The Missing Sister Read online

  I hope you can support my decision, though it may come as a shock. You’ve always known what you wanted to do and followed in Mom and Dad’s footsteps, no restless wings necessary. You were all so single-minded about school and medicine, and I’ve never been. About anything. For the first time, it feels right here.

  But I know you’re lonely, because I feel it, too. In my bones, in my tiny residence hall dorm for semester-abroad students, when I’m not experimenting with mystery foods, I feel your sadness and longing. You’ll say it’s the hippie-dippie in me that worries salad leaves feel pain being torn from their mother roots, but it’s the twinning. Remember how once you woke up early from your nap and asked Mom to make dumplings because you knew I wanted them? We could always sense what the other desired without her having to articulate it.

  If ever you feel like talking, dear sister, just close your eyes and reach out for me (cue hippie-dippie)—emotionally, mentally, spiritually extend to me, and I will be there. The ancient religions called it “divining with God on a higher plane.” We’ve been doing that with one another since diapers, and there’s no reason to stop now.

  I’ll keep writing to you even if you don’t respond for a while. You’ll probably go to your quiet place and digest all of this info, per usual. I’m grabbing a drink with Hans, but later I’ll be around if you want to Skype.

  Also, def let me know how your exam went. I know that class was a bitch last quarter.

  Twin for the win,

  Angela Sophia

  Chapter 8

  My feet take me outside, down the morgue steps, on autopilot. My mind is in a thousand places. I’ll go to the police station now and hope Valentin isn’t already in the field, ask him questions, pose them in a way so he doesn’t suspect anything. Then go home and tear Angela’s place apart.

  “Shayna? Hello?” Seb, standing off to the side of the building, waves a hand. In his short-sleeved blue shirt and dark-wash jeans, he blends in with the crowds making their way to work or the dozen museums nearby; I walked right past him.

  “Oh, hey. What are you doing here?” There are no cabs on this side street. Weren’t there a dozen an hour ago? I scan the next road over, visible through the row of manicured trees.

  Seb lifts his eyebrows. “I am here to meet you. We are going to the catacombs still, yes?”

  “Yeah. Yes. Listen, now isn’t a good time.”

  He observes me, registering the shadows on my face, as if he knows I’ve lost five pounds in the last week and failed to rest well my first night in Paris. As if he knows something surprised me inside the building behind us.

  “You do remember, yes?” His forehead creases. “I did not want you to be alone after identifying . . . the body.” His eyes drop, and we both look away—him because he still believes Angela’s dead, and me because if I look him in the eye one second longer, he will know the truth.

  Should I tell him? Wouldn’t I want to know? “I remember, yes. It’s . . . That was an experience inside. I’m still processing what I saw.”

  He nods. “I understand. I am here because when I had to see her . . . I was alone afterward, and it was very hard. I did not want that for you.” The pain in his voice makes me look up again. The knowing sympathy he wears knocks against the internal walls I built inside that Conservation room.

  Men and women in business suits walk by in a hurry. How long will it take to reach the police station in rush-hour traffic? Without knowing the city, I have no way of estimating drive time. The sooner I leave Seb, the sooner I can ply Valentin for information.

  With a sharp cough, I resume staring at the ground. A purple Space Invaders alien is spray-painted on a concrete square. “Thank you for making the trip here. But I think being alone would be the best thing for me now. I’ll see you later.” I turn to leave, but he grabs my arm.

  “Please.” Anguish lines his face, around his mouth, beneath his eyes. “Going to the catacombs will be good for us both. You may learn more about what made Angela happy here, and I can finally learn more about my almost sister-in-law.”

  His words catch me off guard; all I can do is nod. A tentative smile lessens the tension in his skin. He releases me, and we walk toward the main boulevard. A patina-layered archway, long turned green by the elements, presents a stairwell into the underground transit system. Empty beer cans line the ground twenty feet below, while candy wrappers swirl in a passageway breeze. Seeing the catacombs is a high priority—they’re what Angela devoted herself to here. I can go see Valentin this afternoon, and a visit to Angela’s favorite place will provide more time to figure out what to say to an officer trained in detecting deception.

  Almost sister-in-law. The phrase seems to whisper in my ears. Was Angela that deeply in love with Seb? I pause at the railing, bewildered by so much of the last hour.

  “Are you coming?” Seb asks. Both his feet are already two steps down.

  Crowds of people jostle to their destinations below, their bodies pushing up against each other in the narrow, subterranean hall. There is no metro system in San Diego. There’s the trolley that acts as a quaint subway system aboveground, but this underground network teems with life unknown, harboring blind corners and few exits hundreds of feet beneath fresh air. What if there’s a stampede? What if there’s a fire? Anxiety I didn’t know I carried cuts my breathing short.

  Seb watches my face and steps closer. “A taxi might be best,” he murmurs. He heads up the stairs past me and hails one. We climb inside as I try to recall when I began hating tight places. As we merge onto the freeway, two cars collide in a fender-bender, and I flinch; Seb notices.

  “How did you sleep?” he asks. The miniature screen on the back of the passenger seat displays a stern woman on a news segment. The ticker along the bottom says something about traffic hurting the city.

  Deep breath, Shayna. “Briefly. But I did find something.”

  I withdraw my cell phone from my handbag, then click through my notes to find the one where I wrote down the information from Angela’s blog. Maybe Seb can cast some light on my discovery while I practice extracting info. “A number with the words divine and research above it. Does this mean anything to you?”

  Seb examines my phone screen, zooming in and out with his fingers. “There are eleven digits—ten, if the zero is not relevant.” He whips out his own phone and dials, placing it on speaker.

  “Bonjour, Maison de Kebab,” says someone on the other end. Rock music with French lyrics blasts from the small device. From the front compartment, our cab driver turns his radio up.

  “Hmm. Why do you think a kebab restaurant is significant?” Seb ends the call, looking to me for an answer.

  Angela leading me to a Turkish sandwich shop makes about as much sense as if I told her to go to the butcher—we haven’t eaten meat in years. I shake my head, trying to recover the certainty I had last night—that this message must be something real and useful.

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like . . . the message was meant for me, or something. I found it on her computer.”

  Seb lifts an eyebrow. “And Angela said she was the spiritual sister.”

  I place my phone back in my bag, next to Angela’s agenda. He leans in. “You brought your passport? If someone steals it, you will be delayed in returning home. The American embassy will take days to issue a new one.”

  “And lose it in the madness of Angela’s apartment?” The place was a sea of upturned boxes and crates when Seb left last night. He doesn’t even know I kept going. “No way. Better to have it on me.”

  Seb shrugs. “As you wish.”

  Small boutique shops and restaurants line the roundabout of the Denfert Rochereau metro stop. Trees extend to claim their territory from sidewalk plots, while baby strollers group together beneath chatty mothers.

  We step from the car to the curb, and Seb faces a small house. “Welcome to the catacombs.” Reverence fills his voice, making it breathy. Not a house—a toolshed painted dark green. Attached to it is
an imposing stone building, which in my California frame of reference I had assumed was the tourist attraction—not some rickety structure that looks like a gust of wind might take it down.

  “Oh” is all I manage.

  Seb gives a wistful sigh. “The catacombs are five stories deep and eleven thousand square meters in surface area. There are six million Parisians buried below, spanning seven centuries and two hundred miles.” His eyes shimmer in the morning sun. “Shall we?”

  “Five stories?” Gauche laughter catches in my throat. If I couldn’t handle the metro, how will I handle centuries of crypt tunnels? I place my weight on my back heel. “I’d love for you to tell me about them here.”

  Seb looks at me. “This is why we came. You did not realize they were so deep?”

  His tone is flat, but it couldn’t carry more judgment than what I already feel; he’s right. I should go down—to glean even a second of communion with my spiritually minded sister, to see whether she left another clue behind. With a little more than a day to find her before my flight home, this is the best next step I have. A way to understand the person my sister became, knowing she isn’t lying on a steel slab. I take a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “You are sure?”

  “Yes. Before I change my mind.”

  Past the ticket kiosk and inside its slim corridor, framed illustrations tell the history of rock quarries turned catacombs. While the quarries were leveraged for raw materials, the time came when the Black Plague accelerated the need for new burial ground. Several bouts of the disease struck the city, and existing cemeteries in the center of Paris dating back to the first millennium couldn’t handle the strain—the underground walls of adjacent buildings ruptured, and bodies fell into neighboring basements. Seeing an opportunity, city leaders decided certain areas of the tunnels would serve as new burial sites for old bones, and the larger cemeteries’ remains were relocated. From mining pits that evolved into structured tunnels, the Black Plague turned the underground matrix into mass graves.

  As we begin the descent on a narrow spiral staircase, Seb recounts political details from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. He speaks with more vigor than I’ve heard from him yet.

  I nod through clenched teeth as he moves on to the prehistoric lakes of Paris and how they created the dank smell invading my nostrils now. With no sunlight or source of heat here, the chill is arresting. Placing my feet on each slender, spiraling step becomes a lesson in endurance and balance, when I just want to hunch over and shiver. The thin fabric of my hoodie provides all the insulation of tissue paper.

  Once I make the mistake of looking up and see men and women clambering on our trail, the light from the lobby long gone from view, and the realization that we’re essentially trapped underground slams into me—that I can’t push through those bodies to get up and out, that I must pass through the catacombs, all the way to the other side, to exit. That, according to Valentin, there may be a serial killer out there, hunting down Angela and maybe me by mistake, and I’ve cornered myself five stories below the surface. Panic claws at my chest, as if it were a literal zombie risen from its marshy tomb below. What the hell was I thinking, agreeing to visit this place when I can barely stand the claustrophobia of the subway and someone could follow me down here and attack at close quarters? When Seb taps me from above and asks if I’m okay, I realize I’ve been muttering shit shit shit on a loop.

  Finally, when we reach the bottom of the staircase, the vertical chute opens into a tall antechamber (thank you, God) with a concrete floor. The pinch between my shoulders lessens a little. The best way out is always through—one of Angela’s favorite quotes, and I don’t have a choice now.

  Above a diagram of sediment layers displayed on the wall, large black arrows direct visitors into the next room. With each step forward, the arrangements of skulls lining the path become more frequent as the concrete gives way to dirt and the occasional puddle, but they’re oddly reassuring—they remind me of photos I found in Angela’s dissertation folders. If she can spend afternoons and evenings here, I should be able to.

  Sibling rivalry propels me slightly faster down another tunnel with a stunted ceiling, like a string of dwarves once pickaxed their way through. Seb chatters on behind me, his voice a warm thrum.

  “You were close to the truth earlier when you asked whether the Nazis named the catacombs. In fact, both the Nazis and the French Resistance used these tunnels to get around Paris during the Occupation. Angela found the matrix compelling for these reasons, and more.”

  Hearing mention of the Nazis recalls the store clerk’s tattoo and the discomfort I felt last night. Another shot of unease stabs my belly. “Of course she did,” I reply.

  The dull, flat scent of mold lies beneath the pervasive damp, like centuries of rot have taken hold deep within the catacombs, unaffected by the fresh air brought in by foot traffic from above. I retch when I get too close to a slimy wall. A shelf has been carved out of the rock and filled with sticks. When the light shifts, I realize they are femurs.

  “Did you come here with Angela often?” I ask, averting my face, not wanting to see one more bone.

  Lips tremble like he’s holding back another sob-hiccup. “Our time together here was very short. Too short.” Seb is the only person who might understand my pit of loss right now, even as I struggle to understand what her absence at the morgue means. She could be out there—injured, alone, scared—waiting for me at this very second, hoping I find her before someone else does. Or she could simply be gone; she could be dead, just not lying in the morgue, but buried somewhere else.

  A German couple passes, gesturing to the engraved rock beside us, breaking through my panic. Deep breath. Angela wants me here. Divining her research was a clue. The catacombs are her research subject. This is the right next step.

  I step into a new gallery of bones. Breathe. “Did you help with Angela’s work? I don’t know if neurology really applies to urban planning.”

  Seb sniffles. “Not exactly. But I enjoyed hearing about her learnings. A geologist I know conducts archaeological research in the catacombs, and Angela applied for his internship so she could spend more time in the ossuary after the tour office closed.”

  “Naturally.” I shudder, imagining these passages empty of visitors and even creepier. “Anything else hidden here besides skeletons?”

  “Oh yes.” He perks up. “It is a labyrinth. Full of secrets and surprises around every corner. In the late eighteen hundreds, the caretaker of the catacombs went missing.” He gestures with his hands—poof! Gone. “Ten years later, his body was found in an obscure area, not usually frequented. A man so intimately acquainted with the ossuaries, the caretaker himself, became lost to his death.” Seb leans in, then wiggles his eyebrows. “Naturally—anything can happen down here.”

  I squint at him, then walk a few steps ahead. Disturbing anecdote aside, he thinks we’re friendly enough to tease me. Cute.

  Several paths lead in the same direction, according to a mounted plaque. Beneath the plaque, a security guard reaches into a knapsack at his feet and takes out a baguette sandwich. My belly growls at the crisp scent of lettuce and ham in this dusty, dirty setting. The normalcy of it unlocks something in my brain. “Has anyone ever lived down here? I mean, have these—” I motion to the well-crafted walkways, smooth roofs, and pillars holding up seventy-five feet of earth. “Were these always used as quarries?”

  Angela disappeared from campus in the chaos of a school shooting. A tiny voice inside me has been wondering since I saw her thesis draft: Could she have escaped to the catacombs? Was she then followed by her ultimate attacker? Fully allowing the notion to form, then giving life to the question, is liberating. I step forward, the better to catch Seb’s answer.

  He rubs the back of his neck. “Speaking as a scientist, and having worked with several archaeology teams here, no. No one has ever lived down here. Only died.”

  I stare at the V-neck of his blue cotton sh
irt. Through it. The dirt walls seem to absorb his words before I can grasp them, latch on to them, and refute them somehow. Then all I have left is the echo of an argument I almost made, a would-be hidden fact I read in Angela’s work last night, a gotcha! theory that might have held water, were reality not so painfully apparent and true.

  I needed to come down here. To gain some insight into my sister’s world and also some clarity at her options. This is not one of them.

  Cabs await tourists at the exit of the catacombs, eager for fares. I tell Seb I need to go back to Angela’s apartment to finish packing, but in truth I’m dying to find Valentin and ransack the apartment for more notes. Then my stomach rumbles, and he insists on buying lunch.

  I have to eat eventually.

  “All right, let’s make this quick. Where do you want to go?” I ask.

  He smiles. “It’s a surprise.”

  I return a deadpan expression.

  “It’s only fifteen minutes away from here, and on the way back to Montmartre,” he says.

  “That’ll do.”

  We grab a cab and arrive at Seb’s secret destination, along a public park. When I go to pay the taxi driver, Seb huffs and insists that he’ll buy the fare. We exit the cab, and the trees spread wide and thick above our heads, olive colors mixing with beige in the arid summer. As the branches thin out toward a clearing, the Eiffel Tower looms like the icon it is, erect and imposing over the hundreds of people taking pictures beneath.

  We walk along the paved path toward the center of the park, and the smell of pot rises to mix with cigarette smoke. I look up—