Spectacle(59)

“It started shortly after I began doing the morgue reports.” Then, just as she had with Christophe, Nathalie took some time to tell him everything about the visions.

“Of course,” he said, clasping his hands. “Now it all makes sense.”

“It does?”

He nodded. “You once wrote that one of the victims ‘suffered’ before her death. I had you qualify that, do you remember?”

“I do.”

“I knew you were writing from a place of honesty.” M. Patenaude got more animated with every word, like a scientist happening upon a new discovery. “That is, I could tell you weren’t merely assuming—it would have been a sensible guess anyway—but that somehow you knew. I couldn’t figure out how, needless to say, and I confess to being … wary of you.”

She remembered well his strange behavior and how it had unsettled her. Never would she have guessed it was a reaction to her own conduct.

“Apologies if that came across at the time,” he added quickly.

“It’s understandable,” she said. And then, after pausing long enough to collect her thoughts, she told M. Patenaude how she’d learned more about Henard’s experiments, and how she’d deduced that Aunt Brigitte was an Insightful. She told him about the blood jar, too, and how Christophe had since assigned her police protection. He listened, bobbing his head and fidgeting incessantly with his glasses. “When I told Monsieur Gagnon all of this, he explained that Henard died in 1870, the year before I was born. That’s what I was searching for in the archives. More information about that and about Henard’s experiments. I—I need to know how this happened. Did someone else continue to do the blood transfusions after him, maybe something secret?”

M. Patenaude shook his head. “Unlikely. He was very protective of his work, especially when people started criticizing him. He made a ceremony of burning his notes once, claiming his knowledge would die with him.” He walked to the front of his desk and leaned against it. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Tenting them, pressing them against the desk, folding his arms, all in the course of a few seconds. “Nathalie, there’s something else you need to know. I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, but at the moment, I don’t think I have a choice. I’m sure your father will understand.”

“Papa? What does he have to do with this?” Yet as soon as the question left her tongue, she knew.

“Your father got one of Henard’s transfusions, too.” M. Patenaude’s words echoed Nathalie’s thoughts; in her mind she recited the answer right along with him.

Confusion and happiness spun her in a circle, pushed by the very unusual feeling of discovering a tremendous secret that had been kept from her.

Then he lowered his voice. “He has the gift of healing. And I’m forever grateful to him for it. My youngest son had scarlet fever, and if it weren’t for your father, he would have…”

Nathalie’s breath caught as the weight of M. Patenaude’s unfinished words, and of Papa’s gift, rested on her soul. “That’s—that’s beautiful.”

“It is. I have a lifetime of gratitude and debt to pay your father, though he’s too humble to acknowledge as much.”

Nathalie took in the profound significance of that sentiment. She could imagine no greater bond between two people than a life saved, and so many things fell into place at that moment. M. Patenaude’s willingness to give her an unorthodox job for a sixteen-year-old girl. His sense of loyalty to Papa and, by extension, to her. And her own blood tie, literally, to the Insightfuls.

“Somehow he passed it on to me,” she began, almost to herself. “Do you agree? It’s only logical. As much as magic can be logical, although I suppose together with science it is logical, or can become logical. Why didn’t I think of it before? I almost feel silly for not coming up with that idea.” Even as she spoke the words, tumbling one on top of the other before M. Patenaude’s shaking head could interrupt her, she recognized the hollowness in them.

“Insightfuls don’t bestow their gifts on their children, not that I know of,” M. Patenaude said, still shaking his head. His words were laced with empathy. “My wife and I both have gifts, but our sons have no magical abilities. And the same is true for the dozens of other Insightfuls I know, and the accounts I’ve read of still others, so—”

“I don’t care what you say,” said Nathalie, her demeanor stiff as a tree. First she had an answer, then she didn’t. No. She had to be right, and M. Patenaude had to be wrong. “You don’t know every one of Henard’s patients. Maybe some of them did give birth to children like me. There could be hundreds of us for all you know.”

“Nathalie, I’m so sorry—”

She stood up, bristling with annoyance. “We should talk about this again. I have as many questions as you’re willing to answer.”

He opened his hands toward her. “Anything. I promise.”

Now it was she who shook her head. “Not now. Maman is expecting me. I have to go.”

With a nod to M. Patenaude, she excused herself and hurried out of the building. Not until she was almost home did she even remember to look for her policeman, who sat in the back of the steam tram. Once she spotted him, she straightened up with even more resolve.