Spectacle(15)

If touching the morgue glass had indeed untied a memory knot, it should be easy enough to prove or disprove.

Nathalie crawled back to her spot and picked up her journal. She began writing as hurriedly as her hand would move, as if pouring out recent memories might unearth a buried one.

But it didn’t.

Other than the memory gap involving the flowers, she could re-create every hour of the day for the past week.

She had no reason, not one, to think that the experience was a memory. That theory could be discarded.

Leaving her with nothing that made sense.

Maybe, as she’d suggested to Simone, it was something like a heat-induced fever dream. Heat did strange things to people sometimes. Or maybe, as Simone thought, it was a vision.

Or maybe she was going mad and instead of paying visits to Aunt Brigitte, she’d be her roommate before too long.

Nathalie picked up her things and went with Stanley back to the apartment, feeling no better, and possibly worse, than when she’d left it.





7


The next morning, Nathalie was at the morgue before it opened. Even the vendors hadn’t arrived yet, and there wasn’t a beggar in sight. The only other people in front of her were a handful of factory workers in overalls complaining about their boss, a pair of American brothers who apparently found something to be very funny, an older couple with a small dog, and a boy several years younger than herself.

When the doors opened, she glanced at M. Gagnon’s post, which was instead occupied by a droopy older gentleman. She went to the left side of the viewing pane anyway.

“Mon Dieu.”

Nathalie heard the words before grasping that she was the one who’d spoken them.

It didn’t matter that she’d seen the victim twice yesterday and relived the vision in her mind all night. It didn’t matter that she knew there was a second victim and had tried to picture her.

None of it prepared her for the reality of seeing two victims side by side.

She tried blinking it away, as if that could make this sad spectacle of bloodied young women disappear.

The new victim was pale, with a pinkish skin tone, and older than the first. She had very long hair, the color of late-day sun and knotted like a sailor’s rope. Her dress hung behind her, blue and green and damp. Rain on a summer picnic.

The young woman’s face was ripped open; she was the mirror image of her sister in death. Together they were a pair of grisly candlesticks on a gray stone table.

Would it happen again?

Nathalie had to know.

Be courageous. Be brave. Be too brave for your own good, as Maman says.

She moved farther away from the others and put her hand forward. Straightening her posture, Nathalie stretched her fingertips toward the glass.

The touch brought her there quick as a bullet.

Three slashes unfolded in reverse. The blade sank in deep, held by an unseen hand; Nathalie was too close to the girl’s face to see anything else. The knife ripped from collarbone to throat, then lifted and pierced from the top of the throat to the bottom of the jaw. One more time the knife lifted, plunging from the girl’s jaw to the corner of her mouth. Blade and flesh, flesh and blade.

Then the victim stood up and a set of hands pulled back from her. Pushing. Nathalie got farther apart from her, as if she was being pushed away. Running. The girl moved backward, too, both of them running backward down a long hallway with a dark blue and gold rug down the center. Chasing.

The girl’s run slowed to a walk and she turned around, a look of excruciating terror on her face that softened into concern, then a flirtatious grin.

Then it was over.

Chasing. Running. Pushing. Killing. The victim’s realization that she was about to die.

Someone beside Nathalie coughed. She faced them just long enough to see the couple, the brothers, and one of the factory workers staring at her.

The factory worker turned to his companions, glancing over his shoulder at Nathalie as he wiggled between them, as if to get away from her. One of the brothers whispered to the other, and the two muffled a chuckle. The couple continued to gawk; the man put his arm around his wife and guided her away. Then they gazed at the corpses, or pretended to, once again.

Nathalie took a step in their direction. “Excusez-moi—what … what did I say?”

They ignored her. The woman pointed to one of the bodies and whispered something to which the man replied with a vigorous shake of the head. Then they began talking to the factory workers and the young boy about the murder victims.

She pulled her bag to her chest, digging her nails into the leather to steady her fingers.

The guard. Did he notice? Nathalie looked over her shoulder. No, he was examining his knuckles, whereas M. Gagnon’s replacement was in the midst of a yawn.

No second interrogation, at least. And no suppressed memory, she concluded, because to see and forget two murders taking place was very unlikely. She’d already ruled it out, but this confirmed it.

Now what?

Although it wasn’t hot this morning, she could still be hallucinating. Especially if she was crazy, a possibility she gave more credence to by the moment.

She had no answers. Only questions.

One of her teachers had said he’d never met a student who enjoyed asking questions quite like Nathalie. “Distinctly inquisitive,” he’d called her. It was true, or used to be. Right now questions were just vexing worms that burrowed through her mind.