“Yes,” he said, “you sit, you read a book, I don’t care. You watch a film.” He had wild, thick eyebrows. He was furious.
Arnaud had gone still, moved his paper to the side to get a better look.
Fiona wanted to write the woman a note (“Leave him now!”) but there was no way to get it to her without the man noticing. Had someone seen Claire and Kurt like this in Boulder and done nothing? Had anyone seen Claire and the other Hosanna women walking together on a rare trip to town, arms covered, faces down? Did anyone ask if they were alright? If they needed a ride to the airport and three hundred dollars?
The woman was crying, and Fiona managed to make eye contact with Arnaud, who gave a small shrug. The man picked up his own half-empty glass and poured his remaining water into the woman’s. He checked that the waiter had his back turned, and then he wiped the glass with his napkin and shoved it into the woman’s purse.
The woman whispered in French, a protest, and he whispered back. Was this how they furnished her apartment, one pilfered dish at a time? The woman stood, miserable, and picked up her purse. They left quickly.
“Wow,” Fiona said. Her whiskey was gone.
Arnaud folded the paper, shook his head. “Some women are very stupid.”
“Excuse me?”
“What, you think she’s a genius?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be with someone manipulative.” Though really, she didn’t know either. Damian had been older, sure, and he often turned professorial, lecturing and pontificating, but he never manipulated her.
Damian had supported her finishing school that year after the baby was born, and when Fiona had class she’d drop Claire off with a bottle at his office, where she was the little princess of the sociology department. She’d come back two hours later to find the room full of grad students cooing over Claire, holding a rattle for her. Damian was never anything but solicitous; the marriage’s failure was her fault, entirely. She’d offered once that if any new girlfriend called her up, she’d testify to his character, explain how she was the one with commitment issues. How her heart was too battered for anything like real love. When he got together with Karen, Fiona had repeated the offer. “It’s okay,” he said. “She knows.”
Arnaud said, “I see this all the time. What do you think I investigate? Half of it involves, okay, not-so-genius women in trouble with a man. I turn down jobs every week from guys like that who want women followed.”
Fiona told herself not to yell at Arnaud, whose assistance she didn’t want to lose. She said, “I’ve known men in that situation too. Men manipulated by women. Or by other men.”
Arnaud looked at his phone. “She texted.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Okay.” And suddenly she was all nerves again. She tipped the chair back getting up, had to grab the table’s edge, nearly tipped that over as well.
* * *
—
Under other circumstances, it might have been an adventure. Watching for neighbors, scampering inside. But it was terrifying, nauseating. In the worst case, they’d find something horrible. Fiona didn’t believe Kurt would hurt Claire, but did you ever know a thing like that? She remembered something her own mother had told her one of the last times they’d really talked, right before Nico died. Fiona had been blaming her for not standing up to her husband, for letting him kick Nico out. They were in the hospital cafeteria. Her mother said, “You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you’ll only know half of it.”
The apartment was dingy and poorly furnished. A dead-rat-in-the-wall smell, rotting sweet. A big, divided room with an unmade bed at one end, a threadbare blue couch at the other. A small kitchen area, two empty bowls in the sink.
Arnaud had made her promise not to touch anything, and so she stood, helpless, in the middle of the place, turning circles as he explored. “The other closet is coats,” Arnaud announced, “but this one is dresses.” He stood at an open door near the bed. “You recognize any?” If she did, they’d have to be from Claire’s freshman year or earlier. She’d completely given up on the idea that Claire lived here with Kurt, but it couldn’t be ruled out. Maybe the woman with dark hair was just someone Kurt was having an affair with! She stood at Arnaud’s side and peered in. Pastel colors, which Claire hated. Nothing familiar. But there were sundresses and cocktail dresses in here. Not Hosanna clothes.
Arnaud held a whole dress out from the rack, the way you would at a store.
“Way too long to be Claire’s,” she said. This thing would drag on the floor. And there were no toys around, no child’s bed.
There were bills for Kurt Pearce on the small coffee table, and an empty greeting card envelope addressed to a Marie Pearce.
“Marie. She could be French,” Fiona said.
“Sure. Could be from New Zealand for all we know.”
Fiona looked in the bathroom. A medicine cabinet missing a door. Nothing abnormal inside, no antipsychotic drugs. Vitamins, ointments. A packet of birth control pills. The Hosanna did not believe in those.
To the right of the sink, a photo of a little girl had been tacked up in a plastic sleeve.
Oh, God. About three years old. It had to be the girl from the video. Had to.
Fiona felt something like an allergic reaction—tight in her throat, her chest—even as she wanted to sing, to grab Arnaud and waltz him around the apartment. Golden curls, eyes—eyes like Nico’s. Not much like Claire herself, who had resembled Damian even as a child: wan, glowering, lips thin and tight. When Damian was her sociology professor, Fiona had imagined his face suggested soul, a life of wisdom dearly earned. She’d never imagined it might come down to genes. But this little girl! She was a Marcus. Nico’s hair had started blond, had grown dark right as he sprang up tall, right as his voice dropped. Fiona grew suddenly shy around him that year, didn’t know how to relate to this strange, giant boy. And really she never learned again how to be his sister, because within a year or two she’d turned into his accomplice, his thief, his occasional mother.
This child: If you cut her hair, if you dressed her in the boy clothes of the 1960s, she was Nico.
With just her good left hand, Fiona pulled out the tack and drew the photo from its sleeve. There was nothing on the back. She wanted to take it. But she couldn’t do that.
“Look,” she said to Arnaud.
He grabbed it by the edges and said, “Ta ta ta ta ta! Don’t get fingerprints!”
Well, what had he been doing, touching everything, then? He laid the photo on the bed and took a picture of it.
He said, “It’s impossible not to get a spot of light.”