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

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      JULY 30, 2015

      As I drove along the dusty main road of St. Roch, my skin still hummed from the excitement at the hospital: being mistaken for a relative, the plot twist with the Blavettes, seeing Quinn. I came to the part of the road she must have walked along, the jagged points of trees looming like arrowheads dug from a riverbed.

      In the YouTube clip, right before the accident, Quinn makes no effort to dodge the car hurtling her way. Afterwards, she lies in the road, mumbling words you can’t quite catch from the choppy audio as the tourists got close to her, filming all the time, though a number of comment threads have speculated on what she was saying. Heading towards the line of trees, I couldn’t visualize the pixelated image of her prone body that was reprinted in all the papers. In my mind’s eye, she shimmered as she walked out of the forest, her pale fingers beckoning me on to the dark trees.

      My rental car squealed around a turn in the road and towards the house. I wasn’t yet used to driving on these kinds of roads; it amazed me that I could be in town one moment and the next in the heart of farmland, driving down little sewage runnels between rows of squat olive trees or lavender or yellow rapeseed flowers. The Blavette house came after a turnoff for just such a nothing little lane. Opposite it was an orchard, where the apples were growing red and dark and glossy as poison fruit. A sprayer moved between trees, dispensing real poison that ran into drainage ditches and misted the air. This was the place where the American girl had been staying, where her vanished host family had lived for generations—it wasn’t hard to find. Google, the great democratizer of freelance detective work, told me where to go for a bit of trespassing.

      I stopped the car and lit a cigarette, hoping the air around me wouldn’t catch fire in the fug of pesticide. I smoked hard, letting the engine idle while I sized up the house. Like Quinn, it was different from the pictures I’d seen, idyllic shots that must have been stolen from some holiday rental catalog. Paler, sadder, more elegant, and more ruined, it peered from between the trees, a witness to who knows what.

      From my left came a rhythmic clipping noise. I climbed out of the car, keys clenched between my fingers Boston walk-to-your-door-from-the-bar style, cigarette hanging from my mouth.

      An old man ambled from the side of the house carrying a pair of garden shears. He was ancient and white-bearded, clipping away at the leaves of a vine climbing the side of the house, and at first he didn’t see me. Like some scene from a French Pathé reel, he was timeless, whistling to himself as if nothing untoward had happened in the village of St. Roch. I got back in my car and crawled over the pebbles of the drive, slowly so I wouldn’t give him too much of a fright.

      He must have been pretty deaf, because it took him a long time to turn around. But when he did, he looked more scared than I was when I spotted him. I let out a sigh, laughing at myself for succumbing to the gothic fantasy the place suggested. He nodded to me. I got out of the car and walked over and for a moment we stood and looked at each other, caught in the embarrassing free-fall between people who never listened in language class.

      Eventually I broke the silence, introducing myself in shaky high-school French. “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Molly.”

      “Ah, bonjour.” The man took off his floppy cloth hat and held out his hand, gnarled and thorn-tracked as my grandpa’s were. “Monsieur Raymond. Enchanté.” He murmured more words to me in a sweet old man crackle. Their meaning was lost on me, but I gathered from his accompanying gestures that he hammered things here and may have recently cut something with a pair of giant scissors.

      “A gardener?” I asked, smiling, “For the family?”

      He looked at me blankly with milky blue eyes like sucked sweets. I wondered if maybe he didn’t speak English.

      And then he intoned in a gentlemanly crackle (twice as charming for being in Franglais), “I take care of school and, as well, this house while the family …” He thought for a moment, then flapped his hands like birds flying.

      “Are away.” I nodded. Take care of school. I remembered reading something about a school in the reports on Quinn. “You the caretaker?”

      I fished for a cigarette so that he saw no trace of surprise or anything else on my face. “When do you think they’re coming back?” I flicked my lighter wheel, eyeing him through the smoke. From my years of interviewing people, looking for the real stories under their words, I know everyone has little tics, little tells. For most, it’s easier to tell if folks are lying when you know them. But actually, when you’ve been at it a while, you find yourself cold-reading people all the time without meaning to. You had the money for a ticket all along, old lady at the métro stop—yeah, you. And, taxi driver, I see you in your rearview, and no, you don’t know the way.

      But as far as I could make out, Monsieur Raymond was not lying. He shrugged. “They go away often. Are you a friend of theirs? I only live over there, yet I have never seen you.” He pointed to the primeval forest, its dark shapes gathering form and substance as the dusk crept in.

      “You live in the woods?” I asked in the hope of distracting him.

      He smiled. He liked that question. In my experience, professional weirdos work hard to generate notoriety—locally he is Raymond, that crazy man living in the woods. I bet he’s the one who originally spread the rumors about what he gets up to out there all alone.

      “On the edge of those,” he said, pointing vaguely, “that very far edge of school field. You look hard you just see my chimney—she’s smoking.”

      Straining my eyes, I did see it, though before it seemed like just another dark point in the tree line. I felt an involuntary little shiver of glee rattle up my neck at the idea of a childhood myth made flesh—the creepy old guy in the shack in the woods. I’d finally met him.

      As if he could read my mind, he said, “Yes, I am there always. Keeping my eyes in things. I see a lot of things here.”

      “Like what?”

      Tapping his nose. “Everything.”

      I dragged on my cigarette, letting the smoke burn and twirl in my lungs, exhaling. “Did you see her—the American girl—when she came out of the forest?”

      He looked at me strangely, cutting his eyes at me under snowy lashes. Very blue eyes, betraying a much sharper mind than he let on.

      “L’Américaine?” He patted his pockets, pulled out a packet of Drum Gold, took a pinch, and flicked it into a paper, rolling and licking in one seamless gesture so that the cigarette seemed to grow out of his thorn-pricked, nicotine-stained hands like pale elongated fruit. “Sometime I feel sorry for that girl.”

      I flicked my lighter and he dragged hard, cheeks puffing out to show the impressive spider veins of a lifelong drinker. “Why’s that?”

      He shrugged. “Sais pas. Just … well, there was something about her. How you say? Soft? Like a fruit, that you know.” He gouged his fingers as if he were squeezing a peach. “But then I only met her possibly twice.”

      “Sweet girl,” I said, smiling.

      “Ouais. But then so are all the girls they keep here, aren’t they?”

       Molly Swift

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