Sensational

by Jodie Lynn Zdrok

  While she was at the asylum.

  “He did the thought reading in front of me,” M. Patenaude added.

  Oh.

  “What was it? Was he lying?”

  M. Patenaude opened his cigarette case, studied its contents, and snapped it shut. He tossed it on a stack of newspapers. “I couldn’t tell. My gift … wasn’t there.”

  Her heart sank for him. “I’m so sorry.”

  Did those three words convey it?

  No. She needed to say more. “Remember I once asked you about a rumored Insightful who helps other Insightfuls?”

  “Vaguely…”

  “He’s real. He goes by several names. Suchet. Delacroix. Maybe some others. I know him as Dr. Delacroix”

  “I read a written account once of an Insightful who communicated with him—Suchet, at that time,” said M. Patenaude. “I don’t recall the details, but I know the account was true.”

  “Then you know maybe Dr. Delacroix can help you make sense of it.”

  “It’s too late for me, Nathalie.” He let the words sit there, like the plumes of smoke he so often exhaled.

  “If you change your mind, I can tell you how to reach him.”

  “Thank you.” He uncrossed his arms and stood. “As you know, it’s happening more and more lately. I wasn’t able to help. Jules offered to come by again today, so he should be here any time now.”

  “He will?” Her cheeks reddened.

  M. Patenaude nodded. “Christophe is proceeding anyway on instinct and the hope that Jules’s repentance was genuine. It seems so, else Jules wouldn’t have agreed to be interviewed again. Even if I can’t read him, the intent may signal his honesty.”

  The cover on the box she’d put her feelings for Jules in loosened, jostled by a carriage bump. If he truly sought to redeem himself, then maybe she could find it in herself to be a bit kinder toward him and not ignore him on the street.

  “What did he see?”

  M. Patenaude put his hands in his pockets. “He claims the victim’s final thoughts were that the killer looked familiar. She’d seen him the previous day but didn’t know where.”

  “Tens of thousands of people go to the Exposition daily,” she said, studying the framed issues of Le Petit Journal on the wall. The one announcing the opening of the fair had been added since she last noticed. “Who knows how many faces anyone sees in a given day? Impossible lead to pursue, I should think.”

  “The police had already spoken to the husband concerning her disappearance,” M. Patenaude said, and “Monsieur Gagnon proposed that the police speak to her husband concerning their whereabouts the previous day, if they hadn’t already. In fact, that’s probably where he was—paying a visit to the Prefect of Police.”

  Someone knocked. Arianne’s voice carried through the door. “Monsieur Patenaude, a Jules Lachance is here to speak to you.”

  Apprehension passed through Nathalie like a ghost. “I’d best be going. Thank you for speaking with me.”

  She stepped out to meet the gaze she hadn’t expected to meet again, not in such proximity.

  “Hello, Nathalie.” Jules’s voice was tinged with caution. “Or are you going to pretend you didn’t hear me again?”

  “I would not pretend that, because you’re here for somewhat noble reasons,” she said, chin up. “I think.”

  He tapped the toe of his boot on the wood planks. “Indeed, I am. I’ve been filled with regret every hour since that first lie at the morgue, and it’s only gotten worse.” He shrugged. “I thought if maybe—maybe I could help, it might make matters right. Or start to.”

  “It’s an admirable start, yes. Good luck.”

  He replied with a smile, winsome as ever. That cover on the box of Jules feelings slipped out of place some more. Far from open, but at least she might be tempted to look inside at the contents before snapping it shut again.

  “How did you talk your way back in?” asked Nathalie. She eyed Arianne, who was listening despite trying very hard to look like she wasn’t.

  “I nearly didn’t,” Jules said, tapping his fingertips together. “Monsieur Cadoret wasn’t going to allow me in at all. Monsieur Gagnon overheard us talking and permitted me to come inside.”

  “Jules?” said M. Patenaude, standing in the doorway. “Are you ready for our discussion?”

  She took this as her cue to leave and said goodbye.

  “We can keep talking,” said Jules, “if you’d like. Later.”

  When later?

  Nathalie opened her mouth to say something before deciding what that something should be. At some point “yes” tumbled out.

  “Half past seven at the Tour Eiffel? Outside the office of Le—” He peeked over his shoulder at M. Patenaude. “The other newspaper?”

  “Half past seven it is,” she said, her voice friendly but not too friendly.

  Was Jules to be trusted? His bearing was authentic, as was his affection for her. Nevertheless, she’d been fooled in the past. They all had. And he may well have been gambling on the idea that M. Patenaude’s power had faded so much as to be ineffective.

  What would he have to gain by lying again?

  She wanted to believe him, and she did.

  Mostly.

  41

  Nathalie hurried back to the morgue, so much so that she was out of breath when she arrived at the door. She had no need to go through the display room and knocked on the side door instead. Dr. Nicot answered; he told her Christophe was still away and might not return for several hours.

  Her shoulders sagged. It would have to be tomorrow.

  As she left, she started to take her normal route home before stopping in the shadow of Notre-Dame. Last time she’d gone in, she was angry and craved darkness. Today, she sought it for a different reason. She needed a sanctuary of solitude and contemplation.

  She walked around the front of the cathedral, taking in its staggering beauty. Centuries in the making, a realm of magnificence that only time or misfortune could undo. Notre-Dame was a tangible embodiment of forever, a sight to behold by her and countless others who had and would traverse this square. She greeted her favorite gargoyles on the façade (she’d named them Abelard, Tristan, and Bruno), and went inside.

  It was full of tourists, so she went toward the front of the church. She knelt, let the chatter of the crowd fade away in her mind, and prayed for the repose of Aunt Brigitte’s soul, for God to show her mercy. She prayed for Jules, too. Then she sat in the pew and contemplated the exquisiteness of the structure. Every time she came in, she lost herself in one facet of it; she could live inside it decades and never truly contemplate it all. Her eyes glided to the circular Rose Sud, the intricate stained-glass window from the Middle Ages that was, to her, the epitome of sublime.

  The smarmy organist sauntered past her. Moments later she heard Mozart’s Requiem, precisely the kind of music one expected to hear in a centuries-old Gothic cathedral.

  She asked for guidance on the dream, what it did and didn’t mean. Would God deign to help with that? She didn’t imagine He was pleased with the Henard experiments and all they entailed, trying to make humans something more than what He’d made them. That hadn’t stopped her from praying about it from time to time, and Gabrielle had cited prayer as a facet of her Insightful journey as well. Surely He listened, man-made magic aside.

  From there, she went home, where she saw Simone leaving her parents’ apartment. Nathalie greeted her, happy to see that she looked more like herself now, and asked if she had a few minutes to talk on the Rooftop Salon.

  Simone responded by hooking her elbow. “Let’s go. I’m off to watch one of Louis’s rehearsals later—he’s playing Puck, suitably enough, in a café performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that begins next month—but I have some time. I can tell something is on your mind.”

  “Everything is on my mind. Several big things, anyway.”

  They made their way to the roof and settled into the late-day shadows along the outer wall. Sim
one stretched out on her back as Nathalie bunched her legs up.

  Nathalie hugged her knees. “We received bad news this morning. Aunt Brigitte, she took her own—she killed herself. A pitcher shattered the other day. She took a piece as they were cleaning and … that’s what she used.”

  “Oh, mon Dieu!” Simone sat upright, wide-eyed.

  Twice already Nathalie had shared that news, and still the words felt like another language coming out of her mouth.

  Simone crawled over and put her head on Nathalie’s shoulder. “Ma soeur. I’m so very, very sorry. You must be devastatingly stunned. I know she said she was going to confess and you thought the matter was finished, or going to be.”

  “She confessed in a different way, I think,” Nathalie said, her voice quiet. She ran her fingers along the hem of her dress, and after a breath, told Simone everything they’d learned at the asylum.

  “What did your parents say? I know they’ve been strange about this whole affair.”

  “Right now, they’re focused on her death, not what sent her to it,” Nathalie said. In front of her, anyway. They might have spent all day discussing it when she was gone. “Frankly I don’t know if they’re ever going to address her crime again. I wasn’t there when Maman told Papa, and you know how it is. If they want to be silent on something, they will, and that’s the end of it.”

  Simone stood and leaned against the wall. “I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. What else is there to be done?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Nathalie assumed it was, anyway, and left it there to drift off the roof to join all the other unanswerable questions that rose above the city at that particular moment.

  “Last night I had a morgue dream.” She wanted to fill the silence, and she wanted to share this with Simone to see what her interpretation might be. “Everyone on the slab was someone in my life—including you and Louis—and I shattered the glass.”

  “Shattered?”

  Nathalie elaborated on the nightmare, her muscles tensing with each word. She stood when she finished and paced the roof.

  “That’s some coincidence, Nathalie.”

  “Isn’t it, though?”

  “It’s almost as if…” Simone paused. Her eyes darted to the sky and then to Nathalie. “I wonder if, when your aunt … crossed over, her gift passed to you. Based on everything you’ve told me, that dream sounds like the sort she has. Had.”

  Nathalie was relieved Simone said that, because it reflected Papa’s theory as well as her own. Yet she was also disappointed for the same reason. She didn’t want that to even be an option. Was it possible for an Insightful to pass a gift to another?

  “I’ll ask Dr. Delacroix, but I hope it’s nothing like that. I don’t want her ability. Or the consequences.”

  Simone shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking forever. I was thinking perhaps … a goodbye.”

  That was a much less worrisome, much more heartwarming interpretation. “Why is it that I need you to point out these possibilities? My mind goes straight to the unlit path through the bleakest of alleys.”

  “You haven’t closed your eyes except to blink since then. Don’t think that way until you have reason to, yes?” Simone waited for her to respond in the affirmative. “Now. You said several big things. I can’t conceive of what else you’ve got to share.”

  Nathalie stopped pacing. “Jules.”

  “Oh,” said Simone, visibly surprised.

  Those two words initiated a ten-minute discussion on that subject and concluded with two more that culminated in another seemingly unanswerable question from Simone. “What now?”

  “I meet with him and see where the conversation takes us,” Nathalie said, shrugging. “We won’t be resuming a courtship. I—I can’t do that.”

  “He’s a clever conundrum, that one.”

  That he was.

  For all the questions on the roof, Nathalie had several answers, and more questions to contend with, when she and Simone parted ways a short while later.

  A letter from Dr. Delacroix, which came in during her absence, answered some of them.

  42

  The mood in the apartment was understandably somber. Papa sat at the desk and pored over documents from Saint-Mathurin; Maman worked on a chartreuse brocade dress, giving the color of grief on her face a pale, greenish-yellow tint. Nathalie sat on the sofa, Stanley pressing his paws against her hip, and read.

  Dear Nathalie,

  I appreciate your thoughtful response. Thank you for your candor in describing your experiences and the questions that have surfaced for you.

  Please know that my responses aren’t infallible but rather based on the research behind them and other cases as I have studied them. My understanding of naturals (such is the parlance, as you know) is less than that of those who received transfusions directly, but I’ll nevertheless aim to help.

  My contention is that there are indeed naturals—and even those who had the transfusions and consider themselves “failures” in the experiment—who never discover their ability, just as I believe there are people with musical talent or proficiency in mathematics who don’t find themselves in circumstances to uncover that truth in themselves. It’s possible you’d have been among them were it not for your initial, accidental incident in the morgue (fortunately most people don’t often have direct or indirect physical contact with the deceased). Although I don’t believe anything elicited your power per se, I do theorize that Insightful gifts can present at an early age as well as later in maturity. Our gifts arise from the essence of who we are, and as I’m sure you know from your own life, there are parts of ourselves we’ve always known and others we don’t perceive until we age. And some, life and reveries suggest, we never come to know at all but forever wonder about.

  As well, many Insightful gifts are capricious and develop new traits (or lose them) as time goes on. The power itself is, if not a sort of life, than akin to the cycle of it. That your visions are in reverse again could signify one of two possibilities, both of which are elaborations of ideas I put forth in my previous letter. One is that the overwhelming response your mind and body had to the situation with your aunt caused a deviation—a recalibration, as I termed it last time—that may be temporary or permanent (as you noted, with only one instance, a conclusion cannot be derived).

  The other potentiality, and I regret to mention this, should it upset you, is that your power may have weakened. Reverting to the nascent stage of an ability is often a symptom of waning magic. Again, this may be temporary or permanent.

  You mentioned keeping an appointment with friends. If that was connected to erroneous memory, then it’s consistent with the first of the two options mentioned above. A shift in ability can also result in the shift of the power’s consequences.

  I hope these responses have been satisfactory, and I hope this finds you feeling even better than before. Do understand, dear Nathalie, that the state of your gift notwithstanding, you are whole. No matter how much our gifts consume us, it’s important to remember that we are always us, always complete, with or without them.

  Sincerely,

  Delacroix

  Her muscles felt like boulders, weighing her down. My power might change or weaken?

  Papa’s didn’t. Aunt Brigitte’s changed, but so did Aunt Brigitte; who could say what had begotten what? M. Patenaude’s was unreliable now, yet only after decades. She’d heard of Insightfuls whose gift disappeared abruptly, too. Long ago, in the early days. At least, that had been her perception.

  Might she lose it entirely?

  No, that wasn’t a possibility she was willing to accept. A shift, perhaps, though even that was unconvincing. There hadn’t been any memory loss relative to Simone and Louis, so the example she’d provided Dr. Delacroix wasn’t relevant after all. Her memory loss had been brief following the last two visions, and one could argue that represented a deviation.

  It had also been very soon after her hospital stay, and she had gone against the
medical doctor’s recommendation. Not to mention, well, as unsettling as it was to admit … maybe the vision was different because the body was different and not a body at all but a head. The other visions might have been influenced by it in a way she hadn’t perceived.

  Had Dr. Delacroix accounted for that?

  Nathalie put the letter back in the envelope and tossed it on the table. Neither of her parents looked up. Her eyes lingered on Maman, who’d had Henard’s blood transfusions but never manifested a gift. Was she truly deprived of one, or was it an obscure power like Nathalie’s that required an unusual set of circumstances to discover?

  Maman had suffered because of that, or so she’d thought years ago. Did she now? Or was she glad not to have the blessing and curse that was being an Insightful?

  After petting Stanley for a while, Nathalie went into her bedroom to pick out a dress for her rendezvous with Jules, pausing by her collection of important-to-her objects. The brass button had been Dr. Delacroix’s. All of her other visitors denied it was theirs, and it didn’t look like it went on anything the hospital staff wore. Sure, she could ask him in a letter. It was nicer this way, she decided. A memento of their conversation, of his thoughtfulness. And of Gabrielle’s.

  She picked out a navy-blue-and-white linen dress. Briefly she contemplated wearing the bracelet from Jules, but she opted not to, lest she convey ideas she didn’t intend to suggest.

  A clever conundrum indeed.

  Mon bonbon.

  He knew how to appeal to her, didn’t he? She wanted not to care. She didn’t care, not in the way she had during their courtship.

  Yet he still meant something to her. A hint of that had stirred within her at Le Petit Journal today. It must have stirred Jules, too.

  She missed him. Talking to him, laughing with him. She couldn’t give him her heart again. Maybe he would accept her friendship after all?