Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

by Katie Alender

  It was completely, totally not okay for not one but two of the murder victims to be associated with a 230-year-old club of which I was apparently a member.

  When the report was done, Hannah looked disgusted. “They didn’t even mention him! And he was the most important one!”

  I looked at the clock. It was almost time to meet our group in the lobby, but I had other plans. “Are you going out with the class today?” I asked.

  Hannah gave me an “are you serious?” glare.

  “I think I will,” I said. “Is that all right?”

  I knew she’d never come right out and say it wasn’t, so after she nodded stiffly at me, I hurried through my shower and threw on a simple outfit — plaid wide-leg pants and a white sweater. I tied a scarf around my wet hair and grabbed my bag.

  “So we’re skipping the party tonight, too?” I asked.

  Hannah looked straight at me. “Of course not,” she said. “Armand would have wanted me to go.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  “The car’s coming at six thirty,” she said. “We’re picking up our dresses at three. But what are you going to wear? You never went back to the rental shop. You really need to have a costume.”

  “I’ll find something.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Me, too,” I said, my voice rising in annoyance.

  Hannah looked at me darkly.

  “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys later,” I said. “I’ll tell Madame Mitchell you’re not coming, if you want me to.”

  “That would be good,” Peely said, staring glumly at the TV. Hannah didn’t even toss me a tiny scrap of attention.

  I was on thin ice, and I knew it, but I left anyway.

  I called Madame Mitchell from the lobby phone and told her the three of us weren’t feeling well. She must have thought I was the dumbest person alive, thinking she’d fall for it, but as I suspected, she didn’t really care. Plus, she probably figured that if I was going to sneak around behind her back, I’d be trying to sneak around with Jules, who would be approximately fifteen feet from her all day.

  About a half mile from the hotel, I found an internet café and sat down at an open station to search for information on the murder victims.

  The whole time I’d been in Paris, I’d figured that a bunch of dead people had nothing to do with me. Now it was starting to look like my week in France was all about dead people.

  News of the killings had made worldwide headlines, so it was easy to find articles in English. And as I read, the blood in my veins turned iced-tea-on-a-hot-August-day freezing.

  Gabrielle Roux. Pierre Beauclerc. Rochelle DuBois. Armand Janvier.

  And Stéphanie’s middle name was Voclain.

  Every last name was from L’Ordre de la Clé.

  Each victim was young and glamorous — Gabrielle had been a model. Pierre’s photo was taken from a movie premiere, where he had his arm draped around an American starlet. Stéphanie was beautiful, too, in the photo of her that the news website had found from her street-fashion blog.

  And, of course, there was Armand — the most striking boy I’d ever seen.

  They were all the kind of people that, from a distance, look sparkling and fascinating and worthy of being envied and emulated.

  But up closer, I wondered if the shiny exteriors were just that — shiny shells, concealing not-so-awesome personalities. Pierre Beauclerc seemed to have spent the past few years narrowly avoiding facing charges for crimes ranging from drug possession to beating up a bartender. During the last few years of his life, the French tabloids had gleefully followed his exploits, plastering words like MALFAISANT! over his photos in gleeful red type.

  Stéphanie was your classic label-obsessed mean girl — her fashion blog featured three times as many snarky examples of hapless fashion don’ts as inspirational dos. Gabrielle Roux had achieved a small degree of notoriety for throwing a screaming fit in the middle of a nightclub.

  As for Armand …

  My heart hurt as I searched for news articles about him. I didn’t want to find accounts of his bad-boy exploits, tossing innocent deckhands off yachts, yelling at old ladies — or whatever being brought up rich and overindulged made you do.

  Fortunately, all I found was a website for a movie he was trying to produce, a documentary about France’s noblesse ancienne.

  Finally, I forced myself to stop searching for information on the victims.

  All I was doing was distracting myself from the fact that these murders had something to do with the Order of the Key … and that meant they had something to do with me.

  I looked up the address of the Hôpital Sainte-Marina and then found my way there, first taking the Metro and then cutting through a manicured city park to get to the brick-and-glass building. Buoyed by the fact that I’d successfully navigated the subway, I walked with confidence past the reception desk, pausing in front of the elevator to look at the directory. On the third floor was a department called Traumatologie, which sounded like trauma, which seemed like a pretty good fit for what Stéphanie had been through.

  There was only one problem: the stairwell was off-limits. I’d come across enough ALARM WILL SOUND IF DOOR IS OPENED signs in my life to know one when I saw it, even in French.

  I turned back to the elevator.

  The doors opened and a bunch of people poured out. None of them seemed freaked out, as if there had been strange noises or unexplainable shaking or anything else that might indicate that getting on the elevator would actually physically kill me … which was what my gut was telling me would happen.

  Three times I watched the doors open and the exchange of people happen, and three times I let the doors close again.

  You have to do this.

  When the doors parted for the fourth time, I held my breath and rushed in.

  In the almost ten years since I’d been inside an elevator, I’d forgotten basic elevator etiquette, such as — which direction was I supposed to face, toward the door or away from the door? And was I supposed to press the number myself or ask the person closest to the numbers to press it for me?

  Luckily, one of the other people hit the 3 button without being asked. And I faced the door, like everybody else.

  It was a pretty large elevator, as they go — big enough to roll a bed into if you needed to get a patient to another floor. But still, the saliva evaporated out of my mouth and the tears dried out of my tear ducts, leaving me gasping slightly and completely scratchy-eyed. When the doors opened on the third floor, I waited my turn, fighting the urge to push past a pair of elderly nuns and run out.

  It was easy to find Stéphanie once I was on her floor. There was a policeman stationed outside a closed door, as well as a cluster of people I guessed were reporters. I didn’t know what else to do, so I pretended to know exactly where I was going and walked into the center of it all.

  “Mademoiselle,” one of the police officers said, putting a hand on my shoulder. Then he said something in rapid French.

  I put on my best “innocent” face. “Je suis une amie de Stéphanie.”

  He didn’t answer; he just stared. But the idea was pretty clear: no way, no how was I going to be allowed to see Mademoiselle Cocher.

  I held my hands to my heart. “Très, très bonnes amies.”

  He frowned.

  “S’il vous plaît,” I said. “C’est très important. C’est de la clé.”

  “The key?” His eyes narrowed. “What about a key?”

  “Oh,” I said. “You speak English?”

  “I never said I did not,” he said. “What is this about a key?”

  Whoops. Naturally, if the police were looking for an intruder who seemed to be able to pass easily through locked doors, information about a key would be interesting to them. Time to backtrack. “It’s not a real key,” I said. “But she’ll know what I mean. Please, just ask her.”

  He opened the door and went inside. A moment later, he was back. There was a new, differe
nt expression on his face. Where there had been contempt, there was now curiosity.

  His eyes studied me. “She will see you.”

  He held the door open, and I went in.

  Stéphanie was propped up against the raised back of the bed and a few pillows. Her right leg was in a giant cast, and she had a bandage on her cheek. I instantly recognized her from the photos I’d seen online. She was quite lovely, with a sandy-colored pixie-style haircut and delicate features to match — wide brown eyes, small lips, and chiseled cheekbones. Even her ears were petite.

  She stared at me, trembling uncontrollably. One hand grabbed the bar on the far side of the bed, as if she was trying to hold herself still, but it wasn’t working.

  There was an older woman sitting in a chair in the corner, crocheting. Stéphanie spoke to her in French, and the woman got up and left without a word.

  Then Stéphanie turned to me. “Who are you? How do you know about the key?”

  “My name is Colette Iselin.” I started to step closer, and she flinched. So I stayed where I was and pointed to the dark smudge on her arm. “I can see it.”

  “You can? Truly? No one else can.” She held the arm close, as if hiding it from me. “What does it mean?”

  She seemed so fragile — I was afraid that explaining my suspicions about La Clé might send her over the edge. So I decided to start asking questions.

  “Can you tell me about the person who attacked you?” I said. “What did they want?”

  “They wanted nothing,” she said. “Only to kill, to destroy.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes and moved her head quickly back and forth, back and forth. “I can’t say. You will not believe me.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  “No, no, no.” Stéphanie buried her face in her hands.

  I decided to share what I knew. “Back in the time of Marie Antoinette, our families were a part of a secret society. It was called the Order of the Key, L’Ordre de la Clé. Everyone who’s been … attacked — has been from one of the families. I think whoever’s doing this is trying to kill us off because we didn’t die during the Revolution.”

  Stéphanie stared at me. “Oui,” she whispered. “You’re right. She is trying to kill us.”

  “She?” I asked. “It was a woman? Do you know who it is? We need to tell the police!”

  “The police? They can’t help us. No one can help us.” Now her eyes glinted. She knew something I didn’t, and because she was so frightened, she wanted to frighten me, too. “Yes, she is a woman. She came for me, and she will come for you, too. She will wait until you are alone — and she will wait until you are awake — because she wants to taste your fear. And then she will attack you, and you will not be able to escape.”

  “Who?” My stomach turned sour. “Who is she?”

  Stéphanie let out a crazed, high-pitched laugh, a cross between a giggle and a cackle, and sat up straighter in her bed. “You know who I mean,” she said softly, staring at me.

  I did.

  “Un fantôme,” she whispered. “Of course you know. If you can see this mark, then you know … and you also know that she will be coming for you soon enough.”

  I LEFT THE room with the cold, crazed sound of Stéphanie’s mindless laughter bouncing around inside my head. The rest of me felt like a shell, hollowed out and still and silent. I got on the elevator without thinking and rode it to the first floor.

  She couldn’t really mean …

  That the killer was a ghost?

  Marie Antoinette’s ghost?

  It made sense, in a twisted way. Marie Antoinette herself had been beheaded. Now she was bringing that same fate to people today. But why? How?

  She always waits until you are alone.

  Alone how? Alone in a crowd — the way I was alone now, while I walked back across the park? Alone on the Metro platform, waiting for the train? If I, say, stopped to use the restroom somewhere, would she pop into view and chop off my head?

  At the image of the two of us squeezed into a tiny bathroom stall, I let out a burbling, high-pitched laugh that made a guy with a Mohawk give me an uneasy glance and move to another seat in the train car.

  But hadn’t the queen already found me alone? In Le Hameau? And in the Catacombs? She hadn’t killed me — she’d only called me Véronique.

  Véronique, my dearest one, what are we to do?

  Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill me. Maybe I was exempt somehow.

  By the time I got back to the hotel, I was utterly at a loss. I had no idea where to turn, what to do.

  There was the possibility that Stéphanie was crazy — that she had always been crazy, even before someone tried to kill her. Except craziness didn’t explain away my dreams. Or the fact that Stéphanie claimed to have been attacked by the very same ghost I’d been seeing all week.

  Come to think of it, I’d never even said I’d seen a ghost. Stéphanie had brought that part up on her own — more proof that she was telling the truth.

  Back at the hotel, I went to the penthouse and inserted my keycard.

  The room was empty and quiet. I took about three steps in, and the door closed behind me with a click that made me jump out of my skin.

  Calm down, Colette.

  There was a note on the coffee table in Peely’s bubbly handwriting:

  Ready was underlined about four times. The note was signed with a letter P that had a happy face drawn in its loop.

  Versailles? Yeah, right. Maybe in about a million years, I’d set foot at Versailles again. Even if I had a dress, which I didn’t, I couldn’t think of anything on earth that would persuade me to step foot onto the grounds of what had once been the queen’s home.

  But how would I get out of it? Hannah would be furious.

  There’s a psychopathic ghost stalking you. Why are you worried about Hannah?

  What I needed to do was get out of Paris. Get on a plane and go home to Ohio, where the closest thing I’d ever seen to a ghost was Charlie in the Halloween costume he made by cutting eyeholes in the expensive sheets, much to Dad’s dismay.

  The only problem was, we were scheduled to fly out the following night. Mom would tell me to wait it out. After all, it was only one day. What could happen in one day? Logistically speaking, I might not even be able to get on a flight any faster than the one I was already booked on.

  It was okay. I would be fine.

  I didn’t really believe the ghost was trying to kill me, because if that was what she wanted, she’d had her chance. And besides, I didn’t have the mark on my arm. I’d checked four times on my way back from the hotel. There had to be some other explanation for why she was following me.

  Still, I was not going to go to Versailles. Hannah would just have to deal with it.

  I stepped into the bathroom to wash my hands. I was lost in thought, picturing Hannah’s inevitable hissy fit and imagining what she’d say to me.

  I dried my hands and turned back toward the mirror.

  And then I froze.

  She was back, in the mirror, watching me. She wore a simple black dress, her hair in gray-powdered ringlets.

  The woman from the postcard. La duchesse.

  And this time I knew exactly who she was.

  “Véronique,” I whispered.

  She gazed at me without answering.

  “What does she want?” I whispered again, taking a chance. “How do I stop her?”

  Her eyes turned to the floor for a long, thoughtful moment. Then she glanced up at me and spoke.

  “Ce n’est pas seulement le cou — elle veut briser le coeur.”

  Oh, crud.

  “I don’t really speak very much French,” I said.

  She repeated the phrase once more, and then her image melted away, leaving me staring open-mouthed at my own reflection.

  I ran out of the bathroom, trying to speak the words as she’d spoken them. I managed to jot the phrase down on a piece of paper, t
hough I was sure I was getting it wrong.

  All I had was questions. It was time to start finding answers.

  And that meant it was time to get help.

  Audrey answered the door of room 304 on the first knock.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi.”

  “Can we talk for a minute?” I asked.

  She nodded slowly. Behind her in the room, Brynn glanced up from the book she was reading.

  “Out in the hall, maybe?” I added.

  When we were alone, I took a deep breath. I’d worked out what I was going to say on the walk down there, and even if it wasn’t the best plan, it was the only plan I had.

  “So, first of all, I’m really sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I was a little stressed out, and I —”

  “You totally mean-girled me,” she said. “But whatever. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I forgot you’ve been taking Hannah lessons for a year.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” I said. “Jules and I had an argument and I was pretty upset about it.”

  “You couldn’t have just said that?” She stuck her hands in her pockets. “So … are we done?”

  “The reason I came here …” I took a deep breath. “I have an idea. You know how I said we weren’t really friends? Well, what if we were friends?”

  She made a confused face.

  “If you come hang out with me for a while, maybe we can, like, bond. And then when we get back home, I’ll totally be your friend. We’re already going shopping, remember?”

  A smile spread across her lips, and instantly, I felt relief.

  But she just laughed.

  “Colette, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Why would I want to hang out with someone who treats me like dirt? So I can make people think I’m ‘cool’?” She punctuated the word with air quotes and started to turn away, shaking her head. “I think spending so much time with Hannah has actually made you crazy.”

  “Wait!” I cried. “Don’t you wish you could improve your social status? This is your chance.”