“I may have, I’m not sure.”
“I see.” He walked out of the office, leaving the door open. Within a minute he returned with paper and pencil in hand. “I will take your report.”
“I’m not here to report a murder, Inspector, I’m here to find out if it was reported.”
He placed the paper and pencil on the table.
Before he could say anything more, Carol said, “Look, I know this sounds strange, but I’ve lost much of my memory of the time I was in Bordeaux.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, the cigarette caught between his lips.
“I believe I was held captive here, for nine months.” She didn’t want to tell him more than she had to; he looked skeptical enough. “I also believe I may have witnessed a murder. There’s nothing in the police records to indicate that an old man was killed, but that’s what I remember.”
He tilted his chair back and stared at her, squinting his eyes through the smoke curling up his face.
“I needed to talk with someone who was around then, who may remember.”
“Mademoiselle, if the murder is not listed in the police files, I do not see how I may help you.”
“Do you recall a murder about eight years ago? An old man? Killed at night? By the water. A lot of blood?”
“No.”
He answered too quickly. Did that mean he thought she was crazy, or that he was hiding something? It could mean he just didn’t remember.
“Maybe an attempted murder then?”
“Mademoiselle Robins, if you have searched the records and have not found what you are seeking, I do not know how I may contribute to your cause.”
This was getting nowhere. He wasn’t going to help her. She stood. “Inspector, I’m not sure what you do or don’t know but I need to tell you this: something happened to me here in Bordeaux, so horrifying that I can’t recall most of it. It’s eaten up my life trying to remember.”
“Sometimes the past is best left where it is.”
“And sometimes it’s important to dredge it up. It is for me. If anything comes to you that you think might help me, I’m staying at the Royal Medoc Hotel.”
She thought she saw his eyelid twitch.
That night Carol put in a call to Rene at her office—the five hour time difference meant it was only three in the afternoon in Philadelphia. She told her all that had transpired.
“Tomorrow I’m going to rent another car and drive along the ocean again—it’s not far from Bordeaux. I’ll try the north shore this time. Maybe something will come back to me.”
“Carol, how are you doing emotionally?”
“Not bad. Not as bad as I thought. I wish I had more time here—my plane flies out in three days. There’s something here, Rene, I can feel it. I know I’ve been here before. I remember LePage. I remember so many things. I just can’t put it all together.”
The familiar and comforting sound of ice clinking against Rene’s mug calmed her. “If you need me, call. Anytime. My service can page me, just leave a number and when you can be reached. And Carol? Be careful. Whatever happened to you there shocked you into repressing the memory of it. Take it slow.”
Saturday morning Carol rented a Fiat and took highway D1 northwest. Vineyards lined the road, the vines pregnant with ripe grapes trellised in neat rows. This was her third trip along the coast in the last two weeks and each time she had an unmistakable feeling of having seen all this before, over and over, through a couple of seasons. And yet she also realized this scene was typical wine country, depicted in brochures and travel magazines and on postcards. Specifics, though, confirmed her experience.
As she approached the resort town of Soulac-sur-Mer, something about the name affected her emotionally. Like a homing pigeon, she turned in that direction by instinct.
As she drove along the coast, the grey-blue ocean overlapped the image she visualized during hypnosis. The houses were old and solid, again, familiar-looking wood and stone structures with large entrances and dormer windows. Many were visible from the road, but many were not, and she drove down smaller gravel roads and into private driveways. Nothing clicked until she turned down one curving road that lead to a large field-stone château.
Carol slammed on the breaks. It was as if a ghost suddenly materialized in front of her. This was where she had been kept. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name.
When she calmed enough to think clearly, she stepped on the gas pedal gently, inching the car along. No vehicles blocked the driveway but the doors on the enormous garage were closed. She had to be careful.
Her body trembled. I should go back, she told herself. I shouldn’t be here alone. This could be very dangerous. I don’t know who I’m dealing with. But she had come too far and had been through too much to retreat now.
She left the keys in the car, the door open and the engine running, in case she needed to get out of here fast. She knocked at the front door. No one answered.
She moved to one of the front windows of the three story house and peered in. An empty room. As she moved around the main floor, looking through windows at empty spaces, no drapes, no furniture, she recognized the infrastructure: the shape of rooms, doorways, fireplaces. The garage too was empty. This château had been abandoned.
Back at the house she tried to break a window. The outer windows, tinted, broke easily, but the inner windows were apparently shatterproof. Both the front and back doors had been bolted securely. After an hour of trying, she realized she couldn’t do this today.
Carol drove back to Bordeaux and stopped at a real estate office. An agent looked up the house on her computer. It had been empty for just over seven years. It was not for sale. The owner was a number, a corporation with the head office in Switzerland, building managed by a local management firm.
Carol glanced at her watch. It was too late in the day to contact the management company and too late in terms of Carol’s return flight to take the legal route. She stopped at a hardware store and made a few purchases.
First thing in the morning she returned to the house at Soulac-sur-Mer. Gaining entry was easy—it was as though she remembered doing this before: chipping away at the window frame, gouging out putty. The window refused to pop inward but after hours of work she managed to pry it out.
Even the air inside the house smelled familiar. She explored the main floor; in her mind she could see the layout of furniture in this room and remembered a large sculpture of a girl riding a dolphin that sat on a round coffee table. The room felt dense with memories, all of which pressed at her brain for admittance. She went up to the third floor first and decided to work her way down to the basement where the idea of being below ground in darkness unnerved her.
Nothing on the third floor rang a bell. Maybe she had never been here! That thought confused her, especially because the living room swelled with images. The second floor registered the same as the third. Almost. Similar doors leading to similar rooms that meant nothing to her—it felt like she’d never been inside them, just like the floor above. Until she reached the last room.
When Carol stepped inside she broke the seal of a part of her brain that had been locked away. Memories pulsed with the speed of light, overwhelming her. Her body slid to the floor. She hyperventilated. Flashes of a fire in the fireplace; the window she stared out so often; the bed, its placement, waking and sleeping, where and how she had been chained to it. Suddenly her body ached. She convulsed and deep moans poured from between her trembling lips.
She clearly remembered them: Chloe; Gerlinde; Karl; Jeannette and Julien and their children. Her baby. Her tiny vulnerable infant with dark wisps of hair, puckered skin, sucking milk from her breast. Sucking a bottle of blood! And then, as if an invisible door suddenly crashed open in her mind, a face seared its way out of the darkness and into her consciousness. Black hair with grey at the temples. Unnaturally pale skin. Teeth like fangs. Steely eyes emitting unrestrained fury.
Carol screamed as all the doors b
anged open at once, splintering, slicing her soul with too many shards of memory, too fast. She felt herself fragmenting. She could not stop the screaming of a dozen voices.
Chapter Twenty-One
“All right, Carol, let’s go back to the room again, from before the Bordeaux police found you in the house and sent you home—thank God they didn’t charge you with breaking and entering! Tell me everything that happened. Leave nothing out.”
“Rene, we’ve been over this a million times since I got back. I don’t even know where to begin. It’s as though it all came to me in one big explosion.”
“It’s going to take a while to sort everything out, but if we don’t keep at it, we’ll never cement the pieces into their right places. Let me just refill my mug and we’ll begin. I’ve got an extra hour free today, if you need it.”
Over the next months Carol told Rene about meeting André, about returning to Bordeaux when she discovered she was pregnant, and running away twice. And how he had taken her baby away from her and used drugs and a powerful form of hypnosis to lock her away from her own experiences. And through it all, as Carol worked through the intense emotions connected to each layer of her ordeal, one burning thought kept her sane, a thought she often repeated to Rene: “I’m going to find my son and get him away from that nest of vampires.”
“Carol, we’ve discussed this ad nauseam. I think you’ve made them into vampires. It’s a quick and easy way to identify what’s repellant to you. There are elements of truth in this vampire thing but we have to crack the symbolism. It’s a metaphor. Your first instincts were likely correct; they’re a blood cult. Maybe into black magic, that sort of thing. This André impregnated you, probably drugged you. Even when you remember the entire thing, you may not know why.”
“Rene, I’m not wrong about this. And I know how fantastic it sounds. Maybe vampire isn’t the right word, but what they are isn’t human.”
“Their actions are inhuman.”
“They aren’t human. It’s not just that they drink blood, and the things André did to me. I don’t know how to convey it, Rene. They’re like a super species, with their own rules and codes that have nothing to do with what we human beings do.”
“And you find them appealing as well as repellant.”
Carol’s jaw tightened. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, of course. But Carol, I’ve listened for months as you’ve gone over this material again and again and to tell you the truth, you make them sound, well, attractive.” She took a sip and ice cubes clicked against the ceramic mug.
“No. That’s not true. Physically attractive, maybe, but they’re killers.”
“We’re all killers, aren’t we?”
“You sound like Gerlinde.”
“Alright, let’s look at this logically. They use hypnosis, but so do I. Am I a vampire?”
“Do you drink blood?”
“Bloody Marys.”
Carol felt frustrated. “Well, they drink blood.”
“Alright, which ones have you seen drinking blood? Gerlinde? Karl? Chloe? The ones from out of town?”
“No. Just André.”
“And that was when?”
“On the dock. The night he killed the carpenter.”
“It was dark. The police said there was no evidence of that. And you checked the records—there was no murder. They told you they drink blood, but does that make it so?”
Carol said nothing but she felt hostile.
“Do they live forever?”
“I don’t know. They live a long time.”
“You only believe that because they told you they live a long time.”
“I think they do. There’s something archaic about them, the way they think and act, as if they’re from another time. Gerlinde, for example. It’s as though she’s really from the fifties.”
“Well, maybe she is.”
“Oh, Rene, she’d be older than you and she looks like she’s in her early twenties.”
“Who’s her surgeon?”
“I’m serious. And there’s one in particular, Julien. If you saw him—it’s as though he really is from the Middle Ages. And there’s something more about him. It’s as though he possesses some ancient wisdom...”
“Maybe they’ve found the elixir of youth, and maybe this Julien is the leader of the cult,” Rene said. “Often happens, the leader’s a Svengali, possesses enough charisma to get the others to obey.” She sipped from her mug and crossed her legs. “You know, Carol, with the fear of being HIV positive that you had at that time, isn’t it possible you needed them to be eternal? You wanted something to exist that does not die?”
Carol stared at her therapist. “Of course it’s possible, don’t you think I’ve thought about that? But doesn’t everyone dream that?”
“Well, I suppose...”
“I mean, wouldn’t you like to live forever? Never age?”
“You betcha. But that’s unrealistic. We all must face—”
“Please, Rene, don’t give me rhetoric. How do you really feel about dying?”
“Say, who’s the therapist here?” But she stopped and considered the question. “I suppose if I had a choice—”
“You’d go for eternal life.”
“I’m afraid cosmetic surgery is the closest I’ll get. Unless I meet one of your vampires.”
Carol sat up and looked her therapist squarely in the eye. “I’ve decided something. I’m going back to Bordeaux.”
“Can you get the time off from the theater?”
“Not a vacation. I’m going there permanently. At least until I find my son.”
Rene shifted uncomfortably. “Carol, I don’t think this is a good time to think about doing this. In fact—”
“I’ve made up my mind. Rene, you’ve got to understand. I need you to understand. I’m thirty four years old. I’m HIV positive, and that’s likely to change—for the worse. I can’t stop thinking about my son. I don’t have time to do any more therapy.”
“Then maybe it’s time to put it all behind you and get on with your life.”
“I can’t do that either. I feel if I don’t act now I won’t be able to act. It will be too late.”
“Because the virus might become active?”
“That, but more because my son will be nine years old in another year.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know but I have a feeling I need to find him fast and I can’t say why.”
“Carol, I wish you’d reconsider.”
“I’ve considered this since I came back from Bordeaux. I have to go.”
“Well, it’s against both my professional and personal advice, but you know that. Will you promise me one thing? Promise you’ll keep in constant touch with me? I want letters every month, updates, and a phone call every once in a while. We’ve been together a long time now—close to nine years. I care about you as a person, not just as a client. You’re almost like a daughter to me.”
Rene’s words touched Carol. Her therapist had been more of a mother to her than her own mother had been. “I know that, and I’ll keep in touch. And you can always find me through AmEx.”
“These people are dangerous. You should go to the authorities.”
“I tried that. They pay everybody off, or use hypnosis. I have to do this my way. And alone.”
“What will you do when you find them, if you find them?”
Carol shook her head. She didn’t know what but she knew she would do something.
It took Carol three months to prepare for Bordeaux. She placed the principle of her investments into an accessible account, cleared up her mother’s small estate and researched as much as she could methods on locating missing persons. She even consulted a detective who gave her tips on searching records in Europe and, equally important, what not to waste time on. By the time she left Philadelphia, she was in good shape mentally, physically and emotionally. In her heart she knew that if it was the last
thing she ever did on this earth, she would find her son.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Carol immediately headed for Bordeaux. The day she arrived, she called Inspector LePage. He not only refused to help her but wouldn’t even see her.
After that initial failure, she had a minor success. The management company that looked after the château gave her the number of the corporation that owned the house—eight thousand three hundred and twenty. The head office was in Switzerland and Carol flew there the following morning.
She found Zurich immaculate, orderly and utilitarian without the predominance of chrome, glass and concrete of many large North American cities.
Eventually she located the government records—the owners of corporation number eight thousand three hundred and twenty were John and Jane Doe, their address a derelict building. Why am I not surprised? she thought. The Swiss were a polite, tight-lipped people. André and the others had really covered their tracks.
Carol bought a Volkswagen van, which she slept in and ate in to conserve funds. It was a meager arrangement but suited her needs. She planned to spend as long as it took—until her money ran out—systematically searching first the major cities and then all the port cities in France. If that proved fruitless, she’d move along the coast to Spain.
Every place she went she concentrated on two areas—the harbor and the section of town the oddballs frequented. And everywhere she stopped her main difficulty was language. Her French was not good. Still, she persisted and managed to make herself understood. Eventually she became better at understanding.
Very quickly she discovered it was silly to be discreet. People didn’t understand what she was getting at—because she didn’t know colloquialisms. It saved time to just ask if there were any vampires in town. Occasionally someone would admit to having seen one, and once, in Algeciras, she got a lead on Gerlinde. But that lead and every other reached a dead end and Carol always felt she finished precisely back where she had begun. It inspired her to hire a detective from London. Six months and several thousand dollars later she had learned nothing useful.
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