The scene was crystal clear in her head.
“I killed her with my own hands. I remember perfectly. You guys barging into her house threw her into a fit. She was in some sort of trance. I took advantage of it to free myself. I stabbed her.”
Leroy knit his brow.
“You’re sure you didn’t dream this?” Vauvert suggested.
Eva bit her lip.
“Listen, guys, who do you think you’re talking to? I was delirious but not that bad. I studied human anatomy enough. I’m telling you that I drove a blade between that woman’s ribs and pierced her heart.”
She looked at them both, in turns.
“You didn’t find her body, did you?”
Vauvert cleared his throat, uneasy.
“Well…”
“No,” Leroy cut in. “Not yet.”
Eva was dumbfounded.
“I swear I’m telling you the truth,” she insisted.
“We believe you.”
“I stabbed her in the heart!”
“We believe you,” Vauvert repeated. “She must have hidden somewhere after you got out. We’ll find her body. Three whole teams are out there. They’re checking every nook and cranny. Everybody is on the case.”
Eva said nothing. In her mind’s eye, the memories were playing in an endless loop. There could be no mistake. She had aimed accurately. She knew it. She could see herself driving in the scalpel. The blade had penetrated this woman’s vital organ. She had been splashed by her blood.
A river of it.
A black river.
A shiver ran through her. Eva remembered all of this. Still, parts of her memory were still a blur.
She had jammed the scalpel into the masked woman’s heart. But, before that?
Why didn’t remember anything?
She didn’t understand.
But she dug deeper.
And this time, she remembered.
She remembered her twin sister leaning over her and the comfort of the little girl’s arms.
And she remembered that other basement twenty-four years earlier. She remembered the man who had thrown them both down the staircase, her and her sister, and her heart began to pound.
“Oh,” she said, twisting the bedsheets.
She remembered the man pressing Justyna’s against his chest, all the while staring at Eva with his blood- red eyes.
She remembered Justyna’s cries as the knife blade cut into her little-girl flesh.
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Neither of the two men in the room could begin to understand the reason for that sudden outpouring of tears.
It was better that way.
She swept away the visions with the back of her hand and took a breath.
“Say guys, can you find me a pair of sunglasses? The light in here is driving me nuts.”
79
The Havre-Caumartin Metro Station. The escalator dumps a torrent of metro riders into the afternoon drizzle. Amid the anonymous umbrellas, raincoats, and hoodies, she emerges, draped in a long coat that conceals a decrepit body. No one’s paying attention to her wrinkled skin. In fact, no one pays any attention to her at all. She’s just a stooped-over old lady. There are many of them in this throng of people going in and out of stores, pausing for a few moments at the red light before moving again and spreading out on the boulevard. She moves along with the flow.
A speeding car hits a puddle and sends up a wave of muddy water. The woman beside her, in heels and holding an outrageously expensive handbag tight, hurls a flood of insults at the driver. But the old lady pays it no mind and continues walking toward her destination. She is saving her strength. Soon she will need it.
She is absolutely confident.
She knows she is almost there.
The gods are watching. The gods are impatient now.
She turns off Rue de Caumartin and walks along a narrower, quieter street, checking the building numbers, one after the other.
The building she’s looking for is at the very end of the block. It is a six-story apartment building, its stone facade blackened by pollution.
Just before she reaches it, two girls pass her. They are talking animatedly about some other girl in school. They are no more than thirteen years old. They run up the stairs, and one of them slaps her key card against the magnetic reader.
“Rebecca, wait. You’re sure your folks aren’t home, right?”
The one called Rebecca pushes the door open with a sigh.
“I told you like a hundred times already! Dad’s at work, and Mom’s at the gym. No chance they’ll be there to bug us. And I have to tell you what that bitch Nadya did today. I swear to God you’re going to freak out!”
Her friend follows her inside and, without a second thought, holds the door for the old woman climbing the steps.
“I can’t stay too long, okay? Or my folks will chew me out again. Wanna’ guess what their latest thing is? They think I’m doing drugs! Just because of the picture I posted on my profile. You know, the one where I’m pretending to drink whisky from the bottle. Can you believe that?”
“Your folks are, like, so messed up.”
The elevator doors slide open. The two teens hop inside and then wait for the old lady to walk in.
“You’re good kids,” she tells them in a sibilant whisper.
She has an odd smell. The girls frown but don’t say anything. Rebecca presses the sixth-floor button.
“Which floor you going to, ma’am?”
“Same as you.”
The girls give her a wary glance. They’ve never seen this woman in the building before. She looks so old. The doors close silently, and the elevator starts going up.
Ill at ease, the girls stare at their feet.
The elevator reaches its destination. It stops with a soft bump.
“So, that bitch Nadya…”
But Rebecca stops in midsentence. The elevator doors still haven’t opened.
“What the hell is going on?”
The light goes off.
“Shit!”
“I can’t believe this!”
They begin pounding on the door.
“Hey! Let us out! Can anybody hear us?”
In the darkness, they don’t see the scalpel in the old lady’s hands.
