What emerged from the ash was a teenage girl.

She cried out in surprise. I did too. Antoinette gripped my elbow and said a tense, “Well, hello.”

I felt like I was looking at an Ace Attorney extra. Her hair was so blonde that it shone blue-grey, twisted up into a messy bun with stray curls springing out. She wore circular metal spectacles that made her blue eyes look even more enormous. A slouchy satchel was full to bursting on her shoulder.

The girl straightened up, turning her nose in the air. She affected a haughty, mismatched tone as she asked, “Who are you to barge into this scene? You’re not allowed, you know.”

Antoinette said, “Neither are you.”

“I’m a reporter!”

Yeah, right. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Antoinette shot her one of the heiress’s characteristic withering looks.

She popped a hand on her hip. “Okay, well, you lookie-loos better not tell anyone that I was here, either. Deal?”

“What paper do you work for? If you work for one at all.”

She cautiously approached us, clearly wary of stepping around on this unstable ground. She held out her hand; I shook it. While Antoinette embodied authority and confidence, this girl was clearly wearing it like an uncomfortable, oversized coat. “I’m Lucille, head reporter for the St-Boniface Gazette.”

Antoinette didn’t shake her hand. “That’s a high school.”

“And we have a really good paper!”

“Do you make a habit of investigating this site, Lucille?”

“I’ve been the head of this story since it broke.”

“And you’ve never been caught?”

There was a strange standoffishness to Antoinette, though her words came quickly and confidently. I realised I’d only ever seen her interact with strangers when she was trying to get something from them: information from the secretary at the guard hall, a ride from the cab…

Lucille, to her credit, was unperturbed. “Of course I haven’t. There were investigators from all the nearby towns swarming this place, but after the first couple weeks, they all cleared out. Nowadays, I could probably set up a picnic and fireworks and no one would catch me, for all the attention they give this site.”

Antoinette and I shared a glance. I asked, “Wait, you’re saying you’re the only one still investigating?”

Lucille’s whole stance became energized, like she was super excited to tell us her scoop. “As far as I can tell. The local papers,” her tone dripped with teenage disdain, “haven’t had anything new to say in weeks! No one checks the ruins anymore, and I’ve interviewed most of the people of interest—yep, I know; cool, right?—and if they’re to be believed, no one’s spoken to them in ages either. If you ask me, someone’s persuaded the local authorities that they shouldn’t be sniffing around.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I said, “Maybe all their work is happening away from the scene of the crime, that’s all. Forensics and stuff.” Blank looks. “Or going over old documents?”

Antoinette asked, “Lucille. Do you have a hunch about what’s going on?”

She lit up like a Christmas tree. “I can’t say for sure. And it’d be against the journalist code of ethics to publish who I think is involved. But the Gagnons were really well-connected people. You know, a lot of elites cite Mme Gagnon and her team as being the people they’d trust to publish and distribute their biographies or their discoveries.” She pointedly leaned on that sentence. “Someone like that must be holding lots of information that others don’t want exposed at inopportune times.”

I thought of the cultural make-up of La Belle Lavande. All those students very well could have had connections to the Gagnon family. How did no one recognise me? How did Antoinette not know me, when we’d learned by now that even our families were involved together? For that to make any sense, Mme Gagnon and M Delphine’s meetings had to be less about chatting jovially over dinners with the whole household, and more about secret discussions in parlours with the doors locked.

I asked, “Who were some of the people she was going to publish with?”

Lucille smirked. She shrugged her packed bag off her shoulder and riffled through it, eventually producing a copy of a newspaper. The printing-press writing was slightly smeared and the graphic design left a lot to be desired, but she presented it to us with a flourish. “Read and see. Page two.”

I flipped it open and found a massive spread about the case, including a boxed-in list of names. “You mentioned talking to some people who were related to the case, right? What have those interviews told you?”

“I rarely get more than a quote or two, and I haven’t gotten anything from people that are way higher up. I got that list from an anonymous worker at the Gagnon publishing house.” She pointed at the list of names. “Everyone says the same thing. No, they haven’t been spoken to by the authorities since close to the crime, or they’ve never been spoken to at all, and no, they don’t know anything.”

Not that much time and a whole world ago, I would have brushed all that off as the writers being lazy about these unnamed, unimportant characters who only served to get Marie hitched. Now, the emptiness echoed in me.

This girl was close to the case, and she was talking to me, looking me right in the eyes, without any recognition or even a flicker of suspicion. Marie really must have been a private person. The whole family must have been. I thought of locked doors, private meetings, ivory towers, every suspect wrapped up in a cloak of red tape.

Lucky me that I was now friends with Antoinette Delphine. If anyone knew how to get around that stuff, it’d be her.

Antoinette asked Lucille a few more questions, totally taking advantage of the girl’s excitement about having a listening ear, but she kept cheekily citing the paper she’d given me and the journalist code of ethics. She griped a little about her teenage editor on the paper who cared more about his buddies than giving her the proper budget and time to do her hard-hitting investigating, and Antoinette spotted her opening.

Antoinette offered casually that we were both university students at La Belle Lavande, with much more intelligence, skill, and understanding than a teenage boy, so Lucille was welcome to mail her thoughts to us and we’d provide some true editorial expertise.

“Would you really? That’s so nice, I’d love that, miss…uh…?”

Antoinette said, “Avril.”

“Thank you, miss Avril.” She smiled at the both of us, her mock professionalism tumbling away as she became a sixteen year old girl again. “It’s great to finally find people who care about this case as much as I do.”