by Morgan Rice
Having talked to her for less than a minute, Pinsley suspected that the full difficulties amounted to more than that. There was something bitter and sharp edged about Camille du Pont. He found that he had no trouble whatsoever believing that she might be able to do someone harm.
What he believed didn’t come into it, though. Whatever he had experienced in the last few days, whatever Kaia’s talents meant for the world around Pinsley, he was still a rational man. He needed proof. He needed Camille du Pont to give something away that he could use, some thread that he could pull at further.
He observed her, taking in the tiredness of her posture, the rigidity with which she held herself in spite of that. She was proud, and such pride wouldn’t suffer being ignored for others.
“It must have made you angry, being overlooked for the part,” Pinsley said.
“It’s not just some actor nonsense,” Camille replied. “If I don’t work, then I don’t eat, I can’t afford my rent. But yes, I’m angry. Angry that worse actresses than me all got the leading role.”
“Are you aware of what has happened to those actresses?” Pinsley asked, and didn’t give Camille time to think before he confronted her with the next part. “Two of them have been found dead, and one more is missing.”
“Then it looks like I had a lucky escape, doesn’t it?” Camille said. Pinsley saw the moment when realization dawned on her face. “Wait, you think I had something to do with it? Who are you to ask me about this?”
“I have been hired by an interested party to look into the killings,” Pinsley said, repeating the lie that he’d used with the stagehand. He didn’t like lying, but even the illusion of authority was better than not having any at all. He suspected that without that lie, Camille would refuse to say anything more. “Right now, your jealousy about the role gives me a reason to look at you. So, where were you the last three nights?”
“I was at my new job,” Camille said. “Like I said, if I don’t work, I don’t eat. I got a part in a new production of Reynard the Fox at a theatre out in Versailles. So If you think I’m your killer, then you need to think again.”
Damn, Pinsley had really thought that this might come to something. Of course, Camille could be lying, but her alibi was so easy to check that she clearly wasn’t. Versailles was outside the city, too, far enough that there would have been no way for Camille to get back in time to kill anyone. Then there was the fact that she was a relatively short, lightly built woman. Would she really have been able to violently strangle the others so easily.
Pinsley’s heart fell as he realized that he’d wasted his time here.
Although maybe not completely. There were still things he could ask that might help, and more personal things he might be able to get answers to.
“Then, as someone who clearly isn’t the killer, perhaps you can help,” Pinsley suggested. “Can you think of any other actors who have reasons to hate this production? Perhaps someone else who was turned down for the role?”
“M. Lachelle is not a popular man,” Camille said. “Although…”
Pinsley waited in silent anticipation.
“I did hear that their first choice as Romeo didn’t work out.”
That caught Pinsley’s attention. A former Romeo, killing the actresses playing Juliet? It seemed outlandish, but far from impossible.
“Who?” Pinsley asked.
“Pierre Duchene was the actor. A real creep. Used to show up drunk, pick fights. I swear, he spent more time leering at the actresses than practicing his lines.”
That sounded even more promising to Pinsley. Maybe he was going to get answers out of this after all.
“Do you know where he is?” Pinsley asked.
Camille took another few seconds to think, but then shrugged. “If you want to find him, you’ll need to check the wine shops, although he has a small place on the Rue Boutarel, on the Ile Saint Louis.”
“Thank you,” Pinsley said. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
“Now, if that’s everything?” Camille said, in a tone that made it clear that it had better be.
Still, Pinsley knew that he wouldn’t have this chance again, so he had to take it.
“Just one more thing,” he said. “You must know a lot of the actors and actresses in the city.”
“Of course,” Camille said.
“Including a lot of the ones playing smaller parts?” Pinsley said.
“I make a point of learning their names,” Camille said. It sounded like a nice touch until she said the next part. “That way, I know who is coming up after the roles that should be mine.”
She laughed with it, but she didn’t sound as if she was entirely joking. Was everything so bitter and brutal in the theatre? Still, it gave Pinsley the chance to ask what he wanted to know.
“Have you heard of one by the name of Olivia Pinsley?” he asked. “I believe she may have been acting in the production of Romeo and Juliet.”
There was another of those pauses as she thought, and to Pinsley, it seemed as if it dragged out forever. Maybe it was just because he wanted the answer so much.
“Olivia is a common enough French name,” Camille said, “but Pinsley? What kind of name is that? No, I would have remembered that name.”
It didn’t mean anything, Pinsley had to remind himself. Olivia could simply be acting under an assumed name, a French name. He was all but sure that he’d seen her. This wasn’t the moment to give up on that possibility, despite this setback.
Nor was it the moment to give up on trying to find the killer. Camille might not have proven as fruitful a lead as he’d hoped, but at least she’d given him one name that he could follow up on. Wherever Pierre Duchene was hiding in the city, he and Kaia would find him.
He headed out of the café to tell her the news, looked around, and felt an instant mix of panic and anger rising in him.
She was gone. Again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
By the time Kaia got back to the café, the inspector was already waiting for her outside it. She could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t happy about it.
“Kaia, where have you been? I thought I said that you should… wait, is your face bruised?”
Kaia put her hand to the spot where Henri had struck her. Clearly, the bruise there was already starting to rise, although it probably didn’t have to be much for the inspector’s powers of observation to pick it up.
“Kaia, what happened to you?” Pinsley asked, sounding concerned. In that instant, he seemed to have gone from the cold inspector, angry that she wasn’t there, to an almost fatherly picture of concern.
“I got too cold waiting,” Kaia said, the words coming out in a rush, “but then I felt something, and I followed the feeling, and I ended up in this house. There were these people there, but they weren’t the Shadowseers like I expected, they were just this group of criminals holed up there. One of them grabbed me and hit me, but then I did this thing where I just knew everything about who they were and what they wanted. Oh, and I can speak French now.”
Kaia took a gasping breath, and realized that everything that had just happened in the tenement was hitting her all over again. She was blurting it all out in a panic because now, she was panicking in a way that she hadn’t when she’d been back at the tenement building.
“Wait, slow down,” the inspector said, holding up his hands. “Take this one step at a time. You were attacked?”
“In a tenement building a little way from here,” Kaia said. It was hard to put her thoughts in order now, because it seemed as if they were all coming at her at once. “One of them grabbed me and hit me when I told him to let me go.”
“Show me where,” Pinsley said, his expression suddenly furious. “I’ll-”
Kaia shook her head, though, cutting him off. She didn’t need him to go there now and get some kind of revenge.
“I dealt with it,” Kaia said.
“How?” Pinsley asked.
“I talked to them,�
�� Kaia said.
“You talked to them? In English?”
“In French,” Kaia said.
Now it was the inspector’s turn to shake his head. “But you don’t speak French, Kaia.”
“I do now, it seems,” Kaia told him, and then repeated the phrase in French, just to emphasize the point.
“But that’s… impossible,” Pinsley said. He looked as if he couldn’t make any sense of it. “Maybe some kind of unconscious learning? Being immersed in the environment…”
Perhaps because he couldn’t make any sense of it, of course he focused on the other parts.
“What were you even doing, wandering off alone, putting yourself in danger?”
“You left me alone first,” Kaia shot back. She still wasn’t happy with the inspector about that. “You left me out here like I’m a dog to be tied up outside a butcher’s while you go inside. If you’d been with me at the tenement, then none of this would have happened!”
She saw the inspector pause at that, deflating slightly.
“You’re right,” he said. “I put thoughts of propriety ahead of anything else.”
“Including what I actually wanted,” Kaia said. “You didn’t listen before when I said that we should follow the feeling of the shadows, and you weren’t listening when you asked me to just wait for you.”
“There was no way you would have been permitted inside,” the inspector said.
Kaia had to admit the truth of that, but she still didn’t like it. “I know, and I know that I shouldn’t have gone off, but it… I thought I had a chance of finding my family.”
Again, the words seemed to strike home with the inspector.
“I just don’t want to risk losing you. After my daughter, perhaps I am being… overprotective.”
Kaia could understand that, but she still wasn’t going to let him leave her out of this.
“Let me be a part of all this,” she said. “I can look after myself.”
“You still haven’t fully explained how you escaped,” Pinsley said.
“I told you,” Kaia said. “I talked to them. It was like I could see into their hearts.”
“If you’re suggesting that you can read minds now, like some spiritualist-”
“Not their minds,” Kaia insisted. The difference was hard to explain. “I could see what the things they wanted most in the world were. I understood them, who they were.”
“It still sounds very unlikely,” Pinsley said.
“Even after all you’ve seen I can do?” Kaia countered. That was the part of this that made it strangest: the inspector had seen her do impossible things. Was it normal for people to push that aside? To look away because it challenged what they thought about the world?
“You have done several inexplicable things,” Pinsley admitted. “And it seems that you can speak French. You also led us to the theatre, where…”
He tailed off, not finishing that.
“Where we found the murders?” Kaia guessed.
“Not just that,” Pinsley replied. “There is something else I must tell you. Shall we walk back in the direction of the hotel? You look tired, and it sounds like you’ve been through a lot.”
Kaia felt exhausted. It seemed that this use of her powers had taken a lot out of her after all.
“All right,” Kaia said. “But I know you’re just buying time to think of how to say this.”
“Through mystical powers?”
“Just because I know you by now,” Kaia replied, as they started to walk back. “What is it, Inspector? Something has been bothering you ever since we went to the theatre, and if it’s not simply the murders, then what is it?”
“I told you that my daughter ran away,” Pinsley said. “I believe… I believe that I saw her in the theatre the night we went there.”
That news came as a shock to Kaia, partly at the thought of Olivia being there, but also at the thought that Pinsley wouldn’t tell her about it. Other pieces of the puzzle started to make sense then, though.
“That’s why you wanted to get backstage so badly that night,” Kaia said.
Pinsley nodded. “Olivia always loved the theatre. She and her mother would go. She used to play pretending to be other people, and I never thought anything of it. Now though, it seems obvious that she wanted to be an actress. Perhaps she didn’t feel that it was an ambition she could tell me.”
“Because it wouldn’t have been suitable?” Kaia asked, unable to stop herself.
“Exactly,” Pinsley said. Kaia could hear the regret there in his voice. “It seems that my need to do the correct thing has led to more problems than just today. I tried to speak to her that night, and I have asked after her.”
“You need to keep trying,” Kaia said. She knew how much the inspector’s family meant to him. More than that, she knew how much not having a family had meant to her. If her father could have come to the orphanage to find her, she would have given anything to make it happen. “You can’t give up. We could go to the theatre right now, and demand to be let in again.”
“They wouldn’t allow us,” the inspector said. “Besides, things aren’t that simple.”
“What’s not simple?” Kaia demanded. Family meant everything. It was the biggest reason she was in Paris, after all. “You have to try to find her. You have to do whatever it takes.”
The inspector smiled wanly. “You don’t understand, Kaia. You haven’t lived long enough to make the kind of mistakes that complicate things with your family.”
“I’m too young to understand?” Kaia said. They were really back to that. “I understand that you’re missing out if we don’t go to the theatre right now.”
Pinsley kept walking towards the hotel, though.
“We’ll go there,” he said. “But not yet, and not just to find my daughter. We have to do this, but we have to do it the right way. We’ll get you back to the hotel. After what you’ve been through, you should rest. And then… we will find a man who I believe may be responsible for all of this.”
*
Pinsley was relieved once he got Kaia back to the hotel, although it was hard to contain his shock when she started to talk to the landlady.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you before,” she said, in French that was, frankly, even better than his own. Her accent had a strange roughness to it, though, as if it had been copied directly from… well, from exactly the kind of Parisian street tough she claimed to have learned the whole language from in a matter of moments.
“That’s…” the landlady began, and then turned to Pinsley. “I thought you said that she didn’t speak French?”
“She has been taking lessons,” Pinsley said, unable to contain a small smile. “And making very good progress.”
He was glad that he wasn’t the only one astonished by Kaia’s sudden proficiency in the language.
“What’s your name?” Kaia asked the landlady. “I’m Kaia.”
“I am Madam Farge,” the landlady said. “Tell me, young lady, are you eating properly? You did not finish your escargot.”
“I had to leave in a hurry,” Kaia said. “And now, I think I should probably go lie down for a couple of hours. My chaperone here will be taking me back to the theatre, tonight, after all.” She looked over at Pinsley. “Won’t he?”
Pinsley refused to be pushed into it, though. “Perhaps, if it is relevant to the case.”
“Case?” Madam Farge said. “What case?”
“Monsieur Pinsley is attempting to acquire a case of champagne to take back to England,” Kaia said. She was enjoying this far too much for Pinsley’s tastes. “He thinks the business might take him back to the theatre, but I say that we should go anyway. Someone important to him works there.”
“We do not know that for sure,” Pinsley said, trying to contain his annoyance that Kaia was trying to press the issue now. “As I have said, we might go, if it is appropriate. For now, though, you have been through a rough time, Kaia. I imagine that you are tired.”
“All right, all right,” Kaia said, heading for the stairs leading up to the rooms.
“I will bring you up some food later, dear,” Madam Farge said, as Kaia moved out of sight.
“I thought your policy was that diners had to eat in the dining room at set times?” Pinsley asked, confused by this sudden strain of niceness from the hotel’s proprietor.
Madam Farge whirled towards him, lifting a finger. “Don’t think I don’t see the bruise on her cheek. I know about men like you.”
“You think I hurt her?” Pinsley said, scarcely able to believe the accusation. “Kaia is like a daughter to me.”
Yet he was afraid to go see his own daughter, because of how badly that reunion might go if he didn’t handle it carefully. Focusing on the murders was easier, and that almost certainly wasn’t a good sign for the way his life was going.
“So you let another do this to her?” What kind of man isn’t there for someone when she needs him? You say she’s like a daughter to you, well, shouldn’t a father be there?”
That was another question that hit too close to home. All Pinsley could do was ignore the question, because he didn’t have an answer. He sat down in the dining room, considering his options. He went to his room and fetched his metronome from his bag, returning to the dining room and setting it on a table.
“There’s to be no singing here,” Madam Farge said.
“I intend merely to think,” Pinsley said.
He set the device in motion, letting the orderly regularity of it help his attempts to work through what was happening. He considered the murders. That they were linked to the theatre was undeniable. Returning there tonight was probably the best move, although the director probably wouldn’t welcome them. Worse, if Pinsley left it until too late tonight, the killer might already have struck again.
He needed to act, but he had too few leads. There was only the name and address Camille had given him. The most direct course was to try to find Pierre Duchene before this evening. If he proved to be the killer, then Pinsley would be able to stop him before he killed again. At the very least, he might be able to take Pinsley one step further along the path of evidence that would lead to the killer.
