Sensational

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  Nathalie envied the rival newspaper, with its temporary office on the second platform of the Tour Eiffel. It was set up for Exposition coverage, and even though M. Patenaude had promised she could do some reports about the fair, turning her article in at Rue Lafayette was not nearly as exciting.

  M. Patenaude tapped some ash into his tray. “Anyway, how these murders are handled is a separate matter. I’ll take a look at your article.”

  She handed it to him, eyes roaming around the room as he read. Every surface was covered with newspapers, documents, and illustrations. The framed pages on the wall surrounded a window with a stellar view of Paris.

  Upon getting approval with two minor revisions, Nathalie handed in her article to Arianne. The two of them, separated by a decade or so, spoke for a few minutes about the Exposition, with Arianne proudly presenting the green silk pouch she’d bought at the Japan Pavilion. As Nathalie exited the building afterward, she saw Roger Jalbert, Agnès’s brother, from afar. She was fond of him, even if seeing him both lifted her spirits and crumpled them; she couldn’t look at him without being reminded of Agnès. He was almost twelve now, and despite the fact that his family was well off enough that he needn’t work yet, he was captivated by the newspaper business. He wanted to work the presses someday. He was too young for that, but Nathalie had been able to get him a job in the mailroom.

  It was, she maintained, the least she could do. She was the reason his sister was dead.

  6

  When Nathalie—after somehow remembering to pick up bread—got home, her parents were getting ready to visit Aunt Brigitte at the asylum. Maman had the day off from the tailor shop; Papa, a member of La Royale, wasn’t due to go back to sea for another month or so.

  “Ma bichette, would you like to come with us to see Tante?” Maman asked as she patted her ever-neat chignon.

  Her parents still referred to her as their “little doe,” and despite being taller than Maman and nearly as tall as Papa (if she stood on her toes), she welcomed it. One of the few elements of childhood that hadn’t slipped away just yet.

  Stanley sauntered out from underneath a dress form that held one of Maman’s creations in lavender muslin. Nathalie picked him up (and asked him how much white fur he’d left in his wake).

  “I would, Maman.” She didn’t want to wait until her parents returned to talk to them. “It’s been a wretched morning. I have a lot to share with you on the way there.”

  Not to mention, she was curious to see what Aunt Brigitte’s recent dreams might entail, and if she’d be sound enough to convey them.

  * * *

  Saint-Mathurin Asylum wasn’t that old, hadn’t been built 700 years ago like Notre-Dame, but it seemed eternal. Grime-covered stone on the outside, stark and dreary on the inside, its walls were held together by the cries of a thousand troubled souls.

  It hadn’t taken any longer than usual to arrive, not as far as measured time would show. The duration of the trip was another matter. The news of the murders and Nathalie’s episode at the Exposition had shaken both Maman and typically steadfast Papa. The worry over what might happen to Nathalie hampered their pace; it waltzed between her parents like a maliciously gleeful imp, making every step seem slower.

  They made their way to Aunt Brigitte’s floor without a sound, save for their footsteps and the occasional whine of a door hinge. The quiet dispelled when they opened the door, the smell of urine and juniper assaulting them, and proceeded down the hall. A patient muttered to herself, another hummed loudly while staring at an empty wall. Somewhere, someone yelled at a nurse for stealing her pillow.

  They found Aunt Brigitte in a common room, looking out a window into the courtyard. She was elated to see them, wrapping her thin frame around Papa as if it had been months and not six days since she last saw him. She complimented Nathalie on the perfume she was wearing—bergamot, a birthday gift from Jules in February—and responded with delight when Maman presented the tasty madeleines she’d brought.

  “Did you make them? Or are they from the fair?”

  “Neither,” Maman replied. “A street vendor on our way here.”

  Aunt Brigitte scrutinized the madeleines and put her ear to them, like they had a story to tell.

  “Speaking of the Exposition, Tante,” Nathalie began, “we, uh, we have each been there several times.”

  “It’s still happening?”

  Papa took a seat on the tattered sofa, Nathalie and her mother flanking him. “For many months yet,” he said.

  Nathalie and her parents took turns describing some of the attractions at the Exposition while Aunt Brigitte nibbled a madeleine. After her own reminiscing about the 1867 World’s Fair, including her fascination with an Egyptian temple and the sight of a mummy, Aunt Brigitte very abruptly ceased talking, as she sometimes did.

  She put her hand on the window, and Nathalie’s eyes fell on the pinkish-white, jagged scar on Aunt Brigitte’s wrist. The physical remnants of a suicide attempt several years ago, where she’d gnawed at herself during the night. The doctor and nurses had told the Baudins not to discuss it with Aunt Brigitte, so they never did. Nathalie disliked that decision, even if it hadn’t been hers to make.

  Across the room a woman who couldn’t have been more than a decade older than Nathalie reclined in a chair staring straight ahead. Suddenly she laughed and bent over to take something off the bottom of her shoe. Then she ate it.

  Nathalie’s eyes swung to Aunt Brigitte once again. She’d been mostly coherent on recent visits, a tragic variation of almost-well, if such a state existed for a shattered woman doomed to an asylum. Tree leaves brushed against the glass, pleading to come in. “I had a dream about you, Nathalie.”

  The words she’d both dreaded and hoped to hear.

  Aunt Brigitte’s predictive dreams, the effect of the Henard experiments and the cause of her madness, always had an element of truth. Sometimes many elements of truth.

  Nathalie focused on the laces of her boots. “You did, Tante?”

  “You were younger, maybe nine or ten, and sitting in a cold, damp room. A man was looking over your shoulder, but you never noticed. You were playing with dolls.” Aunt Brigitte traced the outline of a leaf on the window. “And you took the heads off, one by one, and lined them up.”

  Nathalie kept staring at her shoes and pressed her heels into the floor. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw the muscles in Papa’s strong forearm tense. Maman gathered the fabric of her dress into a fist.

  “I never did like dolls,” Nathalie said, forcing a chuckle. “That’s why Maman and Papa let me keep Stanley. I much prefer cats.”

  “What an unsettling dream.” Maman spoke so quickly, she nearly interrupted Nathalie. She was skilled in acknowledging Aunt Brigitte’s dreams without dwelling on them. If Maman sensed Aunt Brigitte might get upset ruminating aloud, she’d try to reroute the conversation. (“It’s better that Tante doesn’t know the significance of her dreams,” Papa had said more than once.)

  Why Aunt Brigitte occasionally had prophetic dreams about Nathalie, beginning with the one that had saved her life, was a mystery. Whether the change was in Aunt Brigitte or Nathalie didn’t matter; something bound them together now. Nathalie loved her aunt but was uneasy with this new tether, because she still couldn’t dismiss the worry that perhaps she, too, would end up in an asylum. What if she woke up one day and could only relive every vision she’d ever had over and over and over again?

  “Dolls, dolls, dolls. I never did like dolls.” Estelle, restless Estelle, passed them. She always seemed to be in motion, despite her aged and frail appearance, and repeated much of what she heard. Sometimes, she was peaceful. At other times, Estelle was strikingly vehement, having once gripped Nathalie’s arm so hard a bruise appeared the next day. “I never did like dolls.”

  Tante watched Estelle go by, then took her hand off the window. She faced Nathalie, the corners of her mouth sunken with solemnity. “Do you want to know how the dream ended?”

>   “Yes.”

  “Me too. Except she,” Tante said, pointing a bony finger at a woman across the room, “woke me up. Pulled the sheet off me.”

  Papa stroked his mustache. “Who is she?” He peered at the woman, who was asleep with her mouth open on an uncomfortable-looking chair.

  “Véronique. New roommate. The other one is in the infirmary, so it’s only us. She never stops babbling. Thank God she sleeps so much.” Aunt Brigitte scrunched up her face and lowered her voice. “I don’t like her. She boasts about killing her neighbor and changes the story every time she tells it.”

  Nathalie couldn’t tell from her aunt’s tone if it was the murder or the variations of the story that she found so distasteful. She followed Papa’s gaze as the woman roused.

  Her hair was brown with streaks of gray, like Aunt Brigitte’s, except a tangled mess of curls. She had a lean face but carried weight on her bottom, with thick ankles. When she sat up and faced them, Nathalie recognized her immediately.

  That woman had indeed killed her neighbor.

  Nathalie had seen it once in a vision.

  * * *

  “She poisoned him,” Nathalie told her parents as she opened the door to leave the asylum.

  “Who?” Maman asked, picking up her skirt as she made her way down the steps. “The new roommate?”

  “Yes. The widow Véronique Didion. Remember the case I helped with, maybe eight or nine months ago?”

  Papa took his pipe out of his pocket. “Ah, I think you wrote to me about it, Caroline. The soup?”

  Maman’s hazel eyes widened. “Oh. That one.”

  The one that Dr. Nicot, after his initial inspection of the corpse, had deemed a possible poisoning.

  Nathalie leafed through her journals later that evening to see what she’d written about it months ago. The victim ended up on display because he’d taken a walk after dinner and died in a park.

  No bloodshed, no violence. A subtle murder.

  A woman’s hand, wearing a pewter ring with a light blue gem on her third finger, poured soup into a bowl. The killer then left her apartment and went upstairs to another. She knocked on the door and was promptly let in, warmly at that. “Mushroom soup,” she said. While Nathalie couldn’t be certain of facial expressions, it felt as if the woman may have been smiling.

  Poisonous death cap mushrooms.

  She might have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for Nathalie. She’d evidently stayed with him and taken back her bowl, because nothing had been found. His body hadn’t been discovered for two days.

  Nathalie had followed the newspaper coverage closely, so closely that she felt as if she knew Véronique, in a strange way. (Was knowing someone and knowing of someone the same thing? No, she knew better than to think that.) The woman’s reason for killing her neighbor, a man half her age? She claimed he was not a man at all, but a fallen angel taking on the guise of a human, as evidenced by the “wicked harlot” with whom he kept company.

  Jealousy without adequate basis, the newspapers wrote.

  Madness, the court declared.

  And now, there she was, a troubled and broken woman who’d be sleeping in the bed across from Aunt Brigitte. Never to know that the young woman who came to visit, who tended to her tante with such patience and empathy, had witnessed the disturbing truth that condemned her to that place.

  7

  The next morning, Nathalie went to the morgue shortly after it opened. There were no new displays. M. Arnaud was again on guard duty, smoothing out his mustache when he told her in a pressed whisper that Christophe wanted to speak with her. She was certain that meant there was news about the murders or victims.

  “I’m afraid not,” Christophe said, closing the office door behind her. “I do have some news about what Jules heard. The details imply the man was Italian.”

  Jules’s gift was independent of and thus transcended language, something Nathalie considered elegant (and envied more than a little). It didn’t matter what someone’s words aloud were or even if they could speak at all, Jules could still understand the thoughts. So much more magical than her own gift.

  “Two thoughts stood out.” Christophe held up one finger. “The first was of the man’s wife and young daughter. A picnic, under a tree and beside a stream, a vineyard in the distance. Reading a book in Italian. The three of them smiling, talking, eating, playing. Being a family.”

  Nathalie winced. Jules said the final thoughts of murder victims, when they weren’t pure emotions and instinct, were often of loved ones. It pained him to hear those thoughts the way it pained Nathalie to see that moment when victims realized Death was about to place his hand on their shoulder. “A blessing for the man to have had that memory among his final thoughts, a tragedy that his loved ones will find that same memory to be bittersweet.”

  Christophe’s voice softened. “I’ll omit the rest of the details because you can imagine … love, fear, resignation, and sadness.” He paused, perhaps thinking of the very details he’d spared her, and slowly raised the next finger. “The second thought was drowsy confusion, waking up as you’d seen him—on his knees, pieces of his hair on the floor. He remembered a stranger asking him if he needed help, nothing else.”

  “So he does something to impair them?”

  “Or finds them that way,” Christophe said. “There’s no evidence of a blow to the head.”

  “Then he … dresses them up somehow? The feathers on the woman reminded me of a costume.” Why would someone do that? Do any of this?

  “That’s what we have so far.” Christophe folded his hands over the death register. “The most bizarre pair of murders I’ve ever encountered. None of it makes sense yet.”

  They spoke some more, then Nathalie could see him twitching, something he did when he wanted to resume work but was too polite to ask her to leave. She stood, excused herself, and paused. Something was different about the office. There was no window in here, so it wasn’t the light. The usual smell, a wisp of the morgue’s general scent of autopsy chemicals combined with documents and Christophe’s woodsy-orange cologne. She looked at the walls.

  Ah, that’s the reason.

  “The autopsy print has a companion,” she said, gesturing to the picture of men—one of them smoking—preparing to dissect a body. She’d studied it during her initial visit to this office after her first vision. The second print was a blue lake amidst the mountains.

  “Oh, Marianne sent that,” he said, blushing upon mention of his fiancée’s name. “It’s the Interlaken in the Swiss Alps.”

  “Ah. It’s idyllic. Very serene.” She nevertheless wished he’d hung it in his apartment. It did not suit the office at the morgue.

  Also, she had no desire to see it every day.

  “Right now she and her family are there. I’m joining them. Did I tell you? On holiday. Next month, for three weeks.”

  “In the middle of the Exposition?”

  “The Exposition goes until October. Why should that matter?”

  Because I don’t want you to go.

  “No reason,” she said, her feeble voice not, she realized upon hearing it, very convincing. “I mean, the murders and whatnot. Although I’m sure you need a holiday.”

  “I haven’t traveled in some time. Lorraine with friends five years ago. Then Nice with my cousin about three years ago. I think I told you about that vacation?”

  She nodded. Beaches and fishing and restaurants and ruins. Everything a vacation should be (except fishing, which did not appeal to her).

  “I hope you get to see the Mediterranean someday, Nathalie.” His eyes reflected a fond memory. “Switzerland should be something to see. And that lake looks like paradise for fishing.”

  Nathalie tried to smile, but her muscles didn’t cooperate much. Or was it her heart? She knew he wasn’t hers to have, nor was she his. She’d followed this path of thinking many times before, and the wayfinding remained the same. Circular.

  “Do send me a postcard,” she s
aid, opening the door. The last time she’d gotten a postcard was from Agnès in Bayeux, where they were supposed to spend the summer together. She’d later tucked that postcard into the journal where she’d written about Agnès’s death.

  “Certainly,” he said, but it was an awkward response, one that made her regret asking.

  Decapitated Head Jolts Palais des Beaux-Arts

  Nathalie saw the newspaper story, shouted by Le Figaro, on her way to Le Petit Journal. As she stood waiting to cross the street, she read over the shoulder of a man sitting on a bench.

  MURDER at the Exposition!

  A white scarf, a bunch of grapes, la coiffure à la Titus, and a nauseating amount of blood.

  Yesterday morning’s Palais des Beaux-Arts visitors sought aesthetic pleasure but found a hideous reminder of mortality instead: a human head placed on a pillar in the Galerie Rapp, the room of sculptures.

  “I didn’t think it was real,” said Mademoiselle Catherine Grasson, who was among the first to see the murder victim. “I thought it was some artist’s attempt to confound us, until I got closer.”

  Who the victim was or how—

  Then the man turned the page. He folded the paper and read some article about politics. Nathalie wanted to see not only what was said, but also if the Fontaine de Coutan victim was mentioned. She accidentally let out a hmmph.

  “Pardonnez-moi?” The man turned to her, frowning. “Mademoiselle can get her own newspaper.”

  She slinked away. From there she went to Le Petit Journal to write her morgue article in the newsroom. Now that she was no longer masking as an errand boy, she could use a desk to pen her article without causing a stir. As much as she enjoyed being out and about in Paris, sometimes she preferred the chaotic tempo of the newsroom, especially now. At least she wouldn’t have to share a bench or be distracted by café customers or have tourists interrupt her to ask for directions.