The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller

And then he intoned in a gentlemanly crackle (twice as charming for being in Franglais), “I take care of school and, as well, this house while the family …” He thought for a moment, then flapped his hands like birds flying.

“Are away.” I nodded. Take care of school. I remembered reading something about a school in the reports on Quinn. “You the caretaker?”

I fished for a cigarette so that he saw no trace of surprise or anything else on my face. “When do you think they’re coming back?” I flicked my lighter wheel, eyeing him through the smoke. From my years of interviewing people, looking for the real stories under their words, I know everyone has little tics, little tells. For most, it’s easier to tell if folks are lying when you know them. But actually, when you’ve been at it a while, you find yourself cold-reading people all the time without meaning to. You had the money for a ticket all along, old lady at the métro stop—yeah, you. And, taxi driver, I see you in your rearview, and no, you don’t know the way.

But as far as I could make out, Monsieur Raymond was not lying. He shrugged. “They go away often. Are you a friend of theirs? I only live over there, yet I have never seen you.” He pointed to the primeval forest, its dark shapes gathering form and substance as the dusk crept in.

“You live in the woods?” I asked in the hope of distracting him.

He smiled. He liked that question. In my experience, professional weirdos work hard to generate notoriety—locally he is Raymond, that crazy man living in the woods. I bet he’s the one who originally spread the rumors about what he gets up to out there all alone.

“On the edge of those,” he said, pointing vaguely, “that very far edge of school field. You look hard you just see my chimney—she’s smoking.”

Straining my eyes, I did see it, though before it seemed like just another dark point in the tree line. I felt an involuntary little shiver of glee rattle up my neck at the idea of a childhood myth made flesh—the creepy old guy in the shack in the woods. I’d finally met him.

As if he could read my mind, he said, “Yes, I am there always. Keeping my eyes in things. I see a lot of things here.”

“Like what?”

Tapping his nose. “Everything.”

I dragged on my cigarette, letting the smoke burn and twirl in my lungs, exhaling. “Did you see her—the American girl—when she came out of the forest?”

He looked at me strangely, cutting his eyes at me under snowy lashes. Very blue eyes, betraying a much sharper mind than he let on.

“L’Américaine?” He patted his pockets, pulled out a packet of Drum Gold, took a pinch, and flicked it into a paper, rolling and licking in one seamless gesture so that the cigarette seemed to grow out of his thorn-pricked, nicotine-stained hands like pale elongated fruit. “Sometime I feel sorry for that girl.”

I flicked my lighter and he dragged hard, cheeks puffing out to show the impressive spider veins of a lifelong drinker. “Why’s that?”

He shrugged. “Sais pas. Just … well, there was something about her. How you say? Soft? Like a fruit, that you know.” He gouged his fingers as if he were squeezing a peach. “But then I only met her possibly twice.”

“Sweet girl,” I said, smiling.

“Ouais. But then so are all the girls they keep here, aren’t they?”

Molly Swift (#ulink_be4dfe63-15e6-5d54-9f2e-1297cf521da7)

JULY 30, 2015

For the first part of my life, I grew up in a family that, to the casual onlooker, resembled a Norman Rockwell painting. Dad was a senior partner in a Boston practice who could afford not only an apartment on Beacon Hill, but the beachfront house in Maine where my sister and I spent the best summers of our childhood. Mom was a part-time paralegal secretary and domestic goddess of Martha Stewart proportions. My sister, Claire, and I were brats: she the mean teen homecoming queen; me the band-camp-loving nerd.

The summer I turned thirteen, a letter arrived. I never knew exactly what it said, but I remember Dad’s hands shaking as he read it, Mom’s angry nagging curdling the hot August air. I was used to their ups and downs. I think I took my bike out for a ride around the coast instead of worrying. In any case, the malpractice suit that ate up everything we owned took its sweet time. It was another year before we’d gone from living like princes to crowding into my Jewish grandmother’s stuffy brownstone, torturing her cats. When she threw us out and we began a stint with my Catholic paternal grandparents in Boston’s South End, I began to notice the comments friends and relatives whispered as they sat around the big kitchen table: “Col’s losing his way and he needs our prayers”—a Catholic way of saying that my father had gone nuts.

We moved back to Maine, to the northern woods that smell of hemlock and balsam, the setting for Dad’s new purpose of refashioning his bankrupt life in the image of Thoreau’s. By which I mean that he tumbled, babbling, into Grandpa Swift’s old timber cabin on Chesuncook Lake and used what money remained to stockpile AK-47s and all the canned creamed corn you could stand. Out in those woods, while Dad snared rabbits and speared trout, Mom discovered a taste for home-brewed beer and I became a delinquent. It was easy to do since my dad’s transformation into a wild-eyed survivalist meant that the materials for mischief—knives, rope, power tools—were all around me. By the time I was Quinn’s age, my favorite hobby was stealing weed killer and a bag of sugar and rolling my own fuses from cigarette papers so I could blow the fuck out of the earth that trapped us in that madhouse. My sister—through a rock solid combination of grit and conformity—came out of that life pretty normal. She learned to blend in, to agree, to hide the crazy. I didn’t, or couldn’t. I’ve always been the black sheep, though over time, life has sanded the rough edges off me.

On the positive side, Dad’s questionable parental supervision taught me three crucial things: how to blaze a trail, how to hot-wire a car, and how to pick the toughest locks. Joyriding in cars, carving arrows in trees, and breaking into barns to scare sheep haven’t been all that useful in furthering my journalistic career, but the ability to pick locks? Handier than you might think. Filing cabinets, abandoned warehouses, creepy Silence of the Lambs lockups are not a problem as long as you’ve got a bobby pin, or in my case a little black bag of hook picks, pins, and paper clips. I pulled it out, ready to take a look in the Blavette house.

I needn’t have bothered. My evening’s trespassing was made a whole lot easier by the fact that either the police or the caretaker had left the back door open. It was pitch outside now, the stars sharp and bright as police spotlights. It didn’t quite look like a crime scene yet, but you could tell the police had been poking around from the big-booted footprints scattered around the floors, the occasional coffee cup left to stain surfaces. Once I was sure Monsieur Raymond wasn’t still lurking around, I took a deep breath, peeled away from the doorway, and crossed the hallway to the stairs.

At the top of the stairs was a bedroom. The large bed told me it was probably the master, and the matching rose-pattern wallpaper and curtains suggested a woman had decorated it. I tiptoed over the pastel rug towards the bed, as cautious as if I might find someone sleeping there. On the nightstand sat a framed picture of the Blavette family, when the husband was still on the scene. I snapped an iPhone photo and moved on, flicking my torch over the ointments and powders on the antique dresser, illuminating the dark spots freckling the mirror. Without its people, the house felt frozen in time, like the ballroom of some lost ocean liner.

I crept out into the dark well of the hallway and walked on, identifying the various bedrooms, all with objects and clothes left strewn across beds and floors. First was what I decided was the son’s room, the door decorated with a photo of twenties Paris and a map of the stars; inside, a guitar, a basketball hoop, and thick textbooks. Save the French titles of the books, it could have been the room of any American college-age boy. Next was a young girl’s innocent bedroom: a world map dotted with photos of pen pals decorated one baby-pink wall and the shelves were crowded with pony figurines and books about ballerinas.

The guest room was bigger but had less character, its floral walls and drapes echoing the master. It smelled of lavender and cigarettes. Weirdly, the wardrobe and desk were clean; where had Quinn’s clothes and things gone? I snapped a few pictures but found nothing more useful than some old book about the history of the local caves and a half-written postcard addressed to someone called Kennedy. “Hey, dude!” it began. “Missing your face. So awesome …” My heart sank a little at the way it tailed off mid-awesome, as if something had interrupted the writer. On impulse, I stuffed both the book and the card in my bag.

At the end of the hallway was another door I hadn’t tried yet. I twisted the handle. It moved, but the door didn’t open. I had just knelt down to look through the lock when there was a noise downstairs, like the scrape of a chair. My hand fumbled my keys from my pocket. I pushed my sharp little front door key between my forefinger and middle finger, straining my ears towards the stairs. As I tiptoed down them, I heard a noise from outside, a sharp bark, like a fox. Maybe it was that I’d heard. In a place like this, it wasn’t surprising my mind was playing tricks on me.

I was just creeping back into the front room when I heard tires gobbling up gravel and saw the lights of a car. It pulled to a halt. The thrum of an engine stopped and the headlights went out. A door slammed. I stopped in the hallway, just listening. A ring tone sounded outside, then stopped and a man’s voice began speaking rapid and low in French.

I turned around in a slow circle, thinking about the house, the windows, the doors, the ways out. The only option was that back door. I tiptoed to it, trying to keep my steps light, my breathing calm. Outside, the voice stopped talking and the man cleared his throat. I glanced behind me to see the front door handle beginning to turn.

Quinn Perkins (#ulink_cbe2bb47-d4c6-5258-b7d8-0e54e64d3c8f)

JULY 13, 2015

Blog Entry

Back home in Boston, this blog is all about coming up with creative ways to make my boring life seem interesting. I:

tell weird stories that are semibased on my antics

post bloodthirsty stories about zombies and hell beasts

quote lines from classic horror movies of the ’80s

write trashy tabloid headlines to caption my most awkward moments

I guess it’s how I met you all, horror fan friends, who always write bloodthirsty comments on my Monsters of New England posts: My Rockport Devil Sighting, What Mothman? and my most popular post ever, Lizzie Borden and the Fall River Witches! Earlier in the year, I had so many great chats with talented writer friends like PoeBoy13 and dreamswithghosts that I got up the nerve to send some of my horror stories out to zines and even got “Lila on the Ceiling” published in Splatterpunk! (It’s that one you all said reminded you of early Stephen King—oh, how I would love to be Stephen King one day!) I thought my travels in France would give me the perfect chance to develop my skills with some travel writing, and find some new spooky places to do a little urban exploring, dig into the local legends.

Turns out I didn’t need to leave this house to find the darkness. It found me. It’s weird to think that this blog used to be all about a wannabe writer with no life experience to write about. Now that life in France has taken a dark turn and real stuff has happened, I should be unblocked, but I’m not. Now for once I find myself wishing my life was more ordinary.

It’s almost dawn and I’ve given up on trying to sleep. I’ve taken my meds early—clonazepam, Wellbutrin, Depakote, lorazepam—hoping to calm down, but they didn’t make me any less anxious or depressed, so now I feel drowsy and stressed.

In the cold light of day, it will seem less scary, I guess, but I still have that papery feeling. Like something’s about to go wrong. I’ve turned around and around and around in the starched sheets all night and haven’t actually slept. That video thing freaked me out way too much.

Any suggestions, people? Maybe y’all are asleep.

At least Noémie’s home now. I heard the noises of her door creaking open, the whisper of her clothes falling to the floor, the rusty metal groan of her climbing into bed. I felt such relief to hear those familiar sounds, so much that I almost went in to tell her about what happened … but I didn’t know what to say. The video is gone. I put the text message into Google Translate. It said, This is real. That’s all. Pretty weird, huh? And I don’t know her well enough to guess how she would react.

Though after three months here, I should, right? I came here just after Easter, hoping to complete my very last quarter of high school speaking fluent French. Since then, I’ve walked with Noémie each day to the shiny new lycée for fast-talking French lessons and head-spinning economics lessons (not sure if the latter is useful preparation for being an English major at Bryn Mawr in a couple of months, but Noé’s studying it for her baccalaureate so I’m tagging along). Each weekend—as stipulated by my study abroad program—we’ve gone on an odyssey of cultural discovery in Charente-Maritime: exploring the Vieux Port, the amphitheater and the big old church in La Rochelle, the museums of commerce and automata and the son et lumière at the castle (that place about a hundred times!). The Sacred Heart Travel Scholarship promised a chance to “soak in the French way of life through full cultural immersion, expanding academic horizons as much as comprehension.”

If anything, I have less comprehension. Noé is more of a mystery to me than when I arrived. Back in April she seemed excited to have an American friend, giving me friendship bracelets and mixtapes, throwing me parties. Since the holiday started, she’s been quieter, staying in her bedroom a lot … sang-froid, maybe, or plain old-fashioned dislike. We were hurled together by the freak weather conditions of cultural exchange, matched by an educational eHarmony through a database of hobbies that couldn’t possibly tell if we had much in common. Secretly, though, I think we have too much in common—living in our heads, not being, as the French say, bien dans sa peau. It makes for a lot of awkward silences at dinner, that’s for sure.

It makes for being lonely. I even tried to phone my dad, but I think he’s too busy getting ready for the trip to Tahiti with Meghan. They’re superbusy, anyway, preparing for the new baby, the tiny half sister or brother who’s arriving just in time to fill in for me when I go off to college. Pity that kid! I mean, Meghan’s nice enough. I’m sure she’ll make a good mom. She turns twenty-five in a few weeks, so she’ll be exactly half Dad’s age by the time she goes into labor. He was supervising her PhD when they started sneaking around, and I think she thought he was a catch.

She came to dinner once before they knew I knew and after a bottle of wine she told me “your dad is such a good listener, even when I talk about my feelings.” Then I really knew. Though I still didn’t know whether to hug her or warn her to get out while she could. So I just topped up her glass and later, in my room, I looked at some old photos Mom took of me and Dad for some photography project or other and tried to see if he listened to me back then, if we were close. But how can you tell? Just because people smile for photos doesn’t mean they’re happy.

Poor Meghan’s learning the hard way now. Postmarriage, prebaby Dad is an absent presence, working late, drinking hard, teaching summer school so he doesn’t have to spend time with anyone who’s not an adoring student. I remember feeling bitter when they got engaged and thinking, One day he’ll blame you for everything like he blames me. Like he blames me for Mom dying and for losing it after she did. Now that it’s come true, though, I just feel sad for her.