She paused before answering. “Who are you?”
The calico cat slipped inside through Miss LaBarge’s legs. “It’s me,” I said, unable to comprehend why she didn’t recognize me. “Renée. From philosophy class last year?”
“How did you get in?”
“I squeezed through the bars,” I said, putting my hand on the door frame. Miss LaBarge jolted at my advance.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, wedging the tip of the shovel deeper into the gap.
I searched her face, baffled. Maybe she had lost her memory. Maybe that’s why she was acting this way. “I don’t want anything. I—I didn’t know you were going to be here. But now that you are, I just—I’d like to talk to you. Everyone thinks you died.” I lowered my voice. “It was on the news. I went to your funeral. I watched my grandfather bury you in the ocean. But now you’re here.”
She looked at me, and then at Noah. “You’re both students at Gottfried?”
“Lycée St. Clément,” Noah said.
“What are your names?” she asked.
“Renée Winters,” I said.
“Noah Fontaine.”
Miss LaBarge squinted at me, as if trying to see something she hadn’t seen before. “Winters? The daughter of Lydia and Robert?”
I loosened my grip on my bag. “Yes,” I said, confused. “You knew them.”
Without warning, she receded into the darkness.
“Wait!” I yelled, but it was too late. She had already shut the door.
I rang the bell again and then collapsed with a sigh on the edge of a cement pot by the railing. A black cat that had been sleeping inside hissed and jumped out. “I don’t understand,” I murmured, looking up at Noah.
He put a finger to his lips. On the other side of the door, I heard something clicking, and then just as abruptly as it had closed, the door reopened.
“Get inside,” she said, her eyes darting about the quiet street behind us as we shuffled past her.
The convent was dark and drafty. After bolting the locks, Miss LaBarge gave us a quick glance. She led us through a series of rooms, each one sparsely decorated with little more than a table and a few chairs. There were cats everywhere—curled around the banister, stretching on the windowsills, yawning from beneath the radiators. A Persian jumped down from a mantel and followed us until we reached the kitchen. Miss LaBarge turned on the overhead lightbulb, which bathed her in a dingy yellow glow.
There she was: her plain brown hair, small nose, and ruddy cheeks that made her look like a farm girl. Leaning on the back of a chair, she opened her mouth to say something, but then changed her mind and walked to the stove.
Arrested at the sight of her in the light, I shuddered, my entire body growing cold. Something wasn’t right.
This woman looked exactly like Miss LaBarge, but at the same time she didn’t. Her features were the same, yes, but the angles weren’t correct. Her cheekbones looked a little higher; her jawline looked a little heavier; the wrinkles around her eyes looked a little less defined, as if she were a grainy photocopy of the real Annette.
She removed the lid from a dented kettle, crossed to the sink, and filled the kettle under the faucet. “Tea?”
I must have been staring, because Noah nudged me with his elbow.
“Yes, thanks,” I said.
Miss LaBarge moved too briskly about the room. I watched, horrified, as she sliced a lemon and squeezed its juice into her tea. Miss LaBarge always preferred cream.
“You’re—you’re not Miss LaBarge at all.”
The impostor put down the lemon and gave me a sad sort of look, like she pitied me. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she pulled out two chairs at a plain wooden table. “Please, sit down.”
Noah sat down at the end of the table, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I felt paralyzed and confused and angry, so angry. Who was this woman pretending to be Miss LaBarge?
Setting two mugs of tea on the table for us, she took a seat across from Noah. “My name is Collette LaBarge,” she said. “I’m Annette’s younger sister.”
I nearly spilled my tea. “What?”
“Annette is dead. She died in August. I’m her younger sister.”
All at once, everything suddenly made sense. I hadn’t been seeing Miss LaBarge this year; I had been seeing her sister. It seemed too easy and too dreary to be true.
She frowned. “You look disappointed.”
“I thought—”
“You thought she was still alive. You wish I were someone else.” Collette’s eyes had a coldness to them, and her hands were balled into fists, as if she were ready to fight. She leaned back in her chair. “I’m sorry.”
“So there’s no way she’s still alive?” I uttered, only realizing then that somewhere within me I had reserved the smallest hope that Miss LaBarge had survived.
Collette lowered her eyes. “No.”
“But then why are you here?” I asked. “Why are you in hiding? No one knows about you. You didn’t even come to her funeral.”
“I did attend.”
“I saw you, then,” I said, realizing that it was Collette on the coast that day as we sailed away. “But you weren’t on the boat. You were on the shore.”
“Annette and I weren’t close.”
I shook my head, trying to understand. “But every time I saw you on the street you acted like you didn’t want to be seen.”
She put down her mug. “When have you seen me?”
“The first time was at Miss LaBarge’s burial. The second time was when your car stopped at an intersection. I wanted to talk to you, but you vanished. The third time, I was with Noah at a bakery in the old port, when you walked by. We followed you downtown, where you took an elevator into the underground. When we made it to the tunnels, we couldn’t find you anywhere.”
Collette didn’t say anything for a long time, her eyes darting between us. Finally, she spoke. “Why have you come here?”
Noah’s eyes met mine, but neither of us answered.
“Was someone chasing you?” she said, her eyes wild.
“We were looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters,” I said finally.
Collette coughed.
“You know it?” I said, studying the way her eyes widened, the way she shifted her weight.
“You’re asking a dangerous question,” she said softly. “Looking for the secret of the Nine Sisters can only bring death—just like your parents’, my sister’s, Cindy Bell’s. Or you’ll become like me, living in confinement, waiting for the Liberum.”
“It’s too late,” I said. “They already found us.”
As my words sank in, a flicker of understanding passed over her face. Her body grew tense as her eyes moving from us to the window. “Did they follow you here?”
“What do you know?” I said.
“Did you bring them here?” she said, growing panicked.
“It’s possible,” I admitted. “Please, tell us what you know. There isn’t much time.”
She pushed her tea across the table and gave me a level look. “I’ll show you.”
We followed her down a corridor and one set of stairs, until we were in an old cellar.
“We all became friends at Gottfried—your mother, Annette, Cindy, me. That’s where we first heard about Les Neuf Soeurs. Like everyone else, at first we were just intrigued, but as we did more research, we started to believe that the secret still existed, hidden by the mysterious ninth sister. And what started as a hobby turned into an obsession.
“We traveled all over Europe—France, Italy, England —looking for any kind of information that might identify her. We searched through all of the French Monitor archives, looking for a talented girl of seventeen who had lived around the time of the Nine Sisters. Of course we didn’t find anything. The problem was that we had focused our entire search on France, since that’s where the Nine Sisters had come from. It never even crossed our minds to look in Montreal, where they sent their youngest member for schooling.”
Collette walked to a hutch in the corner of the cellar. She opened one of the drawers and took out what looked like a box of loose leaf tea. Lifting the lid, she removed an envelope, yellowed with time.
“Annette gave this to me before she was killed. She said your parents had given it to her, and that it was incredibly important I keep it safe.”
With that, she handed it to me. The paper was so worn it was almost transparent. It was addressed to Alma Alphonse in France. I remembered the name from Madame Goût’s lecture: Alma was one of the eight sisters who was murdered. Gently, I opened the envelope and removed the paper, flattening it on the counter. It was faded and creased and smudged with oil, as if it had been folded and unfolded dozens of times. The right-hand corner was embossed with the crest of a canary.
April 2, 1732
Cher Alma,
I fear we have made a grave mistake with Ophelia. Her doctor at the Saint-Laurent says she is responding well to treatment; however, after visiting her in Montreal, I am quite worried. She seems rash and unable to control her urges. In confidence, she confessed to me that she often desires to kiss people, and her mood fluctuates between rapture and severe melancholy, in which she complains of the world clouding to tedium. She is resistant to the treatment we give to her kind, and speaks of suffering from a moral crisis and lovesickness, though it is unclear with whom she is in love. The only person she seems fond of is her doctor, Bertrand Gottfried.
She has taken an unusual fancy to water. Her nurses say she studies it day and night, staring at the basin in her room or sitting by the fountain, a practice which is in stark contrast to the vigor and discipline she held as first rank Monitor. No doubt this is a reaction to the fire; however,
I have asked them to remove her from St. Clément for the safety of the other students. Doctor Gottfried expressed interest in taking her to the American colonies, where he plans on opening a new hospital for the Undead, though I wonder if it will help. I implore you to consider the safety of our discovery. Ophelia Hart has changed too much. We cannot trust her, and I beg of you to consider the option of putting her to rest.