LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

       Quinn Perkins

      JULY 12, 2015

       Blog Entry

      It’s midnight. The family is out. Noémie’s at a party in the woods. Madame Blavette is on her date with Monsieur Right. I’m alone in the house in the middle of the French countryside, tucked into my lumpy bed that smells of bleach and jam and sterilized milk. A latchkey kid still, just in a different country. Through the slats of the wooden shutters, I can hear cicadas thrum, a thick carpet of sound, unbroken. It’s comforting somehow, though I’m almost too sleepy to work on the blog, sleepy and a bit drunk still, from cider and beer and cheap rosé all swilling together.

      My phone beeps: one new message. I see the number and the knots of my spine draw closer together. The sweat on my face and chest grows cold. That number. It’s the one I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the one you guys all said you were worried about (I remember loserboy38 suggested adding it to Contacts under “Stalker,” but that was too creepy, even for me). So anyway, consequently it just comes up as just a series of ones and nines and fours and sevens. Sometimes the number series sends texts, photos like that one I posted up Thursday—the blurry photo of me sunbathing. There was another: my hoodie up, my school bag on my shoulder, and my sneakers kicking up dust on the road back to the schoolhouse. It creeped me out too much to post.

      This time, it’s just a single emoji, a winking face. I delete the whole message thread, like always, and at that moment, a notification pops up, a Snapchat from lalicorne, some random person I only half remember adding a week or so ago because I thought it was a friend of Noémie’s. But they haven’t chatted me yet and the profile image is one of those gray mystery man icons so you can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl. I open the app and swipe onto the chat thread to see what they’ve sent.

      I tap on the pink square and a video loads. The film is dark, hard to see, but I hear a noise like heavy breathing. A muffled scream startles me. I grip the phone harder. A girl’s face appears, too close up to see in detail. The film is choppy and moves so fast it’s hard to take in before the timer in the top right corner counts down. The girl’s breathing hard and there’s something—a plastic bag, maybe—stretched over her face. Three … two … one, and the screen goes black, the video vanishing forever as Snapchat deletes it and, with it, the girl.

      For a long time after that I sat on the floor. The curtains were open and outside I could hear the constant cricket machine, see star-shine countryside black with no light pollution to reassure me that I was anything other than alone. Mme B says this place is haunted. I don’t think I believe in that stuff, but sitting there alone in the middle of the night, I knew what she meant, like I could almost hear the laughter of the people who lived here before trapped in the walls, behind the brick, the ghost of a good time.

      I started to make up explanations to comfort myself—that it’s Noémie’s doing, a practical joke or some really weird junk mail. After a long while, I reached for the phone, half hoping it was all some weird dream, half wanting to see it again and find out that it’s really just a clever advertising campaign for a new handheld horror movie. But somehow I know it wasn’t a horror flick clip. It was too real for that. When I do pick up the phone, the video’s gone. Snapped into an untimely death in the virtual void, because it’s Snapchat, of course. All messages are instantaneous, ticking down the moments it takes you to read or watch them like a fuse on a bomb and then they’re gone.

      She’s gone, as if she was never there, and I’m sitting with my back against the door, typing this on my blogging app. And here’s a straw poll: What do I do, guys? Who do I tell? Anyhow, I need to go now, to check the house, to lock the door. Something instead of sitting on the floor, feeling scared and alone in the middle of nowhere, waiting for them to come home.

       Molly Swift

      JULY 30, 2015

      As I drove along the dusty main road of St. Roch, my skin still hummed from the excitement at the hospital: being mistaken for a relative, the plot twist with the Blavettes, seeing Quinn. I came to the part of the road she must have walked along, the jagged points of trees looming like arrowheads dug from a riverbed.

      In the YouTube clip, right before the accident, Quinn makes no effort to dodge the car hurtling her way. Afterwards, she lies in the road, mumbling words you can’t quite catch from the choppy audio as the tourists got close to her, filming all the time, though a number of comment threads have speculated on what she was saying. Heading towards the line of trees, I couldn’t visualize the pixelated image of her prone body that was reprinted in all the papers. In my mind’s eye, she shimmered as she walked out of the forest, her pale fingers beckoning me on to the dark trees.

      My rental car squealed around a turn in the road and towards the house. I wasn’t yet used to driving on these kinds of roads; it amazed me that I could be in town one moment and the next in the heart of farmland, driving down little sewage runnels between rows of squat olive trees or lavender or yellow rapeseed flowers. The Blavette house came after a turnoff for just such a nothing little lane. Opposite it was an orchard, where the apples were growing red and dark and glossy as poison fruit. A sprayer moved between trees, dispensing real poison that ran into drainage ditches and misted the air. This was the place where the American girl had been staying, where her vanished host family had lived for generations—it wasn’t hard to find. Google, the great democratizer of freelance detective work, told me where to go for a bit of trespassing.

      I stopped the car and lit a cigarette, hoping the air around me wouldn’t catch fire in the fug of pesticide. I smoked hard, letting the engine idle while I sized up the house. Like Quinn, it was different from the pictures I’d seen, idyllic shots that must have been stolen from some holiday rental catalog. Paler, sadder, more elegant, and more ruined, it peered from between the trees, a witness to who knows what.

      From my left came a rhythmic clipping noise. I climbed out of the car, keys clenched between my fingers Boston walk-to-your-door-from-the-bar style, cigarette hanging from my mouth.

      An old man ambled from the side of the house carrying a pair of garden shears. He was ancient and white-bearded, clipping away at the leaves of a vine climbing the side of the house, and at first he didn’t see me. Like some scene from a French Pathé reel, he was timeless, whistling to himself as if nothing untoward had happened in the village of St. Roch. I got back in my car and crawled over the pebbles of the drive, slowly so I wouldn’t give him too much of a fright.

      He must have been pretty deaf, because it took him a long time to turn around. But when he did, he looked more scared than I was when I spotted him. I let out a sigh, laughing at myself for succumbing to the gothic fantasy the place suggested. He nodded to me. I got out of the car and walked over and for a moment we stood and looked at each other, caught in the embarrassing free-fall between people who never listened in language class.

      Eventually I broke the silence, introducing myself in shaky high-school French. “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Molly.”

      “Ah, bonjour.” The man took off his floppy cloth hat and held out his hand, gnarled and thorn-tracked as my grandpa’s

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