Not with Agnès. Her death was never placed into a compartment under the guise of duty. Nor could Nathalie separate herself, or her ability, from it.
If it weren’t for my power, I would never have been targeted and Agnès never would have been seen. Never would have been selected out of spite. Never would have fallen into the trap laid by my Insightful ability.
That sentiment was constant, water on the cusp of boiling.
The omnibus came to a stop. They stepped off into an already-thick crowd in front of Notre-Dame. “Shall I go right to Christophe or go through the morgue first?” Nathalie asked as they walked across the square in front of the cathedral. Her eyes found St. Denis on the façade, holding his own head. She’d seen it so many times before and felt nothing. Today, her stomach rippled like the Seine after a storm.
Simone evaded a tourist with his eyes on a map rather than his path. “The body may not even be out, but we should look anyway.”
“Have they ever done that?” Louis made a chopping gesture. “Put out a headless body?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” said Nathalie.
Would the morgue display a headless body?
Or just a head?
“Ugh, everything about this makes me squeamish,” Simone said, echoing Nathalie’s very thoughts. “I still want to see it … I think.”
The queue at the morgue was bulging with tourists like all the other queues at all the other venues in the city. The morgue, famous as much for identifying bodies (its official purpose) as for entertainment (the reason most people came), was in the guidebooks alongside the museums, the Catacombs, monuments, public gardens, and everything else that comprised Paris. After the Exposition ended in autumn, the crowds would still be here for the morgue. Nathalie couldn’t imagine a time when they wouldn’t be.
Mme. Valois was selling one bouquet of flowers after another, and the food vendors were all in the midst of transactions. When the lines weren’t long, Nathalie often stood in them because watching people fascinated her. She had the option of entering whenever she chose, much to the dismay of others in the queue. (“What’s this, morgue nobility?” was her favorite overheard comment.) She was no longer merely the anonymous morgue reporter. She was also Nathalie Baudin, Insightful adviser to the police. She’d come to know everyone who worked at the morgue, and, if not quite friends, they were comfortable familiars: the guards, fastidious M. Arnaud (with an equally fastidious mustache) and good-natured M. Soucy with a bulbous nose that somehow suited him; M. Cadoret, who stood watch from behind the morgue glass with placid cordiality; and stern Dr. Nicot, whose smile only made rare appearances.
Today the guard both inside and out was M. Arnaud, who waved in Simone and Louis with mild exasperation, as if letting in all three of them at once was a burden too great to bear.
They stepped inside amidst grumblings in several tongues. Nathalie let her eyes adjust to the dimness, then moved closer to the viewing pane. M. Cadoret stood beside the black velvet curtain in the display room, rubbing his eyes beneath round glasses that seemed too small for his broad face. He winked in acknowledgment when he spotted her.
Twelve corpses lay on the slabs, eight men and four women. A gray lace dress next to a woman missing a foot. A threadbare suit beside a man with jaundiced skin. A floral blouse and skirt for a young, emaciated woman covered with sores.
Not one of the bodies was without a head.
Other than the removal of a man’s body that had smelled as if he’d bathed in wine before being found dead on a stoop, nothing had changed since the previous day.
“Same as yesterday, other than the removal of the drunkard,” said Nathalie. “Must be in Autopsy.”
Louis tapped the glass. “Or maybe they won’t put it out until they’ve got the head.”
A short woman in front of them whirled around. Even in the opaque darkness, her horror was evident. All three of them looked away.
“We’ll meet you on the bridge,” said Simone, hooking Louis through the elbow and accompanying him to the exit.
Nathalie went to the wooden door separating the display room from the rest of the morgue. The familiar, hideous Medusa on the door glared as she knocked.
Footsteps approached from the other side. The hinge grunted as the heavy door opened.
A slender young man with a single-dimpled smile greeted her. “Good morning, ma colombe!”
Jules? What was he doing here? Maybe Christophe didn’t call them here for the headless body.
“You look bewildered. I know Monsieur Cadoret often answers the door, although not by calling you his dove. Or does he?” Jules said, stroking his chin.
Nathalie crossed the threshold and gave his hand an affectionate pat. “Not once,” she said. She peeked around him, as if she expected to find a headless corpse in the corridor. “I didn’t mean to be abrupt. I appreciate the humor, but I—I didn’t anticipate seeing you here.”
Jules’s grin fell away as he raised a brow. “Why not?”
“Is Christophe in his office?”
“He is.” Jules brushed aside the chestnut waves that tumbled across his forehead. “Something’s happened. What?”
“Come, I’ll explain it to both of you.” Nathalie strode down the hall and into the office, Jules trailing her. Christophe was at his desk, affixing a corpse photograph into the documentation book.
“You’re here sooner than I thought,” he said, amiable as usual. “We have a most unusual case this morning. But first, how was the Palais des Beaux-Arts? I’ve not yet been.”
Nathalie glanced from Christophe to Jules and back. “Horrid. And I thought that’s why you called me here. I—I expected … Mon Dieu, I can’t believe I’m saying this.” She gathered her dress and sat in a chair. There were two now, ever since Jules had joined them. “I thought I’d see a headless body.”
Behind her, Jules’s breath caught, the quick trim of a wick. Christophe stared at her, unblinking.
“I apologize for sounding blunt. There’s no elegant way to convey such news.”
She straightened her arms and pushed her palms into her knees. After a lengthy exhale, she told them what had happened. Jules settled into the chair beside her, wringing his hands. Christophe put on his staid police liaison demeanor (except when she mentioned touching the head, whereupon he grew visibly concerned) and when Nathalie finished, he closed the documentation book. He and Jules made eye contact; suppressed disquiet passed between them.
“What is it? Clearly you’re both thinking the same thing.” Nathalie gestured to each of them.
“There’s been a strange coincidence.” Christophe reached for some paper and made some notes. “What you described would be upsetting in its own right, and your presumption that we had the rest of the body is a valid one. However, that’s not why I called you here so early.”
He and Jules shared another tacit look.
“It’s not a body at all,” Jules said, his voice quieter with each word. He rested his hand on the arm of her chair. “It’s another head. A woman’s. Neatly severed.”
Nathalie’s hand went to her throat, her fingers riding the smooth undulation of a swallow. “Like from a guillotine.”
Christophe leaned back. “Dr. Nicot made that observation during the autopsy and was puzzled by it, as you might suppose. Yet your vision bears that out, not to mention the location. A pair of Exposition groundskeepers found the woman’s head at daybreak.”
“Where?”
“The Fontaine de Coutan. Affixed atop a bird’s nest, which was floating on a sizeable plant—possibly something from outside the Pastellistes building.” The pastel arts building, near the Monaco Pavilion they’d passed this morning, had showy, exotic greenery. “The head also had la coiffure à la Titus.”
Jules bit his lip. “And … a white scarf.”
The walls seemed to liquify ever so slightly in Nathalie’s periphery. The fountain she and Louis had used to rinse blood from their hands. Then the children. Those children sub
merging their hands in the same water that had swirled around a decapitated head and cleansed the stains of another.
Not one victim’s blood. Two. Did those children get a trace of blood on their fingertips, wipe it on their clothes as they skipped away from the fountain?
How many other tourists would do the same today?
Nathalie balled her hands into fists. The head on the pedestal had seemed like a tragic joke, barbaric but … singular. Never, never did she imagine two.
Who could?
“We were there,” she said, her voice small and faraway. “That’s where I met Simone and Louis. Afterward, we went back there, and I wrote everything down, and we washed blood from our hands, and—and this family with children…”
She let go of the words, let them flow away. Like the blood dissipating in the fountain.
“My hands were in that water,” she added. Tonight and every night the fountain would be illuminated. People would stand in awe, take in the sight, consider it a wonder of beauty and man’s achievement. Not darkness. Not mankind at its diabolical worst.
Jules angled his chair closer to hers. She could tell he wanted to reach out but wouldn’t, not in front of Christophe, whom he addressed as M. Gagnon. “I’ll gladly take them in mine when we stroll.”
She smiled and thanked him. Christophe’s blue-eyed gaze strayed to her hands and then to his own.
For a moment none of them spoke.
Nathalie broke the silence. “Apart from me, apart from the family at Coutan and the crowd in the gallery … the whole city will plummet into fear. Again. Two years ago, it was the Dark Artist, London had Jack the Ripper last year, and now with the Exposition…”
“Monsieur Patenaude was going to keep this—well, the victim at the fountain—out of the newspaper for that reason,” Christophe said, tenting his fingertips. “It would be disastrous for the Exposition. We hoped the groundskeepers, whom we’ve already asked to stay silent, were the only ones to have seen the head. Given the early hour and whatnot. My intent was to have the two of you use your abilities and otherwise keep the affair quiet, unless the body showed up publicly.”
“And now?” asked Jules.
Christophe pressed his fingertips together harder. “I can’t begin to say. I don’t know what the plan will be for either newspaper coverage or morgue display.”
Nathalie bit her lip and faced Jules. “You had a thought reading, then. Oui?”
Jules was fortunate in that many of his readings weren’t dramatic. Natural deaths didn’t trouble him as much—people’s last thoughts were often of peace, poignant farewells, or relief at ending the pain. Or if they died suddenly, the random pieces of a day except for the last moment.
He hated hearing the final moments of a murder victim. Heartbreaking thoughts about loved ones, absent of goodbyes, the unjust suffering of the grief they were about to face. And then the bitter release of life itself: despair and terror, anguish and betrayal. The hearing loss was always more severe and longer lasting with murder victims.
“A cursory one,” he said, almost as if it was an apology. “She thought about whatever was in her mouth—the rag, perhaps?—and told herself to be patient.”
“Patient?”
Jules squeezed his shoulders together and dropped them. “That’s all I perceived. Strong thoughts of Marie Antoinette, too. I wasn’t confident that I heard or understood correctly, but your vision … the guillotine makes sense. She must have thought about how the queen was beheaded.”
“Odd, but it could well be.” Christophe rapped his knuckle on the desk. “Nathalie heard ‘May the king live forever.’ Coronation words.”
Nathalie thought about the cropped hair. “Some gripe about the Revolution, a century later? Some sort of political motivation? And such an unusual affect with the voice.” She stood. “Let me see the … the woman’s head.”
Christophe looked at her in that way; it was poetic and sensible and spoke of things neither of them could say, for he was betrothed to another. Nathalie had seen his fiancée once, and to her dismay, she came across as intelligent, witty, and sophisticated. And while it wasn’t a formal engagement, as of February, Nathalie had been spoken for as well. “Are you sure? The last time you touched a body, there were … considerable complications.”
Christophe, ever the kind protector.
“It’s such a risk, Nathalie,” Jules said, choosing his words carefully as he so often did. Rash speech was a rarity from him. “From what you’ve told me, that is. You don’t know what to expect. It’s one thing to take a chance when you know what might happen, and it’s another when a swarm of questions surround it.”
Jules, ever the gentle pragmatist.
Nathalie straightened up even taller. “Do you intend to touch the head from the Palais des Beaux-Arts? Two in one day, no matter how long you’re robbed of hearing?”
He answered with a solemn nod.
“So do I, then. I’ll, uh, I’ll be fine.” Yet she didn’t know that. Couldn’t know that. She did know she wasn’t weak or going to adopt an air of fragility. Apprehension and dread coursed through her veins, but she didn’t have to show it.
“Nathalie, please don’t. Wait a day. Or two.” Christophe pled with his eyes. She could almost see him looking into the past, remembering last time. The morning after her overnight with Simone, when she’d recognized the memory loss, he’d taken her to lunch. Talked to her about the days she’d lost, recounted what he knew. They talked about their childhoods and favorite foods and leisure pursuits (she never would have guessed that billiards and fishing were among his hobbies). When it was over, Christophe had told her she was brave and fearless and one of the most interesting people he’d ever met.
That, thankfully, she never forgot. It was preserved in her memory, her journal, and her heart.
Nathalie laced her fingers together. “That was almost two years ago and probably an anomaly. I had an intimate connection with the life that expired from that body. I don’t know these…” Her voice trailed off.
People. It was hard to perceive a severed head or headless body as a person. Was she callous for thinking that? Hadn’t she reached for the head at the Palais des Beaux-Arts precisely because of its humanity? Of course they were people. Had been people. She often mixed up tense when speaking of the recent dead, so close did she straddle the line separating life and death in her visions.
“These victims are strangers,” she continued, her voice shaky. “The man was, and I’m assuming the woman was as well.”
Saying it out loud, weaving that unsteady tale of justification she herself didn’t fully believe, gave her bravado. Although she appreciated their concern, the more they insisted she “rest,” the more she wanted to invoke a vision. Jules picked some invisible lint off his cuffs, and Christophe rapped his knuckles on the desk yet again.
Nathalie moved toward the door, chin up. “Let me do what you called me here to do.”
With an expression somewhere between reluctance and resignation, Christophe stood from his desk. “Over to refrigeration, then.”
4
Suspended death.
Every corpse that arrived at the morgue ended up in refrigeration. Chilling the bodies, a process that took hours, arrested the relentless march toward decomposition. The air in the access room was cold and crisp, like an early November day of brown shrubs and dead trees.
Most of Nathalie’s visions happened in the morgue viewing room, as discreetly as she could manage. Not every murder victim was put on display; some were known or quickly identified but nonetheless brought to Dr. Nicot for autopsy. When that happened, she’d have a makeshift “display”—someone would hold a pane of glass over the body for her to touch. Whether the protective barrier of glass was a necessity to lessen the effects of memory loss, an emblem of superstition, or some combination thereof, she didn’t care. Every Insightful had to moderate the consequence of his or her gift to keep from being eroded by its power.
Jules’s a
bility worked the opposite way. The viewing pane made fainter the thoughts of the dead, like listening through a thick wall. He did his thought readings either in Autopsy or in the display room, where M. Cadoret would draw the curtain while Jules touched the heads of the deceased.
Never had Nathalie gone straight to refrigeration. And yet with no body, how much of an autopsy could be done?
The three of them stood beside a refrigeration compartment, Christophe wearing gloves and Jules holding a pane of glass. A portable shield for her vision, as she liked to think of it. Part of her armor.
Christophe pulled a lever. The automated belt rumbled before coming to a creaky stop, and he opened the compartment door.
Nathalie quivered, crossing her arms and pretending it was the cold air. It wasn’t.
Despite preparing for it and having seen and held a human head that very morning, she gagged in disgust.
“That was my response as well. I think it’s a natural reaction to something so … unnatural.” Jules tightened his grip on the glass, eyes locked on the head. “It—she—reminded me of the Medusa carving on the door, only with feathers.”
Two long, purple feathers were twisted into a circle and lodged into the woman’s short tresses. Her eyes, framed with long lashes, were shut and her skin, the white-gray of plaster. She looked more like a statue than the head at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Her hair was coated in frost, making it look sepia.
Nathalie conjured up an image of the two heads side by side in the display room. She hoped they didn’t end up in public view, at least not together like some sick exhibition resembling dummies at the hat shop where Jules worked.
“Where do you want to do it?” Christophe cradled the head by the ears and tilted it back, as if the rest of the body were laid out on a slab. She looked more human this way. Less like a vase. Or a Medusa.
Sensational Page 3