Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer (19 page)

Fortunately, all I found was a website for a movie he was trying to produce, a documentary about France’s
noblesse ancienne
.

Finally, I forced myself to stop searching for information on the victims.

All I was doing was distracting myself from the fact that these murders had something to do with the Order of the Key … and that meant they had something to do with me.

I looked up the address of the Hôpital Sainte-Marina and then found my way there, first taking the Metro and then cutting through a manicured city park to get to the brick-and-glass building. Buoyed by the fact that I’d successfully navigated the subway, I walked with confidence past the reception desk, pausing in front of the elevator to look at the directory. On the third floor was a department called
Traumatologie
, which sounded like
trauma
, which seemed like a pretty good fit for what Stéphanie had been through.

There was only one problem: the stairwell was off-limits. I’d come across enough
ALARM WILL SOUND IF DOOR IS OPENED
signs in my life to know one when I saw it, even in French.

I turned back to the elevator.

The doors opened and a bunch of people poured out. None of them seemed freaked out, as if there had been strange noises or unexplainable shaking or anything else that might indicate that getting on the elevator would actually physically kill me … which was what my gut was telling me would happen.

Three times I watched the doors open and the exchange of people happen, and three times I let the doors close again.

You have to do this.

When the doors parted for the fourth time, I held my breath and rushed in.

In the almost ten years since I’d been inside an elevator, I’d forgotten basic elevator etiquette, such as — which direction was I supposed to face, toward the door or away from the door? And was I supposed to press the number myself or ask the person closest to the numbers to press it for me?

Luckily, one of the other people hit the
3
button without being asked. And I faced the door, like everybody else.

It was a pretty large elevator, as they go — big enough to roll a bed into if you needed to get a patient to another floor. But still, the saliva evaporated out of my mouth and the tears dried out of my tear ducts, leaving me gasping slightly and completely scratchy-eyed. When the doors opened on the third floor, I waited my turn, fighting the urge to push past a pair of elderly nuns and run out.

It was easy to find Stéphanie once I was on her floor. There was a policeman stationed outside a closed door, as well as a cluster of people I guessed were reporters. I didn’t know what else to do, so I pretended to know exactly where I was going and walked into the center of it all.

“Mademoiselle,” one of the police officers said, putting a hand on my shoulder. Then he said something in rapid French.

I put on my best “innocent” face.
“Je suis une amie de Stéphanie.”

He didn’t answer; he just stared. But the idea was pretty clear: no way, no how was I going to be allowed to see Mademoiselle Cocher.

I held my hands to my heart. “
Très, très bonnes amies
.”

He frowned.

“S’il vous plaît,”
I said.
“C’est très important. C’est de la clé.”

“The key?” His eyes narrowed. “What about a key?”

“Oh,” I said. “You speak English?”

“I never said I did not,” he said. “What is this about a key?”

Whoops. Naturally, if the police were looking for an intruder who seemed to be able to pass easily through locked doors, information about a key would be interesting to them. Time to backtrack. “It’s not a real key,” I said. “But she’ll know what I mean. Please, just ask her.”

He opened the door and went inside. A moment later, he was back. There was a new, different expression on his face. Where there had been contempt, there was now curiosity.

His eyes studied me. “She will see you.”

He held the door open, and I went in.

Stéphanie was propped up against the raised back of the bed and a few pillows. Her right leg was in a giant cast, and she had a bandage on her cheek. I instantly recognized her from the photos I’d seen online. She was quite lovely, with a sandy-colored pixie-style haircut and delicate features to match — wide brown eyes, small lips, and chiseled cheekbones. Even her ears were petite.

She stared at me, trembling uncontrollably. One hand grabbed the bar on the far side of the bed, as if she was trying to hold herself still, but it wasn’t working.

There was an older woman sitting in a chair in the corner, crocheting. Stéphanie spoke to her in French, and the woman got up and left without a word.

Then Stéphanie turned to me. “Who are you? How do you know about the key?”

“My name is Colette Iselin.” I started to step closer, and she flinched. So I stayed where I was and pointed to the dark smudge on her arm. “I can see it.”

“You can? Truly? No one else can.” She held the arm close, as if hiding it from me. “What does it mean?”

She seemed so fragile — I was afraid that explaining my suspicions about
La Clé
might send her over the edge. So I decided to start asking questions.

“Can you tell me about the person who attacked you?” I said. “What did they want?”

“They wanted nothing,” she said. “Only to kill, to destroy.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

She closed her eyes and moved her head quickly back and forth, back and forth. “I can’t say. You will not believe me.”

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

“No, no, no.” Stéphanie buried her face in her hands.

I decided to share what I knew. “Back in the time of Marie Antoinette, our families were a part of a secret society. It was called the Order of the Key,
L’Ordre de la Clé
. Everyone who’s been … attacked — has been from one of the families. I think whoever’s doing this is trying to kill us off because we didn’t die during the Revolution.”

Stéphanie stared at me. “
Oui
,” she whispered. “You’re right. She is trying to kill us.”

“
She?
” I asked. “It was a woman? Do you know who it is? We need to tell the police!”

“The police? They can’t help us. No one can help us.” Now her eyes glinted. She knew something I didn’t, and because she was so frightened, she wanted to frighten me, too. “Yes, she is a woman. She came for me, and she will come for you, too. She will wait until you are alone — and she will wait until you are awake — because she wants to taste your fear. And then she will attack you, and you will not be able to escape.”

“Who?” My stomach turned sour. “Who is she?”

Stéphanie let out a crazed, high-pitched laugh, a cross between a giggle and a cackle, and sat up straighter in her bed. “You know who I mean,” she said softly, staring at me.

I did.

“
Un fantôme
,” she whispered. “Of course you know. If you can see this mark, then you know … and you also know that she will be coming for
you
soon enough.”

I LEFT THE room with the cold, crazed sound of Stéphanie’s mindless laughter bouncing around inside my head. The rest of me felt like a shell, hollowed out and still and silent. I got on the elevator without thinking and rode it to the first floor.

She couldn’t really mean …

That the killer was a ghost?

Marie Antoinette’s ghost?

It made sense, in a twisted way. Marie Antoinette herself had been beheaded. Now she was bringing that same fate to people today. But why? How?

She always waits until you are alone.

Alone how? Alone in a crowd — the way I was alone now, while I walked back across the park? Alone on the Metro platform, waiting for the train? If I, say, stopped to use the restroom somewhere, would she pop into view and chop off my head?

At the image of the two of us squeezed into a tiny bathroom stall, I let out a burbling, high-pitched laugh that made a guy with a Mohawk give me an uneasy glance and move to another seat in the train car.

But hadn’t the queen already found me alone? In Le Hameau? And in the Catacombs? She hadn’t killed me — she’d only called me Véronique.

Véronique, my dearest one, what are we to do?

Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill me. Maybe I was exempt somehow.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was utterly at a loss. I had no idea where to turn, what to do.

There was the possibility that Stéphanie was crazy — that she had always been crazy, even before someone tried to kill her. Except craziness didn’t explain away my dreams. Or the fact that Stéphanie claimed to have been attacked by the very same ghost I’d been seeing all week.

Come to think of it, I’d never even said I’d seen a ghost. Stéphanie had brought that part up on her own — more proof that she was telling the truth.

Back at the hotel, I went to the penthouse and inserted my keycard.

The room was empty and quiet. I took about three steps in, and the door closed behind me with a click that made me jump out of my skin.

Calm down, Colette.

There was a note on the coffee table in Peely’s bubbly handwriting:

Ready
was underlined about four times. The note was signed with a letter
P
that had a happy face drawn in its loop.

Versailles? Yeah, right. Maybe in about a million years, I’d set foot at Versailles again. Even if I had a dress, which I didn’t, I couldn’t think of anything on earth that would persuade me to step foot onto the grounds of what had once been the queen’s home.

But how would I get out of it? Hannah would be furious.

There’s a psychopathic ghost stalking you. Why are you worried about Hannah?

What I needed to do was get out of Paris. Get on a plane and go home to Ohio, where the closest thing I’d ever seen to a ghost was Charlie in the Halloween costume he made by cutting eyeholes in the expensive sheets, much to Dad’s dismay.

The only problem was, we were scheduled to fly out the following night. Mom would tell me to wait it out. After all, it was only one day. What could happen in one day? Logistically speaking, I might not even be able to get on a flight any faster than the one I was already booked on.

It was okay. I would be fine.

I didn’t
really
believe the ghost was trying to kill me, because if that was what she wanted, she’d had her chance. And besides, I didn’t have the mark on my arm. I’d checked four times on my way back from the hotel. There had to be some other explanation for why she was following me.

Still, I was
not
going to go to Versailles. Hannah would just have to deal with it.

I stepped into the bathroom to wash my hands. I was lost in thought, picturing Hannah’s inevitable hissy fit and imagining what she’d say to me.

I dried my hands and turned back toward the mirror.

And then I froze.

She was back, in the mirror, watching me. She wore a simple black dress, her hair in gray-powdered ringlets.

The woman from the postcard.
La duchesse.

And this time I knew exactly who she was.

“Véronique,” I whispered.

She gazed at me without answering.

“What does she want?” I whispered again, taking a chance. “How do I stop her?”

Her eyes turned to the floor for a long, thoughtful moment. Then she glanced up at me and spoke.

“Ce n’est pas seulement le cou — elle veut briser le coeur.”

Oh, crud.

“I don’t really speak very much French,” I said.

She repeated the phrase once more, and then her image melted away, leaving me staring open-mouthed at my own reflection.

I ran out of the bathroom, trying to speak the words as she’d spoken them. I managed to jot the phrase down on a piece of paper, though I was sure I was getting it wrong.

All I had was questions. It was time to start finding answers.

And that meant it was time to get help.

Audrey answered the door of room 304 on the first knock.

“Oh,” she said. “Hi.”

“Can we talk for a minute?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. Behind her in the room, Brynn glanced up from the book she was reading.

“Out in the hall, maybe?” I added.

When we were alone, I took a deep breath. I’d worked out what I was going to say on the walk down there, and even if it wasn’t the best plan, it was the only plan I had.

“So, first of all, I’m really sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I was a little stressed out, and I —”

“You totally mean-girled me,” she said. “But whatever. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I forgot you’ve been taking Hannah lessons for a year.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” I said. “Jules and I had an argument and I was pretty upset about it.”

“You couldn’t have just said that?” She stuck her hands in her pockets. “So … are we done?”

“The reason I came here …” I took a deep breath. “I have an idea. You know how I said we weren’t really friends? Well, what if we
were
friends?”

She made a confused face.

“If you come hang out with me for a while, maybe we can, like, bond. And then when we get back home, I’ll totally be your friend. We’re already going shopping, remember?”

A smile spread across her lips, and instantly, I felt relief.

But she just laughed.

“Colette, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Why would I want to hang out with someone who treats me like dirt? So I can make people think I’m ‘cool’?” She punctuated the word with air quotes and started to turn away, shaking her head. “I think spending so much time with Hannah has actually made you crazy.”

“Wait!” I cried. “Don’t you wish you could improve your social status? This is your chance.”

Her expression didn’t change. “Not everyone is obsessed with what other people think about them.”

Then she reached for the door, and I felt my options slipping away.

“Audrey, please!” My voice caught. It was close enough to being a sob that Audrey turned back to look at me.

The look on her face made it clear that she really did think I was nuts.

Might as well go ahead and reinforce that.

“I lied,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing it as a favor to you. It would be a favor for me.”

“If … I come hang out with you?”

“Yes.” I thought about what Jules had said, about Audrey being a better friend than Hannah and Peely. Then I spat the truth out in one go. “I need your help with something. But it’s … it’s weird.”

Audrey took a moment before she replied. “Weird how?”

“Weird, like really weird.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Weird, like you’re the only person in the world I can turn to.”

She stared at me.

Oh, forget it. I dropped my eyes to the floor. I didn’t blame her.

“All right,” she said simply. “Let me tell Brynn.”

It was like a chorus of angels began to sing. “Seriously?”

“Yeah,” she said. “If you need help …”

“You have no idea,” I said. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

I almost said
I owe you one
. The words made it all the way to the end of my tongue. But suddenly I knew that wasn’t what Audrey would want to hear. It wasn’t about owing and being owed. For the first time, that was really clear to me.

So instead, I just said, “Thank you.”

By the time we got back to the penthouse, I’d changed my mind. The words I’d been planning to say sounded completely nuts. There was just no way Audrey would help me, even if I appealed to her charitable side.

“So, what’s up?” she asked, after taking a second to look around the room. “What’s going on?”

I was searching for a way to tell her that I was sorry, that I was wrong, that I didn’t need her help, when the events of the week snowballed and rolled right over me. I broke down crying.

“Oh, no, Colette.” Audrey’s dark eyes searched my face anxiously. “What happened? Please tell me what’s wrong.”

For a minute, I couldn’t answer. She looked around a little awkwardly, and then she stopped in front of the coffee table and picked up the paper where I’d tried to record Véronique’s words.

“What’s this?” she asked. She read over the words silently, then translated them out loud. “It’s not just your neck — she wants to break your heart … ?”

I sat up straight. “Is that what that says?”

“Well, kind of,” she said. “The spelling’s pretty bad, but I think that’s the general idea. What does it mean?”

It meant that the queen hadn’t killed me when she had the chance because she was planning something else … something worse.

“Audrey.” I said her name to test my voice, and then I looked into her eyes. “Do you believe in ghosts?”