The American Girl (16 page)

AUGUST 5, 2015

Video Diary: Session 5

[Quinn
sits on the edge of a half-made bed in a hotel room. She's dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and seems lucid and alert]

I'm out of the hospital. Yay! I'm in a hotel room now. See?

[Quinn pans the camera around the room]

There's TV, Wi-Fi, and a frickin' minibar for the win. I'm psyched! It was driving me crazy to lie there doing nothing while they came and asked the same questions over and over again. They've left me with this . . .

[She taps the camera]

Why? So I can keep giving the same useless answers, I guess . . .

Yeah, I was really going nuts listening to the bleeping of machines hooked up to me. Staring at four walls painted that shade of green that's meant to be therapeutic, stupid from the drugs
they shot into me. If you ask me, there's
nothing
therapeutic about the color green.

[Pause]

Even less therapy value in talking to my friends. That girl Kennedy—she acted nice, but I saw a clip of her on TV saying she thought I was “kinda quiet.” As in “it's always the quiet ones.” Am I right? Not to mention my other good “friends” who've been chatting with Fox News. I've blocked them all now. And then there's my dad. He called yesterday on the hospital phone and I stood there listening to him, shivering in my gown and slippers while the other patients wheeled their plasma bags by.

He asked me how I was and said sorry for not being there. “The baby's due any day and Meghan's really struggling at Boston West. Inadequate care there if you ask me. Her first child and all . . . unimaginable what she's going through.”

Yes, unimaginable, Dad. I mean, I've not been in the hospital after a hit-and-run or anything. He talked and talked about his wife and her problems and him and his summer school marking as if I was someone he'd just met on a train. I felt this anger well up, like I would burst if I heard any more excuses. Wasn't he supposed to be my parent, to care about me, to save me?

In the end, I blurted out, “Have you seen the news? It's a really big deal here, what happened to me.” And, um, there was this really long, awkward silence on the other end of the line. I thought maybe it had gone dead.

Then he said, “Are you getting all the
attention
you need, Quincy, after your . . .
accident
?”

Before he could squeeze in another word, I slammed the receiver down as hard as I could. I couldn't breathe or see straight. The way Dad said those words—
attention
and
accident
—it was obvious he meant he thought it wasn't an accident. He was implying I did it on purpose, for attention.

[Quinn hits bed with the flat of her hand]

I don't even like attention! I don't want to be coddled and soothed and patronized anymore, not by the doctors and not by Dad. He's not visiting me here, that much is clear; he didn't even make plans for me to come home yet. Though he did make some small talk about my start date for Bryn Mawr. Does he hate me? Did he always? Is it because I like “attention”? Have I always hated him, too? See, that's the kind of question that keeps me awake at night, trying to jog my memory. It feels like when I was a kid and I had loose teeth I was always trying to push out with my tongue. Twice as frustrating, though.

[Pause]

But those memories are starting to come back. I've been thinking about that dark place I was in, with the dripping water. Remember?

A name finally came into my mind: Les Yeux. I think it's somewhere near here. Tomorrow I'm going to tell Aunt Molly about it and see if she'll take me. Dad may be a waste of space, but at least my auntie loves me and I feel . . . yeah, I can really trust her. Maybe if I find that place I'll remember the rest. I Googled it on my phone and it's a real place, only a little way away from this hotel. Speaking of my phone, I've left that thing somewhere.

[Searches]

In the covers? No . . . On the floor, maybe? No, that's Aunt Molly's . . .

[Knocking sound outside the door
]

“It's me, Didier.”

“Hang on, I'll let you in.”

[Sound of the door opening]

“Everything okay, Quinn?”

“Ouais.”

“I'm thirsty. I think I'll go kick that vending machine downstairs. Want anything?”

“Coke Zero?”

“One Coke Zero coming up.”

[Pause]

That cop Didier has a great smile. He sits outside the door of this room playing Sudoku or Flappy Bird or texting his girlfriend or whatever. Being normal, I guess. I don't know where Aunt Molly's gone, seriously. I fell asleep and I thought she maybe had gone out for cigarettes, but she's taking ages.

[She pats the bed, searching for something and growing increasingly frantic]

Where is my phone? Seriously? Where is my fucking phone?

AUGUST 5, 2015

V
alentin's hotel room was reassuringly as I had expected: hospital corners on the double bed, his dry-cleaned suits hanging neatly in plastic—a sand-colored one, a white one, a dark one. An empty Scotch glass and an overflowing ashtray on top of a pile of police files demonstrated how he'd been occupying himself while I was keeping Quinn entertained. God, he was a walking cliché, one too lazy to commute from La Rochelle to St. Roch for this case every day by the looks of things. I wondered if his flat in the city was the same.

When the cliché gestured to the bed, I raised an eyebrow and he laughed. “Let's sit, talk.” He offered me a cigarette and a Scotch. Perched on the armchair together, we smoked out the window, watching the rain run off warped old tiles, dyeing them brown, slipping in rivulets down facades of medieval stone tugged crooked by the centuries. It made me think of the book I'd found in Quinn's room at the Blavettes' detailing the dark
tangle of secrets that tied the family's ancestors to Les Yeux. I unfolded a scrap of paper on which I'd scribbled down a quote I'd Google Translated.

>> The seventeeth-century history of the region includes the notorious story of Duc Philippe Blavette, a Witchfinder appointed by Louis XIII the Just in 1623. Upon Blavette's land lay the network of caves known locally as Les Yeux and one night a local farmer came with a troubling report of satanic ritual murders committed there. The following day, the duc and his men searched the caves and found a woman and some children hiding in one of the chambers. Despite being informed of the fact that the woman was his wife and the children his own, the Witchfinder was pitiless: he had the chamber blocked up, where it is assumed his family died. Not a twelvemonth later, Duc Philippe was wed before the king to a young handmaiden in the queen's service. It is a tale of persecution and torture, greed, and betrayal rivaling none.<<

Women trapped in the caves, the machinery of local gossip and prejudice working against the innocent. I shivered. What was it someone said about history repeating itself? Maybe the contraband phone I had on me, the one hidden in my bathrobe pocket, could help.

I handed it to Valentin. For a moment, he held it nonplussed: the confirmed technophobe holding a piece of random technology. Then he clicked the button and the photo of Raphael and
Quinn appeared on the lock screen. Two tanned kids on the beach, smiling and young and in love.

He glanced at me, a kind of sad tenderness on his face. Despite all the drinking and the panama hats and the irritating chauvinism, it was his sentimentality that made me like him. He wrinkled his brow at the passcode screen that had popped up over the picture. In a fit of hospital-bound paranoia, Quinn had added it, but I'd watched her key in the code a dozen times. Guiltily, I keyed it in for him.

“How did you get this?” he asked as the compact rectangle of metal and glass that contained a teenage girl's whole life spun open.

“The old-fashioned way. I took it.”

He shot me an odd look.

“Believe me, I don't feel good about it.”

He shook his head. “That is not what I was thinking.” He took up a little notebook and Biro that seemed quaintly outmoded, and turned back to the phone.

For a long while, he looked through the contents without speaking, occasionally tutting when he couldn't work out how to use an app. When he'd skimmed some of her blog, I helped him unlock the little secrets of her life: the parts of her Instagram and Facebook accounts that the media hadn't been able to access because they were password protected. They were easily seen on her phone. Finally I led him to the little folder of videos. He played one of Quinn and Raphael laughing and whispering, their faces spotlit by the light of the phone.

“You hear that in the background behind their voices?”

I nodded. “Sounds like dripping water.”

“A cave perhaps . . .” He scrawled a note.
Les Yeux.
The name sent a chill down my spine, reminding me of what Stella and Marlene had told me.

He tapped another cigarette out of the pack. “How do I keep these photos?”

“I think they're all on here.” I clicked on her Instagram. “And here.” Her blog. “And probably her Facebook, too.”

He made a note of what I'd said and handed the phone back to me, a stern look on his face. “It seems bad that Quinn has not shown us this.”

“She probably didn't think it would be useful,” I said, sounding more defensive than I meant to. “I mean, it's the last bit she has of her life, her thoughts and feelings. I can understand how she would want to cling on to it.”

Valentin took out his own phone and typed out a couple of rapid texts. “Perhaps she doesn't understand that the lives of the Blavettes are at stake. If I can discover the reason Quinn was wandering at night in the woods, I might be able to find the family.”

“I'm pretty sure she does understand,” I said, surprised at the sharp tone of my voice. I didn't know why his words made me so angry. He wasn't saying anything I hadn't thought myself. Perhaps that was why. In the back of my mind lurked the fear that Quinn was not telling me everything she knew—that she might have more agency in this strange situation than she was letting on—and he'd just made it seem more true.

A text pinged into Valentin's phone, buzzing obnoxiously. He glanced at it, nodded to himself, and switched off the screen before I got a chance to read it.

“C'est ça,”
he said. “It's done. The team at St. Roch are on to this now, looking through her social media still more thoroughly than the papers have already been doing. I have made a flea in their ear, though really I know it is a problem of understaffing in this rural place. And myself, I am too technophobe for this . . . Instagram.”

I turned away so he wouldn't see the guilt in my eyes.

Valentin rubbed his nose with a sigh. “I'm sorry, Molly. I didn't mean . . .” He touched my hand. “I know how you love her. You're like a mother to her. When I see you together, it reminds me of my own . . .” He trailed off, looking sad.

I took his hand between my own. “What?”

“My wife. My son.” He put his face in his hands and rubbed again. When he looked up his eyes were bleary. “I fucked that up.”

I picked up the bottle of supermarket blend whiskey and topped up our glasses. “Here's to fucking things up.”

He chinked his glass against mine, smiling wistfully. “It was strange to see that picture of your niece and the Blavette boy. On the beach. Carefree. In love. Remember those days when it was easy?”

“Yeah, those days are long gone, I guess. Anyhow, I should go . . .” The phone was burning a hole in my pocket. I had to get back.

So I don't know why I let him take my hand and turn it and kiss my wrist, or slip my robe back to plant kisses on the inside
of my elbow, or unfasten the cord at the waist and push the robe down.

In the afterglow, I stood near the window, my head muzzy with whiskey, my throat smoked raw. The world and its pain seemed far away. I felt unexpected happiness—the elusive satisfaction we all seem to grub around looking for, that kind that feels way too good to last for very long and, reassuringly, never does.
Grab it while you can
, I thought.
Take it now
. Lying near the window, I saw something else I could take—or at least take a look at: Valentin's investigation files. Should I have a quick glance before going back to the bed? I went to the bed and threw myself down next to Valentin's half-covered body, and looked at him instead, listening to the rain outside slowing as it bled its last.

After a while, Valentin sighed and reached for his cigarettes. “Well, Molly, I have not felt like this for a very long time.”

With my cliché of a new man, I enjoyed that most clichéd of moments—lying side by side in bed, smoking and looking at our phones. I hoped he wouldn't feel the need to tell me lies or say that he loved me, that he could leave not-quite-felt things unspoken.

But inevitably, after a while, he seemed to give in to some inner rom-com script, and started whispering sweet nothings: that so many bad things happen in life, but sometimes good comes out of them, et cetera. I suppose it was nice to hear this said in his soft-accented voice in the darkness. I heard his expectant silence, and whispered to him that he wasn't so bad himself and that, in fact, I'd had worse evenings.

He almost pushed me off the bed. “Really, you are a terrible woman. Here I am emptying my heart for you and you are mocking me!”

“Sweet nothings aren't my strong suit,” I said.

“Clearly.” He wound a length of my hair around his hand. “Ah, Molly.
Je crois que je vais tomber amoureux
—”

There was a knock on the door and whoever was knocking didn't pause while we answered. They knocked again while we both scrambled in the darkness for our clothes. Valentin gestured towards the bathroom and I sprinted there, pulling on my robe, shutting one door as he opened the other like something out of a French farce. I couldn't help but smile to myself in the dark mirror, thinking of him tucking his rumpled shirt into his trousers, smoothing his tousled hair for official business. Through the door I could hear a conversation conducted in rapid French. The other voice was muffled, but it sounded like one of his gendarmes reporting to him.

I was slurping a sip from the faucet like a child when I heard the room door close with a bang. I went back into the room. Valentin stood by the window, biting his nails. He looked about ten years older than when I'd laid eyes on him moments before.

“What's wrong?” I said uneasily.

“Molly . . .” He tried to pull me close.

I pushed him away. “Something's wrong and you're not telling me.”

He shook his head. “I don't know what to do.”

“Tell me.”

His face, in profile, was washed yellow by the streetlights. “Quinn's gone.”

“Gone where?” In my surprise I laughed, disbelieving.

“We don't know, but it looks like there was a struggle . . .” He took me by the shoulders too gently, the bedside manner look in his eyes, the dealing-with-the-victim's-family look. “We think she's been taken, Molly.”