The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller

Everything around—the white moths shivering in the headlights, the treetops soughing in the wind, the bats, the night noises—fucking everything gave me the creeps. I drove on instinct alone. No higher brain function available. Just getting towards people, lights, civilization as fast as I could, away from the silent house and whoever was in there with me. Twice I drove into one of the loose-dirt ditches that run the length of the narrow roads, once out of sheer nerves, once because a car came straight at me around a bend, headlights blazing, radio blaring. We almost crashed. I swerved. It was only sitting in the ditch, the other car’s horn blaring angrily into the distance, that I realized I was on the wrong side of the road. I sat, took a deep breath, took out a cigarette.

I pride myself on my stoic nature. I always have, from my tree-climbing, bottle-rocket-building childhood onward. I talk straight. I swear loud. I honor promises. Like John Wayne, but female and much less right wing. If you asked me to describe myself in a word it would be tough. Or bitch. Or maybe tough bitch, but after the scrabble out of the Blavette house, the headlights on the way home, it took a full ten minutes until my hands stopped shaking enough that I could light that cigarette.

I couldn’t help wondering if it was Monsieur Raymond who had opened the door at the house, followed me along the dark road. Take it from your unreliable narrator: there was something creepy about that creepy caretaker. No way of knowing for sure, though.

My phone binged at me from its plastic rest on the dash. A message popped up—Bill asking if I was still alive.

I tapped to call him. He picked up after two rings but didn’t say anything. “Hey, Bill. You good?”

“Who wants to know?” He sounded cranky. A couple of days without checking in, and already the sarcasm had begun.

“Me, Molly,” I said with a laugh, taking a drag of my cigarette, my eyes flicking nervously to the rearview to see if anyone was there. “You losing the plot without me there?”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, you know,” he said in the deadpan tone I knew and loved.

“That how I ended up working for you for peanuts?”

“Ha. You got anything on this girl yet?”

“Yeah. But listen, I gotta go,” I said, turning the ignition.

“You okay? You sound …”

“Call you later.” I hung up and turned out into the road.

I knew St. Roch was a short drive from the Blavette house, but nonetheless it seemed like a very long while before my poor car juddered to a halt outside the Overlook—the seen-better-days hotel Bill had booked me a room in. Actually, the only hotel in town, a grand old turn-of-the-century building with a comfy three-star hotel inside. Its original name, Le Napoléon, better befit its air of seedy hubris.

But I love a fleapit, and the Orwellian level of journalistic commitment it implies. I love that you meet people from all walks of life, that you can drink out of a paper bag or eat pizza or smoke cigarettes (hell, probably even crack) in your room. Most of all, I love that there are people inside and the lights are always on.

After the trauma at the Blavette house, I felt that life owed me a pack of Gauloises and a whiskey. My room in the Napoléon can just about sustain a guest edging around the single bed to turn on the TV or open the door, and the pissoir is so closely situated that you can practically use it from the bed if you’ve got good aim. You can also turn the TV on with one toe as you smoke out the window. So instead of going straight to my room, I walked past the bored desk clerk playing Angry Birds, past the wolf pack of journalists decamped from the hospital to the hotel bar. As soon as I reached that comforting oasis of wood and free peanuts, I ordered a double JD.

I stared into the drink, my pale, freckly face suspended in the dark liquid like a bad moon rising, my hair wild. Not a good look. Turning to my phone, I checked for messages, pretending to myself that I wasn’t still shaking. There were two: one from my mom and another from Bill. I texted Mom that I was really fine, and left Bill for later.

Playing silently on the TV over the bar was a news bulletin about the missing Blavettes, showing the faces of the mother, the son, the daughter. Pictures harvested from their Facebook accounts just as Quinn’s have been. Photos showing smiling faces, glowing tans, people with places to go and everything to live for.

Back in Paris, when the #AmericanGirl story broke, I did as much Googling around as I could on my phone. News about Quinn was easy to find. Deeper searches led me to a dedicated subreddit as well as a concerned group of Facebook well-wishers, online supporters for this viral heroine having sprung up overnight like chanterelles. The main theory of the subreddit armchair detectives (the very same sweetly fanatical cellar-dwellers who tune in to my show each week) is that the family went to visit a relative, to get away for a weekend. They’ve been roundly criticized as irresponsible for leaving a foreign exchange student in their care to wander and wash up broken. Now the police have declared them officially missing, the clock will begin ticking, as it is already ticking for the girl.

After messages, I flipped through the photographs I’d taken with my iPhone, glancing at dark and poorly composed images of the woods, the house, the bedrooms in darkness. The one that made me pause longest was the photo of the photo on Émilie Blavette’s nightstand, so different from the fake-smiley Facebook ones issued by the police. In the picture from the nightstand, Émilie looks happy. She hugs her husband close, though he stands more aloof, all French and cool in his sunglasses and crisp shirt. Young Raphael leans his head on her shoulder, a gangly fourteen-year-old momma’s boy. Noémie at twelve is a chubby little thing, cute in her pigtails and halter top, hugging Daddy tight.

How does a whole family disappear? Leave the face of the earth without a trace? From reading the news and snooping at the house, I know this: one minute the Blavettes were a normal(ish) happy(ish) family—the son a star athlete, just beginning his university career in film-making, the daughter a shy girl who loved ballet and ponies and boy bands, the mom a former head teacher. One minute they were going to the beach, posing for smiling photos, the next, gone. And what of the American girl, who they’d invited to be part of their family for a summer? How did she fit into this picture?

I took advantage of the better standard of Wi-Fi in the bar to check out Twitter (#AmericanGirl still trending, video still viral) and Facebook. I’d already had a brief look at Quinn’s page, but now I looked again, noting her relationship status: “it’s complicated.” Her privacy settings meant you couldn’t see much: a profile picture of her with the Blavette boy and girl arm in arm on the beach with the sea behind them, tanned, grinning happily, Quinn in the middle, squeezed between the siblings. They must have been pretty buddy-buddy to get to the profile pic stage. Behind them lies Quinn’s cover image of herself standing in the middle distance on a Boston lake in winter, black-clad against the snow and ice, serious-faced, a forlorn contrast to her seeming happiness in France. The only other thing I could find is a little clip of her waving pom-poms at some high-school football game, blond hair bouncing. A different Quinn again. This version seems like the sort of popular airhead whose high-school yearbook reads like the story of her, whose bed would be surrounded by get-well cards. The “Mean Girl” type. I found myself wondering which image is the real her, or if any of them were.

Thinking back, I didn’t see one get-well card; and that fact only deepened the mystery surrounding her. The American news had said a lot about her father, Professor Leo Perkins, head of classics at Harvard. It also mentioned that she was an only child whose mother had died years before. A fresh Google search revealed a Spotify with a bunch of playlists and an Instagram with more pictures. I looked at her snaps of a pool, a beach, the woods, a club full of young people partying, trying to make sense of the captions—Picnic at the beach, Noé, Raffi and Freddie, Adventure at Les Yeux and the hashtags #funtimes, #selfie, #thuglife.

By two in the morning, the barman was yawning and giving me a weary look as he polished beer glasses and swept peanut shells off the bar and into my lap. Finally, even this exquisitely polite individual lost patience and asked me to go. I was about to head upstairs when I remembered that in my fearful rush, I’d forgotten my notes in the car. Good time to nip out for a smoke, anyway.

In the parking lot, I teetered along, suddenly realizing how drunk I was. It had been raining and the streets were gleaming. As I came closer to my car, I saw that the passenger door was ajar. Had I forgotten to close it? Kicking myself, I tottered closer, hoping that wasn’t where I’d left my file of clippings on the case.

It was only when I reached the car that my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw that I hadn’t forgotten to close the door at all. Someone had jimmied it open with a piece of metal, or something—you could see it from the tiny scratches in the paint job around the handle. Pulling it open, I saw my file was gone.

Quinn Perkins

JULY 13, 2015

Blog Entry

Today we went to the pool. Again. Noémie took her bike and I borrowed her brother Raphael’s. He’s been studying film in Paris at the Sorbonne, so doesn’t really live in the house anymore, but is coming home for the summer. He’s kind of the local hero in St. Roch, the all-star football player, the guy that got the scholarship. Some days he’s all you hear about, especially from Noémie’s mom, who’s fond of getting the family albums out. Noémie must get sick of it—I mean, I’ve only been here a few months and I’m already a bit sick of hearing how amazing and handsome and smart and athletic he is. At the same time, after looking at about a million photos of him over the last few months, I’m not sure I don’t have a bit of a crush on him. After all, I practically know him already.

So I borrowed the all-star’s bike and we cycled along the dusty country road dodging Vespas and farm trucks, the boy saddle punching my girl butt with each pedal stroke. And then we were there: the pool, with its rusted green fence, its siren song of blue, its golden boy flesh pulling us through the rose-tangled gates.

In St. Roch, the pool is the place to be. There aren’t many teens in this town, maybe twenty or so around my age and a little bit older. There aren’t any jobs either: some really big scandal happened years ago from what I’ve heard, and it almost shut the place down. Now it’s the southern French equivalent of one of those American ghost towns that used to rely on coal mining and then the mine shut and the people left. You might think that in a rural town surrounded by idyllic beaches, teens would tan there every day, but no jobs means no transport. You need a car to get to the beach and almost no one has one.

Plus, no adults go to the pool, so it’s like this secret clubhouse where kids can smoke and get up to mischief. When I saw the photos on the study abroad site, the town seemed so picturesque and “so French.” Over the past few months, I’ve come to find those advertising-perfect images funny in a sad way: they’re such blatant lies. In reality, this place is dying, everything around fading and breaking as residents abandon it and tourists find better places to go.

The kids I’ve met here feel trapped, as if they’ll never go anywhere else or find anything better to do, so they make things worse by vandalizing everything, even the pool, where, unless it’s raining, they all come after lunch and lounge on the burned grass around that little rectangle of blue. Surrounded by the looping hate speech of their graffiti, they smoke and gossip and flirt and play guitar, and they swim, dive, dunk, splash, all day every day, all summer long. I guess it’s okay, if you’re good at flirting and swimming and tanning, if you’re not feeling totally paranoid about who’s stalking you.

(I know, I know. You all said to chill out and relax, and if it happens again to tell an adult. But wouldn’t you be just a *tiny* bit freaked?)

We strolled in, not greeting anyone too enthusiastically, not letting our eyes fix on anyone beautiful, boy or girl. To me, the one outsider, they all look so at home there—as if they sprang up in the night, flesh fresh from the wrapper. Twenty pairs of fake Ray-Bans turning to watch us walk in before losing interest.

This early, the pool is empty except for two acid green noodles and a busted pink inflatable raft. We reach our usual spot under the olive tree and kick off our flip-flops, shake out our towels, ditch the baguettes Émilie made us take in the nearest bin. “Get Lucky” is playing on somebody’s minispeakers as we strip off, stretch out, already breaking out the tanning oil. As usual, a knot of sinewy guys is looking our way, their eyes popping like the Photoshopped colors of a soda ad because their skin is so brown. They’re hot, but all I can think is: Is it one of them?

One is offering his hands up to the service of our un-sun-creamed backs, grinning straight-white-toothed, eager and horny. This is Noémie’s doing, not mine. Berated at home and by her own account hated at school, she is Queen Bee at the pool. And it’s not hard to see why: she totally has that French chick thing going on: the smooth tanned skin, cool, short-cropped hair, beestings of tits (French titties, I call them). Lounging by the pool in her bikini, smoking American Spirit and shooting the shit, she’s all sang-froid.

The guy with the hands—Freddie is his name—takes pride in his work. It’s a weird feeling, but not a bad one. When he undoes my bikini top, though, and gestures that I should turn over so he can do my front, I shake my head, feel my face flush. Noémie rolls her eyes at me as if to say, Prude, or whatever the French is for that, and beckons him over. I want to tell him to tuck his tongue back in. He’s her flunky. Neither of us would ever date him.

After an hour of sunbathing—and you could set your watch by this—Noémie says, “Let’s play the game.”

So we obey her, playing the daily game of dunking each other in the pool, seeing who can hold their breath the longest. The St. Roch boys love these games of dunking. Me, not so much. But Noémie eggs me on, shooting me a disappointed look every time I try to drift towards the sidelines. She’s a pro at the old peer pressure.

I’m holding my own until Freddie comes up behind me and dunks me hard and for a long, long time. I start panicking. Chlorine burns my throat and eyes. Starts stripping out my sinuses.

Alone down there where no one can hear me scream, I flail, kicking his leg, clawing his arms. I start to think—no, I start to know I am drowning.

Molly Swift

JULY 31, 2015

The only things taken were my notes on the case, though actually, it was that choice that worried me. Why would anyone break into a car, not to steal it, not even to take the GPS—still sitting brazenly on the dash—but to take my lousy papers? I thought about the noise in the house, the headlights following me home. Maybe whoever was behind me on the road had followed me here.

“It looks to me that someone has cracked up your car,” said a French-accented voice at my elbow. “Have they also taken your things?”

I turned around, poised to take a swing, and saw a man in a panama hat and a crisp white suit, smoking a purple Sobranie and looking pretty pleased with himself for his observation.

“Computer printouts,” I said, “which were worth nothing. It’s more just …”

“… stressing, I know,” he said, his eyes twinkling sympathetically. “There have been a few break-ins around here. The hotel should have warned you.”

“That would’ve been good,” I said, slamming the door. It bounced open again.

“It would seem the locking parts are broken,” said the man. “I may have something that will be of use in this.”

“I’m fine, really,” I said.

“It’s not a problem,” he said, lifting his hat briefly to reveal thinning blond curls.

It seemed rude to say no twice. He walked a few feet, opened the trunk of a green Figaro, and pulled out some cardboard and gaffer tape. How convenient, I thought. It just so happened that he was out here when I found my car and that he had the very things I need to fix it. I squinted at the Figaro, trying to see if the headlights looked familiar from the road to St. Roch. I was still a bit bleary from the Jack Daniel’s and it was hard to tell. I got my keys ready between my fingers to be on the safe side.

When he came back, grinning with DIY man-pride, I said, “So how come you were here in the parking lot? It’s nearly three A.M.”

By way of answer, he took a drag of his cigarette. “We are both working on catching the lung cancer, I think. Here …” He handed me the tape.

I accepted it, not completely convinced, and bit off a length of silver tape. Together, we forced the door to stay closed with one of the most haphazard repair jobs of all time.

“Looks like a pirate with a shitty eye patch,” I said.

“Of course it is.” He smiled glassily, looking like he hadn’t a clue what I was saying. “Are you staying at the Napoléon?”

I nodded. “You, too?”

Mr. Panama Hat smiled charmingly with one side of his mouth, and I felt surer than ever that he was either my stalker or a journalistic rival. Still, he seemed harmless enough for the moment, so I waited while he put his tape back, and walked back to the Napoléon with him. A few steps from the door, the rain started coming down hard. Before I knew it, my knight in shining armor was sweeping his coat off, holding it out to protect me like something out of a Robert Doisneau photograph.

When we were safely inside the doorway, he laid his hand on my arm. “I can see you are shaking.” With a little bow he pulled the door open for me.

“I’m fine,” I snapped. Chivalry frightens me.

“Really? It might do you good to drink one more Jack Daniel’s for the road, to steady your nerves?” He smiled his charming smile, his face moving too close to mine.

“What do you mean ‘one more’? How do you know what I’ve been drinking?”

“You’ve been in the bar for a while,” he said with a laugh. “I did see you before, and now you are weaving a little. It is part of the reason I helped you.”

“Well, don’t,” I said. “I can hold my drink and I don’t need some two-bit Jean-Paul Belmondo impersonator holding doors open for me.”

I strode through the door to the old-fashioned brass elevator and jackhammered the button. It was stuck.

Monsieur Tremblé, the concierge, walked up. “All is well, mademoiselle?”

“No,” I said. “That gentleman over there has been bothering me. He—”

“That gentleman—” Tremblé gently released the button “—is Monsieur Valentin. I’m sure he would only be meaning to help.”

The elevator arrived and he pulled open the delicate birdcage.

“Thank you, Tremblé.” I smiled weakly and stepped inside, thinking that I knew that name from somewhere.

Monsieur Valentin. Inspector Valentin. I’d just missed a golden opportunity to have a drink with the detective in charge of the case. I could have drunk him under the table, charmed him, pumped him for information, and captured it all on video. Instead, I verbally kneed him in the balls. Typical.

Quinn Perkins

JULY 13, 2015

Blog Entry

Hands burrow into my armpits, close on my upper arms, strong as a vise, pressing into me. Hurting me so I want to yell. But I can’t because my mouth is full of water, my lungs burning, chest, flesh heavy as lead. The hands squeeze me, wrench my flesh, and I am fighting tooth and nail, fighting for all I am worth, sucking the water deeper and deeper, my nose, my throat on fire.

And then the hands haul me to land and I flop on the concrete oven shelf at the side of the pool, its grit raking my flesh, then I lie still, weirdly still, no longer fighting at all.

The field of my bright-light-spotted burning blur vision darkens. Something is over me, on me, blocking out the sun. Someone. Vaguely, I see a tanned face, dark eyes, lips. Then the lips are on mine, blowing, and strong hands pump my ribs. I cough, splutter up water, choking, wheezing for air. Lips press mine again, soft and hot against my freezing lips, breathing harsh life into me. I cough harder. More water comes out. The man moves, turns me on my side. It strikes me that he is fully clothed in black and I have the surreal thought that the ghost of Johnny Cash just saved me from drowning.

My ears pop and the world shrieks again. Voices crash against my eardrums, angry, cacophonous. Waves of sound, argument, some angry exchange in French happening over my head that I am way too out of it to translate. The squall of words ends as suddenly as it started. The hands are on me again, under me, lifting my waterlogged floppy fish body. Johnny Cash cradles me against his black-clad chest. I blink and stare up like a baby. His face is all I can see and he is beautiful … and familiar somehow.

He frowns down at me and I hear my voice all high and dreamy. “Am I dead?” My own voice betraying me.

He grins and says, “That’s terrible.”

“What?”

He’s laying me down on a towel at this point, my own towel under the olive tree. Other faces jostle behind him to look at me. Noémie, Freddie, Sophie, Romuald. They are blurry, out of focus. Then I see Freddie, who nearly drowned me, and I look away, look back at Johnny Cash. Less Johnny Cash now that I’m gazing up into his dreamy brown eyes, more James Franco. He has the tousled dark hair, a stubbly beard, and cute crinkles in the corners of his eyes.

“Terrible,” he murmurs, leaning close to my face so only I can hear, “to almost drown and then the first words you come out with are cliché.”

I smile up at him, even though my ribs ache and my eyes sting and my throat burns. “So the next time I have a near-death experience I should—” cough “—stop watching my life flash in front of my eyes and take a minute to come up with a better line?”

“Ah, irony. You must be feeling better. I am officially no longer needed here.” He pretends to get up and then kneels down closer, grinning again. He smooths strands of hair from my forehead, then turns to Noémie and says something brusquely in French I don’t catch.

“Mais non!” says Noémie angrily, her pouty lips twisting in disgust. “I hate you.” She turns away, her arms folded.

The boy frowns. “Forgive my sister,” he says. “She has not taken care of you.”

“Noémie’s your sister?” I say, surprised. And then I realize why he looks so familiar: it’s Raphael, the Sorbonne student whose photos I’ve been admiring for months.

“But of course.” That charming smile again. “Didn’t she say I was coming today?”

“No.”

Noémie turns around just far enough to interject. “You are an asshole, Raffi. Maman is expecting you Sunday. She will lose her mind.”

He smiles back sweetly at her. “But, dearest sister, my college term has ended, and I heard from Maman there was a nice new American exchange staying all summer, so I thought I’d come entertain her.” He winks at me.

We ignore Noémie as she pretends to vomit.

“Are you staying all summer?” I want to kick myself for my obviousness.

He shrugs. “Well, maybe, if I find something fun to do. Otherwise, I will go back to Paris. It can get quite boring here, you know?”

“Yeah, really.”

When Raphael tells me that he is nineteen and at college in Paris studying film, I try to pretend I don’t already know everything about him. He finds out where I’m from in the States and seems really interested, asking about Boston and my college plans and what music I like. All the while, just at the edge of my vision, I see where Noémie sits scowling. Freddie is sitting next to her on her towel and every so often he just stares in my direction.