Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

IN HER APARTMENT
high above the streets of Paris, Gabrielle Roux stood in front of the bathroom mirror, still wearing her daringly short purple dress and sky-high platform heels. The light glanced off her golden hair as she brushed it and thought back to the glittering party from which she had just come.

There had been at least twenty girls there, and Gabrielle was sure that she had been the most beautiful and most admired. Six boys — at least one of whom had a girlfriend — begged for her phone number.

Of course, she wouldn’t text back any of the boys. They just weren’t good enough for someone like herself. After all, at only nineteen years old, she was already an almost-famous model. She didn’t need to resort to stealing an ugly girl’s not-cute-enough-and-not-rich-enough boyfriend. Once her Italian
Vogue
cover came out, she would naturally start hanging out with people who were more worth her time and attention.

Gabrielle wet a washcloth and gently removed her makeup, patting her high cheekbones. As she reached into the cabinet for her eye cream (it was never too early to protect her porcelain complexion), she scowled, catching sight of her arm. There was a dark smudge just above her wrist. She scrubbed her forearm with soap until the skin around the splotch was pink. When that didn’t work, she used rubbing alcohol. But still the dark stain remained.

With an angry grunt, Gabrielle walked out of the bathroom — and froze.

All the lights were on.

But she hadn’t turned on any of them — certainly not the light in the kitchen.

“Maman? Papa?”
she called, irritation in her voice. Her parents were supposed to be out of town. It would be just like them to come home early and ruin her weekend.

But would they really return at two thirty in the morning?

There was no reply.

Well. She squared her shoulders, tossed her shiny hair, and walked toward the living room. Gabrielle wasn’t scared of anything.

But as she reached the arched entryway to the luxurious sitting room, the skin on the back of her neck began to tingle …

And she knew she wasn’t alone.

Ever so slowly, she turned around, expecting to see a stalker (preferably a smitten, handsome young man who’d broken in so he could proclaim his undying love).

But it wasn’t a crazed fan.

A woman stood in front of her, wearing a long pale-pink dress with a wide-open lace-trimmed collar. Her hair was white and piled in frothy curls that extended nearly a foot into the air above her head.

Gabrielle stared. Clearly, her apartment had been invaded by some sort of crazy person — or was this one of her annoying friends in a costume, playing a joke on her?

The woman’s cold eyes seemed to glow from within.

And Gabrielle realized that something was very wrong.

“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez!?”
Gabrielle whispered. What do you want?

The woman’s silence sucked the warmth out of Gabrielle’s blood. Finally, she spoke in a low hiss.
“La fille de la famille Roux.”

Gabrielle opened her mouth to promise the intruder anything — all the money she had, her mother’s jewelry, the keys to her father’s car —

Before she could speak, a sharp
CRACK
filled the apartment. The mirror on the wall behind the woman shattered into jagged shards.

Gabrielle’s eyes went wide as the largest piece flew across the room toward her.

And then her head fell off her body.

YOU WOULD THINK it would be impossible to lose a large suitcase inside an apartment that was, itself, approximately the size of a large suitcase.

You would be wrong.

I’d searched my room, Mom’s room, and my little brother Charlie’s room (I’d had to sneak in, as things were still pretty tense after the morning’s blueberry muffin incident), and had dug through the unpacked boxes in the living room — all with no luck.

“Mom!” I yelled. “Did Dad take all the suitcases?”

My mother was in her bedroom, trying to condense a walk-in closet’s worth of clothes into her new closet, which was about three feet wide. “No,” she said. “We have the big blue one and the little brown one.”

“I’ve looked everywhere.” I leaned against her doorjamb. “I can’t find them.”

Mom sighed. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she still had to work the closing shift at Macy’s that night.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll call Dad.”

“I know where they are.”

The voice came from behind me. I turned around to see Charlie standing at the end of the hallway, smirking.

“Where?” I asked.

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because,” I replied, “if I don’t have a suitcase, I can’t go to Paris tomorrow, and then you’re stuck with me for all of Spring Break instead of having a nine-day sister-free bonanza.”

“Good point,” he said. “They’re down in the garage.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to figure out if he was messing with me.

“In the storage closet,” he added. “In the very far-back corner.”

My heart fluttered.

“Have fun,” he said, heading for his bedroom.

“Wait!” I stepped into his path. “Have I ever told you what a good brother you are?”

“Nice try.” He moved around me. “Watch out for spiders.”

“Charlie!” I cried. “Come on, please. I’d do it for you.”

He stood up to his full height, five foot six — an inch taller than me, even though I was sixteen and he was fourteen. Suddenly, he looked like a young man and not just a twerpy boy. And when he spoke, he sounded world-weary, like he was the older sibling. “You would not, Colette.”

Well, okay, no, I probably wouldn’t. But admitting that wouldn’t help. “I’m sorry I ate your muffin, okay? I’ll buy you more as soon as I’m back from France. Please —”

Charlie shrugged, slipping past me into his room. “It’s not my problem you’re scared of the dark.”

“I’m not scared of the dark!” I yelled at his closed door. Then I stood in the silent hallway for a minute, formulating a new plan. “Hey, Mom?”

“Forget it, Colette,” she said. “You’ll be fine. It’s not that dark down there.”

Anger flared up inside me like an explosion. “I am
NOT
scared of the dark!”

Really — I’m
not
afraid of the dark. I’m just afraid of a lot of places that happen to
be
dark. What I’m scared of — what I hate — is feeling confined. Elevators, windowless basements, overcrowded public spaces …

And storage closets.

Five minutes later, I stood in the underground parking garage, looking at the cluster of doors.

The ceiling was low and seemed to sag — in fact, the whole garage felt like it was pressing in on me. The sound of water plinking into shallow puddles echoed from the far reaches of the structure, and the waiting cars were like sleeping monsters guarding the darkness.

A train whistle sounded outside on the tracks that ran about a hundred feet from our building. The sound, low and mournful, lent a chilling loneliness to my surroundings.

The key was warm and slippery in my clammy grip.

“Be rational, Colette,” I said out loud.

You are a junior in high school. You are about to spend nine days in Paris, without your parents. You can handle one stupid little closet.

You know how, in fairy tales, the prince cuts his way through the deadly thorned vines, past piles of skeletons, to get to the dragon?

I felt like one of the skeletons.

The third door from the left had
203
written on it in what looked like goopy black nail polish. A gritty coating of rust on the knob turned my hand pinkish red, and the door squealed in protest as I pulled it open and peered inside.

The storage area was about four feet wide and eight feet deep, with filthy cinderblock walls. The sides were piled high with boxes and plastic storage tubs, leaving a narrow path all the way to the back. I stared at the suitcases, which were at the very bottom of the stack at the very far end.

Okay, no.

I would just have to pack what I could into my carry-on and do without a few extraneous items. Like, you know, shoes.

I considered begging Mom to come down, but that was basically hopeless. She was sympathetic to my claustrophobia up to the point where she decided I was just working myself up over nothing.

Dad would get it out for me.
I felt a little twinge of guilt as I thought about my father. I still hadn’t broken the news to Mom that I planned to spend the summer in New York City with him … and maybe stay there for senior year, too.

And then I heard a noise behind me.

Scritch, scritch, scritch …

I swung around and looked for its source — for the first time in my life actually
hoping
I’d see a rodent of some kind. But there was nothing, and immediately I imagined that someone had followed me down here and was hiding between the parked cars, watching me … waiting to pounce.

I could hardly breathe.

Scritch, scritch, scritch.

“Hello?” I called. “Who’s there?”

And then I heard breathing. Soft but unmistakable, echoing lightly off the low ceiling.

Only the fear of being murdered could have made me do what I did next — I plunged into the closet and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I stood in the dark, holding on to the doorknob and wondering if there was a way to lock the door from the inside. If not, I’d just made things worse for myself.

A wave of nausea hit me, and I doubled over. Flashes of light seemed to blast through my peripheral vision, a familiar symptom of what I was feeling — pure panic.

Outside, footsteps approached. Someone pulled on the door from the other side.

I pulled back with all my strength.

“Colette?”

I paused. Was it a trap?

“Charlie?” I said.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I let him open the door, and then I ran out of the darkness, plowing into him. I was on the verge of tears, gasping for air.

“Be careful,” I said. “There’s someone down here.”

“Are you kidding?” He snorted.

Then I realized that there was no psycho on the loose — it had been my brother all along. I went limp in his arms.

“Jeez, it was only a joke,” he said, holding me up. I could tell from the sound of his voice that he felt bad. Well, good. He
should
feel bad. “I came down to help you.”

Now that the fear had passed, I was just humiliated. “Some help,” I muttered.

“Move over,” he said, wedging himself into the narrow opening. When he reached the back, he started unpiling things from the top of the luggage.

“Take this,” he said, handing me an old cardboard box. “I’m afraid it’ll fall apart.”

I took it from him and watched as he unearthed the big blue suitcase and dragged it out of the closet.

He relocked the door. “Are you going to stand there all afternoon? Go.”

I went. “It was nice of you to come down.”

He shrugged.

“I’ll do something for you soon,” I said, smiling at him. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

My brother’s mouth twisted in disgust. “You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

The rattling of the suitcase wheels went quiet as Charlie stopped and looked at me. “You don’t do nice things for people because you want to get something from them. You just do nice things to be nice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And you’re nice so people will be nice back to you. That’s how the world works, Chuck.”

“Your world, maybe.” He rolled his eyes and started moving again. “Knowing your friends, I guess it’s not a surprise.”

I bristled at the mention of my best friends, Hannah Norstedt and Pilar Sanchez. “At least my friends have lives that don’t revolve around role-playing games,” I snapped.

“Oh, right. Hannah’s and Pilar’s lives just revolve around their cars and their bottomless credit cards.”

I could have said his lame friends could pool all their money and be able to afford maybe the hood ornament off Hannah’s Mercedes.

But I didn’t — partly because he’d come down to help me, and partly because, now that we were poor, poverty jokes didn’t seem all that funny. Besides, my insistence on staying at my private all-girls school, Saint Margaret’s Academy, was possible only because Charlie had offered to leave Saint Bart’s and go to public school (which is where he fell in with the War of Witchcraft people, or whatever it was called).

I followed him up the stairs. “So you’re telling me that you came down here out of the goodness of your heart? That’s actually kind of —”

Charlie glanced back at me, over his shoulder. “Not for you. For Mom. She was starting to guilt-trip herself.”

Oh.

Not that we had the best sibling relationship, but I’d liked it better when I thought Charlie had helped for my sake, not for our mother’s.

“Remember to send Mom a postcard as soon as you land,” he said.

“I will.”

“Seriously. I don’t think you understand how important this trip is.”

I turned to him in surprise. “This trip is the most important thing ever. How could I not understand?”

Had he not noticed the way I’d spent the past year thinking and talking of nothing else? How I’d switched to French after taking four years of Spanish, starting from scratch with a strange foreign language, just so I could qualify to go?

“I mean to
her
,” he said. “Not everything is automatically about you. It’s Mom’s way of trying to make up for all the stuff that’s happened.”

“That’s ridiculous.” As if I blamed
Mom
that Dad had a midlife crisis and left her. As if I blamed her that we had to leave our old house and move into a cramped, dark little apartment. None of that was her fault … just like my wanting to go live with Dad wasn’t my fault, right? First of all, given the choice, who in their right mind would choose Toledo, Ohio, over Manhattan? Second of all, I would actually be doing Mom and Charlie a favor — they’d have way more room if there were only two people living in the apartment.

“It’s the truth.” At the top of the stairs, Charlie set the bag down with a
thump
. “She’s dying for you to have a good time.”

“Well, that makes two of us.” I held open the apartment door. “I’m dying, too.”

He pulled the suitcase all the way into my room. As he passed me on his way out, he looked down. “You’re still holding that box.”

I was. And it was a gross old box, too. The cardboard had gotten oily and soft with age.

“Just leave it in your room, and we’ll put it back when we put the suitcase away,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “And, Charlie —”

I was going to say
thanks
.

But he’d already closed his bedroom door.

Not to brag or anything, but I’m pretty ninja-like when it comes to putting together outfits and packing. So about twenty minutes later, I was finished. I moved the suitcase to the side of my room and started to prep my carry-on. First, I found the printout of our trip itinerary and read it over for possibly the billionth time.