witness claimed she had jumped off the bridge’s wide stone railing, laughing as she fell.
But the American tourist contradicted these things, saying no one could have seen her fall. He found her at 7 a.m. Any witnesses would have had to be on the bridge in the middle of the night.
The American also pointed to her missing stockings and mismatched shoes. Her traveling companion, one Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, said Miss Brown had never traveled anywhere without her St. Christopher’s medal and her grandmother’s solid gold wedding ring, both missing.
Police now believe Sophie Nance Brown is the third victim of a killer who play tricks on investigating officers. The witness who claimed she had fallen matched the description of a man seen carrying an unconscious woman to the base of the bridge around midnight.
Anyone with information about this most interesting case should contact the Prefect of Police.
Decker stared at the words. The paper did indeed come out of the platen curled, but he didn’t care. The story was good enough for the Trib, if it published crime news like that (which it did not, afraid it would scare the tourists). But the story wasn’t really good, just good enough.
He had written the facts as he had been trained. But that wasn’t what he knew.
What he knew was this:
The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.
She had turned away from him and wiped at the stain, the very first time she had seen him. Sophie Nance Brown, of Newport and Westchester and points south. Sophie Nance Brown with the laughing eyes, who said she had come to Paris for the adventure.
But her index finger was broken, bent backwards at an angle painful to look at, even now, when he knew she could feel nothing.
She had felt something. She had felt too much something when she went to the bridge after a long dinner on the Right Bank with friends. She wanted to feel the breeze in her hair, look at the moonlight over the Seine. She asked her traveling companion, Eleanor Rose Stockdale of Battle Creek, Michigan, to accompany her, but Eleanor Rose, a sensible girl, had heard that nice people did not stand on the bridges at night and had declined.
Later, Miss Stockdale would say she thought saying such things would discourage Miss Brown, but other friends said nothing discouraged Miss Brown when she set her mind to something.
Miss Brown had met a young man who had captured her fancy. Her interest in him was what she wanted to discuss with her friends at dinner. Knowing him had caused an ethical dilemma for her, especially since she was so far from home. He lived alone in a solitary room in one of the more disreputable hotels near the Sorbonne.
Miss Brown worried that she was too old-fashioned for the new morality, but too young to press the young man into something less exciting, something more permanent.
Instead of listening to her, Miss Brown’s friends teased her “mercilessly.” They laughed their way through dinner, interrupting her, until she grew angry, threw down her napkin along with a few francs and left the restaurant, heading for the Pont Neuf.
The Pont Neuf was suggestive, Miss Stockdale said, because Miss Brown found it romantic.
Miss Brown stood in the center of the bridge, peering out over the Seine at the famed lights of Paris, thinking that no woman should stand in such a spot alone. The light played with her old-fashioned hairstyle and her modern clothing, her ankles nicely turned out, the skirt accenting her shapely legs.
He had noticed that. He had noticed the contradiction from the start.
Decker paused, his wrists aching. He had them bent at an odd angle. His headache had cleared for the first time since he started drinking in Paris.
He wasn’t writing news any longer-or at least, he wasn’t writing news that he recognized. He was writing something else, seeing something else, something he didn’t want to think about.
The pages had piled up on the small desk beside his typewriter. The voice was odd. It wasn’t his, and it wasn’t exactly the voice of impartial journalist. He was edging into something else, something his editors would disapprove of-“worried” and “thinking” and “noticing”-actual viewpoints, which were not allowed in the dispassionate prose of journalism.
Decker rolled another sheet of paper in the platen, ready to type that damning “the” again, ready to leave it, and count all of this as an aberration.
Instead, he continued:
He had watched her since she got off the boat. She wore a wide brimmed hat with a red ribbon, fanciful and old-fashioned. Her clothing hinted at a girl who wanted to break out of the old ways, but her hair spoke of a girl who cherished what had come before.
Almost Parisian. Modern, yet grounded in the past. He loved his city, and he wished others would as well. But he did not love the tourists, particularly the American ones, with their loud braying laughter and their lack of manners.
Although they grew their women tall and beautiful in America. Solid women, with high cheekbones and flashing eyes.
He followed her to her hotel, then watched her, meeting her first on the Champs Elysees, then finding her in the Tuileries, regaling her with stories of his novel-every young man in Paris these days had a novel- his notebook clutched in his hand…
Decker stopped. Those memories, the things he saw, they weren’t his? He frowned, trying to see something else, trying to remember when he had first met her. The date-
He dreamed of her. He dreamed of her, after he had found her. Six months into his stay in Paris.
Six months.
But he had never seen her, touched her, laughed with her. He hadn’t really encountered her until he saw her half-naked foot hanging off the walkway, her shoe dangling over the sparkling waters of the Seine.
Only it wasn’t her shoe. The killer changed the shoes. That was his little joke. He tossed her sensible shoes in the water and gave her little Parisian heels, delicate shoes that he had bought just for this purpose…
Not Decker. Him,
Etienne Netter, whose apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement had been in his family for six decades. His parents long dead, his mother distressed when he came home from the War with “haunted eyes.”
“But at least I am home, Mother,” he said plaintively, when so many young men had not come home. She had not seen what he had seen, how the blood turned French fields into mud, all for the sake of a few
