Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer (3 page)

PIERRE BEAUCLERC SAT
at the sidewalk café, drumming his fingers on the table as his father droned on about family honor, pride, and keeping up appearances. Apparently, “borrowing” a parked police car and driving it around the city didn’t fit into his father’s idea of what the heir of the Beauclerc family should be doing with his time.

Pierre’s tie felt like it was strangling him. He loosened it with a sigh. He’d already been lectured that morning, by the judge (who, after accepting a bribe from Monsieur Beauclerc to go easy on his son, decided to at least make it look like he was being tough on the young man). Why did these useless people think their words mattered to someone like him?

He was twenty years old, tall and slender, with silky black hair. He looked like a movie star, and he not only knew it but also used it to his advantage on a regular basis.

He snapped back to attention as his father stopped talking. All the old man required from Pierre was a few bland apologies and an insincere promise that it would never happen again. They’d been through this a half-dozen times, for a half-dozen different offenses, and though his father always threatened to cut off Pierre’s allowance, it had never happened — and never would happen. Pierre knew his father actually admired his brazenness, and, after all, the law could always be bought.

Now he smiled winningly at his father, called him Papa, and cracked a joke that made the old man grin, recalling his own youth.

Pierre and his father finished their cups of café au lait and left some coins on the table. With a good-natured hug, the two parted. Pierre paused to check his reflection in the plate-glass window, pleased with everything about his appearance except for a dark stain on the skin of his wrist; some filthy person must have brushed against him at the courthouse. He’d wash it off later.

He cut through an alleyway toward the parking lot where he’d left his motorcycle, whistling as he walked, kicking litter out of his path and then imagining how handsome he looked doing so. If only there were a pretty girl around to watch.

He didn’t see the woman who stood in his path until he’d already kicked an empty bottle in her direction.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, preparing to shout at her for being so careless.

But then he saw two things at once: first, that the woman wore a huge, elaborate dress — like something out of a history book, and second …

… that the bottle he’d kicked passed right through the dress, landing on the ground behind her with a
clink
.

“Qui êtes-vous?”
he demanded. In his fear, he lashed out.
“Vous avez l’air ridicule!”

She didn’t answer. She only stared at him. He’d been wrong, of course — if anything, she was the opposite of ridiculous.

Pierre felt a chill travel up his spine, and for reasons he couldn’t understand, he wished he hadn’t insulted her. Her silence was terrible, and yet Pierre felt that were she to speak, it would be even more terrible.

Then, at last, she did speak.

“Le fils de la famille Beauclerc,”
she whispered.

Confused, Pierre said,
“Oui?”
He was the son of the Beauclerc family. But how did the strange woman know that?

He took a step back, glancing over his shoulder to see if there was an easy place to run. He needed to get away from her.

He was in luck. Just to his left was an old metal fire escape, attached to the side of an abandoned building. He ran toward it, intending to leap up and grab hold of the ladder.

But his foot landed on the bottle he’d kicked, and he slipped and fell backward. He found himself on his back, staring up helplessly at the woman in the dress.

After gazing down at him, she moved away.

Pierre breathed a sigh of relief before he noticed that the entire fire escape above him had come loose from the wall of the building.

And he had just a moment to realize what was happening before the rusted old handrail dropped down and separated his head cleanly from his body.

I’M IN PARIS.

Just thinking the words made me feel like I’d been waiting my whole life to be able to say them. Determined to savor every detail of the trip, I took a long, deep breath….

Unfortunately, as we were standing in the shuttle bus pickup area at the airport, I got a lungful of French exhaust fumes.

The flight had been as agonizingly long as I’d suspected it would be. I’d been stuck in a middle seat between a girl who took approximately fifteen bathroom breaks and Madame Mitchell, who snored like a freight train. I hadn’t been able to shut my eyes for more than twenty minutes at a time.

But none of that mattered. We had landed safely, pushed through the mobs in baggage claim, and were about to start our drive right into the heart of Paris.

“Now,” Pilar said, stifling a yawn, “where are my delicious French men?”

“Oh, look, here’s one for you,” Hannah said.
“Yummy.”

The man in question was our van driver, who was neither mind-boggling nor soul-twisting. He was about nine hundred years old, shriveled and wrinkled with a massive fluffy white beard. On his head he wore a cable-knit cap, and his beady eyes watched us with a hefty dose of wariness as we clambered into the van.

“Everybody, she is in the vehicle?” he asked.

A chorus of yeses answered him.

“Oui, merci beaucoup,”
Madame Mitchell said in her clearest French-teacher voice, giving us all the stink-eye.

As this was a trip for students of the various French classes, chaperoned by the French teacher, we were supposed to be immersing ourselves in the language. But we were all too tired to even think or speak in English, much less French.

The van doors slammed shut.

“Are you all right, Colette?” Hannah asked. “You look a little gray.”

I
felt
a little gray. The combined effects of lack of sleep, an airplane-quality turkey sandwich, and being packed into a crowded van made my body buzz with anxiety.

“Why don’t we switch seats?” Pilar asked. “I’ve seen Paris before.”

I was on the verge of agreeing when Hannah spoke up. “It’s not like she doesn’t have nine days here. No one can be that excited about seeing the side of a highway.”

“Yeah, thanks anyway,” I said to Peely. “But switching places would be a logistical nightmare.”

As we drove on, it seemed Hannah was right — from what I could see of it, the highway was pretty much like an American highway, complete with unimpressive views of normal-looking buildings and untended grassy hillsides.

But when we passed into the city, the whole world changed. I momentarily forgot to feel ill, craning my neck in the hopes of glimpsing some famous French sights.

“À la droite, la Seine,”
Madame Mitchell called from the front seat. We all looked out the right side of the van, where the River Seine cut through the middle of the city. I’d seen it a million times in movies, usually in a scene where the two main characters take a romantic nighttime stroll. But that was nothing like seeing it for real — the way the light reflected off the choppy water, sunken between two centuries-old stone walls and crossed by magnificent bridges with carved stone railings and ornate sculptures.

“Et à la gauche, la cathédrale de Notre-Dame.”

On the left loomed Notre Dame, the massive cathedral. Its two towers stretched through a foggy mist toward the cloudy sky.

The van came to a jerky stop, sending all of us slamming into one another.

I tried to see out the front window, but there were too many heads in the way. Girls in the rows ahead of us strained to look, and finally Audrey turned around.

“It’s a roadblock,” she said. “Police cars.”

“Oh, goody,” Hannah said. “Stuck like sardines in a can. What a way to spend our first night in Paris.”

“We’ll be moving again soon,” Madame Mitchell said.

But we weren’t. We sat in the same spot for nearly a half hour. The air inside the van was getting stuffier. My breath was growing quicker, and my fingers were ice cold.

Madame Mitchell looked a little green, too. She leaned forward.
“Pardon, monsieur,”
she said to the driver.
“Savez-vous pourquoi nous nous sommes arrêtés?”

The driver, who didn’t seem interested in participating in our language immersion process, replied in English. “My wife call. She say there is another murder.”

The word
murder
settled over the van for a moment, until Hannah broke the silence.

“Wait —
another
murder?” she asked. “When was the first one?”

“Last night,” the old man said. “This one is same, my wife say.”

The blasé tone of his voice sent a chill up my spine.

“The same how?” In her curiosity, Madame Mitchell forgot to
parle français
.

“The same for the head,” he replied cheerily.

The van was quiet.

“What about the head?” Hannah asked finally.

“The head.” He drew one finger across his throat, like a knife slicing it. “She is cut off.”

My heart stopped beating for a second.

Pilar’s eyes were as big as tennis balls. “She is?” she asked faintly.

Hannah had hauled out her phone and was looking online, thanks to the gazillion-dollar international data plan her father had shelled out for. She and Peely were the only girls in our group with working phones.

“Oh, here it is,” Hannah said, and read out loud. “‘Serial killer on the loose in Paris … Gabrielle Roux, up-and-coming model … Pierre Beauclerc, son of … some-French-name-I-can’t-pronounce Beauclerc.’”

“A model?” Pilar asked. “That’s terrible.”

Audrey peered at us, one eyebrow raised. “Only ugly people deserve to be killed?”

Hannah waved her off.

Alarmed voices rose up like a bunch of yelping puppies. Brynn wore an expression of worried disbelief. “Are we going to get … like … murdered?” she whispered.

Madame Mitchell turned around. “Calm yourselves, ladies. I’m sure we’re all quite safe. However, this is a good reminder of how important it is to stay together as a group.”

“Or you’ll get murdered,” Hannah added.

“No!” the teacher said. “
Honestly
, Ms. Norstedt.”

Hannah gave me a wicked grin, and I couldn’t help grinning back.

That was the thing about Hannah — she could be really funny.

But that was also the thing about me when I was around Hannah. I laughed at her jokes, even when some deep, dark part of me didn’t think they were very funny at all.

Eventually, we detoured across a bridge and turned onto a road that led us into Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the neighborhood where we’d be staying. It was made up of dozens of little avenues, all connected like a spiderweb.

It was everything I’d pictured Paris to be — chic boutiques, little cafés, flower shops, and open counters selling baguettes. The narrow cobblestone roads bustled with people who hopped onto the itty-bitty sidewalks to avoid our van.

We pulled to a stop on a tiny side street, hardly more than an alley.

“Hôtel Odette,” the driver announced with a weary sigh.

“You get the idea that these were the worst hours of his life,” Pilar said.

“I bet he’d rather quit than drive us back to the airport,” I said.

“I know being in the van is great and all,” Hannah said, “but could you two please move?”

After I got my suitcase, I stopped to look around.

The buildings were made of stone or smooth plaster and held little storefronts under apartments with curtains fluttering in their windows. I’d never been to a real city where you could just run downstairs and find grocery stores or a café. It felt so connected, so alive, as if the place were feeding off the energy of the people who lived in it.

And the people were magical.

I could have sat on a bench and watched them for hours — there was just something so perfectly
Parisian
about them. Even the little old ladies walking their tiny dogs had an extra “something” — a scarf or a pair of red boots or a baby-blue trench coat. The women dressed with great care but not the faintest trace of fussiness — they never looked overdone or like they were trying too hard. I was immediately inspired and ran through a mental list of the clothes I’d brought, planning modifications to look less like a girl from Ohio and more like a young mademoiselle from the sixth
arrondissement
.

“Nice, right?” Pilar looked up at the buildings around us. “This is my favorite neighborhood in the whole city.”

“I love it,” I said. It was mid-March, and the air was still crisp and cool, with a brisk breeze coming from the river. It ruffled my hair and brushed against my cheeks.

“I knew you would,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I always thought you were like a French person. You have that
je ne sais whatever
.”

I
felt
like a French person. I closed my eyes and inhaled the mingled scents of spring flowers and smoky sweetness from the tea shop two doors down. Even though I was in a foreign country halfway across the world, I felt weirdly like I belonged here … like I’d come home.

“Come inside, girls,” Madame Mitchell said. “Let’s get settled.”

Passing through an elaborate wrought-iron gate, we entered the tiny hotel. Inside were marble floors and fancy old chairs. To the right was a small restaurant with a sign that read
CAFÉ ODETTE
, and to the left was the reception desk. Madame Mitchell made a beeline for it.

“Norstedt, Sanchez, Iselin,” she called a minute later. “Come get your room keys.”

We were the only people staying three to a room — but that was because Hannah’s dad had decided that only the penthouse suite was good enough for his little princess. I’d be sleeping on the pullout sofa, but I didn’t mind. I wasn’t paying any extra, so I didn’t have any reason to expect a bedroom of my own.

The clerk held out a little envelope marked
501
, with three keycards inside, and Hannah snatched it from her.

“Meet in the café at eight for dinner,” Madame Mitchell said. “Peterson and Corbett, come get your keys.”

Hannah, Pilar, and I started for the elevator — something I hadn’t considered. The penthouse was on the fifth floor. My mind raced for an excuse to take the stairs, but I couldn’t think of one.

Finally, the door slid open. My heart sank even farther — it was the smallest elevator I’d ever seen, about the size of a bathroom stall.

“Come on,” Peely said. “We’ll squish.”

I hesitated.

“Colette?” Hannah said.

Just then, I heard voices behind me. Audrey and Brynn were rolling their bags over, talking animatedly about the city. I half-stepped out of their way, and they got into the elevator before noticing that I was standing there.

“Oh, sorry,” Audrey said, seeing me. “We’ll get off and wait.”

“Nah, forget it.” I rolled my bag over and shoved it in with the four of them. “Can you just get my bag, Peely? I’ll take the stairs.”

“Sure,” Pilar said.

I took a second to catch my breath, and then I started the long climb.

When I reached the top, Pilar stuck her head out of a door and waved. She’d left my suitcase in the hall, near the elevator, so I took it with me. Still panting, I dropped onto the sofa.

“That’s why you’re so thin, Colette,” Hannah said approvingly. “That, and you don’t just snack on whatever’s sitting around.”

Pilar had already unwrapped a piece of chocolate from the fancy welcome basket on the coffee table. When Hannah turned away, she tossed the chocolate into the trash can. “Let’s explore,” she said.

The penthouse was gorgeous, fit for a president or a queen. There were two bedrooms, each with a king-size bed piled with lush covers and overstuffed pillows, and its own bathroom, updated with gleaming white tiles and modern chrome fixtures. The living area was huge, with an additional bathroom off to the side and a beautiful flowered couch that converted to a pullout bed — the one I’d be using.