The American Girl (3 page)

JULY 12, 2015

Blog Entry

It's midnight. The family is out. Noémie's at a party in the woods. Madame Blavette is on her date with Monsieur Right. I'm alone in the house in the middle of the French countryside, tucked into my lumpy bed that smells of bleach and jam and sterilized milk. A latchkey kid still, just in a different country. Through the slats of the wooden shutters, I can hear cicadas thrum, a thick carpet of sound, unbroken. It's comforting somehow, though I'm almost too sleepy to work on the blog, sleepy and a bit drunk still, from cider and beer and cheap rosé all swilling together.

My phone beeps: one new message. I see the number and the knots of my spine draw closer together. The sweat on my face and chest grows cold. That number. It's the one I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the one you guys all said you were worried about (I remember
loserboy38
suggested adding it to
Contacts
under “Stalker,” but that was too creepy, even for me). So anyway, consequently it just comes up as just a series of ones and nines and fours and sevens. Sometimes the number series sends texts, photos like that one I posted up Thursday—the blurry photo of me sunbathing. There was another: my hoodie up, my school bag on my shoulder, and my sneakers kicking up dust on the road back to the schoolhouse. It creeped me out too much to post.

This time, it's just a single emoji, a winking face. I delete the whole message thread, like always, and at that moment, a notification pops up, a Snapchat from
lalicorne
, some random person I only half remember adding a week or so ago because I thought it was a friend of Noémie's. But they haven't chatted me yet and the profile image is one of those gray mystery man icons so you can't even tell if it's a boy or a girl. I open the app and swipe onto the chat thread to see what they've sent.

I tap on the pink square and a video loads. The film is dark, hard to see, but I hear a noise like heavy breathing. A muffled scream startles me. I grip the phone harder. A girl's face appears, too close up to see in detail. The film is choppy and moves so fast it's hard to take in before the timer in the top right corner counts down. The girl's breathing hard and there's something—a plastic bag, maybe—stretched over her face. Three . . . two . . . one, and the screen goes black, the video vanishing forever as Snapchat deletes it and, with it, the girl.

For a long time after that I sat on the floor. The curtains were open and outside I could hear the constant cricket machine, see star-shine countryside black with no light pollution to reassure me that I was anything other than alone. Mme B says this
place is haunted. I don't think I believe in that stuff, but sitting there alone in the middle of the night, I knew what she meant, like I could almost hear the laughter of the people who lived here before trapped in the walls, behind the brick, the ghost of a good time.

I started to make up explanations to comfort myself—that it's Noémie's doing, a practical joke or some really weird junk mail. After a long while, I reached for the phone, half hoping it was all some weird dream, half wanting to see it again and find out that it's really just a clever advertising campaign for a new handheld horror movie. But somehow I know it wasn't a horror flick clip. It was too real for that. When I do pick up the phone, the video's gone. Snapped into an untimely death in the virtual void, because it's Snapchat, of course. All messages are instantaneous, ticking down the moments it takes you to read or watch them like a fuse on a bomb and then they're gone.

She's gone, as if she was never there, and I'm sitting with my back against the door, typing this on my blogging app. And here's a straw poll: What do I do, guys? Who do I tell? Anyhow, I need to go now, to check the house, to lock the door. Something instead of sitting on the floor, feeling scared and alone in the middle of nowhere, waiting for them to come home.

JULY 30, 2015

A
s I drove along the dusty main road of St. Roch, my skin still hummed from the excitement at the hospital: being mistaken for a relative, the plot twist with the Blavettes, seeing Quinn. I came to the part of the road she must have walked along, the jagged points of trees looming like arrowheads dug from a riverbed.

In the YouTube clip, right before the accident, Quinn makes no effort to dodge the car hurtling her way. Afterwards, she lies in the road, mumbling words you can't quite catch from the choppy audio as the tourists got close to her, filming all the time, though a number of comment threads have speculated on what she was saying. Heading towards the line of trees, I couldn't visualize the pixelated image of her prone body that was reprinted in all the papers. In my mind's eye, she shimmered as she walked out of the forest, her pale fingers beckoning me on to the dark trees.

My rental car squealed around a turn in the road and to
wards the house. I wasn't yet used to driving on these kinds of roads; it amazed me that I could be in town one moment and the next in the heart of farmland, driving down little sewage runnels between rows of squat olive trees or lavender or yellow rapeseed flowers. The Blavette house came after a turnoff for just such a nothing little lane. Opposite it was an orchard, where the apples were growing red and dark and glossy as poison fruit. A sprayer moved between trees, dispensing real poison that ran into drainage ditches and misted the air. This was the place where the American girl had been staying, where her vanished host family had lived for generations—it wasn't hard to find. Google, the great democratizer of freelance detective work, told me where to go for a bit of trespassing.

I stopped the car and lit a cigarette, hoping the air around me wouldn't catch fire in the fug of pesticide. I smoked hard, letting the engine idle while I sized up the house. Like Quinn, it was different from the pictures I'd seen, idyllic shots that must have been stolen from some holiday rental catalog. Paler, sadder, more elegant, and more ruined, it peered from between the trees, a witness to who knows what.

From my left came a rhythmic clipping noise. I climbed out of the car, keys clenched between my fingers Boston walk-to-your-door-from-the-bar style, cigarette hanging from my mouth.

An old man ambled from the side of the house carrying a pair of garden shears. He was ancient and white-bearded, clipping away at the leaves of a vine climbing the side of the house, and
at first he didn't see me. Like some scene from a French Pathé reel, he was timeless, whistling to himself as if nothing untoward had happened in the village of St. Roch. I got back in my car and crawled over the pebbles of the drive, slowly so I wouldn't give him too much of a fright.

He must have been pretty deaf, because it took him a long time to turn around. But when he did, he looked more scared than I was when I spotted him. I let out a sigh, laughing at myself for succumbing to the gothic fantasy the place suggested. He nodded to me. I got out of the car and walked over and for a moment we stood and looked at each other, caught in the embarrassing free-fall between people who never listened in language class.

Eventually I broke the silence, introducing myself in shaky high-school French.
“Bonjour. Je m'appelle Molly.”

“Ah, bonjour.”
The man took off his floppy cloth hat and held out his hand, gnarled and thorn-tracked as my grandpa's were.
“Monsieur Raymond. Enchanté.”
He murmured more words to me in a sweet old man crackle. Their meaning was lost on me, but I gathered from his accompanying gestures that he hammered things here and may have recently cut something with a pair of giant scissors.

“A gardener?” I asked, smiling, “For the family?”

He looked at me blankly with milky blue eyes like sucked sweets. I wondered if maybe he didn't speak English.

And then he intoned in a gentlemanly crackle (twice as charming for being in Franglais), “I take care of school and, as
well, this house while the family . . .” He thought for a moment, then flapped his hands like birds flying.

“Are away.” I nodded.
Take care of school.
I remembered reading something about a school in the reports on Quinn. “You the caretaker?”

I fished for a cigarette so that he saw no trace of surprise or anything else on my face. “When do you think they're coming back?” I flicked my lighter wheel, eyeing him through the smoke. From my years of interviewing people, looking for the real stories under their words, I know everyone has little tics, little tells. For most, it's easier to tell if folks are lying when you know them. But actually, when you've been at it a while, you find yourself cold-reading people all the time without meaning to. You had the money for a ticket all along, old lady at the
m
é
tro
stop—yeah, you. And, taxi driver, I see you in your rearview, and no, you
don't
know the way.

But as far as I could make out, Monsieur Raymond was not lying. He shrugged. “They go away often. Are you a friend of theirs? I only live over there, yet I have never seen you.” He pointed to the primeval forest, its dark shapes gathering form and substance as the dusk crept in.

“You live in the woods?” I asked in the hope of distracting him.

He smiled. He liked that question. In my experience, professional weirdos work hard to generate notoriety—locally he is
Raymond, that crazy man living in the woods.
I bet he's the one who originally spread the rumors about what he gets up to out there all alone.

“On the edge of those,” he said, pointing vaguely, “that very far edge of school field. You look hard you just see my chimney—she's smoking.”

Straining my eyes, I did see it, though before it seemed like just another dark point in the tree line. I felt an involuntary little shiver of glee rattle up my neck at the idea of a childhood myth made flesh—the creepy old guy in the shack in the woods. I'd finally met him.

As if he could read my mind, he said, “Yes, I am there always. Keeping my eyes in things. I see a lot of things here.”

“Like what?”

Tapping his nose. “Everything.”

I dragged on my cigarette, letting the smoke burn and twirl in my lungs, exhaling. “Did you see her—the American girl—when she came out of the forest?”

He looked at me strangely, cutting his eyes at me under snowy lashes. Very blue eyes, betraying a much sharper mind than he let on.

“
L'Am
é
ricaine?
” He patted his pockets, pulled out a packet of Drum Gold, took a pinch, and flicked it into a paper, rolling and licking in one seamless gesture so that the cigarette seemed to grow out of his thorn-pricked, nicotine-stained hands like pale elongated fruit. “Sometime I feel sorry for that girl.”

I flicked my lighter and he dragged hard, cheeks puffing out to show the impressive spider veins of a lifelong drinker. “Why's that?”

He shrugged. “
Sais pas.
Just . . . well, there was something
about her. How you say? Soft? Like a fruit, that you know.” He gouged his fingers as if he were squeezing a peach. “But then I only met her possibly twice.”

“Sweet girl,” I said, smiling.

“
Ouais.
But then so are all the girls they keep here, aren't they?”

JULY 30, 2015

F
or the first part of my life, I grew up in a family that, to the casual onlooker, resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. Dad was a senior partner in a Boston practice who could afford not only an apartment on Beacon Hill, but the beachfront house in Maine where my sister and I spent the best summers of our childhood. Mom was a part-time paralegal secretary and domestic goddess of Martha Stewart proportions. My sister, Claire, and I were brats: she the mean teen homecoming queen; me the band-camp-loving nerd.

The summer I turned thirteen, a letter arrived. I never knew exactly what it said, but I remember Dad's hands shaking as he read it, Mom's angry nagging curdling the hot August air. I was used to their ups and downs. I think I took my bike out for a ride around the coast instead of worrying. In any case, the malpractice suit that ate up everything we owned took its sweet time. It was another year before we'd gone from living like princes
to crowding into my Jewish grandmother's stuffy brownstone, torturing her cats. When she threw us out and we began a stint with my Catholic paternal grandparents in Boston's South End, I began to notice the comments friends and relatives whispered as they sat around the big kitchen table: “Col's losing his way and he needs our prayers”—a Catholic way of saying that my father had gone nuts.

We moved back to Maine, to the northern woods that smell of hemlock and balsam, the setting for Dad's new purpose of refashioning his bankrupt life in the image of Thoreau's. By which I mean that he tumbled, babbling, into Grandpa Swift's old timber cabin on Chesuncook Lake and used what money remained to stockpile AK-47s and all the canned creamed corn you could stand. Out in those woods, while Dad snared rabbits and speared trout, Mom discovered a taste for home-brewed beer and I became a delinquent. It was easy to do since my dad's transformation into a wild-eyed survivalist meant that the materials for mischief—knives, rope, power tools—were all around me. By the time I was Quinn's age, my favorite hobby was stealing weed killer and a bag of sugar and rolling my own fuses from cigarette papers so I could blow the fuck out of the earth that trapped us in that madhouse. My sister—through a rock solid combination of grit and conformity—came out of that life pretty normal. She learned to blend in, to agree, to hide the crazy. I didn't, or couldn't. I've always been the black sheep, though over time, life has sanded the rough edges off me.

On the positive side, Dad's questionable parental supervision taught me three crucial things: how to blaze a trail, how to
hot-wire a car, and how to pick the toughest locks. Joyriding in cars, carving arrows in trees, and breaking into barns to scare sheep haven't been all that useful in furthering my journalistic career, but the ability to pick locks? Handier than you might think. Filing cabinets, abandoned warehouses, creepy
Silence of the Lambs
lockups are not a problem as long as you've got a bobby pin, or in my case a little black bag of hook picks, pins, and paper clips. I pulled it out, ready to take a look in the Blavette house.

I needn't have bothered. My evening's trespassing was made a whole lot easier by the fact that either the police or the caretaker had left the back door open. It was pitch outside now, the stars sharp and bright as police spotlights. It didn't quite look like a crime scene yet, but you could tell the police had been poking around from the big-booted footprints scattered around the floors, the occasional coffee cup left to stain surfaces. Once I was sure Monsieur Raymond wasn't still lurking around, I took a deep breath, peeled away from the doorway, and crossed the hallway to the stairs.

At the top of the stairs was a bedroom. The large bed told me it was probably the master, and the matching rose-pattern wallpaper and curtains suggested a woman had decorated it. I tiptoed over the pastel rug towards the bed, as cautious as if I might find someone sleeping there. On the nightstand sat a framed picture of the Blavette family, when the husband was still on the scene. I snapped an iPhone photo and moved on, flicking my torch over the ointments and powders on the antique dresser, illuminating the dark spots freckling the mirror. Without its people, the
house felt frozen in time, like the ballroom of some lost ocean liner.

I crept out into the dark well of the hallway and walked on, identifying the various bedrooms, all with objects and clothes left strewn across beds and floors. First was what I decided was the son's room, the door decorated with a photo of twenties Paris and a map of the stars; inside, a guitar, a basketball hoop, and thick textbooks. Save the French titles of the books, it could have been the room of any American college-age boy. Next was a young girl's innocent bedroom: a world map dotted with photos of pen pals decorated one baby-pink wall and the shelves were crowded with pony figurines and books about ballerinas.

The guest room was bigger but had less character, its floral walls and drapes echoing the master. It smelled of lavender and cigarettes. Weirdly, the wardrobe and desk were clean; where had Quinn's clothes and things gone? I snapped a few pictures but found nothing more useful than some old book about the history of the local caves and a half-written postcard addressed to someone called Kennedy. “Hey, dude!” it began. “Missing your face. So awesome . . .” My heart sank a little at the way it tailed off mid-awesome, as if something had interrupted the writer. On impulse, I stuffed both the book and the card in my bag.

At the end of the hallway was another door I hadn't tried yet. I twisted the handle. It moved, but the door didn't open. I had just knelt down to look through the lock when there was a noise downstairs, like the scrape of a chair. My hand fumbled my keys from my pocket. I pushed my sharp little front door key between my forefinger and middle finger, straining my ears towards the
stairs. As I tiptoed down them, I heard a noise from outside, a sharp bark, like a fox. Maybe it was that I'd heard. In a place like this, it wasn't surprising my mind was playing tricks on me.

I was just creeping back into the front room when I heard tires gobbling up gravel and saw the lights of a car. It pulled to a halt. The thrum of an engine stopped and the headlights went out. A door slammed. I stopped in the hallway, just listening. A ring tone sounded outside, then stopped and a man's voice began speaking rapid and low in French.

I turned around in a slow circle, thinking about the house, the windows, the doors, the ways out. The only option was that back door. I tiptoed to it, trying to keep my steps light, my breathing calm. Outside, the voice stopped talking and the man cleared his throat. I glanced behind me to see the front door handle beginning to turn.