The Missing Sister Read online

  “Angèle, you are okay?”

  “Get away from me!” I struggle to tear free, to get inside.

  He says something in French, raising his voice.

  “Let me go!”

  “Angèle, you know I drive on Fridays. Why do you not call me?” His grip tightens, towering over me. “You cannot keep running, Angèle. We must talk of what happened!”

  I dig in my bag and yank out the stun gun. Mathieu sees it and releases me, throws me forward, so that I catch my balance against a garbage bin.

  His upper lip curls in a sneer. “First, you would . . . scratch me? Now you would hurt me again?” The streetlamp above casts him in darkness.

  I don’t respond, not trusting my voice. His outline blurs in and out in my vision, and I know a full fever is on its way.

  He growls. “How you were there one second at the bordel . . . and gone the next?”

  “Listen to me. I don’t care what happened between us earlier. Leave me alone.” I step back toward Angela’s building without breaking eye contact.

  “Angèle, wait . . .”

  I throw a twenty-euro note to him and turn and jam the jailer’s key in the door.

  “Angèle!”

  The entry slams shut, and I pause behind the safety of six inches of metal. The curved handle jiggles underneath my palm. “Angèle!” Mathieu cries, his voice muffled, though his angry expression is clear through the glass. “Angèle, return, please!”

  I make my way to the stairs, shaking, and ignoring his words in English, then French. Based on my experience with him at the brothel, the way in which he described Angela’s escape the last time they met, and his behavior now—Angela might have been warning me about him, too, on the whiteboard, in addition to Jean-Luc. Although she wouldn’t be this afraid of one person—so afraid she hasn’t gone to the police, or come to me directly—would she? Are Jean-Luc and Mathieu working together, then? Mathieu probably has connections from the brothel, a network of black market muscle, like the man who offered me help in getting even with any heartbreaking ex-boyfriends. Does Jean-Luc have those same connections?

  The three flights of stairs are my Mount Everest, and it takes all I have to stay upright. My balance teeters at every curve in the stairwell, and I stop twice to rest on a step. Mathieu is silent by then, hopefully driven far away, never to return.

  When I get inside the apartment, I lurch straight for the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I paw Angela’s stash of over-the-counter medications until I find something that treats headaches, fever.

  Lifting my eyelids requires herculean effort, so instead I fumble for the pills and swallow. Each feels like a brick against my dry esophagus. If a serial killer or anyone else wanted to kill me now, I’d probably thank them first. I stumble to the bed and fall deep into a dream.

  Figures on my lids take shape. Menacing, limping bodies come closer, reaching out while I scramble away, my balance suddenly restored. They crawl toward me when they stumble, their limbs catching on rocks and crevices as the earth cracks and fissures, tearing feet and elbows from their sockets. They crawl forward anyway, using their chests, their foreheads, sloughing parts and tracts of skin. When heavy lead fills my core, a body catches up and reaches for me. I pull my ankles forward an inch with my hands, kicking and screaming internally, but no external struggle shows; it’s not enough; it’s never enough. One body extends its remaining fingertips, its hollow skull grinning with a shift of light, as its cold bones grasp my own.

  I come to, standing beside Angela’s desk. Pitch-black surrounds me. I pat around for the reading lamp and flinch when its click slices the middle-of-the-night quiet. The whiteboard is toppled to the ground, Angela’s message to me in our twin language smeared and indiscernible even to my fluent eyes. The room is empty. No monsters. The door is locked, too. Bedsheets are rumpled in a pile on the floor, and when I reach for them, a rush of blood makes me dizzy all over again. Our hieroglyphics—Greek letters, even planes, careful dots—ruined. I want to curl into a ball and claw the whiteboard, break it in two, howl into a pillow again. Angela’s one incontrovertible clue to me, gone—or at the very least affected and tainted by my sleep terror jumping up and away from monsters that weren’t there.

  Numbness seeps straight through my organs, staring at this visual of my carelessness. Poisoning me the way I deserve.

  Something moves outside below—a pair of policemen. They’re removing the homeless man who sleeps beside the front entry with his cane. He argues with them, then stands, rises with no wavering, and walks away like it’s the most natural act in the world. The cane is under his arm. I rub my eyes. When I look up, he’s gone. The two police officers confer alone. I touch the back of my palm to my forehead. Still warm. Did that just happen? I try to recall if I’ve ever seen the man walk before. Whether I’ve seen him carry his cane instead of using it to stand.

  With both hands on the windowsill, I take slow breaths until my equilibrium stabilizes. This crusty, sick feeling is better than expecting my head to implode at any moment, but not by much. I make my way to the bathroom to splash water onto my face. Red veins spiderweb from each of my irises in the oval mirror. Freckles across my nose are amplified against pale skin. Behind me in the reflection, an image on Angela’s corkboard stands stark against the notes to self and knickknacks she’s collected.

  I pick my way back across the room. The photograph is glossy, though faded from the years. I unpin it from the board. The four of us stand beside the World’s Ugliest Moose. On the back of the photo, in my mom’s perfect scrawl, it reads San Diego Zoo, August 2002. I cup the edges, careful to avoid prints. Sadness binds my chest, observing the way our eyes nearly disappear into our heads; we were smiling so hard.

  Think, Shayna. I only slept a few hours, and the sun will be up soon. I should go back to bed to rest, but I can’t. Not now. Not before I admit I did write myself a to-do list. That I’ve been grieving and that I blacked out for an hour or so. That my sister isn’t alive. Maybe the real shame here is how I’ve been leading myself on a wild goose chase all week, instead of accepting the truth.

  I set to biting my nails again, a habit I kicked when we turned thirteen and Angela told everyone I ate hangnails. My teeth worry my index finger, twisting and chewing. I sit down at Angela’s desk and check my email. The essays Jean-Luc found in the Sorbonne archives sit in a pile against the wall. I pick one up and reread the first page.

  Angela wrote about the plight of the Paris homeless during periods of extreme weather: triple-digit heat in the summer and fifteen below zero in the winter. There should be some significance here, some insight I can glean from the way my flighty sister settled down and married this research topic her first year in the doctoral program. She concluded that, if we only had better urban planning, we could provide protection for the homeless from the elements, especially the elderly homeless—public verandas to shelter people in known homeless enclaves, natural havens to exploit cooler temperatures, such as the Luxembourg Gardens and other geographic bowls within the city.

  Divine. Research. Trying to figure out possible veiled meanings of each piece of her life leads me to switch hands after nibbling another nail down to the plate. Angela wanted more than anything for us to be one mind on the ethereal twin plane she mentioned in the early emails. She wanted to tap into it when needed, like a superpower she imagined when we were children that she never let go of.

  Social welfare. Community. Brothels. Shelters. Heat waves. Death. My legs feel weak again, and I sit cross-legged on the floor amid other papers I think might matter. The brothel tour receipt is grouped with my Notre Dame crypt pamphlet; the drawings on each are poor comforts now. They could be useless, absentminded doodles rather than burning X MARKS THE SPOT signs pointing the way.

  Key phrases pop out from my sister’s notes, her emails, an image of the Gate to Hell.

  Narcissism. Intricate underground tunnels. Twin for the win.

  Sprawling flat on my back on the papers
covering the wooden floor, I close my eyes. The tightness in my chest bursts into a sob that I swear carries down to the main entrance. Reaching out for Angela, trying to open my mind the way she always insisted we could, leaves me more frustrated as salty streams dry on my cheeks. This entire time I’ve felt like I was chasing the ghost of my sister, wondering if I even knew her anymore. Guilt crashes into me as I stare at this library of her hints. Everything she needed from me is stacked in haphazard piles, and I haven’t been able to deliver on any of it.

  Another headline surges forward from my jumbled thoughts: the dangers of trafficking as described on the front page of the lobby’s newspaper my first day. I sit up, stricken.

  If I stop to think, there have been hints everywhere I turned. The miniature TVs found in each cab I take, the ticker announcing the latest trafficking concern. Not vehicular traffic, but human trafficking. Chang mentioned the catacombs are one part tourist attraction, one part trafficking hub. Hugo even mentioned the police shutting down off-the-record entrances.

  Psychopaths—those are the ones who sneak up on you. Jean-Luc stalked my sister, and like any good predator, he has been following me all week, relishing my discovery of the details of Angela’s kidnapping, too arrogant to believe he would be found out, hiding in plain sight. Is he part of the trafficking ring? Is that how Angela came to be on his radar—through her research, spending time in the catacombs after hours, maybe stumbling across one of the tunnels they used? As Valentin suspects, the recent murders are impersonal. Clean. Driven by a higher need, with men and women being abducted arbitrarily. Human traffickers don’t need anyone in particular; they need bodies.

  I get dressed as quietly as possible, throwing on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. My passport is already in the inner pocket of my messenger bag, and I add the Taser to the mix. My thoughts turn to Hugo, but he’s not the person I need now. Not Hugo, Seb, Valentin, or even Nour. Creeping downstairs as quietly as possible at four thirty in the morning, I hope against hope I’m doing the right thing.

  Chang still wears the white leotard and red plastic skirt she owned in the deejay booth, but the neon makeup has been removed. When she opens her door, she lets out a gasp.

  “Shayna. Is everything okay?”

  I pause. The memory of the matching twins in the photo on Angela’s corkboard, hand in hand, a representation of singular happiness, quiets my nerves. “I need to go to the catacombs. Can you take me?”

  A smile turns her full lips upward. “You’re joking, right? It’s the middle of the night. I’ve actually had a pretty long one this evening.” She tilts her head to the side, and a pop issues from her neck.

  “I know, and I’m sorry to visit you so late. But I was at Danse La Nuit and saw you deejaying. I just thought I would ask, since you used to be so adventurous—”

  “Used to be?” Chang raises thin brows. “Were you with that rude boy who called me old? I think I saw you.”

  I suck in a breath, feeling the conversation teeter. “I know the guy he was dancing with. I’m sorry about him—he was rude, you’re right.”

  Chang’s tiny, slippered foot taps the ground. “Well, he’s not entirely wrong. I’ve lived three of his unrhythmic lifetimes. But it’s been a while since I’ve had a real rush.” Opening the door wide, she motions for me to enter. “I’m in. Let me grab my hiking boots and some supplies.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  Chang grins. “Mahjong isn’t my only hobby, Shayna. I think it’s time for another adventure.”

  Chapter 28

  from: Angela Darby

  to: “Darby, Shayna”

  subject: Update #2

  Shayna, sister of my bones, breaker of my heart:

  I’ve been thinking a lot about us. You probably recall the Period of Solitude is well underway, so maybe you were expecting me to draft this letter that I’ll never send. I know you’re going to Aunt Judy’s in Boise for Christmas this year. I know a lot of things about you that you might not be aware of. Judy invited me, too, said she’d give me a tour of the German lager part of the brewery, but I said no. Not this year.

  The truth is I’ve been thinking about that one day on the beach. The one you never like discussing and forbade me from talking about. In hindsight, the terror on your face is pretty laughable. Is that wrong? It’s laughable because it’s almost as if you didn’t know the game we were playing, and you seemed to think I was some monster. Laughable, and yet it galls me in the middle of the night, when my apartment building creaks and moans like a weatherworn pirate ship, straining against its mooring—against the injustice punted at it from a past life. That day on the beach is simply another reminder you never understood me, never desired to. Rather than view my actions as well intentioned, you only see the end result. The product of pain and confusion instead of my meaning, my efforts.

  The beauty of not sending you these emails is they allow me to shout from the rooftops all the things I normally would dilute and couch in compliments and empathy. Here, that’s unnecessary. Here, I can say exactly what I should have, and should have kept saying, knowing you deluded yourself into believing otherwise.

  If you ever begin to read this letter, you’ll have stopped somewhere around “forbade,” but in case your eyes scan down, I’ll write this big:

  YOU ARE NOT SOME VICTIM, SHAYNA.

  You are no one’s victim. And least of all mine.

  Chapter 29

  Sunrise is still a solid hour away. I can barely see straight in the semidarkness, despite roaming to and from this corner all week. Sleeping bodies line the doorways of the block. Mathieu’s cab is nowhere in sight. The glossy corners of the photograph are stiff in my hand, and I press the flesh of my thumb pad to each until a dull prick registers. This is not a dream.

  My family and I stood beside the World’s Ugliest Moose at the San Diego Zoo when Angela and I were eight. Out of frame and to the side was a wooden cutout of the animal (with warts, bald spots, malformed vertebrae, and all) for zoo goers to stick their faces into round holes with antlers. A banner above read A FACE ONLY A MOTHER COULD LOVE! When we finished laughing through a dozen pictures, my mother took Angela and me aside; she said, “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re unlovable.” Holding the four of us in my palm recalls everything that was lost. And leaves me guessing when exactly I forgot those words.

  In my other hand, a folded square of paper weighs like a brick—a scrawled note from Valentin I found wedged underneath the apartment door. He must have come by sometime while I was passed out. Yellow lights approach in the distance. I clamp my arms to my sides for warmth.

  Bonjour, Miss Darby.

  Apologies to reveal this info in a note, however, I did not want to wake you. A sixth body was found. Confirmed presence of series murderer in Paris, first in almost thirty years. City lockdown from now to sunrise for safety—no one wants additional death as their legacy. Check the news at 7:00 a.m., and get home to USA in one piece on Sunday, Shayna.

  Best of luck.

  Valentin

  PS The body you found in Emmanuelle Wood’s apartment, sadly, is her. Thank you for alerting the police.

  Bright beams pierce my blurry sight. A taxi rolls to a stop beside me as Chang steps from the building’s main door. She changed into cargo pants and a long-sleeved shirt and shoulders a canvas backpack. “Is this our trusty steed?” she asks.

  A serial killer. Something Valentin has been alluding to for days now, and which my experience this week all but screamed through a megaphone. The information makes me feel exposed, raw. My eyes dart to the dumpsters of the next side street, the homeless man missing from my stoop. Cold fear slinks down my torso, curling into a knot in my stomach. Manu is dead. Officially.

  If Jean-Luc stalked and kidnapped Angela to sell her as part of a human-trafficking ring—or if she was caught snooping and he wanted to get her out of the way before she told the police—is Jean-Luc the serial killer? Angela’
s body double pulled from the Seine could have been another one of his trafficking victims.

  An easy gunshot to the head would be in line with Valentin’s analysis. Impersonal. Clean. Driven by a higher need. Valentin didn’t say where the most recent corpse was found, but extra police will be deployed in force all over Paris starting now. I wonder briefly whether Valentin knows it’s Jean-Luc—has known this whole time, and that’s what his warnings were about. I hope you are not talking with strangers.

  A shiver runs along my neck, then I nod to Chang. “Our motorized carriage.”

  “It’s a looker. What do you have there?” She points to the photo.

  “Just a good-luck charm.” I tuck it into my back pocket, and we slide across the seat of the taxi.

  The driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror, wrinkled skin illuminated by the interior light. Most of his face is shrouded by a baseball cap. “Bonjour,” he chirps. Chang gives him directions where to go while I settle into the worn cushions, my bag across my lap.

  Hugo’s words in the club—I met her in the tunnels—switched on a dozen light bulbs. Not only was Chang Angela’s building concierge, a billionaire widow, and a deejay since Reagan, but the free time she gained during the day allowed her to pursue the less conventional interests I saw framed on her wall—cave diving, running with the bulls, and exploring the catacombs. She confirmed as much when I knocked on her door and caught her unwinding with a pot of tea.

  My head has stopped throbbing, but I still feel disoriented, like a bubble encases my every move. Although I wanted to kick and scream going underground on Monday, I had to see for myself what beguiled my sister. I had to verify the question that felt so ridiculous to voice: Could Angela be hiding underground? Seeing it for myself—the cold darkness, the miles upon miles of chutes, passages, and cracks in the walls—cemented my suspicion that No, no one could, as Seb affirmed. No one could live underground indefinitely, but they could be held there in transit before being shipped off to a buyer in another country. Returning to the catacombs now is the right next step, now that I know what I’m looking for. I’ll find the proof that Angela was taken there, that she’s been hiding from her abductors—Jean-Luc and whoever he’s working with—then go to Valentin with everything.