The Missing Sister Page 24

  Angela trembles. She bites the inside of her mouth, exaggerating the contours of her face. When Seb first tied us together and we walked into the light, I was shocked to see the hollow air of her once full cheeks—lucky cheeks, our Chinese grandmother used to call them, and our Scottish grandfather used to pinch them.

  “I’m the one who’s sorry,” she whispers. “I got us into this mess. Seb and I went out, but I had no idea he wanted the both of us. I was devastated after Mom and Dad died, and I was so mad at you, even all this time later. If I hadn’t cut you out, I wouldn’t have been so willing to trust him.”

  I pause, allowing her words to fully pass between us—this is the closest we’ve ever come to talking about our family tragedy in person. “You don’t have to say anything. These last three years have been hard for both of us. I’m disappointed in myself, too.”

  She snorts. “Wow. Perfect Shayna is disappointed in herself? Break out the champagne—we’ve got remorse.”

  Her anger is a slap, and I recoil, stunned. “What?”

  “You don’t get it,” she says, emotion wrapping her words. “Seb was never my boyfriend; this is not an act of domestic violence. We went out on one date. Before he kept me here in the catacombs.”

  Angela draws her knees to her chest while I stare, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand.”

  She focuses on the skeletons across from her. “I met him a month ago, but he’d been watching me for some time before. I thought he was a part of the internship, too. Agreeing to dinner was supposed to be for networking—I don’t know. The next day, when the shooting happened at the Sorbonne, he found me in the library, hiding behind a shelf. Told me he would keep me safe. Instead he brought me here. He’d been waiting for the right time to make his move, I guess. I escaped when he went to the hospital where he works part-time.”

  Fear slinks down my chest, cold along my limbs. Goose bumps ignite the skin of my neck as I fill in the blanks between sentences. She was kidnapped. Beaten. Terrorized. I want to leave this space, disappear somewhere, to burrow away from her words and what she endured. The raw skin of my eyes burns with new wetness.

  She clears her throat. “He knew you and I only had each other. He did his research, too.”

  “But why didn’t you come and tell me all this? Why wait until we were trapped underground and I was followed? Why not go to the police?”

  Angela grunts. “Seb took my passport. He told me he framed me for a friend’s death, so if I did escape, I couldn’t leave France or ask for help.”

  “Manu? The cops would have listened.”

  She pauses at the name, confirming my guess. “They wouldn’t have. I tried to come to you the first day you arrived. Waited until I saw a light on in my apartment, but a homeless man tried to grab me, recognized me. Seb paid him, probably. Each day, the man waited out front, then followed you wherever you went, hoping to find me again. I knew as long as we weren’t together, we would be safe, so I never approached you. I had to trust you would find me.”

  That scream the first night. Angela’s scream. She was there just below the window. All that stood between us then was two flights of stairs and a mercenary. “I gave that homeless man my change.”

  “You chose this trip to be generous?”

  Watching him miraculously heal from a limp when police arrived was bewildering; I thought it was the fever. She’s right—he was watching me the whole time for Seb. “Then you left me a message under Nour’s doormat, told me to go to the nightclub by hiding it in a to-do list. You wanted me to find Chang.”

  “Yes.” We’re each silent a moment, gathering our thoughts. “What day is it?” she asks.

  “Not sure,” I murmur. “Saturday or Sunday, July 29. I was supposed to fly out tonight.” Past tense. Dirt has crept down the back side of my jeans, into my shirt, under my fingernails. Slowly invading every part of me. Burying me from the outside in. “How did you survive this last time?”

  Angela meets my gaze, finally. “I got lucky. When he left to go to the hospital for something, the scissors were out, and I was able to cut myself free.” A harsh edge sharpens each word she speaks. “I don’t want to die in here. I can’t. Not after escaping already. And not with you.”

  “What—?”

  “Most of all,” she resumes, her voice taking on a gravelly, thick quality. Her eyes become watery. “I don’t want to die in here before I hear you say it.”

  I stop breathing. Her words linger, flat in the enclosed air. Every muscle in my body stiffens, fearful of what comes next.

  Angela takes my silence for confirmation and nods. “Auntie Meredith told me, right after the funeral. I’ve known ever since that summer. You needed Mom and Dad to pick you up from somewhere because you drank too much. Again. On their way to rescue you, they were hit.”

  Cold shame roils across my body, unfurls in a cloud of anguish, and I don’t even protest her words. The phantom taste of bourbon, my drink of choice then, along with the feel of the scratchy wool blanket I was sleeping on when the police officer called, stirs from my memory. Angela’s easy summary is a punch to the gut, too reduced and too clinical, without the ensuing self-hatred that followed. More than anything I want to tell her she’s wrong. But I can’t.

  It was a Friday, and I was on a date with some guy, drinking too much. I was neck-deep in oncology research that summer, trying to get an article published—to start medical school on the right foot—and, if I’m being honest, alcohol was a means of coping with stress long before that night. My mother always insisted, “Call if you can’t drive home, honey. We’ll come get you.” My parents were nearing Genesee Avenue when they were struck by a delivery van whose driver had fallen asleep at the wheel after a long day of dropping off graduation wreaths. The force of the collision threw my parents over the elevated exit ramp from the highway and into the sloped valley below, where they died on impact. When they didn’t show, I requested a rideshare to get back. Passed out on my couch for five hours, too out of it to navigate the stairs to my bedroom. The call from the police woke me.

  Officer Rudolph asked if there was anyone she could phone to keep me company, but I shook my head. No one would want to come once they learned the truth: I was the catalyst to this night. By asking my parents to save me from myself yet again—as they had in the past from happy hours after exams, from wine tastings, from friends’ birthday parties in Del Mar—I was the cause of their deaths. Work hard, play hard was the self-serving mantra I used to justify each binge—knowing they were always there for me, no matter the time of night or location.

  “I blamed you for their deaths the last three years, after Auntie Mer told me,” Angela admits, her cheeks wet. “And if I’m being honest, I still haven’t forgiven you. I’m sorry, because that’s awful, but it’s true. The loss of them became the loss of all of you.”

  “All this time,” I begin in a small voice, “I thought you were angry because I wouldn’t sell the house.”

  “You could have. I meant it when I said I wanted it sold. Difficult memories are too much there, too concentrated.”

  “Don’t you get it?” I shake my head. “I couldn’t—not without you coming home. I needed us to say goodbye to them together, since you didn’t come home for their funeral. I needed to tell you the truth in person.”

  “Ready for the hippie-dippie, Shayna? The thing is, I do get it.” She gives a clipped laugh. “I want to forgive you. I want to move forward, because it’s not your fault they died. You didn’t know they would be hit. I just don’t know how to.”

  “Angela.” My voice breaks. Pleads. Strains from how much I need her to say it’s all right, that she does forgive me, after three years of shouldering my unrelenting guilt alone. When I first saw her whiteboard message, the need rose so strongly, the sudden possibility of it gripped me to the point where I almost collapsed onto her floor. The cruelty of that hope slams back into me now. I can feel my heart hardening, because otherwise it would break.

  A pebble
lands on my arm. It’s come loose from the dirt ceiling.

  This isn’t happening.

  I crane my head to my rear pants pocket. Seb shoved my hoodie into a yellow opera bag when he brought us here, just like the one I saw at the Leroux crime scene, but he didn’t remove any other clothing. From my back pocket, the tip of something pokes out. The moose photograph. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re unlovable—undeserving of love, or otherwise. My mother’s words ring in my thoughts, her creased, narrow chestnut eyes so concerned. I promised her I wouldn’t.

  Calm down. Compter jusqu’à dix. Start over.

  “Angela, I’m sorry for . . . for everything. For Mom and Dad. For what you’ve gone through here alone, but we need to focus. After you cut yourself loose, where did you go?”

  She swallows with a loud gulp. “Home. I used the spare key I hid in the lobby and grabbed some cash I kept in my apartment for emergencies, wrote the message on the whiteboard, hid the bookmark to my blog post for you to find, and the receipts. I knew you’d search everywhere and that Seb would contact you to lure you here.” The rickety breath she takes swells her lungs, bolstering her words. “He told me he’d stolen a body from the hospital morgue, dumped it in the river, and everyone thought it was me.”

  The memory of rotting, waterlogged flesh fills my nostrils, and I gag picturing the thighs of that cadaver. But a quick glance at Angela’s feet confirms her ankle does have the Gemini symbol, the symbol for twins, in black ink.

  “After I escaped,” she continues, “I started living in the catacombs, thinking—”

  “That it would be the last place he’d look. Makes sense.”

  “I started thinking about what you would do in my situation, Shay. You’re so precise about everything. But you can’t logic him to death the way you normally would. He doesn’t think in normal terms.”

  “No kidding. But why mention Jean-Luc in the updates folder I found? You had me convinced that he was the one who took you.”

  “I might be the better person to ask.” Seb fills the doorway. He tosses a large canvas bag to the ground, items within banging together. “Since I wrote it.”

  We look at him—identical twins, the same petrified mien. A gust of cold air ruffles my long sleeves, searing my skin in goose bumps. How long has he been standing there? I try to catch Angela’s eye, but she stares resolutely at the ceiling, our conversation paused. He strolls into the chamber.

  “The party was hyper chouette last night! Sound familiar?” Smug victory stiffens his mouth.

  I rack my brain for the exact wording of that email and remember the term look-holes. Yet another way I underestimated my sister; I assumed her English had dipped in those three years, that she might call peepholes “look-holes.” The guilt returns, and I focus on calcified dirt until the lump in my throat dissolves.

  Seb crosses to a corner. He flicks a switch on the generator, and the metal box whirs to life in a low growl. “Now that I’ve paid another visit to the hospital, we can move on to next steps.”

  Before I can react, he’s on me, and I grab at a rock behind me a second too late. He whips out a syringe and yanks up my sleeve. Seb’s face is reserved as he leans in close. “Shayna,” he says, not unkindly. “It’s time for blood work.”

  Chapter 32

  Electrical cords explode from a thin, silver laptop, leading to various areas of the room. The wide laptop screen displays the entrance with the narrow hallway just out of view beyond; the lower-right-hand corner of the screen displays the fork in the path another fifty feet outside and closer to freedom, ready to transmit images of anyone coming to our rescue—or escaping. Following the line of sight, I spy the wireless camera wedged between studs overhead.

  Seb arranges his supplies in a steel cabinet, talking over his shoulder. “I have everything necessary for the preliminary experiments—the anesthesia, antibacterial wipes, antiseptic.”

  “Please don’t do this.” I clear the rasp from my throat. “You can let us go.”

  He pauses tinkering with plastic bottles. “But I can’t, Shayna,” he says softly.

  “You can.” I press on, hearing the hesitation in his voice. “Let us go, and we’ll give you a head start and everything before going to the police.”

  His head dips back as though examining the ceiling. Then he crosses to Angela, grabs the section of zip tie between her wrists, and drags her to the adjacent wall, beside the black pit of the entrance within the camera’s scope. Taking a chain from the ground, he loops it through her linked arms, then secures it to a hook protruding from the wall with a metal lock. Pocketing the key, he turns to me.

  “Please, Seb. You’re . . . you’re a good person. You don’t have to do this,” I cry as he crosses the fifteen feet to me in deliberate strides. He halts before me in a jerking motion, reminding me of that day on the Champs-Élysées when he caught me shopping for large-brimmed hats. Something in his face drops—lessens the unfeeling determination he’s been wearing since he took us.

  He surprises me by laughing. A blunted, empty sound that stops short. “Look at us, Shayna. Would you have imagined this, your first day here?”

  I think back to Seb’s morose expression, mirroring my own grief, in the lobby of Angela’s apartment building. His deep-blue irises were red from crying, I had believed. “No, I wouldn’t have. I thought you cared about us.”

  Something of that day’s emotions returns to his face, pinching his eyebrows together. “The only thing I have cared for, for a long while, is finding a cure.”

  “For cancer?”

  “For chemical weapons,” Angela whispers, legs tucked underneath her, huddled against the wall.

  Seb stares past me, over my head. “That is correct. My brother died from one. I watched him expire, unable to help. Only to watch.”

  Mustard gas, Valentin had said was the cause of death for Baptiste Bronn. I suck in a breath, then release it in a measured exhale—counting the seconds—not wanting to disturb whatever Seb seems to be reliving. “That’s terrible.”

  Seb lowers his gaze to me. “Yes. Baptiste was taken from me. And I have been unable to truly rest since then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I came back to Paris, I saw him in crowds, or believed I did. At the grocery, the park, the catacombs. Realizing my eyes were betraying me was a devastation all over again. Men and women, everyone, fools and noncontributors to society, were a constant taunt that Baptiste was not alive. It was not fair. Why should they continue to live and not my brother? It was not right.” His hands clench into fists at his sides, and I fight the urge to lean away from his tools of pain.

  “What did you do?”

  “I returned to the only thing I knew. To science, to search for a cure. At first, I tested existing theories to combat different forms of chemical warfare and disguised these tests as part of my hospital research. Then I realized, quickly, the field had become stagnant. Devoid of progress. Other studies, however—studies less palatable to some—showed parallels between the responses of human twins and those of test animals. Yet how could I find the resources to continue those studies?”

  Angela and I exchange a glance, but neither of us breaks the spell by interrupting.

  “One day, here in the tunnels, I met a man, a traveler passing through. He was homeless and eager for conversation from one who was unafraid and willing to engage with him, as I was. When he mentioned he was a twin, I knew my chance had come. I took him deep within the catacombs, into one of the many rooms, and performed my first experiments on a live subject, testing his blood, his muscle tissue, and taking these samples to the hospital lab before I had proper equipment moved here. I knew no one would come looking for him.”

  Cold fear spiders across my skin, hearing the preview of what’s in store for us. I lick my lips and try to discreetly scan the room for a weapon. I’m not chained up yet, like Angela.

  “I was clumsy, at first,” Seb continues, nodding at this disappointment. “I gave to
o much anesthesia during procedures to make them more bearable, but I soon learned that progress will not allow for anything but precision.” He purses his lips. As if he regrets withholding the one thing that could be considered a mercy.

  “How many bodies did you need before becoming . . . practiced?” The cabinet of tools with its sharp and shiny objects is off in the corner, another twenty feet away and behind Seb. Out of reach.

  “Too many. You’ll recall studies show infant twins can sense when their sibling is in distress? At first, I focused on individual, fraternal twins, hoping to leverage this ability, before realizing—” He locks eyes with me. “I needed a complete set. From there, I theorized that twin abilities must be heightened among identical twins.”

  All those people. The four bodies before I arrived, and the three after. “You’re the serial killer the police are looking for,” I say on an exhale.

  Seb straightens, stands up tall. “I will thank you not to trivialize my work, Shayna. Each contributor—the two homeless men, the carpenter, the woman I located through my access to records at the hospital, and the gypsy girl—took me another step toward finding a cure.”

  “Why did you kill Leroux? Was he a twin?” It seems years ago that I watched Valentin exit a building with scissors and thought he had taken something from the crime scene, like a serial killer would do. In hindsight, the pair of scissors was marked with masking tape, likely police property used to cut through Leroux’s clothing or remove his zip ties.

  A sob bursts from Angela; she didn’t know, hiding underground, dashing out above for food and to leave me notes, that her internship director had been killed.

  The pinched expression returns to Seb’s face. “I didn’t want to hurt Angela. She was different from the other experiment resources. You won’t believe me, but it’s not something anyone dreams of. No one dreams of this,” he says, pointing first to me, then Angela. “I was concerned for Angela when she escaped, and I went to Leroux, believing he might know where she was. But he became suspicious. So he had to be dispatched.”