Sensational

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  Jules unwittingly reined in her drifting thoughts. “Say it again?”

  “Oh. Is your hearing starting to waver?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” He took out his pocket watch, a bequest from his uncle, a watchmaker who’d died of tuberculosis when Jules was thirteen. “Perhaps that will serve me well at la chapellerie if Monsieur Lyons reprimands Jacques for spending more time talking to customers and neighboring shopworkers than working.”

  Nathalie smirked. Jacques was the gregarious son of the far-less-gregarious M. Lyons. “Doesn’t that happen nearly every day?”

  “Other than when Jacques had a sore throat over the winter, yes.” He touched his ear lightly, a movement he often did when his hearing loss began, as if he could soothe it away. It was a boyish gesture, something Nathalie pictured him doing as a child when he first discovered his power. “Speaking of Monsieur Lyons, I’m confident he’s cursing me at the moment. I’m late for work.”

  “You have to leave now?”

  “As it is, I’m trying his patience by always asking him to accommodate my time here and at Rue du Chocolat.”

  Nathalie admired his work ethic. Three jobs, yet he never seemed overwhelmed by all the responsibilities heaped on him by his family. She didn’t like that he had so much less leisure time than she; she was not only ashamed of that sentiment but also that she’d once admitted as much to Simone. (“He has to do what he has to do,” Simone had said with a shrug.)

  “I’ll see you on Friday,” she said, making sure he was watching her when she spoke. “You’ll come by at six o’clock?”

  He confirmed. They were going to Simone’s for a while, then to the Exposition. After the nightly fireworks, they planned to go up the Tour Eiffel.

  “It’s windy on the tower, so you might wish to bring a coat,” Nathalie said.

  “And maybe a bonbon.” He kissed her on the cheek. “But … probably not.”

  “Has anyone told you lately how unbearable you are?” She pretended to shoo him out the door, and Jules made a comical face as he waved goodbye.

  After he left, she leaned against the wall and waited. And waited. And waited some more.

  She folded her arms, uncomfortable from standing and increasingly impatient. Who was this important guest? Twice she’d tried listening at the door, but some street musician outside hampered her ability to hear anything besides his mediocre renditions of patriotic songs (on a violin no less. Who played “Coming Back From the Parade” on a string instrument?). She was about to write her statement down to leave with Dr. Nicot when Christophe’s door opened, startling her.

  A young woman several years older than Nathalie stepped out. She made eye contact with a demure half grin. Her clothes were plain; her sapphire eyes were deeply set and her mahogany hair was pinned up in braids.

  “Oh!” said Christophe, several paces behind the young woman. “Chance smiles upon us. Mademoiselle Thayer, this is Nathalie Baudin.”

  “Please call me Gabrielle, both of you.”

  Christophe invited her to call him by his first name as well.

  Who is this Gabrielle and why was Christophe talking to her about me? And even Jules calls him Monsieur Gagnon. So familiar, so soon?

  “Gabrielle will be working with us,” he continued, “until we make some progress with the decapitation cases.” Christophe spread his arms out, as if they were a family about to gather for an embrace.

  “Ah, I see,” said Nathalie, although she didn’t, really. Perhaps Gabrielle was here to assist Dr. Nicot in Autopsy; she’d heard he might be getting an assistant. “In what manner?”

  Gabrielle offered an almost apologetic smile. “I’m an Insightful.”

  13

  Nathalie glanced at Christophe, who was wearing his taut but gracious police liaison smile, and back at Gabrielle.

  Then she remembered to smile herself. “Is that so?”

  “We were about to go to Maxime’s,” Christophe said, waving his hand toward the exit. His eyes landed on her gloves, then her coat. “If you’d like to join us, please do. How are you feeling?”

  She didn’t want to answer that, not yet. And maybe not at all in front of Gabrielle. Nathalie needed to find out who she was first. That she was a fellow Insightful wasn’t enough.

  “Better than yesterday. We can talk about that à un autre moment.” She peeked inside the empty office. “I had a vision. Shouldn’t we tend to that?”

  Gabrielle shifted her feet and looked away.

  “In Autopsy?”

  “No, the morgue room. Exceedingly brief. There was a man, stout and bald. No exterior wounds, so—”

  “Oui,” said Christophe. “Killed by a single punch to the throat.”

  Nathalie flushed. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “Very good. Thank you.” Christophe went back into the office and opened the death register where he took notes. Nathalie followed him, handed him Jules’s written thought reading for the woman’s death, and made to take a seat.

  “Let me note these, and we’ll go,” he said, taking the pen from his inkwell. He scratched out something, read it back to himself, and closed the register. “It was a fight after a Freemasons meeting. The victim disrupted it, a stranger who went on a political tirade. Two men followed him out, then cornered him in an alley. An altercation ensued, and one of the men punched him in the throat. When he dropped, they thought he’d merely fainted.”

  “Did the man who landed the fatal blow confess?”

  “This morning, yes.”

  That’s why M. Cadoret didn’t have Jules do a thought reading. So Nathalie had endured a vision—and invited more memory loss, so soon after the others—for something they already knew? “In the past when I’ve come, one of the guards has always intercepted me to let me know if there’s a murder victim whose assailant is already known. Such that I don’t invoke a vision for no purpose.”

  Nathalie took her hand off the chair. Her eyes darted around the room and landed on the Switzerland print, which only exacerbated her annoyance. Although she didn’t remember her visit to Christophe yesterday, she’d made a cursory note about it. (C. going to Switzerland next month; she sent a print and unfortunately it is now in his office.)

  “And someone should have today.” Christophe held up his palms. “I apologize for the poor communication. Between the body of the first victim and Gabrielle’s arrival, and on top of that a disagreement among whether or not to display the headless victim … I neglected to inform either Monsieur Arnaud or Monsieur Soucy.”

  That was unlike Christophe, to have an oversight of that sort. She tried to hide her disappointment but presumably failed, given the shimmer of guilt that passed over Christophe’s face. “Nathalie, I’m so very embarrassed. I apologize. Especially after…”

  “Mistakes happen.” Nathalie forced something resembling a smile. She watched as Gabrielle hovered near the doorway, blinking much too frequently. “We should make our way to Maxime’s before it gets too crowded.”

  * * *

  They left the morgue, encompassed by the melodies of the street musician, now joined by two others to form an enthusiastic French trio, and a group of forty or so tourists following a guide. Nathalie removed her gloves and coat (no need to call attention to her coldness over lunch) and caught up to Christophe and Gabrielle as they made their way through the crowd.

  While approaching them, Nathalie noticed that Gabrielle had a mild hitch in her gait. Her feet moved lightly but uncertainly, as though they couldn’t trust the cobblestone below despite keeping pace.

  “The limp is from using my gift,” said Gabrielle without turning to her.

  Nathalie knew her cheeks matched the pink of her dress at the moment. “That was rude of me. I didn’t mean to stare. I don’t like it when people do—” She halted, her embarrassment stepping aside when Gabrielle’s words belatedly reached her brain. “Oh! What … what’s the nature of your ability?”

  She threw a glance at Christophe, who opened his
mouth to say something, but Gabrielle spoke first.

  “If I place my hand on the feet of someone who is ambulatory—or was, because it works on the dead as well—I can determine the route they’ve walked recently. Path tracing, I call it.” Her tone was unaffected, no different than if she were providing the time of day. She still didn’t make eye contact with Nathalie but stared ahead at the bridge in front of them. “It’s more intuitive than visual. If I were to place my hands on your feet once we got to the café, I’d know we left a building. Maybe the morgue, if it had a distinct walking pattern, like pausing in the viewing room if we were visitors. And I’d perceive that we crossed a bridge because of the angle and the feel underfoot, then another street. And I’d sense the proximity of other pairs of feet, so I could tell if you’re in public or in a queue or home.”

  How unusual. “How interesting!” Nathalie said, trying to show the enthusiasm Gabrielle herself did not.

  Gabrielle drew a square with her hands. “I’d see it like a map, the way a person thinks through it: I started at the morgue, I went here and there, and I ended up at the café. I can’t tell specific addresses but more general areas; I think it has to do with places I myself have been. The better I know a route, the stronger I sense it.”

  “And it hurts your own feet?” Nathalie asked.

  “Not so much pain as numbness to varying degrees. Sometimes it sets in immediately, sometimes later. It … impedes my ability to walk. At times, not always.”

  As with all Insightfuls. Unpredictable consequences of unpredictable duration. The magic decided, not the person whose blood flowed with it.

  “I hope having three of you on the case will lessen the burden,” Christophe said. “Of consequences, that is. And you, Nathalie. Are you feeling well enough?”

  They were crossing the bridge, the bridge Nathalie resented. Before she could respond, the Notre-Dame bells tolled. She loved their deep sonorous bellow; she was particularly grateful for it, and how it prevented her from answering at the moment. She’d walked across the bridge with Christophe since that disappointing conversation two summers ago and always felt awkward doing so, unable to be articulate. Not that he’d ever know, or even guess. He’d care if he knew, of that she was certain. That was precisely why she did not want him to.

  They were well past the bridge and almost at Maxime’s by the time the bells finished. Nathalie turned to reply to Christophe just as a beggar clutched onto his sleeve, asking for a centime and getting distracted when someone else threw one in his cup.

  Maxime’s was lively, as always. Nathalie’s favorite waiter, Jean, walked them to the back of the café. She was too preoccupied with spying on the patrons, clothing styles and compelling faces from all over the world, to notice the route they’d taken. When they arrived at their table and Jean held out the chair, Nathalie’s breath caught in her throat.

  “Is there … anything else?”

  “Exposition crowd,” said Jean with an apologetic lift of his shoulders.

  Christophe gestured toward the exit. “Would you rather go to another restaurant?”

  He knew. He understood. So did Jules, Simone, and Louis.

  She didn’t want to create an inconvenience for anyone. “No, this—this will do.”

  Nathalie sat in the chair and became like one of Rodin’s bronze sculptures, fixed and hefty and softly undefined at the edges. This was where she’d had her last moments with Agnès over a shared pain au chocolat. This table, this chair. For almost two years she had avoided it, just as she never returned to Le Canard Curieux where they’d had what became their final lunch. They’d planned to meet again for lunch a week later. Instead, Agnès was a corpse in a matter of days, and on the day they were to have lunch, her body was en route to her grandmother’s property in Bayeux on the Normandy coast.

  Nathalie had never since sung the melodies Agnès roused the café into singing that day. She hadn’t touched another pain au chocolat since that day, either.

  “Christophe tells me you’ve known of your ability for about two years. How did you discover it?” Gabrielle interrupted her thoughts, in a well-mannered tone and with a courteous smile, as if she weren’t sitting in Agnès’s seat.

  “Dramatically.” Nathalie’s eyes fell on the large, oval amethyst ring Gabrielle wore on her right hand. She’d noticed it on the walk over, how garish it seemed compared to the rest of Gabrielle’s unfussy appearance, including a modest gold crucifix ring on her left hand. “And by accident.”

  Christophe clasped his hands, perhaps a bit too firmly.

  Gabrielle raised her eyebrows in anticipation. “I’m aware of your contributions in the Dark Artist case. My father makes it his business to stay apprised of Insightful happenings and rumors, through some channel or another. It’s a pastime for him, truly. He was so inspired after the news of the beheadings spread that he gave my name to the Prefect of Police, certain I could help.” She clenched her jaw and then plastered on a rigid smile. “Congratulations on doing such good work. How did it, uh, all come to be?”

  “Merci.” The same question, asked differently. With a sigh on the inside, because she didn’t see any gracious way out of this conversation, Nathalie recounted her circuitous path to comprehending her identity as an Insightful. Gabrielle nodded along in apparent empathy, and Christophe’s clasping loosened up as the conversation progressed. They ordered lunch and were served quickly, despite the crowd.

  Nathalie didn’t disclose anything about Agnès—or any more detail than necessary, frankly. Gabrielle was a stranger with a mostly unreadable affect thus far, and Nathalie had too much to protect to open up just yet. And how much had Gabrielle shared? Not enough. That they were about to become colleagues meant cordiality, but time would tell if it would, or should, be anything more.

  “Scotland Yard nearly brought her in for the Jack the Ripper killings,” said Christophe, in between bites of artichoke, “but the Chief Constable objected strongly to the use of Insightfuls.”

  Gabrielle beamed at Christophe, as she did each time he spoke. Even when, like this, there was nothing about which to beam. That affect was decidedly not unreadable.

  “I named my cat Stanley because he strikes me as British, even though I found him on the carousel at Luxembourg Gardens,” Nathalie said, swatting an invisible fly to get Gabrielle’s attention again. “And while I’d love to travel to London, I’m glad I didn’t have to witness the Whitechapel murders.”

  Christophe leaned forward. “How are you doing after the other day?”

  She poked the teaspoon on her saucer. Gabrielle had asked two versions of the same question, and Christophe had asked three times. Either they were both persistent or the fragility of her coyness was obvious.

  Nathalie wanted to tell Christophe how she was doing, sincerely and without all the trappings of superficial banter. That two days of her life had fallen into a chasm of time, that she’d been excessively cold, though much less so today. She wanted to tell him about her trip to the sewers with Jules. But that was a moment for the two of them, not the three of them.

  She responded with a look she hoped conveyed all of that. Or at least, the notion that she’d provide the details later. “As expected,” she said. He gave her the faintest of nods.

  He understood.

  Silently thanking him, she turned to Gabrielle. “I was late to discover my ability. Might never have known it existed at all if I didn’t happen to touch the morgue viewing pane by accident one day.” Nathalie thought of that first encounter, the little girl behind her crying out suddenly and startling her. Her hand grazed the glass and the rest … well, here she was, sitting in a café discussing everything that constituted the rest. “How did you come to know yours?”

  Gabrielle pressed her lips together. She, too, was weighing how much to say; Nathalie could tell.

  “My parents brought me to Dr. Henard for a transfusion when I was a baby. I’d just learned to walk. They didn’t get transfusions for themselves, but they w
anted it for me. They thought it was the greatest gift they could give me.”

  Nathalie absorbed the significance of that. It was one thing to inherit Insightful blood, and it was another to choose the transfusions. To have the choice made for you was yet another, and perhaps the most complicated of all. Gabrielle didn’t say that. The way she spun her crucifix ring as the words came out did.

  Then Nathalie came to another conclusion. “Is that why your ability is connected to locomotion? Because you were learning to walk?”

  “That’s the belief, yes. I don’t even remember my first episode. According to my parents, I was four years old and woke my father up from a nap by touching his feet. I babbled on and on about where he’d been that day in great detail.” Gabrielle twirled the crucifix ring some more. “Not until a few more incidents along those lines did my parents comprehend what was happening.”

  Nathalie took a sip of coffee and collected her thoughts. She had many questions for Gabrielle but wanted to restrict them to a few; to ask too many questions was also to invite them, so she had to balance her desire to know with her own wish for distance. “Dr. Henard must have died before they had a chance to ask.”

  “Yes,” Gabrielle said, mouth twitching. “They thought I was a failure. So much so that they didn’t bring my two younger siblings for a treatment. You can imagine how pleased they were to find out that I’d manifested an Insightful power after all.”

  “Gabrielle might be able to help us given the … unusual nature of the crimes,” Christophe said, tapping his fingers. “One of the victims is likely a tourist, if not both. We might be better able to identify them and how they encountered the murderer if we can trace their paths. Anything we can learn is beneficial.”

  “That’s … good of you to share your gift with us,” said Nathalie as she drummed the side of the cup.