The American Girl (29 page)

AUGUST 12, 2015

I
woke up bleary in my room at Stella's to find that Quinn's bedroom was empty. For a second, I panicked, until I returned to my room and found her curled up under my bed sucking her thumb. I let her sleep, drove down to the
tabac
to get cigarettes. And there my short-lived calm abruptly ended. Covering the news rack like some weirdly patterned wallpaper was the same smiling photograph. It was one I'd seen before—Quinn and Raphael at Les Yeux, him smiling his assured smile, her scrunching her nose up in a playful snarl, both with red-eye from the camera flash. On her blog, she'd joked that the red-eye made them look like devils from the caves. I grabbed a paper off the rack.

“Police Hunt for Victims of Demon Lovers.”
Quinn et Raffi:
Folie à deux?
read the caption under the photograph, leading to a think-piece on page six by the “leading profiler” from before, this time claiming that from his analysis of Quinn's blog and Raphael's journal pages, the combination of their personali
ties must have created a “perfect storm of psychosis,” a recipe for murder. I recognized the photo of the hack who had written the piece: Aurelia Perla. She'd used the stuff I sent, clearly. She'd just completely ignored everything I'd written to explain it. I shoved the tabloid back in the rack in disgust. It tore a little as I walked away with my cigarettes, the tobacconist hurling abuse at me for my vandalism.

O
N THE DRIVE
to the Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse, Quinn was silent, no cracks about my music taste, no red nail polish. Her hair was tied back tight, her face scrubbed clean as a penitent's, or a convict headed for the gallows. I didn't know if she'd seen the papers or not. I hurried her past the
tabacs
and cafés, buckling her into her seat like a child and dumping a bag of pastries in her lap. When we drove over a bump in the road, they fell to the floor in a flurry of buttery crumbs and she didn't move to pick them up. She just stared out the window, biting her nails. I could hear the click-click of teeth piercing nail through the smoke of Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” on the radio.

When we pulled into the parking lot of the hospital, she sat up and cupped her face to the window.

“Look familiar?”

“Why are we here?” She looked flustered, as if she thought I'd taken her back here to be locked up again.

I slung the car crookedly between the dotted lines of a space, leaving the engine running. “I just need to slip in and ask a few questions. Why don't you stay here, eat a croissant, unless you need to pee or something?”

She nodded vacantly. “You won't be long?”

“I'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail.”

I
N THE LONG
, green-painted room where the nuns' sneakers squeaked on the polished floor, the skinny girl in the bed could have been mistaken for Quinn. Her bony knees barely tented the covers. Noémie wore a floppy sun hat over the cuts and bruises on her cropped head and it hid her pale face, the sunken shadows of her eyes. When I sat down in the plastic bucket seat beside her, she looked up uncertainly.

“Who are you?” she asked in French.

I hesitated, no longer as slick and certain as I once was. The truth was I didn't know what to tell her. A lie . . . The truth? That I'd been to a weird porn lockup the day before and Quinn might have had a memory of Noémie being there? It seemed like a pretty thin pretext, even to me. In the end, she saved me the trouble.

In tentative English, she said, “You found me in the cave. You saved me.”

I half nodded. “
Saved
might be too strong a word.”

The nuance was lost in translation. Her pale twig-arm reached out and her delicate fingers settled on my wrist. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” I said. I wished I really had saved her. But looking at her, tiny and emaciated in her hospital bed, I wondered if anyone could.

We exchanged pleasantries for a while, in broken English and worse French. I discovered a sweet girl who sometimes
struggled to meet my eye, quite a different creature from the sulky beauty of Quinn's blog, aloof and cruel by turns. This Noémie spoke to me haltingly, asking me, at long last, if there was any news about her family.

“No. I'm sorry, Noémie.”

She frowned, but it was an odd little frown. Behind it was an emotion other than sadness. Relief. “You know, a journalist came yesterday to talk,” she said, “until the nuns got mad and dragged her away!” She let out an odd little laugh.

“Oh?” I said, a picture of Aurelia forming unpleasantly in my mind. “I'm surprised they let a hack like her in.”

Noémie gave me an odd look, as if she knew more about me than I imagined, saw through me somehow. “She said the police found a locker place where Raphael took girls to. She asked if I remembered it.”

“And did you?” I asked, holding my breath for the answer.

“I told her I did not.” She stared at her bony hands. “But that was a lie.”

“You do remember?”

“I wish I didn't. I wish I was forgetful . . .” She met my eye and I saw something underlying her shy look. A question. Or a challenge. “Am I on these films?”

“What films?”

“You haven't seen?” She put her hands over her face, peering at me from between her fingers. “After our father left, my brother missed him, like I did. And after a while, he followed him into the family business, working at the club. It was easy for him to sell the films to them, to threaten . . . to get money from
girls this way. Then when they went home to their own countries, he would blackmail them to keep his secret.”

“You mentioned the club? Did you mean La Gorda?”

She nodded. “It was a bad thing he did to these girls.” Noémie started to cry. Her heavy head fell into her hands and she sobbed brokenly. Her cries rose and became wails until the other patients started stirring, looking around at the source of the disturbance.

JULY 27, 2015

Draft Blog Entry

He found me on the road. Don't know why I didn't go through the woods, seeing what I saw, knowing what I knew . . .

After Noémie's confession, I'd walked out of the Old Schoolhouse in a red haze. Couldn't think. I ran through the woods, my mind telling me the steps I needed to take: getting my clothes, my ticket, catching a bus to the airport. As soon as that picture had formed, my thoughts would double back to that dusty computer room—how could I leave Noémie there?

She was so scared that if anyone knew how long she'd been in on it all—the videos of girls, the pay site, the blackmail—she'd go to prison. Her brother certainly would. Either way, her life would be ruined. But as she put it, “Now I am not sure I would mind that very much.”

I had to help her somehow—like she'd tried to help me with the Snapchats. I was up to my neck in all this. We both were.

Raphael leaned out the low-slung window, yelling like an angry cabdriver. “I waited outside. Maman went crazy at me. Where were you?”

“Didn't see you,” I said lamely, eyeing the distance to the tree line, trying to picture the town I couldn't quite make out on the horizon.

“Fuck, Quinn.” He slammed his hands down on the steering wheel.

I kept walking, my feet moving as fast as they could without actually running.

He followed me at a crawl, the wheels crunching the road, right on my heels. The next time he spoke his voice was different, even and inviting, that voice that only a couple of weeks ago I thought was the only one he ever spoke in. “C'mon, babe, get into the car. We'll go to the woods, have some beer, a little party, then tomorrow you fly. God, I'm gonna miss you soooooo much. Gonna miss your eyes . . .”

And still I kept walking, steady, eyes on the road in front of me, closing my ears to everything he said.

I heard the engine rev, felt the air rush as the car swerved around. Relief came, tsunami-style. Maybe he was going to leave me alone. Then he stopped, just a little way ahead of me, and I saw the light glint off a piece of white paper.

“My e-ticket.”

“I printed it out for you.” Raphael smiled. “See, I can be a nice and helpful boyfriend sometimes.”

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing for it, falling forward as the car inched out of my reach.

“Not so hurrying, Quinn. You'll get it when you get in.” The e-ticket vanished inside.

“I don't need it, anyway. I can just ask for another at check-in,” I said, brushing the road off my jeans.

The car stopped. “Come on, babe. What do I have to do to prove that I love you? Don't be so hard on me . . . I'm trying.”

Don't judge me, even if I seem like one of those girls who goes back to him over and over again. I was so tired, so confused, after days of pills and crazy and not sleeping. It was hard to think of what to say when Raphael looked at me that way. I thought we'd be in the car five minutes, then Stella's, then the airport, like some montage at the end of a Disney film. I didn't know we'd still be creeping around on a full tank of gas hours later trying to lose some car on our tail. Raphael says it's an undercover cop car. He knows from the dark glass. Other times he says it's Séverin. He's smoked more in the past hour than most people do their whole lives.

Night is falling, but when I look in the wing mirror, I still see the car with the dark glass a few meters behind. I've started to think Raphael's right. We are being followed, but the way it's happening fills me with dread. Surely if it were the police, they'd have stopped us by now? And if not the police . . . ? The road sprawls like hair, cut loose and held high by the witch. We drive into a fire-engine sunset that will take your days-long hangover and raise you a brain aneurysm, take your pounding head and run it through a wood-chipper
Fargo-
style. The radio plays the
French charts. Three months into my stay, I knew every verse of French rap, every bridge to a Johnny Hallyday song.

Raphael smokes furiously and flings Gitanes at me without sparing me a look. He drives with one hand on the wheel, the other fidgeting with something under his coat. Something tells me that it's a gun and I wonder which would be worse, to be stopped by whoever's in the car, or to keep on with him in this frame of mind.

I know now that he is broken beyond repair. I didn't see it at first, or for a long time, but now I see nothing else. Something is wrong with every part of him, or rather with the way the parts don't fit together: the sweet smile, the cute broken English, the way he acts easygoing but is actually pulled tighter than a garrote wire. Something happened to him when his dad disappeared, to his whole family, and they cannot come back from it. I thought I was broken after my mom died, but the Blavettes could run circles around me in the dysfunction department. They have me beat.

I could ask why he's keeping me with him, but I don't want to hear him speak the words in my head: that somehow he knows what I know and he doesn't want me to tell.

AUGUST 12, 2015

I
moved near to Noémie on the bed, trying to calm her, but she was beyond me, somewhere else entirely. On the edge of my vision, I saw the gray forms of habits approaching along the ward. In a moment, I would look up and see the angry face of Sister Eglantine, who would be incredulous to see me here in her hospital again, causing more trouble.

“Noémie,” I whispered, “Quinn's here. She remembers things. She told me—”

Noémie stopped wailing and looked up through a haze of tears. “Quinn is here?”

I expected her to really freak out then, like she had in the caves, but her response surprised me far more. “Can I see?” she asked in a childlike voice.

“We need you to go now,” said a voice from the foot of the bed. “You're upsetting her.” It wasn't Sister Eglantine. It was one of
her jackbooted lackeys. I remembered this one throwing me out on my ear once before.

“Of course, Sister,” I said, flashing her a big, fake smile, but before I got up from the bed, I whispered in Noémie's ear. “She's in the parking lot in a black Buick. I'll wait until you come out.” I walked away, looking over my shoulder at the tiny shape in the bed, the one slowly shrinking from view.

In reception, I stopped, my attention caught by a strange scene. All the patients waiting to be treated were crowded around the television in the corner. The nurses and doctors, too. Even the receptionist had left her post to go investigate. The crowd was so dense I couldn't see or hear the TV at the center of it. Whatever was on must have been compelling stuff.
Well,
good
, I thought. This way Noémie could sneak out and go talk to Quinn. I was curious to see what effect bringing the two of them together might produce.

I was about to walk out to the parking lot when I saw the silhouette of a panama hat in the light flooding in from the entrance. Valentin walked towards me, a grim expression weighing down his cherubic face. When he saw me, he took off his hat and ran a hand through his blond curls. He came to rest about a foot away from me, his eyes downcast, his lips twitching. I remembered then how he had spent the morning—part of one last futile search party through Les Yeux. I imagined their flashlights glowing, their voices echoing through the maze of tunnels. It must be a bleak feeling to have to give up on people like that, to leave them lost somewhere.

“So you have seen Noémie?” he said distractedly. He sounded out of breath.

“I did. We talked until the nuns booted me out.”

“And—” he flicked a look around the waiting room, his eyes resting briefly on the crowd around the television “—did she seem okay?” His forehead shone with sweat.

I laid my hand across it. “You're feverish,” I said. “What's wrong?”

He swallowed hard. “We found the Blavettes,” he said, seeming amazed at his own words. His eyes pricked with tears and he wiped them away.

I was too shocked to feel anything. “That's amazing,” I said, my brain not really processing the words. “Will they be okay?”

He shook his head. “No, Molly . . . you don't understand. We found two bodies in the caves this morning and we have not identified them yet . . . but we think it may be Émilie and Raphael. I just went in the ambulance to the hospital morgue and then I came here, as we agreed.” He looked around again distractedly. “Where's Quinn?”

“Out in the car,” I said. “She didn't feel like—”

His eyes bugged. “We must go get her in this very moment.”

“And tell her, I know. But wait—”

“No.” He grabbed me by both arms, shaking me. “I don't want her to find out by the radio or something. I have to be with her when—”

“When what?” His panic was spreading through me, shocking me out of my numbness.

“They are planning to arrest her again, Molly, for the murder of the Blavettes.”

We ran outside, but it was too late. The Buick was gone. Quinn must have heard it on the radio, just as Valentin had feared.

There was worse to come. When we checked the ward, we found Noémie was gone, too. Ever the bad influence, I'd encouraged her to sneak out and she had. She'd even managed to creep past Valentin and me, too caught up in each other to see her.

There was only one conclusion to make: that Quinn had driven off with her. I called and called, but Quinn wouldn't pick up her phone. I could only imagine how scared she must be, her worst fears having come true.