Spectacle(89)

Nathalie suddenly felt dizzy. This couldn’t be real. She couldn’t be standing in the apartment of the Dark Artist’s companion. In fact, she shouldn’t be. The police should be here, not the three of them.

“You didn’t have to investigate,” said Nathalie. “You could have gone right to the police. Even if it didn’t turn out to be accurate. They get false leads all time.”

Louis put his hands on his hips. “Now where would the fun in that be? Worry none. If this plan of mine fell through this evening, I had every intention of going to the police in the morning. But I figured some evidence might help to back up my theory.”

Nathalie was both aggravated and impressed with him for devising this scheme. He was much more clever than she’d perceived. She’d taken him as a poet with an interest in the occult. Beneath all that flamboyance was a shrewd, observant mind.

She turned to Simone, but Simone wasn’t listening. She was transfixed by the jars. “This is it. Proof of her involvement. Look—look at those jars. Girl #2. Girl #3. Girl #1 is missing, but the rest correspond. All dated this summer. What else could it be?”

Agnès’s blood. There. In a jar, like a science experiment or natural history museum exhibit.

Nathalie’s finger trembled as she touched the one labeled Girl #5. “Agnès was Agnès, not Girl #5.”

“I’m sorry,” said Simone, stroking Nathalie’s back. “I’m sorry you had to see it and think it.”

They searched in silence for a few minutes. Nathalie joined Louis at the bookshelf as he pointed out the science books he’d brought her. She wasn’t listening to him, however. She was trying to find Ovid. “What if she’s working with whoever sent the letter? Or sent it herself?”

“For what, though?” asked Simone. “She could just disappear and no one would ever know she was collecting blood with the Dark Artist.”

“No one does.” Louis pulled out a book and leafed through it. “Yet.”

The books were mostly science books, a few philosophy, and a handful of novels. Virgil’s Aeneid, a volume of Cicero’s works. No other ancient Roman literature.

Nathalie’s eyes danced around the room. She walked over to a wooden cylinder desk and rolled back the curved cover. To the left stood a framed carte de visite, the small photograph slightly faded with a tattered corner. A pretty, dark-haired young woman sat in a chair; a slim, older man who resembled her stood behind. Zoe and her father, presumably, or an uncle? Nathalie picked it up to show Louis. “Is this her?”

He examined the photograph. “Her face is leaner now and she wears her hair up, but yes. That’s her.”

Simone came over for a look. “Pretty girl,” she said, tracing the outline. “I wonder if her father, or whoever that is, warned her about murderous men?”

“Or imagined she would grow up to collect bottles of blood.” Nathalie returned the carte de visite to its place, her feelings vacillating between disbelief and disgust. She couldn’t reconcile this image of Zoe with the grim peculiarity of the apartment. The girl in the photo could have been a schoolmate, a friend to her and Agnès. Instead she was an inscrutable woman, obviously unhinged, who preferred jars filled with the blood of murder victims to figurines made of Limoges porcelain.

Nathalie scoured the desk. Envelopes, receipts, scraps of paper, financial documents, and two notebooks, all in neat piles, took up the rest of it. She began thumbing through a notebook when Louis walked over to one of the jar-lined shelves.

“So we know she was an accomplice,” he said. He plucked a bottle marked “Mine, +1, with laudanum” off the shelf and slipped it into his pocket. Casually, as if breaking into someone’s apartment and taking a blood jar off the shelf was a perfectly normal thing to do. “And we know she experiments with blood somehow. But we don’t know how or why.”

Footsteps came down the outside hall. Nathalie held her breath.

“It’s not her,” said Louis, waving his hand. “She won’t be back for hours. She’s at a séance.”

Simone narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”

“Because there is indeed a séance tonight—one of my acquaintances is the host, and I arranged for him to use the back room of The Quill. I saw the guest list a few days ago, and she was on it.” He tapped his fingertips together. “She won’t be back until late tonight.”

Nathalie felt an unexpected stab of disappointment that they themselves weren’t at the séance. What if she could have contacted Agnès?

She returned to the notebooks. The first one appeared to involve banking—numbers involving dollar amounts and transactions. The second, with faded ink and yellowed pages, contained symbols she’d never seen before and extensive notes. The penmanship alternated between long, flowing script and crisp, narrow text; it had to be that of two people. “Who is this woman?”

“Madame la Tuerie,’” said Simone after a pause. Madame of the Massacre. “I’m going to call her that. Never mind Klampert.”

“Brilliant,” said Nathalie, wishing she’d thought of it.

They started walking toward the bedroom when Nathalie spotted a table covered in lace and red silk at the end near the dining area. In the center of the table, surrounded by three unlit pillar candles, was a statue of a Roman centurion holding a lance in one hand and a crucifix in the other. A prayer book rested near the edge of the table.