The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller. Kate Horsley

or Noé or anybody. In the end, I just spent the whole night feeling totally paranoid, making a bullet-point list of suspects (in other words, a list of all the people I’ve met here so far):

       Noémie Blavette

       her mom, Émilie

       Marlene who works at the café

       Émilie’s British friend Stella

       the school caretaker, Monsieur Raymond

       the local kids who hang around the pool

      Seriously, though, I can’t think of any reason any of them would send me snuff movie texts. After all, I’m just an ordinary girl who happens to be a long, long way from home.

       Molly Swift

      JULY 30, 2015

      Halfway back to the hotel, a pair of headlights glared in my rearview mirror, burning full blaze. I shielded my eyes. The car came closer, going faster. I craned around, blinded by the lights. Behind me, the car was almost touching. I braced for impact, squeezed my eyes half shut. I heard the engine rev, the rubber squeal of the tires swerving around me. As it flew past, it swiped the side of my rental, jolting the car.

      I almost steered into a ditch but I didn’t stop. I kept on driving, forcing the little car back on course. I could feel the sweat streaming down my collar. By the time I was straight and steady again, the red taillights of the other car were just visible in the distance like the eyes of a demon dog. Then they left me in darkness.

      Everything around—the white moths shivering in the headlights, the treetops soughing in the wind, the bats, the night noises—fucking everything gave me the creeps. I drove on instinct alone. No higher brain function available. Just getting towards people, lights, civilization as fast as I could, away from the silent house and whoever was in there with me. Twice I drove into one of the loose-dirt ditches that run the length of the narrow roads, once out of sheer nerves, once because a car came straight at me around a bend, headlights blazing, radio blaring. We almost crashed. I swerved. It was only sitting in the ditch, the other car’s horn blaring angrily into the distance, that I realized I was on the wrong side of the road. I sat, took a deep breath, took out a cigarette.

      I pride myself on my stoic nature. I always have, from my tree-climbing, bottle-rocket-building childhood onward. I talk straight. I swear loud. I honor promises. Like John Wayne, but female and much less right wing. If you asked me to describe myself in a word it would be tough. Or bitch. Or maybe tough bitch, but after the scrabble out of the Blavette house, the headlights on the way home, it took a full ten minutes until my hands stopped shaking enough that I could light that cigarette.

      I couldn’t help wondering if it was Monsieur Raymond who had opened the door at the house, followed me along the dark road. Take it from your unreliable narrator: there was something creepy about that creepy caretaker. No way of knowing for sure, though.

      My phone binged at me from its plastic rest on the dash. A message popped up—Bill asking if I was still alive.

      I tapped to call him. He picked up after two rings but didn’t say anything. “Hey, Bill. You good?”

      “Who wants to know?” He sounded cranky. A couple of days without checking in, and already the sarcasm had begun.

      “Me, Molly,” I said with a laugh, taking a drag of my cigarette, my eyes flicking nervously to the rearview to see if anyone was there. “You losing the plot without me there?”

      “Flattery will get you everywhere, you know,” he said in the deadpan tone I knew and loved.

      “That how I ended up working for you for peanuts?”

      “Ha. You got anything on this girl yet?”

      “Yeah. But listen, I gotta go,” I said, turning the ignition.

      “You okay? You sound …”

      “Call you later.” I hung up and turned out into the road.

      I knew St. Roch was a short drive from the Blavette house, but nonetheless it seemed like a very long while before my poor car juddered to a halt outside the Overlook—the seen-better-days hotel Bill had booked me a room in. Actually, the only hotel in town, a grand old turn-of-the-century building with a comfy three-star hotel inside. Its original name, Le Napoléon, better befit its air of seedy hubris.

      But I love a fleapit, and the Orwellian level of journalistic commitment it implies. I love that you meet people from all walks of life, that you can drink out of a paper bag or eat pizza or smoke cigarettes (hell, probably even crack) in your room. Most of all, I love that there are people inside and the lights are always on.

      After the trauma at the Blavette house, I felt that life owed me a pack of Gauloises and a whiskey. My room in the Napoléon can just about sustain a guest edging around the single bed to turn on the TV or open the door, and the pissoir is so closely situated that you can practically use it from the bed if you’ve got good aim. You can also turn the TV on with one toe as you smoke out the window. So instead of going straight to my room, I walked past the bored desk clerk playing Angry Birds, past the wolf pack of journalists decamped from the hospital to the hotel bar. As soon as I reached that comforting oasis of wood and free peanuts, I ordered a double JD.

      I stared into the drink, my pale, freckly face suspended in the dark liquid like a bad moon rising, my hair wild. Not a good look. Turning to my phone, I checked for messages, pretending to myself that I wasn’t still shaking. There were two: one from my mom and another from Bill. I texted Mom that I was really fine, and left Bill for later.

      Playing silently on the TV over the bar was a news bulletin about the missing Blavettes, showing the faces of the mother, the son, the daughter. Pictures harvested from their Facebook accounts just as Quinn’s have been. Photos showing smiling faces, glowing tans, people with places to go and everything to live for.

      Back in Paris, when the #AmericanGirl story broke, I did as much Googling around as I could on my phone. News about Quinn was easy to find. Deeper searches led me to a dedicated subreddit as well as a concerned group of Facebook well-wishers, online supporters for this viral heroine having sprung up overnight like chanterelles. The main theory of the subreddit armchair detectives (the very same sweetly fanatical cellar-dwellers who tune in to my show each week) is that the family went to visit a relative, to get away for a weekend. They’ve been roundly criticized as irresponsible for leaving a foreign exchange student in their care to wander and wash up broken. Now the police have declared them officially missing, the clock will begin ticking, as it is already ticking for the girl.

      After messages, I flipped through the photographs I’d taken with my iPhone, glancing at dark and poorly composed images of the woods, the house, the bedrooms in darkness. The one that made me pause longest was the photo of the photo on Émilie Blavette’s nightstand, so different from the fake-smiley Facebook ones issued by the police. In the picture from the nightstand, Émilie looks happy. She hugs her husband close, though he stands more aloof, all French and cool in his sunglasses and crisp shirt. Young Raphael leans his head on her shoulder, a gangly fourteen-year-old momma’s boy. Noémie at twelve is a chubby little thing, cute in her pigtails and halter top, hugging Daddy tight.

      How does a whole family disappear? Leave the face of the earth without a trace? From reading the news and snooping at the house, I know this: one minute the Blavettes were a normal(ish) happy(ish) family—the son a star athlete, just beginning his university career in film-making, the daughter a shy girl who loved ballet and ponies and boy bands, the mom a former head teacher. One minute they were going to the beach, posing for smiling photos, the next, gone. And what of the American girl, who they’d invited to be part of their family for a summer? How did she fit into this picture?

      I took advantage of the better standard of Wi-Fi in the bar to check out Twitter (#AmericanGirl still trending, video still viral) and Facebook. I’d