“I tell you they were up there. You don’t see them? A talking head or two?”
Theo took out his smartphone and snapped some pictures of the contents of the attic. He had wanted to believe in Egon’s story and was disappointed in equal measure for himself and for his friend, but it seemed little more than a nightmare, a delirium brought about by too much drink or too little company. “The assembly has disassembled. They were sad to see you go. I’m coming down.”
On his way to the hatch, he tripped when his foot struck an object on the floor and kicked it across the room, two pieces parting and skittering in different directions. Theo crawled on his hands and knees to fetch them. Two pale blue shoes, women’s heels, one whole and one broken. Kay had worn such a pair. He cupped them in his hands the way he had once held her feet.
16
A half-eaten baguette stuffed with jambon and mozzarella sat on Foucault’s desk. He set the shoes next to his sandwich and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. Theo and Egon eased into the chairs facing him, anxious to begin, but they were all waiting for Thompson to arrive. The shoe with the broken heel leaned against the upright shoe. In the stark light of the police office, Theo was more convinced that the pair had belonged to Kay. The policeman regarded them indifferently, as if they were ordinary shoes and not a clue to her disappearance. He seemed more interested in his interrupted lunch.
“You must forgive my colleague,” Thompson said as he entered the squad room. “If he doesn’t get fed by a certain hour, he gets crabby and fickle.” He came around the desk to shake hands with his visitors. “What’s this I hear about shoes?”
They told him three versions of the story. In the first, innocently enough, they had returned to the toy store, remembering how Kay had loved it so, and seeing it abandoned, they tried the door and rummaged around inside, and came across the discarded pair of shoes. “I am almost certain,” Theo told the detectives, “that these are the ones she was wearing the night she vanished. She liked to wear them with her yellow sundress.”
“But why would your wife have gone into the toy shop after midnight?” Foucault asked.
“It was on the route between the cirque and our flat. I don’t know, perhaps someone was after her and she needed a place to hide. Perhaps that’s why she broke a heel, she was running away from him.”
“A very distinctive color,” Thompson said, picking up the broken-heeled shoe. “If these are hers … The right size, I assume?”
“I don’t know what size she wore—we had only been married a short time, so it is hard to say.”
Foucault finished chewing another bite from his sandwich. “But you don’t know for certain. Could be a random pair of lost shoes.”
The second version peeled back another layer to the story. Egon began with a confession—that he had gone back alone and broken into the Quatre Mains well after Theo had left town. That he had found the matchbook with the cryptic SOS. Theo dug the matchbook from his wallet and handed it to Thompson.
“‘Help,’” the detective read aloud. “‘Get me out of here.’ Is this your wife’s handwriting, Mr. Harper?”
“Hard to say. Normally, she didn’t print like that; in fact, I don’t think I ever saw her printing.”
Thompson handed the matchbook to Foucault, who inspected both sides with mild curiosity. “Have you ever been to this Les Déesses in Montreal? Some sort of gentlemen’s club, monsieur?”
“Of course that’s her handwriting,” Egon said. “Just as those are her shoes. I’m telling you, she was at the Quatre Mains.”
The sergeant flipped the matchbook next to the shoes. “It could be a clue. Or it could be a joke. A random bit of trash in an abandoned store. Perhaps this is a note from a stripper to one of her customers? Les liaisons dangereuses.”
Thompson asserted his authority. “We will look into it, obviously. But unless you could be sure there is a connection to your wife—”
“I tell you she was there,” Egon insisted. “The place is haunted. I heard them. I seen them.”
“Seen whom?” Foucault asked.
“The puppets. The ones who took her.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” Theo said. “Just his imagination running away.”
The third version was the true story. Egon told them the whole thing from the beginning. How he had found himself homeless and nipped into the shop for a few nights out of the cold. How he had discovered the broken toys and puppets in the attic. How they had seemed to be alive and threatening, and how he went to New York to fetch Theo to see for himself. “As sure as I’m sitting here, those things were alive. And they have something to do with the disappearance of Kay Harper. There was a book of scripts in the attic, with all their weird plays and so on.”