by Gigi Pandian
Sébastien nodded and looked out over the water, and for a few minutes, he was oblivious to my presence. A wave of emotions overtook his face. Memories, good and bad, must have filled his mind. How much must this scene have changed over his long lifetime? I knew only snippets of his life, and didn’t even know how much time he’d spent in Paris. What memories had I dredged up by inviting him here?
“This family has certainly suffered more than most,” he said, breaking the silence.
“After the men in the family did their part colonizing and looting Cambodia, ignored their children, and abused their factory workers.”
Sébastien grinned and it was clear he was firmly back in the present. “I never said they didn’t deserve it. At least some of them. I do feel sorry for Marc. Remember even before he died, his wife had left him. Not only that, but she went to America with their only child. It was no wonder he became a drunken fool who thought it amusing to tempt fate.”
A frigid wind blew my hair into my face.
“We’ll be tempting fate if we stay in the cold sitting still,” I said. “Let’s get back to the apartment.”
“Life is too short to sit in a tiny apartment. We’re in Paris. With several hours before we can put our plan into action. There’s something else we can do. No, there’s something else we must do.”
“More research?” We’d already made a brief stop at the Musée Guimet, the Asian Art museum in Paris, as one of our errands before settling into the scenic café, where we saw many nagas but none related to the Durant family.
“Not exactly. If we’re about to be arrested, at least we can enjoy Christmas in Paris. We’re going to a Christmas market.”
“I love you, Sébastien.”
“Of course. What’s not to love?”
My brother Mahilan was spending Christmas with his fiancé and her son in Switzerland. My father was in Goa with old friends he’d been close with before my mother died. Lane hadn’t seen his parents in a long time, so he’d decided that in spite of his fraught relationship with his father, he wanted to see his mom. Tamarind was flying to Mexico City to spend Christmas with extended family, bringing Miles to meet them. Therefore I’d resigned myself to not doing much for Christmas this year. Nadia had invited me to Christmas Eve dinner with her and Jack. Even though we considered each other friends as well as tenant and landlord, it still felt rather depressing.
As we approached from across the Seine, a towering Christmas tree adorned with bright blue lights came into view in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.
“The Marché de Noël à Notre Dame market is across from Notre Dame.” Sébastien pointed. “You can see the lighted cathedral in the background. Nothing can keep down the spirit of the French, not even a tragic fire.”
I squeezed his hand and we walked into the festivities. A band was playing amongst the matching booths with their white steeple-topped coverings that protected against the light snow that began to fall.
We agreed to skip the mulled wine, but I ate my fill of gingerbread.
“This couldn’t be more magical,” I whispered.
“It couldn’t?” Sébastien produced a three-inch wooden Christmas tree out of thin air. I smiled and was about to lift it from his gloved hand, when I saw this was no simple tree. The branches folded inward before opening again. As they opened, green pine needles sprouted from the branches.
A little girl next to us squealed with delight. She asked him a question in French, and Sébastien knelt on the ground and spoke a few words to her. She nodded and grinned, and he handed her the tree. She ran toward her parents and brother, showing them her prize.
“I can make another one for you,” Sébastien said as he stood back up. “But since you’re not a budding young engineer, I thought the tree belonged with her.”
“Agreed. I’ll be happy with a hot chocolate before we head back.”
“If this is my last evening of freedom,” Sébastien said, “I couldn’t have picked a better way to spend it.”
Chapter 24
At 10:30 p.m., we put our plan into action. Late enough that the streets were no longer crowded, but early enough for us to reenact the tragedies exactly as they’d happened.
At 10:31, CCTV cameras picked up the image of a drunken man walking home on the street of the mansion, singing an opera aria at the top of his lungs and feeding a string of birds with breadcrumbs. As he passed the Durant mansion, he tossed the remainder of the baguette next to where we’d identified a key component of the house’s security. Of course, the drunken man was really Sébastien in disguise.
He continued down the block in disguise, and five minutes later walked back down the street as himself. He let himself into the apartment across the street.
Our other errand that morning was to find a vacation rental across the street from the mansion that had a perfect vantage point. Since it was so close to Christmas, it was of course occupied. If we’d been working with Henry North, the man who’d coerced me into robbing the Louvre, he would have had half a dozen ways to sweet-talk the family out of the rental. Sébastien was more pragmatic. He saw that the rental went through a large agency, so the renters wouldn’t know everyone. He’d then found a way to get water through the door to make it look like a leak, arrived to say it was a burst pipe, and upgraded the family to an apartment twice the size and far more luxurious, free of charge, and no paperwork needed.
This place was now Sébastien’s apartment for the duration of his stay, so we didn’t have to share the shoe-box-size one I’d rented. He was thinking of inviting Felix to join him, but thought better of it when I pointed out we were about to commit larceny.
“Bluebird and Celine are ready to get to work,” Sébastien said, sitting next to me in the window across the street from the mansion.
I gaped at the two mechanical birds in Sébastien’s hands.
“These,” he said, “are drones.”
On the outside, the two birds looked like the old-fashioned brilliantly constructed mechanical pieces Sébastien loved to create, made of both intricately jointed wood and feathers, but these creatures had computers in their bellies.
“Courtesy of Felix. My almost-octogenarian beau is bringing me into the twenty-first century. My classic design built around this computerized contraption. What would someone your age call them? Automata 2.0?”
“5.0 at this stage, I’d say.” I took one of the birds in my hand. If I’d been even a few feet away from it, I would have sworn it was real. As it was, there was something unsettling about how lifelike it felt. My hand jerked as it cooed.
“Careful,” Sébastien murmured, petting the jarringly realistic bird and lifting it from my hand back into his. A chill swept into the room as he cracked the window. He set the birds on the sill, then lifted a black device from his pocket.
The two mechanical birds took flight. The birds first went for the breadcrumbs, then flew up to the security system on the front of the house.
They pecked through important wires as Sébastien made it look like they were going for the bread, the curated scene we wanted the security cameras to pick up.
The larger bird pecked away at the wire until a glaring alarm began to sound.
“Celine is stuck,” I said.
“That’s Bluebird. And this gizmo is supposed to fix her.” He banged his head against the controller in his hand.
“I don’t think it responds well to force.”
“Merde. This would have been easier with my old methods.”
“Sébastien, we don’t have much time. I’m serious. We—”
“Got it!”
I let out a sigh of relief. I would have been terribly embarrassed if I was the one hospitalized for a heart attack.
With Celine and Bluebird back, we next released two of Sébastien’s trained pigeons.
By the time the alarm compa
ny arrived, the real pigeons were in place. We waited inside the flat with a view, able to hear the conversation through the microphone we’d planted.
The two men from the security company left quickly when they noticed the pigeons, thinking the alarm had been triggered by birds.
Sébastien laughed and backed away from the window, further into the darkness.
“Ça m’est égal,” he repeated. “They don’t really care if they solve the issue tonight. They’re leaving the system off.”
“That was the idea.”
“Yes. But I wasn’t sure it would work. Remind me never to hire this security company.”
“I didn’t know you used a security company,” I said.
“I don’t. My traps for burglars are much more fun.”
Chapter 25
With the power cut off, it was easy to get into the house. Staying undetected was the bigger challenge. Without power, we had to use flashlights, which could be easily spotted from the street. The drapes had been drawn so onlookers couldn’t tell the house had been closed up, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but we used the low settings even though it made it more difficult to see.
Sébastien locked the back door we’d come through. Though we were inside, when I breathed out I saw my breath in front of me. I closed my eyes. It was perfectly natural that the house felt so cold. It was the dead of winter and there was no heat to warm the sprawling mansion. The concrete floors didn’t help, though at least my shoes didn’t squeak underneath me.
White sheets had been draped over the furniture, covering everything from low sofas and tables to higher shelves that towered over us like abominable snowmen. I alternated between feeling like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo cartoon and like I was in a house of horrors. I was on high alert, half-expecting one of the sheets to come alive, until I realized the reason they were hanging at odd angles was because there were items on top of the furniture.
I sneezed as I eased a sheet off a small mahogany desk. A glass blown paperweight and a wooden model of a clipper ship remained on the desk. The Durant family hadn’t taken their furniture with them when they’d moved to a chateau in the countryside. That somehow made me even more on edge. It was as if the house had been abandoned in a heartbeat. This was nearly a time capsule of what had taken place the night Marc Durant died.
Sébastien removed the cloth draped over the grandfather clock and let out a sigh. “Several minutes after twelve. I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed that it didn’t stop at midnight on the dot.”
“You’re relieved,” I said, eyeing the creepy, oversize clock. “Definitely relieved.”
It was an eerie sight as our flashlight beams cut through dust motes and shone over the uneven heaps of white as we made our way to the central part of the house. The only sound was our breathing and the light pat of our footfalls.
We stepped further into the house, and as we came around a curve of the back hallway, we reached the grand entryway with the infamous staircase and library above.
A chill began in my ankles and made its way up my body. I couldn’t tell what I was reacting to. Not consciously. I’d already adjusted to the white puffs of air left by my breath.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “The scent.” I’d learned in Scotland one of the signs a ghost was present was that you could smell a scent strongly associated with his last moments in life.
“What are you—?” Sébastien began. “Ah, the scent of pine. A Christmas tree? But how could there be a Christmas tree? Unless…”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what he meant. Unless the ghost was making us smell the Christmas tree that had been there when the previous deaths had occurred.
“There was a tree here seven years ago,” Sébastien said.
I rushed forward and came to a stop in the sprawling foyer, with the grand staircase in the center. This was where three people had fallen to their deaths. In the story, Beauregard Delacroix. His wife Delphine. Their grandson Luc. Rick hadn’t disguised their names much at all. Beaumont Durant. His wife Daphne. Their grandson Marc.
Here in the foyer, we were bathed in dim light. I half expected to see a pool of blood at the foot of the stairs. No, it couldn’t be…The cast of light wasn’t white—it was red.
“The moon,” Sébastien said as he reached me. “It’s the moon casting that ethereal light through the stained-glass window above.”
Above us light from the moonlit night sky was coming through a crimson stained-glass skylight. I thought of Soma, the Cambodian princess who represented the moon.
“The scent of pine is stronger here,” I said. “But there’s no tree.” I clicked off my flashlight. Between the moonlight and my eyes adjusting, it was easier to see without the harsh glare of white light and darkness. And, to be honest, less creepy. I would always think of the china cabinet covered in a sheet in the hallway as an abominable snowman with stubby arms raised above his head.
Sébastien whisked a sheet away from a low table next to the base of the staircase. As he did so, a smattering of dried pine needles scattered across the floor.
“They packed up hastily,” he said. His gaze moved from the dry remnants of the Christmas tree up the staircase.
Dark wood furniture filled the room, looking out of place with the walls barren of their previous art. All except for one painting that had been left behind. A portrait of a solitary, unsmiling man. The ghostly portrait from Rick Coronado’s novel.
The sweeping staircase was also just as Rick had described it. Wide at the bottom, with wrought-iron railings cast into Art Nouveau style twirls that followed the narrowing stairs upward to the landing. It must have once been an enticing welcome as visitors stepped through the front door.
“To the library?” Sébastien asked.
“To the library.”
One glass door leading into the room was still broken, so we stepped carefully through the double doors. Sébastien lifted the sheet from one of the bookshelves in the library. Most of the art that had once hung on the walls had been removed, but the books remained on the bookshelves. The sheets had protected them from most of the dust they would have accumulated, but it wasn’t necessary. Sébastien shook his head, and I knew why. These books hadn’t been read. They were fancy hardbacks I expected had been purchased for show. I pulled one off a shelf and sneezed.
“This gives me ideas for a new act…” Sébastien murmured.
“Didn’t you stop performing fifty years ago?” I whispered.
“For some lucky young magician. Perhaps Sanjay would appreciate it.”
We searched methodically, going from room to room. I looked for the types of hiding places that existed in historical buildings, like priest holes. Sébastien looked at the sizes of the rooms themselves, in case they were smaller than they should have been and hiding secret rooms. We even checked inside the large pieces of furniture, in case they included false panels. We found no evidence of mechanical devices that could have convinced people there was a ghost in the house, but those could have been removed in the intervening years. But neither did we find any secret passageways where a murderer could have escaped with the statue. They would have been more difficult to conceal. And none of the walls or furniture held any false panels—Sébastien’s long experience as a skilled magician would have seen through any such deceptions.
“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “A house like this should not be built without at least one secret passageway.”
I picked up a framed photograph of a younger Marc Durant and a blonde woman holding a toddler. A toddler with vaguely familiar features. This was Marc’s family that had left him and gone to America. Their clothes were out of style, but not too much. Taken a decade or so ago. Marc’s family…the age of his daughter…Three names were engraved on the frame: Marc, Gail & Rebecca.
Rebecca. The name of someone I knew. Only I
knew her by her nickname. Becca.
Everything about Rick’s strange manuscript now made sense. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, her actions now made perfect sense.
“Oh no,” I said. “I know who’s behind this. Marc’s daughter. She’s my student, Becca Courtland.”
Chapter 26
Becca. The young woman who’d transferred to the university at the start of this year and had tried to get close to me from the start. What if it wasn’t academic curiosity, but something else? So many of her reactions had struck me as odd, as she’d tried to get close to me but then being frustrated by innocuous things I said. And the timing. She’d come to the restaurant the same night Miles brought me Rick Coronado’s rush delivery. She was watching for my reaction to the pages.
As I told Sébastien about Becca, everything clicked into place. My head spun as my eyes darted around the haunted mansion. Shadows looked more jagged and threatening than they had minutes before.
“The timing can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “Rick Coronado’s story is the same as her family’s, so they have to be connected.” I shone my flashlight around the room, so well described by Rick. “He’s been in this house. Why did they lead me here? Why me?”
“The treasure is why Becca thought you could help. You receive so many inquiries, no? But she knew you couldn’t say no to your idol.”
“That article telling the world I’m a fan of Rick Coronado and that he was a fan of mine brought me nothing but grief. But that information is public. There’s no reason for either of them to pretend they didn’t know. Why didn’t Becca simply tell me she wanted my help solving these unsolved crimes? Why go to all the effort of convincing Rick Coronado to tell me the story as a novel? Why manipulate me?”
“You’ve pointed out the answer many times,” Sébastien said.
I groaned. “The statue was looted.”
