Read Chapter 4: Whispers in the Salon

The retired detective’s apartment smelled of pipe tobacco and boiled cabbage, a combination that turned Camille’s stomach before she had even crossed the threshold. Inspector Marcel Vautier moved slowly now, his once-broad frame softened by age and good living, but his eyes remained sharp as hatpins as he assessed her from his leather chair.

“Miss Delacroix,” he said, not rising. “I read your piece on the woman in the Seine. Bold of you to print the Montfort name.”

“I printed only what I saw.” Camille settled onto the worn velvet settee opposite him, arranging her skirts with practiced grace. “The moth brand was unmistakable.”

“Unmistakable for those who know what to look for.” Vautier reached for his pipe, tamping tobacco with deliberate slowness. “And you, a society columnist who covers opera openings and charity balls, somehow know.”

Camille smiled, the smile she used when she wanted men to underestimate her. “I know many things, Inspector. I know you led the investigation into the Perrin disappearance in ’89. I know you closed the file without a finding. I know you retired six months later on a pension that seems generous for a man of your rank.”

Vautier’s pipe paused halfway to his mouth. The silence stretched between them, thick as fog on the river.

“You’ve done your homework,” he said at last.

“I always do.”

He lit his pipe, the match flame throwing shadows across his weathered face. “The Perrin girl wasn’t the first. She wasn’t the second, either. There were others, going back further than I care to remember. Always the same type—young, beautiful, well-bred, the kind of girls whose families could make trouble if they wanted answers.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “They never did.”

“Why not?”

“Because the alternative was worse than silence.” Vautier leaned forward, his voice dropping. “The Montforts have been in Paris since before the Revolution. They survived the Terror when half the nobility lost their heads. They survived the Restoration, the July Revolution, the Commune. You think a family like that survives by accident, Miss Delacroix?”

“I think they survive by having friends in useful places.” Camille kept her voice neutral. “My father was a magistrate. I know how such things work.”

“Your father.” Vautier’s eyes narrowed. “Philippe Delacroix. He handled the Montfort estate matters in the late ’60s, didn’t he? Before he died.”

The words landed like a blow. Camille had not expected the detective to know her father, much less connect him to the Montforts. She kept her features smooth, but her gloved hands tightened in her lap.

“My father was an honest man.”

“I’m sure he was.” Vautier’s tone held something she couldn’t quite read—pity, perhaps, or warning. “Honest men sometimes find themselves in difficult positions, Miss Delacroix. They make choices they wouldn’t otherwise make, to protect the people they love.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying”—Vautier set down his pipe and fixed her with a gaze that suddenly seemed decades younger—“that you should be very careful whose past you go digging through. The Montforts have long memories. And some debts are never truly paid.”

He rose abruptly, the interview clearly over. Camille stood as well, frustration simmering beneath her composed exterior. She had come for answers, and instead he had given her riddles that only raised more questions—about her father, about the Montforts, about the threads that seemed to connect them all.

“Thank you for your time, Inspector.”

“One more thing.” He caught her arm as she moved toward the door. His grip was stronger than she expected. “The moth. You think it’s a mark of ownership, don’t you? Like branding cattle.”

Camille said nothing.

“You’re wrong.” Vautier’s voice was barely a whisper. “It’s a signature. The Montforts don’t mark what they own—they have no need. They mark what they’ve killed.” He released her arm. “So the rest of us know to stay away.”

The words hung in the air as Camille descended the narrow staircase and emerged onto the gray Parisian street. She stood for a moment, letting the cold air steady her nerves, then began walking toward the nearest cab stand, her mind racing.

The missing women were dead. That she had suspected. But the implication of Vautier’s words—that the Montforts hunted, killed, and left their signature for others to find—suggested something far more sinister than mere aristocratic cruelty.

And somehow, her father was tangled up in it all.

She was so lost in thought that she almost missed the commotion outside the Montfort townhouse. A servant in the family’s deep green livery was loading trunks onto a carriage while the housekeeper, a formidable woman with iron-gray hair, stood on the steps with a young maid whose face was blotched with tears.

“—don’t care what excuses you give,” the housekeeper was saying, her voice carrying across the street. “You were told the east corridor was off-limits. You were seen. Whatever nonsense you think you saw, you keep it to yourself, or you’ll find yourself with no references at all.”

Camille slowed her pace, watching from the corner of her eye as the maid—small, dark-haired, not much older than twenty—clutched a worn carpetbag to her chest. The girl looked up, and her eyes met Camille’s.

Recognition flashed between them. Isabelle. The same maid who had slipped Camille the warning note after the gala.

Isabelle’s lower lip trembled. She glanced back at the housekeeper, then, with a swift, frightened movement, she dropped her carpetbag. It fell open, spilling a few plain shifts and undergarments onto the cobblestones. The housekeeper cursed and bent to gather them, and in that moment, Isabelle darted forward, pressing something into Camille’s gloved hand.

“Please,” the girl whispered, her voice ragged with fear. “They know I wrote to you. They know.”

Then she was gone, scrambling back to collect her scattered belongings as the housekeeper straightened, glaring at Camille with open suspicion.

Camille forced herself to walk on, heart hammering, her hand closed tight around whatever Isabelle had given her. She did not look back. She flagged down a cab, gave her address, and only when the carriage had turned the corner and the Montfort townhouse was safely out of sight did she open her palm.

It was a piece of folded paper, worn soft at the edges, as if it had been carried close for a long time. Camille unfolded it with trembling fingers.

The handwriting was old-fashioned, elegant, the ink faded to brown. The letter was dated 1867—the same year her father had handled the Montfort estate.

*My dearest Philippe,*

*I cannot keep this secret any longer. She is yours, and you know it. If you will not acknowledge her, at least see that she is protected. Once the child is born and settled with the Delacroix family, I will do whatever you ask of me. But you must promise me—she will never know the truth. She will never know what we were. Let her live an ordinary life, untouched by our sins.*

*Yours in eternity,*

*M.*

Camille read the letter three times. Four. The words blurred before her eyes as the cab rattled through the streets of Paris.

*She is yours.*

*A child. Settled with the Delacroix family.*

Her mother’s face swam before her—the miniature portrait hidden in the locket, the woman who looked exactly like Camille. The woman who had died of consumption when Camille was barely six years old.

*She was supposed to be the last.* Philippe’s words echoed in her memory.

Camille looked up, staring out the cab window at the gray Paris sky, and realized with a cold, creeping certainty that she had just read her own origin story.

And the man who had killed her mother might be her father.