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

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СКАЧАТЬ asking if I was still alive.

      I tapped to call him. He picked up after two rings but didn’t say anything. “Hey, Bill. You good?”

      “Who wants to know?” He sounded cranky. A couple of days without checking in, and already the sarcasm had begun.

      “Me, Molly,” I said with a laugh, taking a drag of my cigarette, my eyes flicking nervously to the rearview to see if anyone was there. “You losing the plot without me there?”

      “Flattery will get you everywhere, you know,” he said in the deadpan tone I knew and loved.

      “That how I ended up working for you for peanuts?”

      “Ha. You got anything on this girl yet?”

      “Yeah. But listen, I gotta go,” I said, turning the ignition.

      “You okay? You sound …”

      “Call you later.” I hung up and turned out into the road.

      I knew St. Roch was a short drive from the Blavette house, but nonetheless it seemed like a very long while before my poor car juddered to a halt outside the Overlook—the seen-better-days hotel Bill had booked me a room in. Actually, the only hotel in town, a grand old turn-of-the-century building with a comfy three-star hotel inside. Its original name, Le Napoléon, better befit its air of seedy hubris.

      But I love a fleapit, and the Orwellian level of journalistic commitment it implies. I love that you meet people from all walks of life, that you can drink out of a paper bag or eat pizza or smoke cigarettes (hell, probably even crack) in your room. Most of all, I love that there are people inside and the lights are always on.

      After the trauma at the Blavette house, I felt that life owed me a pack of Gauloises and a whiskey. My room in the Napoléon can just about sustain a guest edging around the single bed to turn on the TV or open the door, and the pissoir is so closely situated that you can practically use it from the bed if you’ve got good aim. You can also turn the TV on with one toe as you smoke out the window. So instead of going straight to my room, I walked past the bored desk clerk playing Angry Birds, past the wolf pack of journalists decamped from the hospital to the hotel bar. As soon as I reached that comforting oasis of wood and free peanuts, I ordered a double JD.

      I stared into the drink, my pale, freckly face suspended in the dark liquid like a bad moon rising, my hair wild. Not a good look. Turning to my phone, I checked for messages, pretending to myself that I wasn’t still shaking. There were two: one from my mom and another from Bill. I texted Mom that I was really fine, and left Bill for later.

      Playing silently on the TV over the bar was a news bulletin about the missing Blavettes, showing the faces of the mother, the son, the daughter. Pictures harvested from their Facebook accounts just as Quinn’s have been. Photos showing smiling faces, glowing tans, people with places to go and everything to live for.

      Back in Paris, when the #AmericanGirl story broke, I did as much Googling around as I could on my phone. News about Quinn was easy to find. Deeper searches led me to a dedicated subreddit as well as a concerned group of Facebook well-wishers, online supporters for this viral heroine having sprung up overnight like chanterelles. The main theory of the subreddit armchair detectives (the very same sweetly fanatical cellar-dwellers who tune in to my show each week) is that the family went to visit a relative, to get away for a weekend. They’ve been roundly criticized as irresponsible for leaving a foreign exchange student in their care to wander and wash up broken. Now the police have declared them officially missing, the clock will begin ticking, as it is already ticking for the girl.

      After messages, I flipped through the photographs I’d taken with my iPhone, glancing at dark and poorly composed images of the woods, the house, the bedrooms in darkness. The one that made me pause longest was the photo of the photo on Émilie Blavette’s nightstand, so different from the fake-smiley Facebook ones issued by the police. In the picture from the nightstand, Émilie looks happy. She hugs her husband close, though he stands more aloof, all French and cool in his sunglasses and crisp shirt. Young Raphael leans his head on her shoulder, a gangly fourteen-year-old momma’s boy. Noémie at twelve is a chubby little thing, cute in her pigtails and halter top, hugging Daddy tight.

      How does a whole family disappear? Leave the face of the earth without a trace? From reading the news and snooping at the house, I know this: one minute the Blavettes were a normal(ish) happy(ish) family—the son a star athlete, just beginning his university career in film-making, the daughter a shy girl who loved ballet and ponies and boy bands, the mom a former head teacher. One minute they were going to the beach, posing for smiling photos, the next, gone. And what of the American girl, who they’d invited to be part of their family for a summer? How did she fit into this picture?

      I took advantage of the better standard of Wi-Fi in the bar to check out Twitter (#AmericanGirl still trending, video still viral) and Facebook. I’d already had a brief look at Quinn’s page, but now I looked again, noting her relationship status: “it’s complicated.” Her privacy settings meant you couldn’t see much: a profile picture of her with the Blavette boy and girl arm in arm on the beach with the sea behind them, tanned, grinning happily, Quinn in the middle, squeezed between the siblings. They must have been pretty buddy-buddy to get to the profile pic stage. Behind them lies Quinn’s cover image of herself standing in the middle distance on a Boston lake in winter, black-clad against the snow and ice, serious-faced, a forlorn contrast to her seeming happiness in France. The only other thing I could find is a little clip of her waving pom-poms at some high-school football game, blond hair bouncing. A different Quinn again. This version seems like the sort of popular airhead whose high-school yearbook reads like the story of her, whose bed would be surrounded by get-well cards. The “Mean Girl” type. I found myself wondering which image is the real her, or if any of them were.

      Thinking back, I didn’t see one get-well card; and that fact only deepened the mystery surrounding her. The American news had said a lot about her father, Professor Leo Perkins, head of classics at Harvard. It also mentioned that she was an only child whose mother had died years before. A fresh Google search revealed a Spotify with a bunch of playlists and an Instagram with more pictures. I looked at her snaps of a pool, a beach, the woods, a club full of young people partying, trying to make sense of the captions—Picnic at the beach, Noé, Raffi and Freddie, Adventure at Les Yeux and the hashtags #funtimes, #selfie, #thuglife.

      By two in the morning, the barman was yawning and giving me a weary look as he polished beer glasses and swept peanut shells off the bar and into my lap. Finally, even this exquisitely polite individual lost patience and asked me to go. I was about to head upstairs when I remembered that in my fearful rush, I’d forgotten my notes in the car. Good time to nip out for a smoke, anyway.

      In the parking lot, I teetered along, suddenly realizing how drunk I was. It had been raining and the streets were gleaming. As I came closer to my car, I saw that the passenger door was ajar. Had I forgotten to close it? Kicking myself, I tottered closer, hoping that wasn’t where I’d left my file of clippings on the case.

      It was only when I reached the car that my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw that I hadn’t forgotten to close the door at all. Someone had jimmied it open with a piece of metal, or something—you could see it from the tiny scratches in the paint job around the handle. Pulling it open, I saw my file was gone.

       Quinn Perkins

      JULY 13, 2015

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