to photos. She hands the phone to me. It shows a screen-grab of a
Snapchat conversation. Well, not quite a conversation—just two Snapchats to me, a video, and a text.

I take the phone from her, hands shaking. “How . . . how did you get this?” But I already know the answer.

“I sent those texts to you and the video,” she says distractedly, her hand on the mouse, rolling the cursor across the screen to a folder sitting on the desktop.
Mes filles
, it says. She double-clicks on it, her eyes turning to me, one bruised closed, the other wide open. “I was so afraid of getting in trouble if anybody found out what I know, what my family has done. I could not just tell you face-to-face . . . but I had to warn you.”

Before the first file opens, I know what I'm going to see next. I wish I could close my eyes.

AUGUST 11, 2015

I
f I'd expected the police to be grateful somehow, to pat me on the head for my excellent detective work, I would have been wrong. As it happened, I'd phoned them on autopilot while Quinn crouched on the pavement beside me, her arms wrapped around her knees. A couple of officers came and poked around the place and took statements. I pointed out the camera and the mattress, told them the hunch that had brought us there, and showed them the pages of Raphael's journal.

They looked at my clutch of grubby notes as if I were a child handing them a crayon drawing and listened to my story in the same spirit. Throughout, I could sense their hostility, seeing Quinn there. I tried to keep her out of it, which wasn't hard because she refused to say any more, even to repeat what she'd said about Noémie being there.

It was frustrating. When I'd seen the video camera—so obviously rigged up for making films of his hapless girlfriends—and
Quinn's reaction, I'd been sure this was the detail that would break the case. Looking around with the gendarmes, I could see I was wrong. Whoever had been using the place had been very careful to leave no evidence of their identity behind.

“Will you at least check out who rented the place?” I asked.

The gendarme taking notes frowned at me. “I thought you said this was your unit, that you were reporting a break-in?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I know my French is bad, but I thought I made it pretty clear I was handing over important evidence in the Blavette case.”

“So it was you two that broke in?” he asked incredulously.

T
HE POLICE COMMISSARIAT
on rue Gargoulleau was an old stucco building, foursquare and wicked to the eyes of thieves like us. We sat in a small room with flaking red paint on the walls. We'd be very lucky, the policewoman who took my revised statement said, if whoever owned the place didn't press charges. Sitting at a plastic table, waiting for Valentin to come and talk us out of the trouble I'd gotten us in, I felt eight years old again: the time Tommy Lutz and I scrawled all the bad words we knew on the sidewalk in chalk, and I spent the rest of the week convinced Tommy would narc on me and I'd go down for it and be thrown in Sing Sing for life.

On the plus side, I had time to dwell on why the lockup seemed significant. As the police kept pointing out, it was just a lockup with a mattress in it. Maybe someone had been sleeping in it—so what? It was all so frustrating. We'd finally found something that might help with the Blavette case. Quinn had remem
bered nearly enough to go on, and nobody believed us. If only they'd seen the way Quinn reacted to that room, they'd believe there was a connection.

That last thought gave me an idea. If my videos had hurt Quinn before, maybe they could help her now. Keeping my phone under the table in case one of the angry policemen came in again, I put the two videos in an email to Bill. Luckily, I'd photographed Raphael's notes before I handed them over, so I sent those, too, along with my thoughts on what had been happening. Right before I pressed Send, I remembered the card that Aurelia Perla had given me. Her email address was on there. I copied her in for good measure. Bill might not be able to get anything together in time, but that woman looked like a trash-news pro.

Through all this, Quinn sat, catatonic, her head turned towards the half-open window of the stuffy room. Outside in the street, there was reggae music playing: the masquerade swinging into its second day. It sounded so festive, so happy, the voices of people just enjoying their lives.

AUGUST 11, 2015

V
alentin drove us to Stella's house without speaking. The radio was on, the top ten, then the news headlines, a local interest item about mountain hamsters as far as I could tell from the chirpy DJ joking and kidding around with the day's guests. He wouldn't even turn to look at me, though sometimes I caught a glimpse of his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, watching me. I got the feeling it had cost him a lot to get us out of there.

We turned into the drive of Mas d'Or. The mansion rose up like a pale face, its eyes half shuttered. As soon as the car stopped, I tugged at the door handle and got out. Like some kind of movie montage, I saw the sunshine and the sea stretching out all around, the roses twining the pergola. It seemed surreal after all that had happened. Quinn, her eyes blank, her lips still sealed, got out and walked inside the house. I was about to follow her when Valentin caught hold of my arm.

“I don't think you should be doing this, Molly. If you poke a stick in a nest of the hornets like this, the bees they will sting you. It always happens.”

I tried not to laugh at the weirdness of his metaphor, especially after all I'd put him through that afternoon. “The bees, from the hornet's nest? You were the one who said there was nothing at that lockup. I found things, important things. No one believes me, so who else is supposed to poke the stick or whatever?”

“
I
believe you,” he said, his jaw tightening. “I just worry about what you are getting involved with.”

“Like what?” I asked defiantly.

He shook his head. “Staying here will not do you good. I mean, take a look at you. You seem to have some sentimental feeling for Quinn, but she is okay. She is free. And remember, she is not your niece, after all.”

“Valentin, I'm a journalist. And this here—” I pointed vaguely in Quinn's direction “—is a story. So as far as you're concerned I'm just like any other hack in this town, following leads, writing words, grubbing for a paycheck. Okay?”

He rubbed his fingers over the bridge of his nose in that familiar gesture. “So you are not going to stop this goose chase?”

“No.”

“Then what is the next place on your list?”

“The hospital,” I said, “to see Noémie.”

He bit his lip, rubbed his nose again. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse with emotion. “There will be a big search in the caves tomorrow, early. The locals are helping this time and
we hope . . . They want me to be there, but I can meet you at the hospital afterwards, perhaps two o'clock?”

“Okay,” I said, “as long as you don't interfere.”

“Interfere? You are infuriating, truly.” He pulled me close and kissed me. I felt his hands on my back.

Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a flicker, as if someone pale and silent was watching us from the darkness of the doorway, but when I looked, there was no one. I pulled away. “Look, I'll see you tomorrow at two.”

Valentin straightened his panama hat and drove off without another word.

S
TELLA LOOKED STRICKEN
when I told her the Jayne Mansfield Buick was parked down a side street in the seedy part of St. Roch. She dispatched her chauffeur and butler to retrieve it and I escaped upstairs to take a bath and avoid further recriminations. I'd just filled the tub to the brim and scattered in some of Stella's hundred-dollar organic bath salts when Bill called.

“Wow,” was all he would say for the first five minutes.

“I know,” I said, climbing into the tub, my thighs turning instantly pink.

“I mean, that's . . . Jesus, I didn't see the story going that way.”

“I know.” I sank down into the neck-deep bubbles.

“We can't use it all.” I could hear him nervously scratching his comb-over. “I mean, we can use some of it . . .”

“You didn't hesitate to use the first video. This one will be just as good and maybe it will persuade people that Quinn is innocent.”

“It's kind of scrappy, Molly . . .” I heard him take off his glasses and polish them.

“Bill, listen. I'll have more by tomorrow.”

“Molly.” Bill's voice was stern. “What are you going to do? I mean, shouldn't you leave it to the police now? This Séverin person you mentioned in your email sounds dangerous.”

“I'm not going to do anything stupid. I just . . . if Quinn wants to stop this now, I'll stop. But if she wants to keep on . . . I mean, this guy she was involved with was sick. I can't see her put in prison when there was clearly more to it.”