Spectacle(21)

Then she reached one written just yesterday according to the date. That entry she read three times.

It was her handwriting. It was her style of storytelling, her use of words. The descriptions, which dove into everything she’d experienced this summer in minute detail, were certainly hers.

Yet she didn’t recall writing a single word of it.

Nathalie wanted to hurl the journal across the room. No, throw it out the window. Or hold it over the candelabra and burn it. Or toss it into the Seine on her way to the morgue tomorrow. She could buy another journal. And maybe she should, because this one betrayed her, played a cruel game with her memory. After all the secrets she entrusted to it, the journal deceived her.

For now, however, she buried it under a pillow behind Stanley.

She walked her mind through the previous day, step by step, the way you’d guide a child across a rock-strewn creek. Then she encountered the gap.

During the night she’d gone up to the roof to escape the thought cage her dark, quiet room had become. She remembered sitting down on the roof and then …

Nothing again until this morning.

Oh goodness. She’d posted a letter to Agnès this morning. A letter she couldn’t remember writing, just like the journal entry.

What did I say?

The bridge spanning the time on the roof and waking up had crumbled away.

As to why she couldn’t remember … well, why couldn’t she remember the bouquet? That first episode in the morgue yesterday, whatever she’d seen or imagined or dreamed up, had shaken her up more than she knew.

Then it’d happened again today in the morgue, and now she wondered if she could trust her own mind. Was she really followed tonight, or had her brain distorted that, too?

She reclined on the sofa, closing her eyes. Somehow she needed to anchor herself in a truth, any truth. It all came back to the morgue. Either her visions reflected reality or they didn’t.

Again and again she called up the memories of what she’d seen for each victim. After a while, Nathalie fell into that strange place between thought and dreams.

Instead of hazy thoughts, she found clarity.

She sat upright, startling both herself and Stanley.

The silver ring. It was a minor detail from her second episode at the morgue, something that had eluded her focus. Until now.

In the vision, the girl had been wearing a simple silver band on her right little finger.

When the first victim was found, there had been two accounts in the newspaper. One was Nathalie’s column about the morgue. The other was a report about the girl’s death—where she’d been found and when, what she was wearing, whether anything had been in her pockets, how long she appeared to be deceased. Tomorrow’s edition would have the same account for the second victim. That was the standard procedure for all the bodies on display.

If the ring was mentioned, then what she was seeing was real. Not because Simone said so, and not because Nathalie would prefer a supernatural explanation to madness. Not because, if she allowed herself to think about it, maybe even indulge in it, there was something powerful about it. Purposeful. Special.

It would mean she’d arrived at a truth. A mysterious one, but a truth all the same.





10


Nathalie woke up later than usual the next morning and rushed to get dressed. She was hurrying to the kitchen to get something for breakfast when the headline stopped her like a stone pillar.

First Murder Victim Identified



Maman sat in Papa’s well-worn burgundy chair reading the newspaper. Nathalie came up behind her, resting her hands on the leather. It smelled of Papa’s pipe and the spicy balm he bought in Morocco and wine and everything else that was Papa. She couldn’t wait for him to come back.

“The girl was a nanny from Giverny,” Maman said, adjusting her green robe. “Visiting Paris on holiday. Alone.”

“A nanny. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“What?”

Nathalie bit her lip. She probably shouldn’t admit to Maman that she tried imagining what the victims had been like, who they were, what their stories had been. It would only add to Maman’s concerns about the morgue assignment. “Some people at the café said maybe she was a streetwalker. What was her name?”

“Odette,” Maman said, putting her finger on the name. “Odette Roux.”

Nathalie crossed over to the kitchen and sliced some bread. Something was unusual about that name. It sounded—familiar, somehow. Yet the only Odette she knew was a little girl who lived down the street.

Or maybe it was that a certain comfort existed in hearing the name. A name, any name, besides “the girl” or “the first” or “Victim #1.” She was Odette with the freckles and the pink dress who tucked in little ones and sang them nursery rhymes. Odette who played hide-and-seek, standing in closets and ducking behind wardrobes as children searched for her. Odette who dried the tears of a little boy who skinned his knee. That’s who she would be to Nathalie.

Maman folded the newspaper and put it under her arm as she stood up. She walked over to the kitchen window, her eyes following a bird that tottered along the sill to avoid the rain. “I’m going to the morgue with you. Then I’d like us to visit Aunt Brigitte.”

Nathalie’s heart sank before bobbing like a cork. “Why?”