The Missing Sister Read online

  Alive. A deep breath rattles in my chest. The sight of Angela’s whiteboard hasn’t left my mind since I got here, along with the terror and exhilaration of reading her words. My stomach knots as I repeat my new mantra and know this time in my marrow it’s true.

  “I love sharing this world, Shayna, but you’ve been before—I haven’t been in ages,” Chang says. She rummages in her bag, withdrawing a roll of duct tape, then a cellophane-wrapped almond cookie that she offers to me. “Are you tired? We could always go later today—you leave Sunday?”

  The variety of items from that bag never disappoints; I shake my head at the cookie. “Probably best to go now. While the crowds are low.”

  Chang doesn’t reply to what I think is an obvious joke. She removes her glasses, then cleans them on her shirt. Seeing her with contacts at the club was weird.

  “You’re probably right. The scene—the network—used to be lively at all hours, but things have changed. Regular people go underground less with all the smuggling nowadays.”

  “What was it like before?”

  “It used to autoregulate—a few kingpins managed it—but once the catacombs became a tourist destination—have you been to Disneyland? The main tour route reminds me of that—big names got arrested and black market activities picked up again. The powers that be sealed all the well-known entrances, but they missed a few.”

  My mind pulses with scenarios, but I can’t focus with the French news being reported on the car radio. Words I don’t grasp spew from the speakers. An apology for interrupting the usual music. Other words carry forward. Tonight. Sunrise. Local forces. The driver’s dark eyes narrow in the rearview. He slows at a stop sign, then peers around him before accelerating, speeding across the Pont Neuf.

  “Chang, what did that report say?” Relaxing music resumes, but no one listens. The energy is tight, nervous between the three of us. “Chang?”

  She types search words into the web browser on her phone. “We have a problem.”

  The driver brakes to a stop beside a closed bakery. “Allez-y. Au revoir, mesdames.” He pulls on the e-brake, then makes a shooing motion with his hands; he’s not going anywhere. Chang tries to negotiate with him, mentioning more money in French, and I offer to pay more, too, double, if he’ll just take us the rest of the way. The driver shakes his head and says something else. Pas la peine. Not worth it.

  I pay for our ride here, to the middle of nowhere I recognize. When we exit, the sign on the cab’s roof goes dark, no longer accepting fares. Chang turns to me with a sigh. “Who knew we had the one law-abiding cab driver in Paris?”

  “What law is he following?” I ask. The car peels away from the curb, then makes a hard left out of sight.

  “The report on the radio. There’s a citywide lockdown from now to sunrise—I can’t remember that ever happening. Must be something serious. They just announced it—anyone out will be stopped by police and questioned.” Chang nods to where our driver disappeared. “Guess he didn’t want to be stopped.”

  Shit. “Are you okay with being out still?”

  Chang hesitates. The fluorescent lamp of a store selling insurance casts a red glow on her skin. Trash litters the doorway beside us. “I usually see the sun come up. We should stay out of sight if you still want to go underground—avoid the police. If we’re caught, be prepared to see my best old and confused woman bit. You’ll have to be my delinquent granddaughter.” She smiles, revealing a dimple in her chin.

  The street’s silence is eerie. Dark shadows seem to multiply the longer we stand here. Along with my chance of being arrested, or worse—sent home to California.

  We keep to the alleys wherever possible, cutting over to adjacent roads when we don’t hear any cars. Twice, voices rise around a corner, and we duck into a recessed doorway. When we pass a sign directing people toward the Musée d’Orsay, I pause. “Isn’t the main entrance to the catacombs behind us?”

  Chang turns to me with surprise. “We’re not going there. It’s after hours, and there’s no way we could enter that fortress.” Forever ago, I stood in front of what I termed a green toolshed with Seb. Its metal doors would be impenetrable by my measly human hands. “Besides, there are police in that square by now—wonder why they’re shutting down the city, very peculiar.”

  “Where are we going, if not to the main entrance?”

  Chang resumes walking in the same direction. “An off-the-record entrance.”

  Slimy fear courses through me, touching everything, down to the tips of each limb. Hugo mentioned it in the club. No shiny banisters allowed. “Impasse de Valmy.”

  “Yes, have you been? Oh—!” Chang pivots into a deep doorway and waves me in quick. I leap in and make myself as flat as possible against a glass wall covered in flyers. The smell of urine is thick. A walkie-talkie radio sputters a message around the corner. Footsteps approach, several pairs of feet, one less steady than the other.

  “Allez-y.” A car door opens nearby. Not breathing, I lean forward and catch a uniformed man ushering a woman in dirty layers of clothing into the back seat of his car. POLICE NATIONALE is visible on the side. They’re already rounding up people, anyone who is outside, including the homeless. Which explains why the streets have been so empty. The engine starts, then fades into the distance. Chang nods to me. We continue on, unspeaking, moving quickly across the parts of sidewalk pooled in light.

  The mile we walk seems longer than it should, but I welcome the physical distraction. My feet ache in my worn sneakers, but each step forward is invigorating. It’s a relief when Chang points across a large intersection. “Just around that corner.”

  We dash to the other side when a spotlight floods the square. “Arrêtez!” a man’s voice bellows. “Arrêtez! Police!” Chang sprints behind a stone monument with me on her heels, along with the quick steps of a cop. She pulls left, charging onto a narrow road opposite the museum. A cramp splits up the side of my ribs, but I dig deep and round the corner. Arms reach out and yank me into another doorway. Adrenaline floods my brain and I shove, but the arms don’t give. The policeman’s footsteps breach the corner, and a uniform goes flying past, farther down the street. The arms release, and I look down to see Chang’s grimace.

  “You do strength training, too?” I hiss. She shakes her head with a finger to her lips. Voices carry from the left.

  “See the large tree opposite the bank?” Chang motions for me to look, carefully. We’re in the hood of a jewelry store doorway and awning. Frosted glass doesn’t allow us to see inside or anyone to see us through the glass walls from around the corner. I peek into the street. An oak tree with a thick trunk surveys the commercial neighborhood.

  “I see it. Two men are standing next to it.”

  Chang curses in French. “Then we’re done for.”

  Regret pinches my stomach, watching her search for a way through this. Chang has only been generous and understanding since we met, and I deliberately put her in this position, one which could end in our arrest. If we step out now, we’ll be rounded up. If we try and sneak back to Montmartre on foot, we’ll be rounded up. God only knows what the French penal code entails. Some form of Miranda rights, probably, but I doubt they come with an interpreter. “Chang, how close are we to the Pantheon?”

  She gives me a sideways glance. “Maybe five blocks. Why?”

  “There’s another entrance.” I peer out onto the street again, but Chang’s strong grasp pulls me back.

  “I doubt it. Most of the entrances were sealed or grates have been put over them. This one is the last entrance that’s still usable within three miles.”

  Pride tightens my chest. Excitement rises with the certainty that Angela left me all the clues necessary in her apartment. “Not all of them.”

  We pick our way along well-lit portions of street and sprint across each intersection after a careful pause. A siren screams past us once, but no cars stop. The sun is almost up and, once it is, our cover will be gone. When we arrive at the neoclassical m
ausoleum, I cut right and focus on hazy memories of Thursday night. The bookstore here doesn’t look familiar, so I reverse direction down the street until I spy the convenience store, the one that Mathieu stood in front of on my tour of historical brothels.

  “Shayna?” Chang’s voice is strained. I push on, jogging to the next street, where I turn right. “Shayna,” she says again. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  A brick wall extends the half block of the alley. Beyond it is a busier street, Rue du Renard, across from the Pantheon, and the one where I cut in line to grab a cab after escaping Mathieu’s bruising grip.

  “Shayna, you don’t have to torture yourself by going everywhere your sister did.”

  I stop in the middle of the road, panting. “What?”

  Chang walks toward me with her palms up. “I don’t mean to overstep, but I spoke to Angela about her research on the catacombs. I know that’s why you want to go underground. If what you need is to go home and take care of yourself, that’s okay, too. You look like you might need sleep.”

  Though she speaks quietly and throws a glance behind her, her words fill my ears like the booming bass back in the club. I stare at the ground littered with broken glass and cigarette butts, weighing the truth of those options. It’s possible I’ll never find my sister. And, even if I do, things may not ever go back to the way they were, to being half of that happy family in the photograph.

  “Someone is coming.” Chang scans the alley in each direction. Tension serrates my belly as walkie-talkie audio fuzz approaches fast from down the adjacent road. I know the door leading to the brothel is unlocked before I touch the handle, and it swings open to the cubed foyer I crammed into with four men. As the last remaining brothel in the city, it serves a steady clientele twenty-four hours a day. Much like the crypts of Notre Dame, it’s connected to a network more vast than I can fathom.

  Chang’s hand is sweaty when I pull her inside and shut the metal door. She looks down at the manhole cover and immediately withdraws a crowbar and workman’s gloves from her backpack. Donning the gloves, she angles the crowbar, wedging it against the rim, and works it at various points around the circumference like a lever. She pries practiced fingers beneath the heavy plate, and I do the same until together we manage to push it up and to the side. Blackness peers back at us, and cold, stale air that reeks of sewage rushes my nostrils.

  Aggressive voices call from outside the door. The police. Chang dangles her small legs into the hole and withdraws from her backpack a flashlight that could double as a battering ram. She points the light down. Rocky ground and a large trough of broken concrete lie a few feet beneath the hole. Chang surveys the space with an approving nod. “Ready?”

  Beyond the circle made by the flashlight, darkness stares back at us, unyielding. Hysteria rises in my chest and threatens to piss all over the clean rug of my fake confidence. I lift my eyes to Chang’s.

  “After you.”

  Chapter 30

  Day 7, Saturday

  A moldy chill penetrates my shirt and jeans. The sweat on my back feels damp well after it would have dried aboveground. The coat of moisture in the air insulates and chokes like a wet sock shoved down my throat.

  “You all right?” Chang shines her flashlight at my feet, where I’ve crouched down in a ball. We’ve been walking for five minutes, but I’ve been fighting the urge to run back to the manhole since we closed it. The halo of light exaggerates Chang’s contoured cheekbones, making her appear ghostly. Concern indents her face and creates shadowy wrinkles you’d think would be evident in the daylight. Panic rips at my chest, clawing to climb out of my mouth in a scream. Counting to ten quells the itch by a small margin.

  All of the dangerous things that didn’t occur to me before fill my thoughts now. Like Mathieu saying, How you were there one second at the bordel . . . and gone the next? Angela scratched him—what if he knows about this entrance? What if it’s where he and Angela scuffled?

  I strain to hear any movement behind us, back at the manhole cover, and am met with silence. Using the pocket flashlight on Angela’s key chain, I confirm no one is following me. But either Mathieu or Jean-Luc could be around any of these corners, could appear from either end and sandwich us in an attack.

  “Let’s keep moving,” I finally breathe. The dirt walls, though high and well packed, inch closer the longer we stay put. Chang nods, turning forward, giving me privacy to fall the fuck apart.

  “No one knows how they’ll react once they’re down here,” she says, generously. “Some people love it. And others . . . less so. What are those coordinates again?”

  “Forty-eight degrees, fifty-three minutes, five-point-seven-five seconds north latitude, two degrees, twenty minutes, one second east longitude.” I recite the coordinates of Angela’s Divine Research blog post by heart, drawing strength from their sound, not even needing the note I wrote earlier.

  Chang trails her hands along the walls, her wingspan just wide enough to touch. “Forty-eight degrees, huh? That will take us under the river—my favorite part. What’s special about them? Your coordinates?”

  It’s just the two of us, and she already knows it on some level, so I mete out a bit of the truth. “I read it in Angela’s research. And fully expect to find buried treasure there.”

  Chang laughs. The high-pitched sound is disturbing in the dark. “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”

  She leads us straight, at a descending angle, for what seems like forever but is probably another five minutes. Crags of rock stick out from the otherwise smooth ceiling, and I have the wherewithal to admire the tunnels’ architecture. Chang shares how she first got started down here with her husband back when it was a niche interest deriving from cave exploration in the south of France. I suspect she’s filling the audio space for my benefit when I start to hyperventilate for the third time. My balance falters as the fever creeps back up, spiking intermittently in a way I’ve only experienced a few times in my life—once when I had mono, and another time when I ate a bad oyster. I stop to lean against the wall. When I’m able to breathe normally again, she resumes listing the people she’s taken belowground over the years and who, I assume, came out alive after.

  We step over a pile of trash, fast food wrappers, and an old pillow long since abandoned. An earthy hostel for the homeless. Angela surmised as much in her research paper, and now I can confirm. Yay. Walking along the creased sewer trough becomes a lesson in endurance and balance as the minutes drag on. Thank God the tunnel is empty, and it doesn’t seem to have been used in ages. I wrap my arms around my chest for warmth, for comfort. Chang passes through a left turn but stops short in the doorway. “What is it?” I ask, joining her.

  Skulls form a thick cross in a domed alcove. Dozens of them. A downward chute lies beneath the cross, a mouth of black the circumference of a human body. My hand flies to my chest, clutching at my heart, as the mental endurance I’d gathered threatens to crumble. “Are we going down there?” I point with the pocket flashlight, throwing shadow monsters around the hub.

  Chang clears her throat. “Not here. The old sewer will lead us lower first to get under the river.”

  Lower. Of course. I nod, then follow her to the right of the two paths. The skull arrangements become more frequent as the concrete gives way to dirt and puddles. Chang barrels ahead, undeterred. I focus on tranquil thoughts, mantras, meditations. This is not the hope chest Angela locked me in. This is a tunnel matrix with dozens of exits.

  This is the burial ground of six million Parisian unknowns.

  Pools of water become more common as the ground dips more steeply. I try not to think about where I am and what I’m doing, because when I do my throat closes. Deep breath, through the nose. A drop of water hits my forehead. “Are we close to the river yet?”

  “We’re under it now.” Chang’s voice booms from farther ahead. The temperature is even cooler here, and my long sleeves feel nonexistent. Plink plink plink. A rock skitter
s behind me. I whirl, but the flashlight reveals the same pile of dirt I just passed. My mother’s gentle reprimand comes to mind: Pick up your feet, Shayna. I jog to fall in line behind Chang. A metallic taste expands on my tongue as my teeth catch a dry section of skin—a reminder that I’m alive. Sane. Alive.

  “What do you do back home, Shayna?” Chang picks her way along a jagged section. Large hunks of earth and stone block the path, and she offers a hand to help me across—a sight I would find comedic (tiny Chang, adult-size Shayna) if I wasn’t so grateful she offered.

  “Well, I start medical school Monday,” I grunt.

  “Wow. That’s great. I know we’ve just met, but that seems like a good fit—or you could be a judge? Have you ever thought about deejaying?”

  “Not really, no. Would you—?”

  Chang spots me as I slide across a flat stone. The ground beneath is a good foot lower, and I steady myself with her help.

  “Are you excited to start medical school?”

  We continue forward in the semidarkness. For whatever reason, I felt a connection to Chang right off the bat, and that’s only grown after hurdling over shrubbery together. I pause, examining the answer to her question. “I guess. I don’t know, honestly. It’s been this goal that I’ve worked toward so long with my parents, and now I’m not sure it’s what I really want. So much has changed the last few years. Now it’s almost a way to honor their memory.”

  Chang makes a clucking noise with her tongue. “Ah, I didn’t realize they passed on. I’m sorry. What would you do if you weren’t starting school on Monday?”

  Cry? Stay here? Get hired as a waitress in the La Jolla restaurant where we had the med school mixer? Looking back on the last three years, I enjoyed volunteering at the veterans’ hospital, dabbling in all aspects of its business. I couldn’t do much medicine-related work, being unlicensed, but the hospital’s administration interested me more than I expected. Going over patient profiles, sometimes assisting in managing legal files. It fed my overanalytical brain when I wasn’t allowed to use it to treat real people. “Maybe something with law.”