Page 31 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

The woman squinted at the screen, an inscrutable smile playing on her lips.

From what I could see of the room they were in, it was decorated with shawls and doilies.

Fringed lampshades sat haughtily atop the many small tables that dotted the space.

Jeanne sat in a green wingback armchair, and with a flourish, she produced a cigarette holder and lit the slim pink cigarette she’d inserted in the tip.

She inhaled, and when she exhaled, a great billow of what I imagined to be lavender-scented smoke exploded into the room.

“Tell me,” she said in a thick French accent, “up at Hildegard College, what kind of food do you eat?”

“Excuse me?” I said, leaning forward. “What kind of food do we eat?”

“It’s a simple question, my dear.”

“I don’t know,” I said, perplexed. “Normal food. Why do you ask?”

“When I was a little girl, my grand-père was the cook at Hildegard. His position, it was a very elite position, very high class. Everything he did there was secret. He had to sign an agreement that he would never disclose the truth of what he saw there. But I never signed a thing.”

She leaned back in her chair as a sly smile spread across her lips.

“She visited as a child,” said Guillaume.

She nodded. “Several times. My grand-père took me with him to see the parties.”

“There were parties?” I asked, feeling strangely uneasy, almost like I was choking—as if even over Zoom the smoke in the air was getting to me.

“Oh yes,” Jeanne said, eyes wide. “The most opulent parties. There were kings and queens, the aristocracy. All the best people. When I was about, oh, five, there was one out in this enormous temple. It was deep in the woods. Lights hanging everywhere, sparkling, magnificent. It was like being in the realm of the fairies. Or on the moon. And my grand-père made a lavish feast with suckling pig. Clark Gable was there. I sat on his knee.”

“Clark Gable?” I asked, perhaps a little too overtly suspicious. “The actor?”

“Not just an actor,” she said, brandishing her cigarette like it was a wand. “The most famous movie star of his time. Handsome like you wouldn’t believe.”

I smiled, trying to be genial. Kids and old people made me nervous, so old people lying about what happened when they were kids left me in a panic.

“Guillaume said that Sabine came to talk to you shortly before she died.”

The old woman plumped out her bottom lip in a pout. “She did, poor creature.”

“She wanted to know about Hildegard?”

Again, that wry, slightly malevolent grin trembled across her lips. “You know how girls are. They want to wear fancy dresses and go to balls. They want to meet princes.”

Again with this. At least I could see now where Guillaume had gotten his dismissive attitude toward young women. But I decided to forgo the lecture.

“But there aren’t parties like that here anymore, are there?”

“Maybe there are, maybe there aren’t,” she said with a wink. “Anyway, I told Sabine to go up and see what she could find out. That there might be a job for her—maybe in the kitchen, maybe on the grounds, you never know.”

“Did she talk to anyone here?” I asked.

“She met with a woman, and this woman paid her to do something. Started paying her lots of money, more money than kitchen work should be. Sabine was very excited about it all—by what was to come. I did not like this woman, but she said she had more jobs in store from Sabine, that she wanted to include her in some kind of secret enterprise. Unfortunately, that never came to pass.”

A shock rode through me as I listened to her speak. Was it possible Sabine had met with Casimir? Lexi’s face also flashed through my mind.

I was getting lost in the possibilities, but the old lady was talking now, monologuing about various celebrities she’d met as a child.

If she was telling the truth, then the scope of the college’s connection to the elite strata of society was even greater than I had imagined, but why would the rich and famous have congregated at a remote monastery in the Rocky Mountains?

Of course she could always be lying. She could have sent Sabine up there with her head full of make-believe. When she stopped talking briefly to light another cigarette, I took the opportunity to get a word in.

“I was wondering how Sabine seemed to you in the days leading up to her death.”

“Her death? Non, we still don’t know for sure that she is dead.”

I cocked my head. “But the article I read said she was mauled by a bear.”

“True.” She nodded. “However, there is no body.”

I froze. “No body? Then how can they know she was mauled by a bear?”

The old woman smiled. “We don’t. As far as I’m concerned, my granddaughter is very much alive.”

I had no idea what to say. I wasn’t sure if she was delusional or if the account I read had been wrong. Either way, I needed to shift the subject.

“Okay, so then in the days before her disappearance, how did she seem to you?”

“I didn’t see her much. She stopped by a short while maybe a week before she disappeared. She was in good spirits.”

“Did she say anything that worried you?”

“Worried me? No. She was secretive about what she was doing, but she seemed happy.” Her gaze shifted to me. “You don’t believe me about Clark Gable, do you?”

After setting her cigarette holder down precariously on the edge of a too-small table, she pushed her slight frame up and out of her chair, and in a flurry of lace and chiffon, she swept out of the frame.

I could hear a cabinet door open and the shuffling of paper.

Guillaume, still on the screen, looked at me apologetically.

A moment later, Jeanne returned holding a photo album.

She sank slowly to the floor like a child playing at fairy princess and began thumbing through the pages.

“Guillaume, hand me my spectacles.”

He reached over and handed her a pair of glasses, which she put on, and then slapped the page of the photo album she was looking at.

“There it is. I told you.” She held up a photo. “Guillaume, make it so she can see the photo.”

He held it up to the camera so I was unable to see anything but the photograph. It was sepia and faded, but the grounds of the college were clear—the garden, the lake in the background—and on a bench sat a mustachioed man with a little girl on his lap. So she’d been telling the truth.

“Very nice,” I said. “That’s definitely Clark Gable.”

I’d been intending to ask more about the woman at Hildegard with whom Sabine had been in contact, but when Guillaume moved the photo, I was shocked to see that Jeanne’s expression had changed markedly.

Instead of the bright-eyed, ruby-cheeked old woman I’d met a few moments earlier, my computer screen showed a stunned-looking creature, her skin suddenly pallid beneath the vast quantities of rouge.

She looked like a completely different person—upset, horrified even.

She whispered something to Guillaume and then pushed herself up out of the chair.

He looked at me, stunned. “We must go,” he said. “Grand-mère is feeling unwell. We must go.”

“Now!” Jeanne snapped from somewhere off-screen.

“Can we speak again?” I asked quickly, but Guillaume’s window suddenly winked out, and I was left staring at my own confused face.