“Um …” I looked down the steps into the gaping darkness. I hated to send someone else to do my dirty work.
Audrey didn’t seem to mind, though. She descended halfway and stopped. “It’s dark, but it’s not small, if that helps.”
It did. I could handle the dark, as long as I knew the walls weren’t pressing in on me. The echoes of our footsteps off the room’s distant edges made me feel better.
We were standing in a cellar of some sort. The store didn’t appear to use it for anything, although when the girl swept her flashlight across the walls, I saw a collection of old brooms and a beat-up metal trash can.
“Aha!” The girl’s triumphant exclamation reverberated around us. “Ici — here!”
Audrey and I came up behind her and looked at the spot on the wall illuminated by her light.
“Oh,” Audrey said softly.
It was an engraved metal sign. At the top was the key design. Under that, it read, L’ORDRE DE LA CLÉ, MDCCLXXXI. EN SERVICE ÉTERNEL À SA MAJESTÉ LA REINE.
“What year is that?” I whispered, trying to remember my Roman numerals.
“One thousand … five hundred … two hundred … L is fifty, right? Plus thirty-one.” Audrey sighed an amazed little sigh. “Seventeen eighty-one. In eternal service of Her Majesty the queen.”
“The queen queen?” I asked, my pulse quickening.
“Let’s see,” Audrey said. “In 1781, that would have been Marie Antoinette. Wow.”
I couldn’t even speak. So “Laclay” wasn’t a person. It was an organization. And now I knew for certain: it had something to do with me — and with the duke in the portrait — and with Armand …
And with Marie Antoinette.
The girl was smiling at us. Clearly, she’d gotten the reaction she was looking for.
Audrey took out her camera. “The Order of the Key. So whoever they were, they were devoted to the queen.”
“But the queen died in the Revolution,” I said.
“Yeah.” Audrey started taking photos. “A lot of people died in the Revolution. Probably these Key people, too.”
The girl who worked at the store wandered around the perimeter of the room, inspecting the walls with interest.
“Come!” she said. “Come, see. More!”
She stood with her flashlight pointed to another metal tile. The key symbol was at the top, and beneath that was a list of words. I knelt down to look at them.
They were names.
DUBOIS. BEAUCLERC. VOCLAIN. ROUX. JANVIER …
And ISELIN.
WE HAD TO book it to the hotel to meet our group by ten o’clock. The whole way back, my thoughts were swirling. Had my family, the Iselins, really been members of this mysterious order? With Armand’s family? The idea of having something in common with a person as awe-inspiring as Armand made me feel electrified.
In the lobby, Madame Mitchell did a double take when she saw me. “I thought you all weren’t feeling well this morning.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m fine.”
“I guess it’s just Hannah and Pilar, then.” The look on her face told me she knew Hannah and Peely were lying — but also that she didn’t really care. I guess after teaching overprivileged girls for twenty years, you’ve pretty much heard it all. I kind of didn’t care, either. If they wanted to sleep through the entire trip, that was their business.
Jules arrived and we began our walk. I didn’t want to seem clingy, so I stayed at the back of the group. Finally, I fell into step beside him.
“Hey,” I said.
“Good morning,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m really sorry about yesterday, at the Basilique. Hannah was … she just wasn’t thinking.”
“That is not your fault. You don’t need to apologize.”
“I feel like I should,” I said. “I hope you don’t think they represent all of us.”
He turned to me, a small smile playing on his lips. “I don’t think that at all.”
I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. “Okay, then.”
I was on the verge of telling him what we’d learned about the Order of the Key, when Madame Mitchell turned and yoo-hoo’d at him, and he had to excuse himself and walk away. A little fountain of happiness sprang up inside me and I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.
We bought our tickets and then went across a massive walled courtyard into La Conciergerie.
“During the Revolution, this was a notorious prison,” Jules announced as we stood inside the vaulted room where huge stone pillars and arching stone beams braced the ceiling. “Many historical figures were held here prior to their executions, including Marie Antoinette, Madame du Barry, and Robespierre. Now, most of the building is used for judicial purposes.”
All I heard was Marie Antoinette.
We walked through a hall filled with examples of eighteenth-century prison cells.
“Kind of tight,” Audrey said, as we peered into a room that couldn’t have been bigger than about six feet by six feet, with a rough wooden bench that served as a bed.
“Yeah,” Brynn said. “Not the ideal place to spend a weekend.”
“Or the last few months of your life,” Jules said, coming up behind us.
“Did Marie Antoinette have to stay in a room like this?” I asked, sort of appalled. I mean, she was the queen. You’d think they’d have given her a little extra space.
“No, her cell was larger. But not very much larger. You will see a representation of it farther along on the tour.”
I noticed that he stayed with us as we passed the other rooms, which were full of janky-looking mannequins that Brynn made hilarious comments about.
But we all fell silent as we crossed into the re-creation of Marie Antoinette’s cell.
A shudder passed through my body as I looked at the items displayed behind glass. A rug. A cup. A water pitcher. Things the queen had actually held and used while she had been locked up, separated from her husband and children … waiting to die.
The room was larger than the other cells, but compared to the grand opulence of Versailles, Marie must have thought she was losing her mind. She had a small bed and a desk, with a short privacy screen to shield her from the view of the guards who were always sitting a few feet away.
I started to back away from the display, my palms growing sweaty.
To live there … to be stuck there, knowing you were going to die but not knowing what had become of your children …
“This is what you get when you tell people to eat cake,” Brynn said.
“Marie Antoinette never said that,” Jules said. “It’s a famous misrepresentation. Actually, she was not even the first person accused of having said it.”
“Then why did people believe it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She was raised in utter luxury as an archduchess and then became a queen at a young age. She was spoiled and probably thoughtless in many ways. But I don’t think she was bad in the way that an evil person might be called bad. She was devoted to charities, and she was a good mother who loved her children very much. But the people wanted to hate her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They needed a symbol,” he said. “Somewhere to project their frustration. Marie Antoinette was a foreigner — she was born in Austria, she was independent, and she had extravagant taste. But she was falsely accused of many things and often used as a … I don’t know how to say it.”
“A scapegoat?” I suggested.
Jules’s confused face was seriously cute. “A what kind of goat?”
“Scapegoat. It means … someone you blame when things aren’t good.”
“Then yes. She was a goat.”
At the far end of the hallway was a small square room, lined with benches. Every wall had a sign on it, filled with columns of names of prisoners held there during the Revolution.
I went straight to the Is, steeling myself for the sight of one or more Iselins on the list. My own relativ
es, horribly condemned to die.
But I didn’t find any Iselins. And when I looked for Armand’s family, the Janviers, I didn’t find any of them.
I tapped Audrey on the shoulder. “Do you still have the pictures you took this morning?”
She started scrolling back through her camera. “Yeah … oh, are you checking the names?”
I nodded, and then we went down the list together, looking for the rest of the families — Beauclerc, DuBois, Roux, and Voclain.
But we didn’t find any of them.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
Audrey shrugged. “That they were lucky?”
Still, I found it weird — that out of literally thousands of people, six whole families had escaped the guillotine entirely — and they just happened to be the same six families who were in the Order of the Key together.
We trailed down the hallway to the final room on the tour — a memorial chapel.
“This room was actually the queen’s cell,” Jules said. “It was turned into a memorial twenty-three years after she died, by King Louis the Eighteenth.”
The chapel was beautiful, with a real altar and everything. It was dark and quiet, small but not suffocating. On one side was a portrait of Marie Antoinette dressed all in black; on the other was a small table.
As I turned to go back to the main room, I froze.
Standing directly across from me was the queen.
She stared at me, her eyes burning with the same intensity I’d seen at Le Hameau.
In the dimly lit room, she almost seemed to give off a light of her own — a ghostly light.
No. I don’t believe in ghosts.
And then a tourist took a step toward the altar — and walked right through the queen’s enormous skirt.
I staggered backward, running into a woman who said, “Watch out, hon,” in a thick Texan accent.
By the time I got my feet back under me, the ghost — or whatever she was — had disappeared.
Audrey was by my side. “Are you okay?”
I wanted to nod, but I was too freaked out. Fortunately, Audrey just assumed I was having a claustrophobic meltdown.
“Come on, let’s go sit. It’s a little stuffy in here.” She guided me back out to a bench in the hallway. We sat for a couple of minutes, and I tried to force myself to take slow, even breaths. The thought kept sliding back into my head that I should feel better, but then it was run over by the giant, screeching fact that I’d seen a ghost — an actual ghost. I’d come so close to convincing myself that I’d been wrong about what I experienced at Versailles … but there was no denying it any longer.
She really was a ghost.
My stomach turned over with a flop. I rested my head in my hands.
“You really don’t seem okay,” Audrey said.
“I think I really might not be,” I said.
Her voice was calm, but I could hear the anxiety she was trying to cover up. “Should I get Madame Mitchell? Do you need a doctor or something?”
I tried to swallow the thickness in my throat but found that it wouldn’t go away. Then I tried to tell Audrey that I was fine, but I couldn’t say the words.
“Let’s go outside and get some actual fresh air,” Audrey said. “Wait here for a second.”
As if I could go anywhere.
When she came back, Brynn was with her. “Is it a panic attack?” Brynn asked. “My mom gets panic attacks.”
“Can you walk?” Audrey asked.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I can walk. No, it’s not a panic attack. I don’t think.” Was it still called a panic attack when there was something actually worth panicking about?
Somehow, I got to my feet, and we walked all the way back to the exit and emerged into the courtyard.
A light, chilled rain had begun to fall.
Instantly, I felt better. Not 100 percent, but I could breathe again. Brynn and Audrey watched me as I stood in the rain, enjoying the cool mistiness and swallowing the sweet, fresh air.
After a minute, I turned back to them.
“Better?” Audrey asked.
“Way better,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Of course.” She made a face like thanking her was kind of dumb. “Do you want to go back to the hotel? I can skip the Champs-Élysées…. It’s just shopping.”
“Maybe that would be a good idea.” Spending a whole afternoon surrounded by stuff I couldn’t afford wasn’t quite as bad as being stalked by a ghost, but it was close. “I’m sure I can get there by myself.”
Brynn pretended to be shocked. “Without your buddy?”
I half-smiled. “I guess I’ll find Madame Mitchell and tell her.”
She shrugged. “It’s easier to apologize afterward than get permission before, right? We’ll tell her you left. ‘We tried to make her stay, but she karate-chopped us. Who knew Colette was secretly a ninja?’”
I grinned.
“You’ll take a taxi, though?” Audrey asked.
“I’m okay to walk,” I said. “I promise.”
“Here.” Audrey dug through her backpack. “Take my umbrella.”
She insisted, so I took the tiny umbrella she offered. I still got wet, but it didn’t matter. The rain made the city seem even more romantic — the people pulling their coat collars up and hunching under overhangs and striped awnings, and the gleam from the headlights on the wet cobblestones.
But even as I took in the loveliness around me, my thoughts were occupied with the ghost.
What I needed was to figure out why I was seeing her, when obviously no one else was. Did I just happen to be visiting places that were significant to her, or was she following me? Was it because of the Order of the Key? It couldn’t be a coincidence that my ancestors had been closely connected to the queen and now I was seeing her ghost around Paris.
That made me wonder — would Armand be able to see her?
The trouble was, to ask him, I’d need his phone number. I couldn’t exactly ask Hannah for it.
In the penthouse, Pilar let me in and then drifted back to the couch, where she was reading a fashion magazine. The shower was running in Hannah’s room.
This was my chance.
“Have you seen my turquoise scarf?” I asked.
Peely looked up and shook her head.
“Did Hannah borrow it?” I turned to look at the closed bedroom door. “I told her she could….”
“Go check,” Pilar said. “She just got in the shower. She won’t care.”
I nodded and opened Hannah’s door, my heart pounding. Her stuff was strewn everywhere, but I found her phone charging on her nightstand.
I scrolled through her texts. There were about six in a row sent to Armand, unanswered. It was a huge difference from the way Hannah usually was with boys — she was the cat, and the boys were the mice, getting batted around for fun. With Armand, she was a tiny white mouse … sending unanswered mouse texts to the big old cat.
I wrote down his phone number on a piece of hotel stationery and crammed it into my pocket, then returned the phone to the nightstand and went back out to the living room.
“Did you find it?” Pilar asked.
It took me a second to remember that I was supposed to be looking for my scarf.
“No,” I said. “It must be somewhere in my suitcase.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m going to run downstairs and grab a sandwich. Are you good?”
She nodded, her eyes drawn back to her magazine. “Do you really think people are going to be wearing a lot of olive green this summer? They keep saying so, but honestly, I don’t see it happening.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I slipped out the door and down to the lobby courtesy phone. I dialed Armand’s number and got his voice mail.
“It’s Colette,” I said. “Please call me at the Hôtel Odette…. I have a crazy question for you.”
Back in the room, Hannah was in a rage because Arm
and hadn’t returned her calls or texts. Trying to avoid attracting her attention, I changed out of my rained-on clothes and borrowed Peely’s laptop to see if I could find anything online about the Order of the Key. But every lead took me to a dead end. There were offhand mentions of the various families, usually in the context of accompanying the king on a diplomatic trip or being present at the signing of a treaty or whatever, but nothing that linked them together … and nothing at all that linked them to the queen.
At dinnertime, Hannah declared that she was going to order room service and watch the DVDs she’d brought from home. Pilar ordered from room service, too, but I said I’d go down to the café and grab some food.
“It’s all the same food,” Hannah said scornfully.
It’s not the same at all, I thought. It’s free.
I endured her eye rolls and made it to the café just as the waiters were making their rounds.
“Colette, over here.” Audrey waved to me from the small table where she and Brynn were sitting. I wove through the tables and stood behind one of the chairs.
“Are you alone?” Brynn asked. “Sit with us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m not eating here…. I’m going to get my food to go.”
I ignored their quizzical expressions but pulled a chair out and sat down.
“I love that dress,” Brynn said. “Is it vintage?”
I nodded. I was wearing a simple black-and-white rayon dress, loosely cut, with buttons down the front, and over it, a short, structured black jacket. I’d found both of them at the thrift store. What Brynn (or Hannah or Pilar) didn’t know is that my so-called vintage clothes weren’t designer vintage. Most of them had labels from brands my friends would never be caught dead in.
“It must be so fun to shop with you,” Brynn said. “Like a treasure hunt.”
“I hate shopping,” Audrey said. “I just wear whatever my grandmother buys me … except the dresses. I have like fifteen dresses in my closet gathering dust.”
“I walk into the Gap, find a mannequin I like, and buy everything the mannequin is wearing,” Brynn said. “Baa, baa.”
“If I could figure out how to dress like Colette, I would try harder,” Audrey said. “But what’s the point? And I don’t want to end up looking like I obeyed the corporate mall overlords. No offense, Brynn.”
Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer Page 11