Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer (12 page)

“
Au revoir, mesdemoiselles!
” he called.

Hannah stared icily at the back of the seat in front of her.

“What did he want?” Pilar asked.

My mind raced for something, anything, that would explain Armand’s actions.

“Yes, Colette, tell us,” Hannah said through her teeth. “What did he want?”

“It’s … a surprise,” I said. “I can’t tell you.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“All right, fine,” I said. “He wanted to know what size you wear. For a present.”

That threw her off. She sat back, trying to look angry but unable to conceal her curiosity. “What do you think he’s going to get me?”

“I told you,” I said. “It’s supposed to be a surprise. I’ve already said too much.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly. “Wait, did you tell him size two or zero?”

“Zero,” I said.

“Okay.” She looked relieved — but not as relieved as I felt that she’d bought my lie.

WE ATE DINNER with the rest of the group at the hotel café. Hannah treated me exactly like usual — at least, that was what I tried to tell myself. Afterward, she and Pilar got into the elevator, and I hung back, trying to think of an excuse to take the stairs.

“Hey, Colette, hang on!”

I turned to see Audrey and Brynn coming up behind me.

“Oops, sorry,” Hannah said, letting the elevator doors slide shut.

“Hi,” I said, hoping they hadn’t noticed Hannah would have had plenty of time to hold the elevator.

“Are you busy tomorrow morning?” Audrey asked.

“Um … just with whatever’s on the itinerary.”

Audrey nodded. “We’re going to the Conciergerie at ten. But before that? Are you busy?”

Only a person like Audrey could make plans before ten in the morning and expect other people to have plans, too. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be … eating?”

“I want to show you something.” Her face was lit up, like she had a big secret. “Will you meet me in the lobby at eight thirty?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Great!” She grinned, and then she and Brynn turned as the elevator returned with a soft
ding
.

They held the door for me, and I shook my head. “I hate elevators,” I said. “I’m claustrophobic.”

“Oh, okay,” Audrey said. “See you in the morning.”

When they were gone, I stood there for a moment, wondering what had made me spit out one of my deepest secrets to people who were basically strangers, when in eight months I’d never found the right moment to say it aloud to Hannah and Peely.

The next morning, I went down for breakfast at eight and found Audrey already there. Because there was no way not to, I joined her at her little table, and we ate our chocolate croissants together.

“What am I going to do without French food?” she asked, taking a big bite of the pastry.

“I wonder if you could melt a Hershey’s Kiss on a regular croissant,” I said.

“Blasphemy!” Audrey laughed. “Not the same at all.”

She refused to say a word about the mysterious place she wanted to take me, even when we were on our way there. All she would tell me was that she’d spotted it the day before, when the group was walking back to the hotel.

We crossed the river and walked through the streets near Notre Dame, where the buildings were elaborately trimmed with stone and iron scrollwork.

“It’s unbelievable,” I said, gazing up at a doorway adorned with carvings of lions. “It’s like somebody decided to take the time to make every single part beautiful.”

“They were artisans,” Audrey said. “They’d rather not build something at all than make it ugly.”

She snapped photos and occasionally took out a small brown notebook and made a note or a sketch.

“Ugh,” I said. “I keep forgetting to send my mother a postcard! She’s going to kill me.”

“Get one now,” Audrey said. “You can buy a stamp at the hotel and mail it this afternoon.”

So we stopped at a tiny storefront and I combed through the racks of postcards. I found one for Mom that was a photo of Notre Dame. Then I found one with a picture of the Paris city skyline for my father, figuring I could write something clever on it about New York.

“Oh, look,” Audrey said, pulling a card off the rack. “Wow.”

I leaned in to see the picture and then did a double take.

It was a painting of a woman sitting on a bench by a little pond … but not just any woman.

It was
me
.

Or rather, it was the not-me me I kept seeing in place of my own reflection. The same light hair, done up in an elaborate twist and covered in powder. The same full lips and wide blue eyes.

“It’s crazy,” Audrey said. “She looks
just
like you. Do you see it?”

I couldn’t answer.

I turned the card over to read the caption, which was written in French and English:

ONE OF THE MANY PORTRAITS PRESERVED AT THE ROYAL PALACE AT VERSAILLES:
LA DUCHESSE
, PAINTED BY DIEGO ROSTANO, CIRCA 1786.

I remembered the old lady back at Versailles taking my photo and saying I was the girl from the picture. This must have been the picture she meant. So I wasn’t just inventing this woman, dreaming her up. She was … or had been … real. Alive. Long ago.

“Are you going to buy it?” Audrey asked.

I forced a smile and slid the card back into its slot. “No,” I said. “I don’t need any more postcards.”

I don’t need that woman staring at me from my carry-on for the rest of the trip
, is what I really meant.

We kept walking, my thoughts racing, until finally, Audrey stopped on a street corner. “There it is!” she said, pointing.

I stared at a tile set into the stone wall of a building. It was streaked with lines from centuries of rain, the carving on its surface rounded and softened with age.

But the design was unmistakable:

It was the key. The key with the cornflower in it.

I gasped. My hand automatically went to the neckline of my shirt, which the medallion was tucked behind — but something, a sudden shy feeling, stopped me just short of pulling it out.

“It’s the thing from your necklace!” Grinning, Audrey reached into her bag for her travel journal and opened it, revealing the page on which she’d originally sketched my medallion. Next to it, in pencil, was a sketch of the tile. “We passed by here yesterday and it jumped out at me.”

“What is this building?” I asked, stepping back and looking up at it. It was three stories tall with wrought-iron balconies and a steeply sloping metal roof.

“It looks like they sell camping supplies,” she said, studying the sign hanging down. “But sometimes they have signs saying what they
used
to be.”

We walked from one edge of the structure to the other but found nothing.

“Let’s go inside and ask,” Audrey said. “It’s nine fifteen, but we can still make it back in time if we hurry.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, I could always come back —”

“But this is important,” she said, reaching for the door.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I mean … it’s important to you, right?”

“Oh. Well, yeah, kind of.”

“So we’ll go in.”

We walked up to the counter.

“
Parlez-vous anglais?
” Audrey asked.

The clerk, a guy in his late twenties, made an uncertain face. “No so good.”

In his halting English and our halting French, we quickly established that he knew absolutely nothing about the building’s history. Audrey showed him the photographs she’d taken of the tile, and he shook his head.

Another employee, a girl who was apparently bored, came over. The clerk showed her the picture of the key, and they spoke to each other in French. I didn’t understand a single word they said, until I heard the girl say, “Laclay.”

“
Excusez-moi
,” I said. “Laclay? Who is that?”

The clerk gently turned Audrey’s camera so I could see the screen, and pointed at the image.
“La clé,”
he said slowly.

“The key,” Audrey said. “
Clé
means key.”

Suddenly, the female employee’s face brightened.
“L’ordre de la Clé!”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“The Order of the Key?” Audrey said.

The girl cast a glance around the empty store, said something to the guy in French, and then beckoned to me and Audrey. “Come.”

A mix of anticipation and uncertainty simmered in my stomach as she led us through a door marked
ENTRÉE INTERDITE
. We passed through a stockroom and made a left turn. There was an old wooden door tucked behind a pair of bikes, which the girl moved out of the way. She reached for the doorknob and yanked on it, hard, until it opened with a loud screech.

She held up a hand, telling us to wait, and darted away, returning a minute later with a camping flashlight still in its package. She flipped the light on and went through the door.

“
Attention!
” she called.
Be careful.
Just inside the door was a rather steep stone stairway.

I hesitated. Already, my heart was beating faster.

Audrey looked at me. “Are you okay? I can go down and see what it is, if you want.”

“Um …” I looked down the steps into the gaping darkness. I hated to send someone else to do my dirty work.

Audrey didn’t seem to mind, though. She descended halfway and stopped. “It’s dark, but it’s not small, if that helps.”

It did. I could handle the dark, as long as I knew the walls weren’t pressing in on me. The echoes of our footsteps off the room’s distant edges made me feel better.

We were standing in a cellar of some sort. The store didn’t appear to use it for anything, although when the girl swept her flashlight across the walls, I saw a collection of old brooms and a beat-up metal trash can.

“Aha!” The girl’s triumphant exclamation reverberated around us. “
Ici
— here!”

Audrey and I came up behind her and looked at the spot on the wall illuminated by her light.

“Oh,” Audrey said softly.

It was an engraved metal sign. At the top was the key design. Under that, it read,
L’ORDRE DE LA CLÉ, MDCCLXXXI. EN SERVICE ÉTERNEL À SA MAJESTÉ LA REINE.

“What year is that?” I whispered, trying to remember my Roman numerals.

“One thousand … five hundred … two hundred … L is fifty, right? Plus thirty-one.” Audrey sighed an amazed little sigh. “Seventeen eighty-one. In eternal service of Her Majesty the queen.”

“The
queen
queen?” I asked, my pulse quickening.

“Let’s see,” Audrey said. “In 1781, that would have been Marie Antoinette. Wow.”

I couldn’t even speak. So “Laclay” wasn’t a person. It was an organization. And now I knew for certain: it had something to do with me — and with the duke in the portrait — and with Armand …

And with Marie Antoinette.

The girl was smiling at us. Clearly, she’d gotten the reaction she was looking for.

Audrey took out her camera. “The Order of the Key. So whoever they were, they were devoted to the queen.”

“But the queen died in the Revolution,” I said.

“Yeah.” Audrey started taking photos. “A lot of people died in the Revolution. Probably these Key people, too.”

The girl who worked at the store wandered around the perimeter of the room, inspecting the walls with interest.

“Come!” she said. “Come, see. More!”

She stood with her flashlight pointed to another metal tile. The key symbol was at the top, and beneath that was a list of words. I knelt down to look at them.

They were names.

DUBOIS. BEAUCLERC. VOCLAIN. ROUX. JANVIER …

And
ISELIN
.

WE HAD TO book it to the hotel to meet our group by ten o’clock. The whole way back, my thoughts were swirling. Had my family, the Iselins, really been members of this mysterious order? With Armand’s family? The idea of having something in common with a person as awe-inspiring as Armand made me feel electrified.

In the lobby, Madame Mitchell did a double take when she saw me. “I thought you all weren’t feeling well this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m fine.”

“I guess it’s just Hannah and Pilar, then.” The look on her face told me she knew Hannah and Peely were lying — but also that she didn’t really care. I guess after teaching overprivileged girls for twenty years, you’ve pretty much heard it all. I kind of didn’t care, either. If they wanted to sleep through the entire trip, that was their business.

Jules arrived and we began our walk. I didn’t want to seem clingy, so I stayed at the back of the group. Finally, I fell into step beside him.

“Hey,” I said.

“Good morning,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m really sorry about yesterday, at the Basilique. Hannah was … she just wasn’t thinking.”

“That is not your fault. You don’t need to apologize.”

“I feel like I should,” I said. “I hope you don’t think they represent all of us.”

He turned to me, a small smile playing on his lips. “I don’t think that at all.”

I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. “Okay, then.”

I was on the verge of telling him what we’d learned about the Order of the Key, when Madame Mitchell turned and yoo-hoo’d at him, and he had to excuse himself and walk away. A little fountain of happiness sprang up inside me and I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

We bought our tickets and then went across a massive walled courtyard into La Conciergerie.

“During the Revolution, this was a notorious prison,” Jules announced as we stood inside the vaulted room where huge stone pillars and arching stone beams braced the ceiling. “Many historical figures were held here prior to their executions, including Marie Antoinette, Madame du Barry, and Robespierre. Now, most of the building is used for judicial purposes.”

All I heard was
Marie Antoinette
.

We walked through a hall filled with examples of eighteenth-century prison cells.

“Kind of tight,” Audrey said, as we peered into a room that couldn’t have been bigger than about six feet by six feet, with a rough wooden bench that served as a bed.

“Yeah,” Brynn said. “Not the ideal place to spend a weekend.”

“Or the last few months of your life,” Jules said, coming up behind us.

“Did Marie Antoinette have to stay in a room like this?” I asked, sort of appalled. I mean, she
was
the queen. You’d think they’d have given her a little extra space.

“No, her cell was larger. But not very much larger. You will see a representation of it farther along on the tour.”

I noticed that he stayed with us as we passed the other rooms, which were full of janky-looking mannequins that Brynn made hilarious comments about.

But we all fell silent as we crossed into the re-creation of Marie Antoinette’s cell.

A shudder passed through my body as I looked at the items displayed behind glass. A rug. A cup. A water pitcher. Things the queen had actually held and used while she had been locked up, separated from her husband and children … waiting to die.

The room
was
larger than the other cells, but compared to the grand opulence of Versailles, Marie must have thought she was losing her mind. She had a small bed and a desk, with a short privacy screen to shield her from the view of the guards who were always sitting a few feet away.

I started to back away from the display, my palms growing sweaty.

To live there … to be stuck there, knowing you were going to die but not knowing what had become of your children …

“This is what you get when you tell people to eat cake,” Brynn said.

“Marie Antoinette never said that,” Jules said. “It’s a famous misrepresentation. Actually, she was not even the first person accused of having said it.”

“Then why did people believe it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “She was raised in utter luxury as an archduchess and then became a queen at a young age. She was spoiled and probably thoughtless in many ways. But I don’t think she was bad in the way that an evil person might be called bad. She was devoted to charities, and she was a good mother who loved her children very much. But the people wanted to hate her.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They needed a symbol,” he said. “Somewhere to project their frustration. Marie Antoinette was a foreigner — she was born in Austria, she was independent, and she had extravagant taste. But she was falsely accused of many things and often used as a … I don’t know how to say it.”

“A scapegoat?” I suggested.

Jules’s confused face was seriously cute. “A what kind of goat?”

“Scapegoat. It means … someone you blame when things aren’t good.”

“Then yes. She was a goat.”

At the far end of the hallway was a small square room, lined with benches. Every wall had a sign on it, filled with columns of names of prisoners held there during the Revolution.

I went straight to the
I
s, steeling myself for the sight of one or more Iselins on the list. My own relatives, horribly condemned to die.

But I didn’t find any Iselins. And when I looked for Armand’s family, the Janviers, I didn’t find any of them.

I tapped Audrey on the shoulder. “Do you still have the pictures you took this morning?”

She started scrolling back through her camera. “Yeah … oh, are you checking the names?”

I nodded, and then we went down the list together, looking for the rest of the families — Beauclerc, DuBois, Roux, and Voclain.

But we didn’t find any of them.

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

Audrey shrugged. “That they were lucky?”

Still, I found it weird — that out of literally thousands of people, six whole families had escaped the guillotine entirely — and they just happened to be the same six families who were in the Order of the Key together.

We trailed down the hallway to the final room on the tour — a memorial chapel.

“This room was actually the queen’s cell,” Jules said. “It was turned into a memorial twenty-three years after she died, by King Louis the Eighteenth.”

The chapel was beautiful, with a real altar and everything. It was dark and quiet, small but not suffocating. On one side was a portrait of Marie Antoinette dressed all in black; on the other was a small table.

As I turned to go back to the main room, I froze.

Standing directly across from me was the queen.

She stared at me, her eyes burning with the same intensity I’d seen at Le Hameau.

In the dimly lit room, she almost seemed to give off a light of her own — a ghostly light.

No. I don’t believe in ghosts.

And then a tourist took a step toward the altar — and walked right through the queen’s enormous skirt.

I staggered backward, running into a woman who said, “Watch out, hon,” in a thick Texan accent.

By the time I got my feet back under me, the ghost — or whatever she was — had disappeared.

Audrey was by my side. “Are you okay?”

I wanted to nod, but I was too freaked out. Fortunately, Audrey just assumed I was having a claustrophobic meltdown.

“Come on, let’s go sit. It’s a little stuffy in here.” She guided me back out to a bench in the hallway. We sat for a couple of minutes, and I tried to force myself to take slow, even breaths. The thought kept sliding back into my head that I should feel better, but then it was run over by the giant, screeching fact that I’d seen a
ghost
— an actual ghost. I’d come so close to convincing myself that I’d been wrong about what I experienced at Versailles … but there was no denying it any longer.

She really was a ghost.

My stomach turned over with a flop. I rested my head in my hands.

“You really don’t seem okay,” Audrey said.

“I think I really might not be,” I said.

Her voice was calm, but I could hear the anxiety she was trying to cover up. “Should I get Madame Mitchell? Do you need a doctor or something?”

I tried to swallow the thickness in my throat but found that it wouldn’t go away. Then I tried to tell Audrey that I was fine, but I couldn’t say the words.

“Let’s go outside and get some actual fresh air,” Audrey said. “Wait here for a second.”

As if I could go anywhere.

When she came back, Brynn was with her. “Is it a panic attack?” Brynn asked. “My mom gets panic attacks.”

“Can you walk?” Audrey asked.

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I can walk. No, it’s not a panic attack. I don’t think.” Was it still called a panic attack when there was something actually worth panicking about?

Somehow, I got to my feet, and we walked all the way back to the exit and emerged into the courtyard.

A light, chilled rain had begun to fall.

Instantly, I felt better. Not 100 percent, but I could breathe again. Brynn and Audrey watched me as I stood in the rain, enjoying the cool mistiness and swallowing the sweet, fresh air.

After a minute, I turned back to them.

“Better?” Audrey asked.

“Way better,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” She made a face like thanking her was kind of dumb. “Do you want to go back to the hotel? I can skip the Champs-Élysées…. It’s just shopping.”

“Maybe that would be a good idea.” Spending a whole afternoon surrounded by stuff I couldn’t afford wasn’t quite as bad as being stalked by a ghost, but it was close. “I’m sure I can get there by myself.”

Brynn pretended to be shocked. “Without your buddy?”

I half-smiled. “I guess I’ll find Madame Mitchell and tell her.”

She shrugged. “It’s easier to apologize afterward than get permission before, right? We’ll tell her you left. ‘We tried to make her stay, but she karate-chopped us. Who knew Colette was secretly a ninja?’”

I grinned.

“You’ll take a taxi, though?” Audrey asked.

“I’m okay to walk,” I said. “I promise.”

“Here.” Audrey dug through her backpack. “Take my umbrella.”

She insisted, so I took the tiny umbrella she offered. I still got wet, but it didn’t matter. The rain made the city seem even more romantic — the people pulling their coat collars up and hunching under overhangs and striped awnings, and the gleam from the headlights on the wet cobblestones.

But even as I took in the loveliness around me, my thoughts were occupied with the ghost.

What I needed was to figure out why I was seeing her, when obviously no one else was. Did I just happen to be visiting places that were significant to her, or was she following me? Was it because of the Order of the Key? It couldn’t be a coincidence that my ancestors had been closely connected to the queen and now I was seeing her ghost around Paris.

That made me wonder — would Armand be able to see her?

The trouble was, to ask him, I’d need his phone number. I couldn’t exactly ask Hannah for it.

In the penthouse, Pilar let me in and then drifted back to the couch, where she was reading a fashion magazine. The shower was running in Hannah’s room.

This was my chance.

“Have you seen my turquoise scarf?” I asked.

Peely looked up and shook her head.

“Did Hannah borrow it?” I turned to look at the closed bedroom door. “I told her she could….”

“Go check,” Pilar said. “She just got in the shower. She won’t care.”

I nodded and opened Hannah’s door, my heart pounding. Her stuff was strewn everywhere, but I found her phone charging on her nightstand.

I scrolled through her texts. There were about six in a row sent to Armand, unanswered. It was a huge difference from the way Hannah usually was with boys — she was the cat, and the boys were the mice, getting batted around for fun. With Armand, she was a tiny white mouse … sending unanswered mouse texts to the big old cat.

I wrote down his phone number on a piece of hotel stationery and crammed it into my pocket, then returned the phone to the nightstand and went back out to the living room.

“Did you find it?” Pilar asked.

It took me a second to remember that I was supposed to be looking for my scarf.

“No,” I said. “It must be somewhere in my suitcase.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’m going to run downstairs and grab a sandwich. Are you good?”

She nodded, her eyes drawn back to her magazine. “Do you really think people are going to be wearing a lot of olive green this summer? They keep saying so, but honestly, I don’t see it happening.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I slipped out the door and down to the lobby courtesy phone. I dialed Armand’s number and got his voice mail.

“It’s Colette,” I said. “Please call me at the Hôtel Odette…. I have a crazy question for you.”