The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller. Kate Horsley

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      Well, you can “ask again later” if you want to.

       Molly Swift

      JULY 30, 2015

      It’s two days since they found her. The papers say she was wandering on the road, barefoot and bloodied, her mouth open in a scream the driver couldn’t hear. He slammed the brakes but didn’t stop in time; he hit her and took off.

      As fate would have it, a German tourist couple was parked on the top of a hill along the road, filming a panorama of the sunrise over the lavender fields. In the midst of their early-morning filmmaking, the camera panned towards the road—and caught the whole accident, from the moment she walked out of the woods. She was lucky, I guess. If they hadn’t spotted her, who knows how long she would have lain there bleeding.

      According to Le Monde, the tourists ran to help and rushed the unconscious girl to the hospital here in St. Roch; but by the time the doctors wheeled her into intensive care, she was in a coma. Shaken, the pair returned to their holiday flat and watched their French sunrise video. They were shocked afresh by the sight of the girl lying crumpled in the road, the way the red car sped away, the scene captured as they ran downhill to help her—filming as they went.

      That’s how the video went viral. The Good Samaritans saw that glimpse of red car, the hint of a plate (a nine? an E?), the merest blur of a man’s face, hair dark, sunglasses on. They decided the best thing to do was upload the clip to YouTube. It spread to Facebook as one of those long status updates calling on the public: “find this monster,” “help the #AmericanGirl.”

      She wouldn’t have made the headlines except it was a slow news week and the story of an American girl abroad for the first time, alone—a mystery girl who walked out of the woods—spread in the way stories do nowadays. In the video, there was that hint of foul play: not just a hit-and-run, after all, but something darker. Otherwise, why would the girl be half naked and screaming before the car ran her down? Soon the clip was trending on Twitter and dominating the insistent worm of text that slithers across the bottom of your TV during the news. It became one of those stories everyone’s curious about, one of those mysteries everyone wants to solve.

      That’s why I’m here, me and the handful of other hacks camped outside the Hôpital Sainte-Thérèse in St. Roch, where the nuns come and go at inhospitable hours, murmuring prayer and giving no sound bites. I’m the most recent arrival, late to the party, crashing in uninvited as usual. Well, not quite uninvited. I was in Paris when I heard the news. First holiday in years, and then this story broke.

      I was intrigued. I called Bill to tell him about it and he said, “Why don’t you go? Cover it for the program. We’ll do an episode on it.” Dangling the thought, a whole episode with me at the wheel.

      I said, “Go away, Bill, I’m on holiday,” but I found myself thinking about that American girl, all the more so because the video was impossible to get away from.

      Of course, the other journalists will state the obvious: the facts, the theories, the local gossip. But this is American Confessional—“the truths no one wants you to hear”—podcast once a week on iTunes in a series of audio episodes topped and tailed with our melancholy signature music. We’re interested in the big themes: police brutality, political corruption, contemporary loneliness in the toxic age of the internet. We’ve gathered quite a following for unpicking the kind of unsolved mysteries that fascinate the American listener (well, the HBO-loving, New Yorker–reading kind). I like to think the show’s motif of moral inquiry emerges through the interviews I do. I don’t judge or comment. Bill and I let our audience decide the guilt of those involved as if they were investigating each case from the comfort of their armchairs.

      So we’re going for more of a think piece on this one: a young American girl coming of age, going into the world on her own only to encounter the unkindness of a stranger. Then cue the ominous music, delving into her life via her social media profile and those that encountered her here. I could see how it would work with our show, too: ragging on law enforcement always draws listeners, so we could condemn the local police, too corrupt or incompetent to find the guy in the car or examine the video before it spawned a legion of online vigilantes.

      I was also the only journalist with enough guts to sneak into that hospital and make my way past the nuns. As a former Catholic-school girl, I’m not scared of nuns, which served me well when I encountered the severe-looking nun manning the hospital’s reception desk. When I asked what room Quinn Perkins was in, she muttered something dismissive in French. I could see she was tough, probably prides herself on getting rid of people; but then, I pride myself on being a professional liar.

      “Could you please repeat that in English?” I said with a smile, holding my ground.

      “Family only allowed here,” she barked, “no person else.” Then she paused, glaring at me over her half-moon specs. “You are a family member of Quinn Perkins?”

      What, because we’re both blond and American? I thought. It was lucky for me that she made that assumption. A little too lucky perhaps. I fought off the impulse to look over my shoulder when I smiled back at her and answered, “Yes.”

       Molly Swift

      JULY 30, 2015

      I felt bold in my lie, but I expected to be found out any moment. I followed the receptionist’s directions to the girl’s room as quickly as I could without looking as if I was hurrying. I came to the room, and stopped at the threshold.

      From the newspaper stories, I’d imagined she would be in a tent of plastic, tangled in tubes and wires, barely visible; but she lay unfettered by machinery, neatly tucked under starched white sheets. Her face was bruised from the accident, her head shaved on one side. A run of stitches tattooed her scalp like railroad tracks: the place the car hit, the blow that knocked her clean from this world into dreamland, some gray space where she couldn’t be reached.

      It always happens when I’m working on a new story: that moment when the person I’ve been researching transforms from a news item into a human being. I’m used to it, so I’m not sure why it hit me harder this time. Maybe because I was far from home and she was, too: the girl in the bed, the girl called Quinn Perkins, was all too real to me now. Bill had told me to take some footage with the little hidden camera he bought me years ago for my undercover work. It was pinned to my lapel, switched on and filming. He’d asked me to find a chart if I could and photograph that—to document the room, the nuns, the state the girl was in.

      Instead, I found myself turning off the camera and, almost as if in a dream myself, falling into the plastic bucket seat next to her bed. I sat watching the rise and fall of her chest, even and slow, and felt a strange peace descend, like watching a child sleep. With her bruised face, her half-shaven head, and black scabs crusting the stitches, she looked worlds away from the fresh-faced teen in the photographs.

      I found myself pondering all over again how she came to be walking out of the woods that gray July morning. I imagined how her legs would have been bare and dirty, her feet cut to shreds when she wandered down the middle of the dirt road, her blond hair stringy with blood. Why? This question intrigued me far more than the driver of the car.

      The video footage the German tourists took of her was so shocking СКАЧАТЬ