Instead of knocking on the door, Louis pulled out a key. He unlocked the door and gestured for Nathalie and Simone to enter. He followed them in and closed the door, locking it.
And then it was immediately obvious.
No one else was in the apartment.
As she watched Louis tuck the key in his pocket, unconcerned, the sick realization overtook her.
There was no séance, and there was never going to be.
It was all a trick.
41
The room they stood in resembled both a parlor and a laboratory.
Striped wallpaper, tapestry sofa and chair, kerosene lamps, a sun-faded rug, a bookshelf. No vases or trinkets or flowers. Only a candelabra on the bookshelf across the room.
And hundreds of jars.
Shelf after shelf of them lined the walls. Filled with liquid, they were all arranged by color. Black, brown, red, purple.
Blood. At least some of them. Nathalie was sure of it.
Her lungs emptied entirely, as if she’d taken a slow-moving cannonball to the stomach. She stole a glance at Simone, who seemed equally as stunned.
“Louis,” Simone began, voice brewing with alarm, “what is this? Where are we?”
“Madame Klampert’s apartment, as I said.” He leaned against the door and eyed them both.
Trapped.
Nathalie scrutinized his face, his demeanor. Those regal, if exaggerated, manners, his lively nature, his congenial expressions … did they cover up a sinister side?
He’s bookish and fashionable. Ovid and the silk cravat.
She banished the thought. No, not him. Not Simone’s beau. That wasn’t why he had brought them here. Maman and Papa knew they were with him.
Yet when he shifted his weight, she flinched. Her eyes found the candelabra on the bookshelf. Just in case.
“Why is the apartment empty? Why are we here?” Nathalie pointed to the bottles. “You asked me about the jar of blood in my satchel on the way here. That’s some coincidence.”
“She’s right. I don’t like tricks, Louis.” Simone folded her arms. “Why are we here?”
Louis gazed at them, a satisfied cat indulging his audience. “Because,” he began, eyes darting around the room, “we have some investigating to do. I suspect we’re standing in the room of the Dark Artist’s lover.”
“His lover?” The next words hung in Nathalie’s throat a moment before she could sputter them out. “Are—are you daft?”
“Mademoiselle Baudin, do you think you’re the first person to ask me that?” Louis said as he straightened his tie, smirking. As Nathalie and Simone stared at him with folded arms, he held up his hands. “I’m not deranged or lying or trying to scare you. Trust me.”
“We’ll trust you when you stop talking in riddles,” Simone said through gritted teeth. She took him by the elbow and pulled him close. “Explain this right now.”
“You can begin,” Nathalie said, “by telling us why you have a key to this apartment.”
“We share a landlord, Madame Klampert and I. The man is a drunkard. He’s not entirely faithful to his wife, either. I happened to come upon him at Le Chat Noir once with another woman.” Louis cleared his throat. “I reminded him of this and we … reached an agreement.”
Nathalie’s jaw slackened. “You blackmailed him for a key.”
“I did. And—my apologies, Simone, but please understand—I told him Madame Klampert was my lover.”
Simone let go of him and scowled. “Sweet.”
“Just a ruse, mon chou. I said I wanted to surprise her.” Louis kissed Simone on the cheek.
“Less kissing, more explaining,” said Simone.
His gaze searched the room as he spoke. “The woman who lives here, Zoe Klampert, comes to The Quill from time to time. She asked for a book on tarot once, three months ago.”
Tarot. The Lovers, the tarot card that was sent to the paper from the Dark Artist.
“Given my interest in fortune-telling,” Louis continued, “I remembered her. Whenever she came in, even to browse, we talked for a moment or two. At some point we discovered we were nearly neighbors, and once I even delivered a few science books to her—that’s where I got a glimpse of the jars.”
Nathalie approached the nearest shelf. She peered at a jar with brown liquid and read the label out loud. “Rat placenta plus iron.”
Simone came up beside her for a closer look. “Mine plus ink,” she said, picking up a nearby jar with blackish liquid.
“Blood mixtures? Experiments?” Nathalie shook her head in disbelief. “And yet no equipment for measuring, no droppers, no chemicals. Only glass bottles.”
Simone dropped the jar and swiped to catch it but missed. It hit the floor and shattered. The surrounding pool of blackness spread as if escaping the pile of shattered glass.
“Oh mon Dieu!” Simone’s pallor turned to milk. “Now what?”
“We clean it up,” said Louis, producing a linen handkerchief embroidered with his initials. “And search for evidence. There’s got to be something here.”
“I still don’t understand the leap,” said Nathalie. “You couldn’t have known what was in the jars at the time.”
Louis finished wiping up the mess, making a little bloodstained and shard-filled bundle. “No, but it was a memorable detail, to say the least.” He stood up. “She said they were tinctures and that she used to work in an apothecary. I wasn’t here very long and, taking her word for it, didn’t think anything of it. Until I saw the Dark Artist in the morgue.”
Simone, who was now inspecting jars on another shelf, turned to him. “You recognized him?”
“At the time, no, not exactly.” He took measured steps around the room, inspecting every horizontal surface and everything except the jars. “However, he was very familiar. For days I couldn’t figure out why. I thought I’d run into him at the club or the book shop. Then I read the account in the newspaper the other day and remembered. I’d seen his picture recently.”
“When you came here,” Nathalie ventured.
Louis nodded. “Indeed. Madame Klampert asked me to put the books on this table,” he said, pointing to a well-crafted wooden table. “Except last time, there was a framed photograph of the two of them. Right here. They were standing before the Medici Fountain in Luxembourg Garden—we even exchanged a few sentences about it.”
The marble and bronze statue of Acis and Galatea, lovers surprised by Polyphemus the giant. Again, lovers. A favorite theme of theirs, it seemed.
Nathalie suddenly felt dizzy. This couldn’t be real. She couldn’t be standing in the apartment of the Dark Artist’s companion. In fact, she shouldn’t be. The police should be here, not the three of them.
“You didn’t have to investigate,” said Nathalie. “You could have gone right to the police. Even if it didn’t turn out to be accurate. They get false leads all time.”
Louis put his hands on his hips. “Now where would the fun in that be? Worry none. If this plan of mine fell through this evening, I had every intention of going to the police in the morning. But I figured some evidence might help to back up my theory.”
Nathalie was both aggravated and impressed with him for devising this scheme. He was much more clever than she’d perceived. She’d taken him as a poet with an interest in the occult. Beneath all that flamboyance was a shrewd, observant mind.
She turned to Simone, but Simone wasn’t listening. She was transfixed by the jars. “This is it. Proof of her involvement. Look—look at those jars. Girl #2. Girl #3. Girl #1 is missing, but the rest correspond. All dated this summer. What else could it be?”
Agnès’s blood. There. In a jar, like a science experiment or natural history museum exhibit.
Nathalie’s finger trembled as she touched the one labeled Girl #5. “Agnès was Agnès, not Girl #5.”
“I’m sorry,” said Simone, stroking Nathalie’s back. “I’m sorry you had to see it and think it.”
They searched in silence for a fe
w minutes. Nathalie joined Louis at the bookshelf as he pointed out the science books he’d brought her. She wasn’t listening to him, however. She was trying to find Ovid. “What if she’s working with whoever sent the letter? Or sent it herself?”
“For what, though?” asked Simone. “She could just disappear and no one would ever know she was collecting blood with the Dark Artist.”
“No one does.” Louis pulled out a book and leafed through it. “Yet.”
The books were mostly science books, a few philosophy, and a handful of novels. Virgil’s Aeneid, a volume of Cicero’s works. No other ancient Roman literature.
Nathalie’s eyes danced around the room. She walked over to a wooden cylinder desk and rolled back the curved cover. To the left stood a framed carte de visite, the small photograph slightly faded with a tattered corner. A pretty, dark-haired young woman sat in a chair; a slim, older man who resembled her stood behind. Zoe and her father, presumably, or an uncle? Nathalie picked it up to show Louis. “Is this her?”
He examined the photograph. “Her face is leaner now and she wears her hair up, but yes. That’s her.”
Simone came over for a look. “Pretty girl,” she said, tracing the outline. “I wonder if her father, or whoever that is, warned her about murderous men?”
“Or imagined she would grow up to collect bottles of blood.” Nathalie returned the carte de visite to its place, her feelings vacillating between disbelief and disgust. She couldn’t reconcile this image of Zoe with the grim peculiarity of the apartment. The girl in the photo could have been a schoolmate, a friend to her and Agnès. Instead she was an inscrutable woman, obviously unhinged, who preferred jars filled with the blood of murder victims to figurines made of Limoges porcelain.
Nathalie scoured the desk. Envelopes, receipts, scraps of paper, financial documents, and two notebooks, all in neat piles, took up the rest of it. She began thumbing through a notebook when Louis walked over to one of the jar-lined shelves.
“So we know she was an accomplice,” he said. He plucked a bottle marked “Mine, +1, with laudanum” off the shelf and slipped it into his pocket. Casually, as if breaking into someone’s apartment and taking a blood jar off the shelf was a perfectly normal thing to do. “And we know she experiments with blood somehow. But we don’t know how or why.”
Footsteps came down the outside hall. Nathalie held her breath.
“It’s not her,” said Louis, waving his hand. “She won’t be back for hours. She’s at a séance.”
Simone narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”
“Because there is indeed a séance tonight—one of my acquaintances is the host, and I arranged for him to use the back room of The Quill. I saw the guest list a few days ago, and she was on it.” He tapped his fingertips together. “She won’t be back until late tonight.”
Nathalie felt an unexpected stab of disappointment that they themselves weren’t at the séance. What if she could have contacted Agnès?
She returned to the notebooks. The first one appeared to involve banking—numbers involving dollar amounts and transactions. The second, with faded ink and yellowed pages, contained symbols she’d never seen before and extensive notes. The penmanship alternated between long, flowing script and crisp, narrow text; it had to be that of two people. “Who is this woman?”
“Madame la Tuerie,’” said Simone after a pause. Madame of the Massacre. “I’m going to call her that. Never mind Klampert.”
“Brilliant,” said Nathalie, wishing she’d thought of it.
They started walking toward the bedroom when Nathalie spotted a table covered in lace and red silk at the end near the dining area. In the center of the table, surrounded by three unlit pillar candles, was a statue of a Roman centurion holding a lance in one hand and a crucifix in the other. A prayer book rested near the edge of the table.
Prayer. Maman was at vespers right now, praying for Papa and probably for Nathalie, too.
She opened the book, which reminded her of Maman’s, and a red and gold prayer card fell out. One side depicted a Roman soldier with a spear and “St. Longinus” underneath. It wasn’t a saint she recognized. She flipped it to the other side and read the prayer.
O Blessed Saint Longinus,
You who pierced the side of the crucified Christ,
You whose blindness His Precious Blood then cured,
Intercede for us.
Aid us in our suffering, strengthen the weakness in our faith.
Keep us on the path to true understanding
Lest we falter into the darkness.
Through your intercession and the mercy of God, the Almighty Father,
Amen.
Nathalie was repulsed by the thought of Mme. la Tuerie praying and hoped that no saint interceded any prayers for her whatsoever. She started to crush the prayer card but changed her mind.
A box of matches lay near one of the pillar candles. She lit a candle and held the prayer card over it, watching it disintegrate as she tossed the last piece into the flame. Nathalie murmured a quick prayer of apology to the saint, hoping he would understand.
“Is something burning?” Simone poked her head around the corner. Nathalie started to explain when Louis called from the bedroom.
“Ladies, you won’t believe what I’ve found.”
Nathalie and Simone rushed in to see him standing over an open drawer. The bedroom was ordinary—street art paintings on the wall, a brass lamp, a quilted bedspread, a vanity with perfume bottles.
Louis took something out of the drawer and held it up.
A pair of white gloves covered in an unmistakable brown stain. Old blood.
Simone let out a squawk and slapped her hand over her mouth. Nathalie’s muscles went rigid.
“Come see,” he said, leaning against the mahogany bureau. When they joined him, he pointed to five more pairs of gloves.
“A trophy for each murder,” said Nathalie, her stomach twisting more with each word.
“We’ll bring this to the police,” Louis said. He began to stuff his pockets.
“Wait,” said Simone, placing her hand on his wrist. “Only one should do. What if she notices? It’s bad enough we took two jars. So to speak.”
“Out of hundreds.” Louis put back the blood-soaked gloves and pocketed a pair. Nathalie wondered whose blood it was. Odette’s? Mirabelle’s? Charlotte’s? Lisette’s? The unnamed victim’s? She hoped it wasn’t Agnès’s.
Nathalie turned away, and her eyes landed on the vanity. She noticed something long and thin among the bottles and leaned in for a better view.
She put her hand to her throat as an acidic taste rested on her tongue. It all sank in at that moment, all of this. The madness of it. The horror. The reality.
“You finish. I’ll be standing by the door in the parlor,” Nathalie said, backing away.
Simone took a step toward her. “Whatever you’d like.”
Nathalie retreated a step and bumped into the dresser. As she caught herself she looked down at the vanity. With a shaky hand she picked up a gold-plated syringe with enamel inlay. “Is this … what she used to draw the blood?”
She put it down and turned away, not waiting for an answer. She knew the answer was yes. They all did. “I don’t know why I didn’t demand for the door to be unlocked and run out as soon as we saw the bottles.” She struggled to get the words out over trembling lips. “This is madness. You’re mad for bringing me here, Louis. My goodness. My beautiful friend’s blood in a jar? The gloves that madman wore when he killed her? I want to leave.”
Both Simone and Louis approached her warily, and this time she didn’t retreat. Instead she let them embrace her as she sobbed, on the threshold of Mme. la Tuerie’s bedroom.
When the moment passed, they stepped apart. Louis, who was facing the parlor window, tensed up. “Oh no.”
Nathalie wasn’t sure if he said “She’s here” or if she just knew it instinctively.
They ran for the door and Louis pulled the ke
y out of his pocket, dropping the gloves. He stopped to pick them up.
The hallway stairs creaked.
“Bedroom window!” he hissed.
They bolted out of the parlor. Simone unlocked the window and flung it open. She stepped onto the balcony first, then Nathalie.
The apartment door opened, followed by the squeak of the floorboards. Louis froze, his stricken face revealing the words he couldn’t utter.
There was no time.
“Gagnon,” Louis whispered, licking his lips. He tossed Simone the bloodstained gloves and put his hand on the window latch. “I’ll catch up.”
With that he pulled the window shut.
42
Nathalie and Simone stood on either side of the window, backs pressed against the cut-stone wall.
“Madame Klampert!” Louis’s voice ascended like a musical scale. “M. Genet told me you were … having some difficulty with a window latch?”
Nathalie eased away from the window, worried she might be visible from a certain angle. She eyed Simone, tense and motionless.
“Not at all. You work at the bookshop. How do you know the name of my landlord?” Her muted voice, suspicious yet under control, came closer with each word.
“He owns the building I live in as well,” said Louis. Nathalie imagined him giving an amiable smile to go with his tone. “I do odd jobs for him every now and then.”
Silence followed. The kind of silence that sends your imagination to a dozen places in the span of two blinks.
“You must have the wrong apartment,” Mme. la Tuerie said.
Was it fear or memory that made Nathalie think she’d heard that voice before?
Louis tittered. “I have to say, he wasn’t entirely sober when he gave me the key.” His voice faded further away as he spoke.
Mme. la Teurie’s response was too muffled for Nathalie to make out. Louis responded; again she couldn’t hear it.
Nathalie patted the side of the building to get Simone’s attention. “Let’s go,” she mouthed.
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