She lay curled into a ball with her hands over her face. Slowly she moved, stretching out her legs, then her arms. The floor beneath her was hard, cold, and slightly damp. Like rock. She rubbed it and realized that it was exactly like rock. She was in a cave. Bats! she nearly screamed.
Mimi sat up and wrapped her arms around her bent knees. It took several minutes to stop shaking, she was so frightened, but she drew a few deep breaths and decided to try another experiment. She spoke out loud. Nothing. She called out again, this time louder. Her voice echoed, but it wasn’t a long echo. She remembered an outing with Madame Puguet. They drove into the mountains. There they had picnicked and walked into a cave that had gone on and on. When they were so far away they couldn’t see the entrance, they had called out and their voices echoed back and forth and back again. This was different. This place didn’t sound very big.
Her stomach growled and tears overflowed her eyes and fell onto her cheeks. If only she had Elie. She gulped and strained to see, but there was nothing. It was black, black, black. What would Monsieur Arsov do? Something. That’s what he said, that he never gave up and he always did something. Keep moving forward, he said. She inched forward, sliding on the rock. Nothing changed and she moved a little more. There was a scuttling noise nearby and she froze, then she understood what it was and started to cry in earnest.
Thirty-one
Agnes stopped at the door to a room she had not seen before, as surprised by its interior as she was to see Doctor Blanchard hunched over a microscope in the middle of the night. A row of oil lamps cast overlapping shadows across the table in front of him.
“Couldn’t sleep thinking about the girl,” he said when she entered. “Settled for this.” He waved a hand over the instruments.
“I agree.” Agnes had the same problem sleeping. She was exhausted, but couldn’t rest thinking of Mimi not in her bed. She suspected others were wandering the corridors of the chateau, unable to sleep, waiting for daybreak so they could continue to look for the girl. After they officially called off the search for the night she had asked Petit to radio up the hill and alert the gendarmerie. The transmission was an admission that there was real cause for concern. At the same time, Agnes knew that alerting the village police was giving false hope to everyone around her. Mimi hadn’t climbed the cliff. Perhaps it would be better if she had.
Madame Puguet had whispered the idea to her: could Mimi have wandered out to the edge of the lake and fallen through? The frozen edge was deceiving. Even if Mimi knew that there was no land under the far end of the cliff she might have been tempted to edge her way onto the seemingly solid surface. Every winter otherwise intelligent adults fell through ice-coated lakes and ponds and died. A full day after Mimi disappeared there was no chance she would have survived a plunge into the lake. This would be a search for her remains.
Keeping the darkest of her thoughts to herself, Agnes had assured the distraught housekeeper that they would search the lake’s edge at first light. Carnet and Petit had seen no child-sized footprints during their searches; however, they couldn’t guarantee she hadn’t ventured outside. Some patches of ice had little or no snow. Agnes didn’t know what she would do if they found the girl frozen in the lake.
For now, for another hour, she had to content herself with waiting. Returning her attention to Blanchard, she looked around the room with renewed interest. The four walls contained a kind of mad scientist’s chamber, with weights, scales, glass beakers, and, in pride of place, a double row of sleek microscopes with gleaming brass and nickel fittings arrayed across two tables. Agnes lifted her light to the walls. Glass-fronted boxes displayed pinned butterflies in perpetual flight. She scanned past an arachnid display, hoping the eight-legged creatures were well and truly dead, before landing on a fully articulated skeleton hanging on a wire.
“Daniel Vallotton told me his uncle was a scientist,” said the doctor. “Died young. An experiment gone awry. He left behind quite a collection of instruments and specimens.” Blanchard shifted a box of bones onto the table. “Officer Petit took me out again late last night to see our body. Mademoiselle Cowell, I mean. Nothing to be done right now, but I wanted to check on her.”
Agnes could imagine the doctor tucking the corpse in for the night, telling her to be patient, they would get her to a morgue soon enough. Mulholland’s time in the ice house had offended the doctor’s sensibilities. A corpse should at least have privacy.
“These bones I could do something with,” Blanchard said, tapping the box. “The microscopes are high quality even if they are antiques.”