Her expression didn’t change. “Not everyone is obsessed with what other people think about them.”
Then she reached for the door, and I felt my options slipping away.
“Audrey, please!” My voice caught. It was close enough to being a sob that Audrey turned back to look at me.
The look on her face made it clear that she really did think I was nuts.
Might as well go ahead and reinforce that.
“I lied,” I said. “I wouldn’t be doing it as a favor to you. It would be a favor for me.”
“If … I come hang out with you?”
“Yes.” I thought about what Jules had said, about Audrey being a better friend than Hannah and Peely. Then I spat the truth out in one go. “I need your help with something. But it’s … it’s weird.”
Audrey took a moment before she replied. “Weird how?”
“Weird, like really weird.” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Weird, like you’re the only person in the world I can turn to.”
She stared at me.
Oh, forget it. I dropped my eyes to the floor. I didn’t blame her.
“All right,” she said simply. “Let me tell Brynn.”
It was like a chorus of angels began to sing. “Seriously?”
“Yeah,” she said. “If you need help …”
“You have no idea,” I said. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”
I almost said I owe you one. The words made it all the way to the end of my tongue. But suddenly I knew that wasn’t what Audrey would want to hear. It wasn’t about owing and being owed. For the first time, that was really clear to me.
So instead, I just said, “Thank you.”
By the time we got back to the penthouse, I’d changed my mind. The words I’d been planning to say sounded completely nuts. There was just no way Audrey would help me, even if I appealed to her charitable side.
“So, what’s up?” she asked, after taking a second to look around the room. “What’s going on?”
I was searching for a way to tell her that I was sorry, that I was wrong, that I didn’t need her help, when the events of the week snowballed and rolled right over me. I broke down crying.
“Oh, no, Colette.” Audrey’s dark eyes searched my face anxiously. “What happened? Please tell me what’s wrong.”
For a minute, I couldn’t answer. She looked around a little awkwardly, and then she stopped in front of the coffee table and picked up the paper where I’d tried to record Véronique’s words.
“What’s this?” she asked. She read over the words silently, then translated them out loud. “It’s not just your neck — she wants to break your heart … ?”
I sat up straight. “Is that what that says?”
“Well, kind of,” she said. “The spelling’s pretty bad, but I think that’s the general idea. What does it mean?”
It meant that the queen hadn’t killed me when she had the chance because she was planning something else … something worse.
“Audrey.” I said her name to test my voice, and then I looked into her eyes. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
AUDREY SAT IN the desk chair, staring at her hands.
“It sounds crazy, right?” I said.
She nodded. “Yup.”
“But I swear it’s all true.”
She still didn’t look up at me. She seemed to be thinking things through, murmuring to herself. “It can’t be a coincidence, can it? The names? I mean, it’s every family from the list….”
I didn’t talk. I’d done plenty of talking, and now I needed to let her decide whether she believed me.
If she believed me, I would have a powerful ally. If she didn’t …
Finally, she looked up at me.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “But … I don’t not believe in ghosts, either, you know?”
I gave a tiny nod.
“I’ve never seen any evidence of that kind of thing. But I suppose it’s … possible.” She looked right into my eyes. “Swear to God, Colette, you’re not just doing this as some sort of huge prank.”
My stomach was in my throat. “I swear.”
“What are you going to do about it?” she asked. “I guess that’s the first question. You haven’t mentioned it to Jules, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Well … maybe don’t tell him about the ghost part. But we should ask him if he can find out anything else about the Order of the Key. He must have access to some restricted materials.”
“Do you think he would?” I asked.
She raised one eyebrow. “He’s totally infatuated with you, Colette. I think you could ask him to steal you a puppy or something and he would do it.”
I managed to laugh — but then I remembered the argument Jules and I had had the day before. Not exactly a puppy-stealing moment.
“You need to call him,” she said. “Right now.”
“What could he possibly learn?” I asked.
“He’s a historian. Maybe he can dig up some clue that would show us how to stop her. Or why she’s doing it. Doesn’t it seem strange that she’s killing the people who were supposedly her best friends? Anything he can find out about the order could be helpful. So call him.”
“Right now? But he has the afternoon off,” I said lamely.
“Even better,” she said. “Call him.”
“But what if he —”
“Colette,” she said. “Call him.”
So I took the folded-up piece of paper with Jules’s phone number on it out of my purse, sat down at the phone, and called him.
There was no answer. I left a message asking him to call me at the hotel and hung up.
“So what now?” I asked.
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Audrey said. “So the big question is, will the ghost follow you?”
“Follow me home?” I hadn’t even thought about that. “She wouldn’t hurt my mother or my brother, would she?”
Audrey was silent.
She wants to break your heart.
I thought of Mom and Charlie, alone and vulnerable in that little apartment.
“I need to call them,” I said. “They could be in danger —”
“Your mother’s not an Iselin by birth, though,” she said. “It would be your dad, right?”
That’s right.
I could call my father. It was early, but he would want to be woken up, when he heard he and Charlie and I could be in trouble.
I dug out my calling card and dialed Dad’s cell phone number.
It seemed to take forever for the call to go through. Finally, it rang. And rang. And rang.
And went to voice mail.
“Dad, it’s me. Please call me at the hotel in France. It’s important.”
I hung up.
Then I dialed again.
This time, it rang twice and then someone picked up. “Hello?”
“Dad?”
My father’s voice was raspy and tired. “Colette? What time is it? I thought you were in France.”
“I am,” I said. “Listen, I’m sorry to wake you up, but this is important. There’s something really weird going on and —”
“Have you called your mother about it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”
“Look, sweetie. I’m really busy these days, and I think you should try your mom first.”
It was like getting slapped in the face. “But, Dad …”
“I’m sure your mom can handle whatever it is you need. I’m just a little overbooked, you know? I’m flying out today for a job interview in San Diego and —”
San Diego? “What about New York?”
He was silent.
“I thought we were going to New York this summer.”
“Well, honey, that’s not going to happen. You know that was never set in stone.”
Never set in stone? My father had taken me out to dinner and asked me how I’d like to spend the su
mmer in Manhattan with him. He’d told me he would find a short-term lease on the Upper West Side and I could get a part-time job and we would go see Broadway shows on the weekends.
I didn’t answer.
Dad went on. “Anyway, Estelle found this opportunity for me in California, and we’re thinking —”
“Who’s Estelle?”
“She’s the …” I heard a murmur in the background, a female voice. “She’s my girlfriend, Colette.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, I felt exhausted.
“I just think maybe it would be better if you stayed in Toledo this summer. Maybe you can come see me in San Diego after graduation.”
That was more than a year away.
“All right, Dad,” I said.
“You understand, right? I’ll owe you one.”
My heart sank. “Sure.”
He hung up.
I sat with the receiver in my hand until Audrey came and placed it back in the cradle. “You’ll use all your calling card minutes,” she said softly.
“He didn’t even ask how I was,” I said. “I could have been dying and he wouldn’t have even known.”
She sat on the edge of the sofa. “I’m sorry.”
“And I was supposed to go to New York for the summer — I’ve told everyone…. I’m going to look so stupid.”
“No one is going to care,” she said. “No one who matters, anyway.”
Hannah would care.
Then it hit me — all the members of the order were shallow jerks. And my dad was a shallow jerk.
And as long as we’re being real, here …
I was a shallow jerk, too.
“Did you try … let’s see … saying a prayer?” Audrey offered. She sat at the desk with the laptop we’d borrowed from Brynn. She was reading from ghost websites. “Or telling the ghost that her presence isn’t welcome?”
“I don’t think so. I guess I might have said ‘Go away.’ Is that what you’re supposed to do?” I was lying on the sofa with my feet on the armrest. “I was too busy peeing my pants.”
Audrey looked back at the screen. “It’s what a bunch of people on this website are saying.”
“And the internet is never wrong,” I said. “Especially about ghosts.”
She sighed and sat back. “Okay, next website.”
We’d been searching for information on ghosts for an hour. Unfortunately, most of it was obviously made up by people who had no idea what they were talking about.
I glanced at the clock. It was four. Hannah and Pilar would be getting back from the rental shop with their gowns soon and starting to get ready. And I would have to come up with a good reason for not going.
“What about apologizing?” Audrey asked.
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, she was beheaded…. That has to be stressful.”
“But those families were her friends.”
Audrey turned around. “Why weren’t any of them tried or executed during the Revolution?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they got lucky.”
“Or they didn’t. What if —”
She was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door.
We glanced at each other.
“Ghosts don’t knock, right?” she asked.
I got up and went to open it.
Jules was outside. “Let me in before someone sees me,” he said. “I’m not supposed to come into your room.”
I let him pass and shut the door behind him. “What are you doing here? I tried to call you —”
“You did?” He pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. “Oh, yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t get your message. I was in the archives at the university library, and reception there is very poor.”
I’d never seen him like this. He was agitated, pacing back and forth, clutching a notebook tightly in his hand.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He turned to me so quickly that it startled me.
“Don’t think I am crazy,” he said. “But I think you may be in danger.”
“Oh, yeah, that,” I said.
He blinked.
“What did you find, Jules?” Audrey asked.
He looked at her and then back at me. Then he seemed to collect himself and opened his notebook. “I remembered that you had asked me about someone named Véronique, and I had a feeling it was related to your family. So I went into the rare books section and looked up Véronique Iselin — just to see if something would turn up. I found a group called L’ordre de la Clé. Initially, the group was formed to support the monarchy — especially the queen.”
“‘In eternal service of Her Majesty, the queen,’” I said.
“Oui, exactly,” he said. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve been doing some research of my own,” I said. “What else did you find?”
“Six families took a blood oath with one another to look after the interests of Marie Antoinette and her family.”
A blood oath? I exchanged glances with Audrey.
“And then, when the Revolution came, they swore to help the king and queen escape. They coordinated efforts to get the royal family out of France. After the first effort failed and the family returned to Versailles, the order stayed close by, to protect her.”
So she was paying them back by killing them off? Nice.
“There were even rumors that they built a secret room where the royal family could hide until their allies came to rescue them, should they ever find themselves in danger.”
“Like a panic room?” Audrey said.
Jules nodded. Then he looked at me. “But as I researched the order, I realized — the last names — they are the same as the people being murdered now. Roux, Janvier, DuBois, Beauclerc —”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “And Iselin is one of the names.”
“Yes,” he said. Then he stared at me. “And that is why I believe you are in danger. But then I asked myself, why would someone kill the members of a secret society from two hundred years ago?”
Not just any someone — the ghost of the woman they swore to protect.
“And I found the answer in the very last chapter of a book written by royalists in the 1830s. The Order of the Key was established to serve the queen, but in the end … they betrayed her.”
I gasped. “They did?”
“Every single family,” he said. “And they did it to save themselves.”
Just thinking about it made my neck hurt.
“It was an elaborate plan,” he said. “They made a deal with the Jacobins — the revolutionaries — who promised the families safe passage out of the country in exchange for making sure the king and queen did not leave Versailles until they could be taken prisoner.”
I stared at the rug, feeling sick to my stomach.
So the queen was taking her revenge. And since the original members of the order were long dead, she was taking her rage out on the next-best thing — their descendants.
“What about Véronique?” I asked.
He set the notebook down. “Véronique Iselin was the Duchesse de Broglie. She was the queen’s most trusted and beloved friend. Her betrayal was the worst of them all.”
The room was quiet for a long moment, except the rustling of pages as Jules looked back over his notes.
“And I’m worried because she’s the only one left,” he said.
I stared at him, not understanding.
“A member of every other family has been attacked. You, Véronique’s descendant, are the only one left. So whoever’s doing this may be coming after you.” He gathered his notebook. “We need to go to the police. I almost went directly there, but I decided to stop here first … to make sure you were safe.”
“The police can’t help,” I said.
Jules furrowed his brow. “Of course they can help.”
“They really can’t,” Audrey said.
“I don’t understand why you would say such a thing,” Jules
said.
I flopped backward on the bed, my arm over my eyes. “I guess I just make sure never to be alone again in my whole life.”
“Actually …” Audrey spoke up from the desk. “It may not be that bad.”
I peered at her through the crook of my elbow.
“Look,” she said, pulling up a map of Paris on-screen. “I marked the location of each murder….”
There was a series of little pin graphics that formed a path from Versailles right to the center of the city.
“It’s pretty consistent,” she said. “I’m not sure what it means, but it seems like there’s a pattern. And the pattern doesn’t include Toledo, Ohio.”
“Wait,” Jules said, leaning down to look at it. “This is the path the royal family took from Versailles to the prison.”
“So every victim happened to be along the route?” I said. “Isn’t that a little —”
“Is it weirder than the fact that there’s an evil ghost killing people?” Audrey asked. “And look — here’s our hotel. So you’re on the route, too.”
She double-clicked, and one last pin fell into place on the map.
“Maybe you’re all drawn to this route,” she said. “It was a blood oath, after all. Maybe it’s in your blood.”
Maybe so. We were quiet.
Jules cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. “Did you say … a ghost?”
We both turned to him. I glanced at Audrey, who shrugged.
“Yes,” I said. “A ghost.”
He looked like a chicken who’d just realized he was hanging out in a fox den. “I don’t understand. Whose ghost?”
I sighed. “Marie Antoinette’s. I’ve been seeing her all week.”
“Ah.” He fidgeted for a moment, glancing at the door. I half-expected him to run for it. Then he wandered away, to stare out the window.
Audrey’s eyes, full of sympathy, met mine, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing.
This was the end of my beautiful Paris romance.
“Well,” Audrey said, “the good news is, maybe you just need to make sure you’re not alone between now and tomorrow, and then …”
“And then never come back to Paris again.” Ever. A sudden sense of loss settled over me.
Still, it beat dying.
“Maybe we should spend the rest of the night looking up other people who might be in danger and calling them,” Audrey said.
Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer Page 18