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

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СКАЧАТЬ Stills taken from clips ended up on the front pages of French papers. Soon “La fille Américaine inconnue” bled through Reuters and Google Translate, becoming “Mysterious American Girl Found.”

      Eventually her father, on holiday in Tahiti with his very pregnant fiancée, recognized the face of his daughter and called up to claim her. She was given a name: Quinn Perkins of Boston. She had come to St. Roch as part of a study abroad program that placed her with a local family called the Blavettes—a schoolteacher mom, her son and daughter—presumed to be away visiting an ailing relative in some mountain area with no phone reception. Their name came out when the police released details of the case.

      The news feed on my phone said Quinn was running out of time, that after the first twenty-four hours of a coma the chances of waking plummet. From the chart at the end of her bed, I could see that this particular coma had been rated a “7.” Google told me that made her chances of recovery about fifty-fifty. She should have had relatives there, talking to her, playing her music, stroking her hand. But the visitor list near the door told me she had no one—Professor Perkins hadn’t yet rushed to her side, which was odd. Not just odd, heartbreaking. A plane would get him here quickly from anywhere in the world.

      They say that sometimes the feeling of touch, the sound of speech, can jolt a person from this dream state, wake them like a kiss in a fairy tale. And so I found myself reaching for her hand, taking it in mine. I touched her hand almost reverently. Time unspooled until I didn’t know how long I’d been in that room with the softly bleeping machines, the sleeping girl, her mystery sealed inside, pristine. All of a sudden, her hand twitched, the fingers wriggling inside mine. I squeezed it again, but this time nothing happened. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, She moved.

      “Only you know how you got here,” I said softly.

      A hand touched my shoulder. As startled as if I’d been sleeping myself, I looked up to see the habit of a nun, crisp white folds around a surprisingly young face.

      The nun’s brow was creased. Her pale eyes looked nervously down at me through frameless specs. “Poor thing, she has been alone. We are so glad her family is here finally.”

      “Yeah.” I smiled, hoping she didn’t want to know exactly what family I was.

      She checked the charts, the machines, making little ticks on a chart as she did. Faintly, I heard her singing a French song under her breath. I sat tensed, wondering if I should make my excuses now and leave before she started asking me questions I couldn’t answer.

      She was in the middle of adjusting Quinn’s sheets when she turned to me and said in very precise English, “Have you heard? It is so terrible. Now they think the family of Blavette is missing.”

      “The family she was staying with?” I asked, managing to sound genuinely shocked because I was. “I thought they were visiting some relative.”

      “No indeed. The grandmother has been in touch and has not seen any of them since Christmastime. The police have just searched their house again and found something perhaps, because they are putting out a news bulletin to say this family is missing. It is on the television now.”

      In the reception area, a crowd had formed around the television. I couldn’t see the images except for a flicker of color between their heads, but I understood enough of the rapid French reportage to confirm the nun’s story: the Blavettes had been declared missing. The search was on for them as well as the hit-and-run driver. Two mysteries to solve for the price of one. When I walked into the hospital parking lot, I noticed that most of the other hacks had gone, perhaps to the gendarmerie to hear the press release. I had other plans.

       Quinn Perkins

      JULY 12, 2015

       Blog Entry

      It’s midnight. The family is out. Noémie’s at a party in the woods. Madame Blavette is on her date with Monsieur Right. I’m alone in the house in the middle of the French countryside, tucked into my lumpy bed that smells of bleach and jam and sterilized milk. A latchkey kid still, just in a different country. Through the slats of the wooden shutters, I can hear cicadas thrum, a thick carpet of sound, unbroken. It’s comforting somehow, though I’m almost too sleepy to work on the blog, sleepy and a bit drunk still, from cider and beer and cheap rosé all swilling together.

      My phone beeps: one new message. I see the number and the knots of my spine draw closer together. The sweat on my face and chest grows cold. That number. It’s the one I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the one you guys all said you were worried about (I remember loserboy38 suggested adding it to Contacts under “Stalker,” but that was too creepy, even for me). So anyway, consequently it just comes up as just a series of ones and nines and fours and sevens. Sometimes the number series sends texts, photos like that one I posted up Thursday—the blurry photo of me sunbathing. There was another: my hoodie up, my school bag on my shoulder, and my sneakers kicking up dust on the road back to the schoolhouse. It creeped me out too much to post.

      This time, it’s just a single emoji, a winking face. I delete the whole message thread, like always, and at that moment, a notification pops up, a Snapchat from lalicorne, some random person I only half remember adding a week or so ago because I thought it was a friend of Noémie’s. But they haven’t chatted me yet and the profile image is one of those gray mystery man icons so you can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl. I open the app and swipe onto the chat thread to see what they’ve sent.

      I tap on the pink square and a video loads. The film is dark, hard to see, but I hear a noise like heavy breathing. A muffled scream startles me. I grip the phone harder. A girl’s face appears, too close up to see in detail. The film is choppy and moves so fast it’s hard to take in before the timer in the top right corner counts down. The girl’s breathing hard and there’s something—a plastic bag, maybe—stretched over her face. Three … two … one, and the screen goes black, the video vanishing forever as Snapchat deletes it and, with it, the girl.

      For a long time after that I sat on the floor. The curtains were open and outside I could hear the constant cricket machine, see star-shine countryside black with no light pollution to reassure me that I was anything other than alone. Mme B says this place is haunted. I don’t think I believe in that stuff, but sitting there alone in the middle of the night, I knew what she meant, like I could almost hear the laughter of the people who lived here before trapped in the walls, behind the brick, the ghost of a good time.

      I started to make up explanations to comfort myself—that it’s Noémie’s doing, a practical joke or some really weird junk mail. After a long while, I reached for the phone, half hoping it was all some weird dream, half wanting to see it again and find out that it’s really just a clever advertising campaign for a new handheld horror movie. But somehow I know it wasn’t a horror flick clip. It was too real for that. When I do pick up the phone, the video’s gone. Snapped into an untimely death in the virtual void, because it’s Snapchat, of course. All messages are instantaneous, ticking down the moments it takes you to read or watch them like a fuse on a bomb and then they’re gone.

      She’s gone, as if she was never there, and I’m sitting with my back against the door, typing this on my blogging app. And here’s a straw poll: What do I do, guys? Who do I tell? Anyhow, I need to go now, to check the house, to lock the door. Something instead of sitting on the floor, feeling scared and alone in the middle of nowhere, waiting for them to come home.

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