Autumn break trundled on. After the Samhain Formal, the entire student body was some combination of 1) hungover, 2) disgruntled about their failed business deals, 3) lazily riding on their successful business deals, or 4) stressed to the point of paralysis about future business deals. The campus was pleasantly subdued without the normal rush of classes.
Of course, some nerds were still hard at work. For example, today, a mostly-recovered Antoinette was in a meeting with one of the other magi-botany class groups to discuss their project.
Sooooo, I decided to misbehave a little bit and use her makeup.
Look, I had to disguise myself somehow. The backstory goons and their cohorts clearly knew my plain face, since I didn’t wear makeup on the daily and I’d had little more than some eyeliner and shadow during the Samhain Formal.
Rémi knocked on my door halfway through, trying with all his might to initiate a game event, but I turned him down. He grinned at me, totally recognising that he’d just walked into the equivalent of a little girl trying on mommy’s makeup. At least Marie let me encourage him to drop the date, and he left.
When I was done, I looked more 2010’s Taylor Momsen than anything else. It made my reflection alienating and unfamiliar all over again, so it was perfect, even if it’d shock the people of the nearby hamlet. I tied up my black hair and tucked it under a pageboy cap I'd stolen from Lou's room yesterday when planning this trip, and the look was complete.
Once I arrived at the hamlet near La Belle Lavande, I had no idea where to start. It wasn’t like anyone had quest marker exclamation points floating above their heads.
But in games, you learned things by talking and looking around until every stone was turned, right?
I popped into boutiques and cafes, asking the workers and anyone who looked at me too long if they knew anything about the Gagnon arson case. I flipped through the newspapers in roadside stands, sure that there’d be a conveniently concise and informational paragraph. Nothing.
Hey, Marie, want to chime in with a dialogue box? Maybe a nice jpg full of clues? No?
One place left. I walked into the police station exuding all the confidence I could.
The station–slick, dark, so full of glass panels and tables that I thought I’d shatter the place if I stomped too hard–was deserted except for a young secretary at the front desk. He was so comically weedy and nerdy that I could practically see the spirals drawn on his oversized glasses and the messy curlicues sprouting from his sandy brown hair. He tossed down the stack of loose files he was holding, caught the few that made a leap for the floor, and said, “H-hello? What brings you here today?”
“Hiya. I need a little help with something.”
He squinted at my face. I may have misjudged how much the raccoon-eye makeup would help me. “O-of course. I can call a guard–”
“No, that’s okay. You can help! I want information on the Gagnon family arson case.” I pointedly looked at his stack of files. “Any and all information.”
He pushed up his glasses…and pushed the stack so it was tucked under the overhang of the desk, away from my prying eyes. “Anything you need, you can find in the newspapers. We–we have a free selection right outside.”
“I need things you can’t find in the newspapers.” I batted my eyelashes, summoning Marie’s sweet, persuasive naivete, tilting my tone so if it was written out, it'd be bracketed by uwu’s and ~’s. “I wish I could tell you why, but it’s really private and important to me, and I…I…I’ll be so indebted to you.”
Clearly this guy had more integrity than I guessed, because he straightened up his bony shoulders and said, “I’m very sorry. Further details on the case are classified.”
“But I said I'd be indebted to you! Don't you know what that means?”
“Miss, you can look in the newspapers.”
Argh, give me dialogue options!!!
The secretary said, voice shaky around his newfound authority, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
I scowled. “I guess not.”
“Have a good day.” He turned back to his files, kinda shuffling and flicking through them, probably so he wouldn’t have to look me in my sparkly protagonist eyes.
I dragged myself outside. All dead ends. What was I supposed to do? Wait for another informational booklet to land in Étienne’s lap? Go to another opera and hope the emcee’s trying out for a true crime gig?
Knock knock, Marie. Got a helpful memory for me?
“Chloé?”
I looked up to see Antoinette, frowning at me quizzically from a shop away.
“What on earth is on your face?”
“It’s, um, it’s a long story.”
Her gaze snapped to the station sign above my head. She strode up to me, heels clicking on the cobblestones, and said once we were side by side, “You weren’t telling them anything about the dance, were you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, what happened, then? You looked like they didn't help you. Dressed like that, it's no wonder.”
“It's a disguise.”
“Who would be looking for you?”
“The answer to that is why I'm here…”
We hadn't spoken much since the dance. I gave her privacy in our dorm to recover, electing to hang out with the guys or explore the campus, but whenever we did speak, she was apparently determined to act normal. I guess if your ‘normal’ was cranky, did it really matter if you were mad at someone for a new reason?
“You remember the Gagnons?”
“Yes, the missing family. Why?”
“I really want to learn more about them. There's gotta be some kind of police–I mean, guard report I can read, something that the newspapers can't reveal.”
She tilted her head, putting a hand on her hip. Then something occurred to her, her red eyebrows shooting up behind her bangs, and she said, “Oh, you think you're the missing daughter, don't you?”
Hearing that, I should have been alarmed. But all I felt was relief. “A little bit?”
“I was wondering when you’d figure it out.” Antoinette bit her lip, seemingly unaware of how much my relief nearly bowled me over. “Were you telling the guard that when they turned you away?”
I could kiss her feet with how easily she took the news. No wonder–it’d take the target off her back if there was a chance the poisoning wasn’t about her at all, which she seemed desperate to do. Besides, she just said I thought I was the missing daughter, not that I was.
“No way, they’d think I was crazy if I said I was a Gagnon!”
Antoinette’s blue eyes narrowed in on the weedy little secretary through the window, now trying to fit a handful of pencils into a cup in one go.
“Come with me.”
I scurried after her. The boy at the desk looked alarmed again at the intrusion, but this time, Antoinette’s presence kept him terrified.
She swept directly up to him, no slowing or weaving like I’d done, and set her hands firmly on the raised part of the desk that acted as a partition (and file-hider). “Salut. I am Antoinette Delphine, daughter of Georges Delphine, heiress to the Aconitum Corporation. A corporation who, you may know, if they respect you enough to give you any information at all, does what for the city guard?”
He blurted the answer, like a prof had called on him in class, “Th-they fund our buildings.”
Talk about a conflict of interest!
“Precisely. That chair you’re sitting on?” She extended a sharp red nail to indicate the red satin and blonde wood peeking over his narrow shoulders. “Taken right from my very own nook in my estate library. I could take it back, if I so pleased, along with anything else that belongs to the Delphines in this pathetic little office. And what is your name?”
“I–...Jean-Paul, miss.”
“Fabulous. Now that we know each other, Jean-Paul, I can trust you to listen to a concern I have, non?”
“O-of course, m-m-miss.”
“This friend of mine,” and here she gestured to me, and Jean-Paul stared at me like he hadn’t even realized I was there beyond the corona that was Antoinette (who could blame him?), “asked you for a summary of the Gagnon case, and you denied her. Is that so?”
“It’s, um, it’s confidential–”
“Oh, of course it is. I fully intend to keep this a secret between the three of us. But if you say no, well, I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep a secret about the guard secretary’s horrible rudeness to the heiress.”
She was speaking at top speed. His eyes darted all over her face like he couldn’t catch half her words.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
So when she hit him with a pointed, icy, “Yes?” he nodded out of what seemed like pure instinct.
“Merci,” she cooed. “We’ll find a private corner to read and return all files posthaste.”
“Well, um, actually…the files are locked up. I don’t have access.”
She frowned. “Excuse me?”
“These are little things.” He slid aside that damn pile of files for her to see. “Like carriage parking violations and taxes and stuff…”
I groaned. “Then why didn’t you say that?”
“Because I…um…” Jean-Paul blushed fantastically. “Because I kind of transcribed the files about the Gagnon case, so…I know…”
I lit up. Antoinette said coyly, “Oh, your thoughts on the case–every single one of them, I must insist–would be grand.”
In his halting way, constantly checking the door, Jean-Paul first gave us a refresher on the tale: out of nowhere, the Gagnon estate in the nearby city of Altolia burned to the ground. The family–Claude Gagnon, Helene Gagnon, and Marie Gagnon (shudder!) were gone. Poof. Nothing was stolen as far as investigators could tell, and the scene was too damaged to assess if there was forced entry or any blood, but they could suss out that the fire was set on purpose, oil dumped all over the floor of the entrance hall and around the support beams, so the house would collapse.
“Could you tell us more about the Gagnons?” I asked.
“Um…Helene Gagnon was pretty well-known for her business. They bound books of all kinds and even published some stuff that the big companies wouldn’t touch a-and had their own factory outside Altolia and everything. They’d gotten into a little bit of, um, trouble recently, I guess, with one of their factories getting damaged and the whole operation having to go on hold, but they were in an okay spot, because of Georges Delphine…”
Antoinette tilted her head. “My father?”
“Yes, she, um–Helene and Georges were involved in business together.”
Antoinette and I glanced at each other.
“Georges Delphine made a couple statements to the guard once the news reached the crown city,” Jean-Paul said.
Obviously I didn’t remember any of this stuff, but Antoinette’s eyebrows were dented together, giving me a hint that maybe she never knew about this either. Maybe the business stuff in question was too boring for the daughters to be involved? Antoinette said, “What kinds of statements?”
“Uh, nothing really of note, as far as I was told? Sympathies and stuff… He explained their previous work together. It was private because it was publishing and wasn’t set to be released yet, you know how that can go, reporting bans and stuff if the topic is really sensitive…”
Aaand what else?
Antoinette brushed it off. “My father has endless business connections. Are there any suspects? Persons of interest?”
He blushed and pressed his lips together. Antoinette pointedly leaned on the counter. He blurted, “The–the insurance and the will are strange.”
“How strange?” I pushed.
“The beneficiaries were changed a bit over a year ago? So in the case of Helene and Claude dying, the insurance money and the inheritance passed on to Helene’s nephew and niece.”
Antoinette asked the question that was caught in my throat. “What about the Gagnon daughter?”
“Th-that’s weird, right? So obviously the nephew and niece were…considered as suspects…but they had perfect alibis, nothing seemed amiss…I mean, last I heard…”
Although we peppered him with more questions, he couldn’t give us much more. When a guard entered the office with his fancy red suit and riding boots, Jean-Paul shut up entirely (looking more suspicious than if he’d kept talking, but whatever). Antoinette and I left.
Niece and nephew? I was stuck on that. In the game, the whole Gagnon case was half-assed and half-explained, pinning the arson on random anonymous goons who wanted to rob the Gagnon family, so their defense could easily be collapsed by Marie’s new beau helping her earn all her money back and put them in jail. Claude and Helene (not even named in Love Blooming!) died in the fire, while Marie ran off, losing her memory thanks to a head injury and plot convenience. Why hadn’t the police (police, guard, whatever) here not even found the dead parents yet? Were their bodies hidden? Were they not even dead?
And what did that mean for me?
If I was gonna get far enough in the game’s timeline to give Antoinette her happy ending, well, I’d have to run into the Gagnon murder plot too.
What if I never solved it? What if I never got the money and estate back? What would I do, just float around this world forever? Oh, god, would I have to job search again and endlessly tour apartments, this time in a world without internet?
And what if I did get the money? I couldn’t run a publishing business! I’d never had more than three thousand bucks in my bank account at any one time, and even that was right before rent was due!
I felt like I’d just stepped off the tilt-a-whirl.
“Chloé?”
I blinked up at Antoinette. We were walking aimlessly through the hamlet streets. “Sorry? What?”
“You were lost in thought. What is it?”
“I…If it is me–if I’m Marie–it’s not like I can help them solve the mystery or anything.”
“That conversation didn’t dislodge any of your memories?”
“Nope. By the way, if flowers start exploding around me, I’m probably remembering something.”
“...Noted.”
I deflated. “I feel like we’re still on square one.”
“Here’s some guidance. If the poison was about you, then investigate your little heart out. But if it was about me, I suggest you stop snooping.”
“Are you that worried about your dad finding out?” Or was she worried that if I dug, I might find out the Aconitum secrets that, in Love Blooming, landed her in prison?
“If he learns about this, he’ll turn it around on me and how stupid I’ve been. Of course he’ll want vengeance, but that will only blow everything up more. For all his lecturing me about not putting a target on my back, he sure can’t help doing the same when he’s on the warpath.”
“Antoinette, that’s not fair. It’s your safety. And–”
She waved a manicured hand at my face. “Are you still anxious? Do you want something? Will that make you feel better? There’s an ice cream shop nearby.”
I laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing, just the way you asked it. How about, ‘hey, Chloé, want to grab some ice cream?’” I grinned up at her flustered expression. “Of course. I’d love to.”
That was enough to reroute my brain. I skipped alongside her as she led me through the hamlet’s cobblestone streets, under shop awnings laden with garlands of pastel flowers and cutesy cafes with names like The Rabbit’s Den and Miss Muffet’s Tuffet and hand-painted tea sets in the windows. The smells of sweet pies and breads wafted through the hamlet.
It was like I’d fallen headfirst into one of my own sugar!Marie x Antoinette fluff drabbles. We were only missing the ice cream blotting on our cheeks and the other gently wiping it off, but there was still time for that!
When we passed a cute fountain in the middle of town, Antoinette dipped in a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to me.
“For the makeup, or whatever you were trying to do.”
I didn’t argue with washing it off. “I didn’t want anyone to point to me as the girl who was looking for info on the Gagnons.”
“That’s shot, because we needed my reputation. Besides,” she said, taking the handkerchief back now that it was streaked with eyeliner, “I think you blend in fine. You’re very pretty, but not in a very interesting way. Girls like you disappear easily. Don’t underestimate that advantage.”
Um, thank you?
Right next to the fountain was a little ice cream parlour, clearly built from the structure of a cottage home. A bell jangled over the wooden door when we entered, the hardwood floor creaking comfortably under our shoes in its own little greeting. The place was chilly to keep the ice cream from melting, and there weren’t as many flavour choices as I was used to staring down at a Baskin Robbins or a even a roadside stand that got their scoops from Costco tubs; Antoinette was quick to tell me that cherry was the best, with lemon being a close second.
I went with cherry. It was served in a little porcelain dish and with a tiny porcelain spoon that I marveled over, used to getting my ice cream in thin plastic or an edible waffle cone (far superior). We sat outside at a small mismatched table with mismatched chairs, shielded from the noon sun by a lacy umbrella.
For a minute I simply enjoyed the atmosphere–the people walking by in their old-timey clothes, talking and laughing; a horse-drawn cab carrying a pack of students I recognised from La Belle Lavande, showing each other their clothing purchases for the upcoming chilly weather; the buildings without a single polished, shaved-down corner to make them more palatable to the HOA or marketable to big-box businesses. Plus, I enjoyed Antoinette sitting quietly with me, taking dainty little bites of her lemon ice cream, but–alas!–not getting any of it dotted cutely on her nose.
“Thank you for helping me,” I said.
“Mhmm.”
“Does this have anything to do with our conversation at the dance?”
She quirked an eyebrow at me. “Conversation, is that what you're calling it?”
“Argument?”
She daintily shrugged, taking a perfect little spoonful of her ice cream and looking out at the square. “Maybe it's an apology of sorts.”
I wanted to instantly say it was okay. But something stopped me. I was ready from the first moment I stepped into this world to forgive her for everything, to ignore her crap behaviour because of the good girl underneath.
Maybe I'd totally invented that girl, with my fics and my theories.
Maybe this was the best Antoinette could do.
And I didn't want to say that was okay.
Taking a deep breath, I said, “You can't keep turning your anger onto other people.” Even if it's a little sexy when you're being commandeering. “I told you that you weren't nice, and I meant it, but I want to be persuaded otherwise.”
We sat in silence for a long moment, the hamlet whirring around us.
Finally, she said, “What if I told you that I didn't feel like it was me who did all those things?”
“I'd understand. Truly!” I added when she shot me a sardonic look. “I'd get it more than you know! I only remember who I was in flashes, right? Everything about me is unfamiliar. I keep doing things that don't feel right, because I never really, totally, feel like me. So I'd understand it. But I wouldn't automatically forgive you.”
She studied me, spoon in her mouth. “You're already more forgiving than I deserve.”
“You have friends; I'm not the only one who lets you get away with stuff.”
“Friends? Hardly.”
Oh yes, oh man. Is this where she'll tell me all her friends are shallow and power hungry? And she feels alone in a crowded room?
“They forgive me because otherwise they'll lose their grip on the scaffolding of my family's patience. All of it, shallow and silly. Sylvain was my only true friend, and still, I feel him pulling away.”
“He cares a lot about you. Like, maybe too much.”
She shook her head. “Well, then, all of this considered, will you treat me accordingly from now on? Will you understand me, if not forgive me, Chloé?”
Who ever would have guessed that I’d hear that from the snarky, selfish villainess?
“I will. I promise.”
I extended my hand across the table, pinkie up. She smirked. Did the same, touching our hands, so I locked our pinkies together tightly.
We finished our ice cream and headed back out onto the street.
I asked, “What were you in town for, anyways? Weren’t you helping some classmates out this morning?” She didn’t have any shopping bags. “I can help you do whatever you meant to do before I caught you up in all my nonsense.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but didn’t say a word. Her brow screwed up. “…I’m not sure. Perhaps your amnesia is catching. Let’s go back to the academy.”
Okay, wait a minute. Rémi had asked me to hang out today. In Love Blooming, Marie had ice cream with him, and they learned a bit more about his family’s empire of clothing and fashion stores, cumulating in Rémi apparently coming for Étienne’s bag by giving Marie loads of jewels and accessories as gifts.
And then Marie and Rémi ran into Antoinette in the boutique, where she sneered at Marie’s appearance and blah blah poor loser girls blah blah. I guess that Antoinette’s old programming urged her to go to town, but without a love interest to hunt down, she was lost.
Until she found me again.
“Yep. Let’s go.”