The Missing Sister

by Marr, Elle

We each remove a file, then thumb through the papers within. My thoughts zigzag despite my calm expression. What else do I think I know about Angela, but don’t? What other strange photos of ex-boyfriends am I going to find with her current beau beside me?

  Focus. Everything in this space is contradictory. Be logical. Find the through line just like you would with a patient profile in school.

  Seb pores over an undergrad multiple-choice test from the Sorbonne—Angela got an A in English—go, girl. Slanted sunlight highlights his square features and a patch of chest hair peeking from the white V-neck shirt he wears.

  If Seb is good enough for my flighty sister to date for a year, I need to learn more about him. I need his insider knowledge of my sister’s recent activities, likes, dislikes, how she spent her days. I’ve got to go deep to decipher any coded clues that might be hiding here and get some context. Starting with this weeping willow of a boyfriend.

  “Seb?”

  “Oui? I mean, yes?”

  “Where did you learn to speak English?” I fan through a folder of papers. A moment passes in silence, and I wonder what Seb is seeing in my face, shadowed beneath the window. How many times has he sat in this exact spot with my sister? What will he do without her?

  “At school, mostly. I was a biological sciences major, and many academic journals are in English.” He breaks into a smile, baring pearly whites. “Languages come easy to me.”

  I nod, absorbing his cheeky raise of one eyebrow. “I was a science major, too. Human biology, premed.”

  “Bio-sci and history double major. Although history did not serve me very well, studying neurology.”

  “Wow. So you finished medical school already? How old are you? You look too young to be a doctor.”

  Seb leans back on his palms. “I have thirty. I have been done with my residency program for a year but have been working in the medical field much longer.”

  “Interesting.” I have thirty. Thirty years old? I resume searching for clues (cryptexes, ciphers, coded letters, cave drawings, etc.) and try to catalog this information. Seb appears devoted to Angela, willing to do whatever it takes to learn what happened to her. It’s impressive. Angela’s type was traditionally the homecoming king, an ideal partner to her queen. Now it seems she prefers the arrogant nerds that always appealed to me.

  Typical—they invariably preferred her. When we were fifteen, I asked my honors biology classmate, Ashton Wheelan, out to a movie, having read in a magazine that confidence was attractive to boys. He said yes—until he realized I wasn’t Angela. He said he wanted someone more on his level. Considering I had just beaten him for the highest grade on our final exam, I knew what he meant: Nonsciencey. Miss Congeniality. The fun twin.

  Even the last New Year’s Eve Angela and I spent together, we were competing for a guy. Teddy Nguyen, a genetics major who lived in the dorm room below me, had asked me out several times; I just couldn’t meet up while studying for first-semester senior-year finals. After helping Angela prep for her Medieval Medicine class, I invited him to a party she was throwing, and the two of them flirted over the spiked punch all night. She swore she was only playing the welcoming host. But I knew she enjoyed taking something I wanted. It had been that way between us since we were children.

  “Listen, Seb. All these are just old tests and papers from her undergraduate studies. I found her agenda book earlier but haven’t looked at it yet. Should we read that?”

  “You do not want to look at the rest of these folders? There are also many more that rest under the bed.”

  I withdraw a file from the box, entitled SORBONNE RECORDS. Small, rectangular receipts are flattened within, some stapled to larger papers, most just lying free. Swirling drawings trace the backs of two receipts.

  “No, I don’t,” I say abruptly. “Let’s move on. I still have to pack all her stuff and donate what I can’t ship.” My extreme need to organize becomes amplified in stressful situations. Surveying the room littered with papers, clothing, and boxes, I feel like I might break out into hives.

  Seb drops the folder back in the carton; it lands with a dramatic slap. “All right. I will defer to your twin powers.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your twin powers. Angela mentioned them. You were psychically connected? Studies have shown infant twins are able to sense the other’s discomfort without seeing or hearing the other.”

  “You’re joking. Right?”

  He smiles like I just asked him to explain gravity. “This power resides somewhere in the cerebral cortex, the area that controls our empathy, and the basal ganglia, the area of our brains that houses intuition. There are many mysteries associated with twins. Although I do not know if it pains you to discuss them.”

  “Um. No, I’m not . . . pained.”

  “Science is at its limit,” he continues, absentmindedly stroking the tattoo on his ankle. “Science is always at its limit until it surpasses itself. The earth is flat until it is not, gravity pulls greater on a fat man until it does not, and there are only sixty elements in the periodic table until there are not.” He pauses, inviting me to disagree with him. “We’re only a few steps short of understanding the final mysteries this world has to offer. Until we learn there are more.”

  I nod slowly. “Let’s check out her planner.”

  Seb stands while I busy myself with an essay on globalization. He certainly seemed intelligent. Opinions about science aside, I guess he would have to share some of Angela’s hippie-dippie beliefs in order to date her for so long. Twin powers?

  Flipping backward through the eighteen-month planner, I get a snapshot of Angela’s life. The more recent days in late June are empty except for one containing a circle with the number fifty-eight inside it and a few notes that repeat on a weekly basis. Names and drawings begin around January; flipping back to December, every other day is scribbled with deadlines and bar outings. One square is decorated in candles and stars.

  “Who is Nour?” I ask. “Angela went to her birthday party last August.”

  Seb shakes his head. “No idea. But we should contact him or her. Nour can be the name of a man or a woman.”

  I release a deep sigh. My understanding of everything feels so limited. “Well, where is Angela’s stuff? Cell phone, passport, purse.”

  “Gone. I assume she had them when she disappeared. Perhaps the police have them. You could ask your inspector.” Seb stacks loose papers on the desk.

  “What do you do again?” It makes sense that the police wouldn’t tell Seb any of the details. It’s an open investigation, and he’s not family. So is he plying me for information?

  He returns my expectant gaze, then scoffs, reading my subtext perfectly. “I do research and work for the Paris Historical Archives. I apply neurological theories to remains found at archaeology sites. That’s how Angela and I came to meet, when she visited one of my projects.”

  I turn back to the agenda and the near-empty month of June. Some people meet in coffee shops or through online dating. Never my sister, Angela, the romantic twin. She’d have to fall in love in a cold cave, where huddling together for warmth is synonymous with first base.

  The green leather cover rubs soft against my dry fingers. A thick border is drawn around Thursday, June 28, in permanent marker, the day before Angela went missing during the shooting at the Sorbonne. I consult May and find the same thick border around each Thursday of the month. From April, extending back to the previous August, the Thursdays of each month are decorated with a square of black ink; the early squares contain the phrase BARRIÈRE D’ENFER.

  “What does this mean?” I crouch beside Seb where he sifts through articles on the floor.

  “It is the entrance to the catacombs of Paris.”

  “And what does ‘Barrière d’Enfer’ mean?”

  Sebastien grins a row of pointy teeth. “The Gate to Hell.”

  Gooseflesh covers my skin as I scan his face for a laugh, a flinch, a tell. Is he kidding? I search my meager store of F
rench history and what I remember from the handful of French films I watched with Angela. Is such a macabre name common here? More importantly, Seb seems to be enjoying my discomfort, his grin widening. Is he messing with me?

  “Are you okay, Shayna?”

  “I’m not sure. Is that really the translation of ‘Barrière d’Enfer’?”

  Seb rises, straightening to his full height. His outline blocks the desk lamp. “Shayna, that is the literal translation. Otherwise it is referred to as the Portal. Would you like to see it?”

  My upper lip curls. “Why?”

  “Because it was the subject of Angela’s doctoral dissertation. She was studying urban planning of the twelfth century and the catacombs’ role in World War II.”

  He maintains a blank face, but I hear his irritation. Perhaps frustration that I don’t fully believe him. “Let me guess,” I say, “the Nazis named it the Gate to Hell during the Occupation?”

  “No, they did other things down there.” He cracks a smile. “How about tomorrow?”

  Courtesy might suggest I laugh off my initial suspicion and change the subject to persuade him everything is fine. Instead I continue analyzing the thick border drawn around each Thursday. If he’s offering up a tour of Angela’s thesis subject, who am I to refuse? “Sure,” I finally say. The better I understand this Paris version of my sister, the better chance I have of solving her dry-erase Rubik’s cube. Even as the hope that she simply ditched Seb and went to Florence lingers.

  When I look up, Seb has pressed his lips into a straight line. He folds his arms across his chest. “Angela did not tell you anything about me, did she?”

  I look to the safety of the window behind him. “Not a thing.”

  “Shayna, I am not perfect.” He sighs and lowers his gaze, like it’s some big revelation. “But I loved your sister, and I am trying to help. I have already spoken to Inspector Valentin and his department multiple times. Angela was my only family, too.”

  My hackles rise—I am annoyed he would compare our family situation to his. He’s probably estranged from his father or in a fight with a cousin. “Oh really?”

  “Yes. My older brother and I were raised by my grandparents, who died when I had twenty. Baptiste died in Afghanistan four years ago, fighting with the French armed forces. Baptiste was my sanity, then Angela became my world.”

  I stare at him, at his earnest expression and the pain drawing his mouth, trying to reconcile my willingness to believe him with the whiteboard’s message beside him. Trust no one. His eyes become glassy, fixating on the floor. A large finger reaches up to dab away tears while I struggle to choose a side.

  I don’t trust him—I can’t, not with Angela’s warning. But I need him to help me learn what happened to my sister. There’s no way I can navigate the city or my sister’s French life for the next two days without someone who knew her, but why doesn’t he shut up and make this easier? Why does he need to feel explicitly accepted?

  In the eighth grade, Angela impersonated me when I had to give a presentation required to graduate middle school. I’ve never felt the comfort she always did in front of a camera or a crowd of people, and I also suck at asking for help. Rather than let me puke on my shoes, she stepped into them without my asking and helped us both progress to the next level. Seb, on the other hand, won’t volunteer without me making the first move.

  Be nice, I tell myself. Be like Angela.

  I clear my throat to speak. “I’m sure she felt the same way about you. She always chose good people to be around.”

  The bunched frown releases slightly. “Thank you, Shayna. Losing a sibling is a terrible loss I have known. I am only here to help.”

  Heat climbs my neck. For the first time in years, the pain of my estranged relationship with Angela fully throbs in my heart. It becomes clearer with each awkward pause that Seb knows my sister in all the ways I didn’t bother to learn. Talking about her like this, seeing her emotional effect on someone else, reminds me of how wonderful our relationship could be when we weren’t fighting. Before all the bad words, hard to take back and even harder to forget, were uttered in the wake of our parents’ deaths.

  Angela always took after our auntie Meredith, our father’s sister, notorious for turning any afternoon into an emotional hurricane. When we were nine, Angela kicked a hole in her closet when she wasn’t allowed to ride her bike; at fourteen, she cried so hard she gave herself a bloody nose when she didn’t get the lead in the school play; at seventeen, she sat in our childhood tree house wailing, in protest of our parents missing her performance at a theater festival because they would be on vacation. It was during a premed psych class that I started to wonder if Angela and Aunt Meredith were both somewhere on the spectrum of emotional imbalance—maybe bipolar—though they were never formally diagnosed.

  What if she hadn’t died? Could our relationship have been repaired? I was far from a model sister myself. I flaunted the red envelopes—lucky money from our grandparents—I received for my straight As, and sometimes I pushed Angela when I knew she was at her breaking point, as only siblings can. If she were alive, could we regain at least some sense of the family that we lost three years ago when our parents died?

  For so long, I blamed myself for their deaths.

  It’s only recently I’ve begun to move past that.

  Seb pulls out his cell phone. “It is late. I will meet you tomorrow morning after you finish at the morgue. Then we will go to the catacombs and continue our search for information.” He nods to our tiny clue pile: a few receipts from June, found on her desk, that the police thought were useless and hadn’t confiscated; a research paper about the catacombs bearing edits in red pen; and now her agenda.

  I stand and follow him to the door. “See you tomorrow.” I lock the dead bolt behind him, my words more a promise to myself that I’m ready. His footsteps groan down the stairwell into the marble foyer.

  My stomach growls. Considering I haven’t eaten anything since a sandwich this afternoon, I open Angela’s laptop to search for supermarkets nearby. I could use something to drink. Only one of them is open at this hour, a place around the corner from here. I’m about to close the window when a bookmark at the top of the screen catches my eye.

  Moon.

  Hope floods my chest. I stop breathing.

  Everyone, including our parents for a while, called Angela Sunshine, while I was the shadowy contrast to my sister’s effusive personality. Complicated, painful emotions rise as I recall her name for me—Moonshine—before either of us knew that typically meant bathtub gin. Moon.

  My trigger finger hovers over the link, then clicks. A public post from a blog she hasn’t touched in years opens, displaying a single phrase followed by numbers:

  Divine Research

  48535.75 2201

  A scream cuts through the square outside the apartment. What the hell? I rise and peer through the open shutters; the fountain is deserted, the sidewalks empty in the lamplit dark. Was that a person? A chill skips along my arms. The sound was feral in its sharp appeal, then abruptly silent.

  Valentin’s accented English echoes in the quiet: Series murderer.

  Divine Research.

  Moon.

  The lifetime of intensity I’ve experienced today alone threatens to pour from every cell of my body in snotty tears, but I don’t let the sobs begin. My sister’s final communication to me could be staring me in the face, possibly containing the answer to why she disappeared, why she died. There’s no time to fall apart.

  Grabbing the apartment keys and my wallet, I head downstairs. Outside the building door, a look in each direction reveals a sleeping homeless man, no one else. Around the corner, the convenience store is empty at nine thirty on a Sunday. The young cashier points to my liter of Coke Light and smirks. “Party big?” He eyes the Bank of America debit card I offer, putting the proverbial two and two together on my nationality.

  I pay without replying, not knowing where to begin. (Yes, a debilitating party
of one.)

  Dark green imprints the light skin of his inner elbow—a tattoo. He catches my glance, then pushes his sleeves higher so I can see the faded right angles of a swastika. A proud smile spreads his thin lips as he hands me my receipt.

  I hurriedly exit the store. Emotions jumble in my chest as I reach Angela’s building and jam the jailer’s key in the door—disgust, confusion, anger. Why would anyone be proud of a Nazi tattoo in this modern era? Upstairs, inside her apartment, I slam the door as if someone were on my heels. I pause, my heart pounding against my ribs, and suck down a gulp of air. Faint streetlight filters through Angela’s shutters. Shadow hands stretch across her bed and seem to grow longer with each second I stand still.

  In the dark of night, and with far more important tasks ahead, I don’t have the bandwidth to mull the implications of that cashier’s grin or wonder whether he was silently judging me as something unclean. Whether he was viewing me as some mixed-race disgrace.

  Whether the neighborhood convenience store clerk, or anyone else, mistook me for my sister.

  Chapter 6

  Day 2, Monday

  The morgue sits on a small island between the Left and Right Banks of Paris, as if neither one wanted that much death on their side. Sounds of traffic carry from behind a row of perfectly square hedges lining the sidewalk where I stand. From a tour boat on the Seine River below, a disembodied voice speaks in French.

  I pause before a commanding archway to soak in the morning sunlight, to feel connected to something I recognize all the way over on this continent. While Angela was nocturnal, I’ve always been a morning person. It’s strange to be here without her. Part of me envisioned finally visiting her in a few years, after medical school, with a husband, maybe a baby—when I could be fully armed against any anger she might lob my way, when I had everything I’d set out to achieve, despite the cost to us both. My husband would take care of the baby while I worked in oncology research. He’d keep the home tidy and have a cheese plate ready when I arrived home, followed by dinner at seven o’clock. The perfect househusband to make me believe I might deserve our little corner of happiness.