Читать книгу The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller - - Страница 8

JULY 30, 2015

I felt bold in my lie, but I expected to be found out any moment. I followed the receptionist’s directions to the girl’s room as quickly as I could without looking as if I was hurrying. I came to the room, and stopped at the threshold.

From the newspaper stories, I’d imagined she would be in a tent of plastic, tangled in tubes and wires, barely visible; but she lay unfettered by machinery, neatly tucked under starched white sheets. Her face was bruised from the accident, her head shaved on one side. A run of stitches tattooed her scalp like railroad tracks: the place the car hit, the blow that knocked her clean from this world into dreamland, some gray space where she couldn’t be reached.

It always happens when I’m working on a new story: that moment when the person I’ve been researching transforms from a news item into a human being. I’m used to it, so I’m not sure why it hit me harder this time. Maybe because I was far from home and she was, too: the girl in the bed, the girl called Quinn Perkins, was all too real to me now. Bill had told me to take some footage with the little hidden camera he bought me years ago for my undercover work. It was pinned to my lapel, switched on and filming. He’d asked me to find a chart if I could and photograph that—to document the room, the nuns, the state the girl was in.

Instead, I found myself turning off the camera and, almost as if in a dream myself, falling into the plastic bucket seat next to her bed. I sat watching the rise and fall of her chest, even and slow, and felt a strange peace descend, like watching a child sleep. With her bruised face, her half-shaven head, and black scabs crusting the stitches, she looked worlds away from the fresh-faced teen in the photographs.

I found myself pondering all over again how she came to be walking out of the woods that gray July morning. I imagined how her legs would have been bare and dirty, her feet cut to shreds when she wandered down the middle of the dirt road, her blond hair stringy with blood. Why? This question intrigued me far more than the driver of the car.

The video footage the German tourists took of her was so shocking it looked like something from a handheld horror movie. That, and the mystery of her identity, seemed to be why the video spread so far so fast. Stills taken from clips ended up on the front pages of French papers. Soon “La fille Américaine inconnue” bled through Reuters and Google Translate, becoming “Mysterious American Girl Found.”

Eventually her father, on holiday in Tahiti with his very pregnant fiancée, recognized the face of his daughter and called up to claim her. She was given a name: Quinn Perkins of Boston. She had come to St. Roch as part of a study abroad program that placed her with a local family called the Blavettes—a schoolteacher mom, her son and daughter—presumed to be away visiting an ailing relative in some mountain area with no phone reception. Their name came out when the police released details of the case.

The news feed on my phone said Quinn was running out of time, that after the first twenty-four hours of a coma the chances of waking plummet. From the chart at the end of her bed, I could see that this particular coma had been rated a “7.” Google told me that made her chances of recovery about fifty-fifty. She should have had relatives there, talking to her, playing her music, stroking her hand. But the visitor list near the door told me she had no one—Professor Perkins hadn’t yet rushed to her side, which was odd. Not just odd, heartbreaking. A plane would get him here quickly from anywhere in the world.

They say that sometimes the feeling of touch, the sound of speech, can jolt a person from this dream state, wake them like a kiss in a fairy tale. And so I found myself reaching for her hand, taking it in mine. I touched her hand almost reverently. Time unspooled until I didn’t know how long I’d been in that room with the softly bleeping machines, the sleeping girl, her mystery sealed inside, pristine. All of a sudden, her hand twitched, the fingers wriggling inside mine. I squeezed it again, but this time nothing happened. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, She moved.

“Only you know how you got here,” I said softly.

A hand touched my shoulder. As startled as if I’d been sleeping myself, I looked up to see the habit of a nun, crisp white folds around a surprisingly young face.

The nun’s brow was creased. Her pale eyes looked nervously down at me through frameless specs. “Poor thing, she has been alone. We are so glad her family is here finally.”

“Yeah.” I smiled, hoping she didn’t want to know exactly what family I was.

She checked the charts, the machines, making little ticks on a chart as she did. Faintly, I heard her singing a French song under her breath. I sat tensed, wondering if I should make my excuses now and leave before she started asking me questions I couldn’t answer.

She was in the middle of adjusting Quinn’s sheets when she turned to me and said in very precise English, “Have you heard? It is so terrible. Now they think the family of Blavette is missing.”

“The family she was staying with?” I asked, managing to sound genuinely shocked because I was. “I thought they were visiting some relative.”

“No indeed. The grandmother has been in touch and has not seen any of them since Christmastime. The police have just searched their house again and found something perhaps, because they are putting out a news bulletin to say this family is missing. It is on the television now.”

In the reception area, a crowd had formed around the television. I couldn’t see the images except for a flicker of color between their heads, but I understood enough of the rapid French reportage to confirm the nun’s story: the Blavettes had been declared missing. The search was on for them as well as the hit-and-run driver. Two mysteries to solve for the price of one. When I walked into the hospital parking lot, I noticed that most of the other hacks had gone, perhaps to the gendarmerie to hear the press release. I had other plans.