The Burial Society

by Nina Sadowsky

  The interior courtyard the breakfast room faces is muffled in darkness, only the faintest streaks of early light paint the sky. A few waxy green plants press their broad leaves up against the glass. A waiter nods a greeting and gestures that Frank should sit anywhere he likes. Frank surveys the room. He’s the sole patron at this hour.

  Frank chooses a table right next to the window, pops his laptop open. Asks the waiter for jus de pamplemousse and croissants. As his computer warms to life, Frank thinks uneasily about Hannah Potter. He doesn’t like this stranger nosing around in their business; her clandestine communications with Natalie annoy him.

  Thinking about Hannah gives his loins a tug. He shifts in his seat to accommodate his erection.

  Frank checks his phone’s display. It’s too early to call Aimee Martinet. Besides, if she had news of Jake, wouldn’t she call him?

  He opens CNN on his laptop and scrolls through the news. Bombings. Shootings. Chemical spills. Corruption. A feel-good story about the love between a dog and an otter. Same old crap.

  This morning Frank had found Natalie dead asleep on the floor, her head pillowed on Jake’s overflowing duffel bag, one of his T-shirts clutched like a teddy bear in her arms.

  He’d lifted her and tucked her into her bed. She was lighter than his much younger girls. Deep purple shadows pressed in below her eyes, she hardly stirred as he moved her. He expects she will sleep for hours. He suspects she was up all night.

  Frank cringes as he remembers her reaction to Aimee Martinet’s revelations about Jake. But what did he expect?

  The waiter brings him the grapefruit juice, a basket of croissants, a pot of creamy butter, and a white tray with three kinds of jam. Frank splits open a flaky pastry and watches the steam waft from its moist center. He slathers one half with butter and strawberry jam and crams the whole delicious bite into his mouth.

  There’s no other option, he decides grimly, Natalie must go back into treatment. He moves the cursor over to his search history. He’d called the center Natalie had been in three years ago only to learn that Dr. Bloom, the former director, had tragically died in a car accident this past year. The new doctor in charge told Frank there were no available beds, but had kindly emailed a list of referrals. Frank had started to investigate the alternatives when Natalie had walked in on him mid-search. He’d slammed his laptop closed, flustered at being found out.

  He needs to have a plan in place for her before anything is discussed. And with Jake missing…Damn it, where is that fucking boy?

  Frank doesn’t know if he’s more worried or furious. He shoves another hunk of buttery, jam-laden croissant into his mouth and checks his email.

  A billing question from his mother’s assisted living. An infuriating email from his lawyer about the custody case. Jesus. He needs to get back to the States! He’s put his whole life on hold. He drains the last of his coffee. Whatever it takes, he is getting hold of those two kids and getting the hell out of Paris.

  Frank’s urgent steps propel him back into their suite. A quick glance reveals Jake has not yet returned. He flings open the door to Natalie’s bedroom, expecting to find her curled on the bed where he’d left her.

  But the bed is empty. A quick check of the bathroom reveals it’s empty too.

  Both kids are gone.

  A sharp tap. The tinkle of broken glass. My gluey eyes reluctantly peel open.

  Darkness. Night? I’m on the floor of my bedroom, head uncomfortably pillowed on a fringed Burberry bootie. No recollection of how I got here.

  An ankle crosses my line of vision.

  I snap a hand out. Seize my intruder’s leg. A sharp “Merde!” explodes into the shadowy room as he (she?) face plants.

  Wait. I recognize the voice.

  “Jumah? Is that you?” I inquire in French.

  His reply in French is heated, a stream of irritated, curse-laden words: “Who else comes up here to help your drunken ass? I think you broke my nose. Shit. Fuck. That hurts. Motherfucker.”

  Jumah goes on to explain that he was knocking on my door for ten long minutes before he finally scaled the spiral fire escape that crawls up the side of my building. He was worried because he could hear me inside, even though I wouldn’t answer.

  “Hear me?” I blurt.

  “Yes. Yelling. As if someone was hurting you. But I guess you were dreaming?” Jumah looks away, embarrassed by the intimacy of this, his inadvertent spying on my troubled sleep.

  After rustling around in the bathroom, Jumah comes back with a cool, damp washcloth, a glass of water, and a handful of Prontalgine tablets (that miraculous French over-the-counter cocktail of aspirin and codeine).

  Do you remember my young friend Jumah? The teenage son of my spice-selling neighbor, the young man I enlisted to drop Elena’s ransom note onto Boris’s broad lap?

  Jumah was our local juvenile delinquent when we met, engaged in the rewarding business of finding the vulnerabilities in the many apartments in the Marais that were now renting as vacation stays. He’d take cash, computers, or jewelry, whatever he could carry out easily. The tourists would file a police report and then head home to wherever they came from with a few less possessions (but a dramatic vacation horror story).

  Until he made the mistake of hitting my place. Details aside, let me just say that I set Jumah on a new path, putting his particular skill set to use in what I like to think is the service of good. I pay him well too. In return he’s picked my sorry ass up from more than one bender.

  If that’s not friendship, what is?

  I take the proffered pills and water. Lay the damp cloth on my clammy forehead. Close my eyes.

  Maybe I fall asleep? I’m not sure. But then there’s the aroma of coffee teasing at my nose. Bless that boy.

  “I’m going out to get you some food,” Jumah says in French. “You have nothing here. And you’re going to need to get your shit together. I have news on that photo you gave me.”

  He slips from my bedroom.

  “Wait,” I cry after him. “You actually got something on that guy?”

  “À bientôt,” Jumah calls. “Food first.”

  I hear the clink and jingle as he lifts my keys from their bowl.

  Then the sound of the door opening and closing softly behind him.

  Wandering through the blush of a Paris dawn, Natalie runs her hands through her snarled hair. Worries her thumb and index finger along the shaft of one strand, right down to the root. Tugs the hair out with one quick yank. The pull elicits a tiny pop of pure euphoria.

  “Body-focus repetitive behaviors,” Dr. Bloom had called them, but Natalie disliked the term. The thrill of charring, the calculated pleasure of cutting, the joyous release of hair tugged clean from the scalp, the easy flow of blood from nails and cuticles bitten to the quick. Char, Scar, Trich, Bit. They were hers, private and gratifying; she resented their clinical naming.

  As she twists the plucked strand of hair into her palm, the usual post-release shame consumes her. She pushes up her sleeves and stares at the scars on her arms, welting, scabbing, healed over.

  She has to stop this.

  A familiar chorus rises in her head.

  You stupid, hateful, ugly freak. You’re grotesque. No wonder Uncle Frank doesn’t want to let you out into the streets. You should be locked up like the animal you are.

  Maybe true, goddamn it, but first she needs to find her brother. Natalie thinks she will literally break clean in half if something bad happens to Jake.

  Just make Jake be safe. I promise I’ll stop everything if he is.

  Catching the pitying glance of a passing tight-suited businesswoman, she wrenches her sleeves down over her arms.

  “None of your fucking business!” Natalie screeches as the woman scurries away.

  It feels good to be loud.

  I’m bringing the information that Jumah sourced to Frank and Natalie Burrows. Maybe I can bring them some measure of peace. A step back toward the light, away from the darkness. Does that
sound grandiose? I mean it sincerely nonetheless.

  I enter their hotel through the main entrance, blowing past the sole lingering member of the press, a fat paparazzo slung with cameras.

  Frank Burrows is waiting for me in the lobby. He steps forward, hand outstretched, and steers me into the hotel bar.

  “Thank you for coming, Hannah.”

  I’d been surprised he’d agreed to see me so readily after warning me away from his family’s business the last time we met. Now, looking at his haggard face, I suspect it’s not that he’s receptive to my agenda, it’s that he has one of his own.

  “What’s up?” I ask, as we settle onto a pair of chrome and leather barstools.

  He shoots me a glance. “Okay. I’m going to get right to it. Jake and Natalie, both kids, they’re gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?”

  Furrows deepen on the bridge of his nose. “Jake’s been AWOL since yesterday. Natalie took off sometime this morning, early, while I was at breakfast. Neither of them is answering their phones.”

  “And you have no idea where they are?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  He vigorously shakes his head.

  “Why not? What’s going on, Frank?”

  He beats a nervous tattoo on the meat of his thigh with two fingers.

  “The policewoman, our liaison, she told me Jake lied about when he got back to Paris. He was here when his father was killed and now he won’t account for his whereabouts during the time of the murder. She had him at the prefecture, but had to release him. And now he’s disappeared.”

  Does he really believe his nephew, that lean, morose string bean of a boy, is a vicious killer? I examine Frank’s eyes. I see fear. Uncertainty.

  “And Natalie? Where is she?”

  “I told you! I have no idea! Except I’m sure she went searching for her brother. And if the police are right about Jake…” He trails off.

  A prickle of warning creeps up my spine.

  “Okay, look, that picture, the one Brian snapped of the guy following him? I gave it to a friend of mine and he found the guy in the photo. He’s an actor. An American living here in Paris. He told my friend he was hired to follow Brian as a prank.”

  “A prank? Who the hell would do something like that?” Frank’s face flushes red.

  “The actor, his name is Victor Wyatt. That name mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Wyatt claims he was hired through a service that sometimes employs him. As a male escort. It’s the kind of business that typically doesn’t ask too many questions and Wyatt didn’t either. But it’s a place to start.”

  Frank summons the bartender and orders a whiskey despite the early hour. Offers to buy me a drink. I decline even though I’m tempted by the hair of the dog. Frank knocks his own drink back in one greedy swallow.

  Then he miserably volunteers, “I found a bunch of postcards and flyers for male escorts in Jake’s things. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. After all, he’s over twenty-one….”

  There’s nothing left but to be blunt. “Do you believe Jake killed his father?”

  There is a long, painful silence before he replies.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Les Halles had been a bust. Natalie had been sure she would find Jake emerging from one of the after-hours gay bars in the neighborhood that he’d told her he’d frequented on his nocturnal outings. But she must have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Why am I so fucking stupid? Why would I ever even think I could track Jake down in a city as vast as Paris? What an idiot I am.

  She’s wandered for hours, welcoming the increasingly brutal heat of the day, her deep abiding thirst, the way her head feels like a balloon, loosely moored to her head, at risk of floating away into the clouds at any instant.

  The Champs-Élysées is flooded with tourists. Natalie trudges along, licking her dry lips, ignoring the vendors with their carts full of icy cold bottles of water. She needs to punish herself. For being so stupid.

  Natalie finds herself at the Arc de Triomphe. She mounts the stairs that take her to the top. Panting, she ascends the final set of steps and emerges into glaring sun; sweat trickles down her spine and temples, between her breasts.

  The city lies beneath her, arrayed like the spokes of a wagon wheel. She can see the Eiffel Tower down one long tree-lined avenue; one distant skyscraper anchors another.

  A spiked fence encircles the perimeter of the viewing platform. Erected to discourage jumpers, Natalie realizes wryly. She wasn’t thinking about jumping when she came up here, but now the fence rouses the thought. She wonders if it’s done the same for others.

  Natalie presses her face up between two spikes and peers out.

  You’re out there somewhere, Jake.

  She checks her phone. No reply from her brother despite her numerous texts. She knows she should contact Uncle Frank, but she’s sick of him, always thinking he knows best.

  I miss Mom. The ache is sharp and sudden. As a rule, Natalie tries not to think about her mother. Part of the past Dr. Bloom encouraged her to tuck away. But how do you just forget your mother? Even if she cheated on your dad, disappointed you, misjudged you, abandoned you?

  Dr. Bloom had told her to be more forgiving, to remember Mallory had just been a person, a human being with strengths and failings like anyone else. And also, sadly, a victim. Her mother hadn’t abandoned Natalie; she’d been murdered. Like Natalie needed to be reminded.

  Natalie sinks down onto her haunches and buries her face in her hands to shut out the memories crowding her. Dr. Bloom had been right.

  What was the point of remembering?

  All it did was hurt.

  While I don’t know where I expected Lilja Koskinen to live, it certainly wasn’t this old brick factory converted to artists’ lofts in Belleville. But in the grimy vestibule, next to an ancient hand-operated elevator with a creaky metal gate, there is a list of tenants. Koskinen/Fouquet is among them. Fourth floor.

  As I ascend in the rickety elevator, I square my story. I hope this is simple, that Natalie is here, that I can return her to her uncle and get back to my business with the Russian.

  I reach the fourth floor and push open the whining door into a spectacular space, flooded with light. The entire top floor of this old building, with windows running from casement to ceiling on all four sides, the loft is open plan, with hanging dividers on runners that can be configured to redefine the space at will.

  One side of the loft is devoted to Fouquet’s canvases, enormous abstracts in muted tones of sand and beige and cream. The other side is a long narrow kitchen, kitted out with expensive appliances, anchored by a steel-and-stone table that could easily seat a dozen. One of the hanging dividers partially blocks the sleeping area, where I can see an unmade bed heaped with snowy pillows. Another reveals half of a large enameled claw-footed tub.

  Lilja welcomes me and introduces me to her husband, a tall, whippet-thin artist by the name of Pierre Fouquet.

  Tantalizing scents of garlic and spices rise from a simmering pot on the stove, competing with an undercurrent of paint and turpentine. The couple sips white wine from chilled stemless glasses. Lilja offers me a glass and I accept.

  “How can I help?” she asks, settling into the sleek cream-colored leather sofa and tucking her bare feet up and under her hip. Fouquet stays by the stove, stirring the contents of the steaming saucepan.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, of course.” I register with calculated pleasure the flicker of alarm that instantly crosses Lilja’s face. She’s already invested. “It’s just that Natalie took off from the hotel where she’s staying with her family and her uncle is worried sick. I thought she might have come to you.”

  “No!” Lilja exclaims. “I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Or Jake?”

  “Neither one. Is Jake missing too?” />
  “This has got to be an awful time for them both. I’m sure they’re just acting out.”

  Fouquet tops off his wife’s wine and addresses me in heavily accented English. “Neither of them has been here. And if they were to come, I would send them away.”

  There is a pointed and rapid exchange between Fouquet and Lilja in French. I crease my brow as if I can’t understand, although I comprehend every word.

  Fouquet’s worried about his wife. He insists she have nothing more to do with the Burrows family. I get the sense the artist was bothered by Lilja’s admiration and respect for Brian Burrows when he was alive, even as Lilja dismisses his jealousy as unfounded. And ever since Brian’s murder he’s been afraid for her. Their argument grows heated as Fouquet urges his wife to quit her job at the power plant renovation.

  As if suddenly realizing I am there, Lilja silences her husband with a wave and turns back to me.

  “Of course we wouldn’t turn either of those children away. But if they come, or we hear from them, what should we do?”

  “Call their uncle.” I give her a piece of the Burrowses’ hotel stationery on which Frank’s cellphone number is scrawled. “And let me know too. Just for my own peace of mind.”

  I leave the couple to their meal. As I ride down the elevator, I’m stabbed with poison green envy of the simplicity of their domestic routine. To be loved so passionately, worried about, cared for, the way Fouquet so obviously cares for Lilja.

  That’s never been possible in my life.

  And it never will be.

  Ache. That’s Jake’s first thought. Everything aches.

  His cheek presses into rough concrete, his nose is probably broken. The caked blood rimming his nostrils makes it difficult to breathe. One eye is swollen shut, his lower lip swells and bursts.

  He rolls from a fetal position onto his back. Groans at the sharp pain in his chest. He suspects he’s broken a couple of ribs. His one open eye is crusty. He swipes away the mix of tears and sleep and dirt.