“Her grandnephew. He was my first real friend in the city.”
She said, “I hope that doesn’t cloud your judgment.”
2015
Fiona wasn’t aware that she had any preconceptions about the detective until they were face to face with him, she and Serge, across a round table at Café Bonaparte. What she’d pictured, she realized, looking at this small, quiet man, was a bumbling person in a trench coat, a sweaty former gendarme who’d turned out to be a genius. But Arnaud (“You can call me Arnold,” he offered in perfect British English, as if she couldn’t handle a simple O sound) was like a freshly sharpened pencil, a pointed nose the primary feature of his small, dark face. Not that she needed a movie detective. This wasn’t a movie case. If Claire was really in Paris, she shouldn’t be hard to find. Convincing her to meet was another matter.
Arnaud accepted the check she handed him, folded it into his breast pocket. He hunched over his fruit salad, ate, asked his questions quickly.
“How is her French? Your daughter’s?”
Fiona looked at her cheese omelet; she’d been so hungry earlier, but now she couldn’t bring herself to take the first bite. “She studied it in high school.”
“Lycée,” Serge clarified. Serge, having driven Fiona there (she’d clung to his waist with her eyes closed), had stuck around and ordered an espresso and now seemed to feel the need to justify his presence.
When Claire was in sixth grade, Fiona had tried the same tack her mother had taken years before: “You’re part Cuban, you know. Don’t you think Spanish—” and Claire had said, “I’m French too. And I share ninety-nine percent of my DNA with a mouse. Do I need to learn to squeak?”
Fiona continued now: “But I don’t know how long she’s been here. Three years, possibly.”
“Three years is when she left the cult?”
“Yes,” Fiona said, “but—” and she didn’t know how to finish. Something about how you never really leave a cult. How there was the cult itself, and then there was Claire’s own private cult, her devotion to Kurt Pearce. One leader and one follower.
“And now you believe she’s in Paris.”
“Well—” And suddenly she couldn’t remember why she’d been so convinced the video showed Paris. Was the Eiffel Tower in the background? No, but—it was a video about Paris. She was so tired. When she turned her head, it took her vision a second to catch up. She said, “You saw the video?” She’d sent him the link when they first communicated earlier this week.
He nodded, pulled a slim laptop from the bag at his feet and, in one fluid motion, opened it and clicked to start the video. That a French café would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.
“The three-minute mark,” she said. It was ten days ago that Claire’s college roommate Lina had emailed a YouTube link and a cautious note: “Someone sent me this,” she wrote, “wondering if that could be Claire, three minutes in. I can’t tell—do you suppose?” And Fiona’s stupid computer hadn’t been able to speed forward, so she’d sat through seven minutes of “family friendly travel tips” for the upper middle class tourist looking to drag children to France. Carousels, hot chocolate at Angelina, little boats on the pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg. And then the pixie-cut host began walking backward on a bridge, talking about the artists “capturing the scene for you to bring home.” And there, behind her—and here, again, on Arnaud’s screen—was a woman on a folding stool, squinting at a small canvas, daubing a paintbrush as if she’d been directed to. Did it look like Claire? Yes. But a bit heavier, a stylish scarf knotted around her hair. “Who knows?” the host chirped. “They might even have their own enfants in tow!” This was in reference to the little girl, a toddler really, playing with some small red toy by the woman’s feet.
“This is her?” Arnaud said, and tapped Claire’s face on the screen.
“Yes.” It did no good to say that she was almost sure, that her nightmares had been full of women on bridges who turned to show rotted faces, animal faces, faces that just weren’t Claire’s. If he was going to look for her, Fiona wanted him to believe he’d find her.