The American Girl: A disturbing and twisty psychological thriller. Kate Horsley
come and go at inhospitable hours, murmuring prayer and giving no sound bites. I’m the most recent arrival, late to the party, crashing in uninvited as usual. Well, not quite uninvited. I was in Paris when I heard the news. First holiday in years, and then this story broke.
I was intrigued. I called Bill to tell him about it and he said, “Why don’t you go? Cover it for the program. We’ll do an episode on it.” Dangling the thought, a whole episode with me at the wheel.
I said, “Go away, Bill, I’m on holiday,” but I found myself thinking about that American girl, all the more so because the video was impossible to get away from.
Of course, the other journalists will state the obvious: the facts, the theories, the local gossip. But this is American Confessional—“the truths no one wants you to hear”—podcast once a week on iTunes in a series of audio episodes topped and tailed with our melancholy signature music. We’re interested in the big themes: police brutality, political corruption, contemporary loneliness in the toxic age of the internet. We’ve gathered quite a following for unpicking the kind of unsolved mysteries that fascinate the American listener (well, the HBO-loving, New Yorker–reading kind). I like to think the show’s motif of moral inquiry emerges through the interviews I do. I don’t judge or comment. Bill and I let our audience decide the guilt of those involved as if they were investigating each case from the comfort of their armchairs.
So we’re going for more of a think piece on this one: a young American girl coming of age, going into the world on her own only to encounter the unkindness of a stranger. Then cue the ominous music, delving into her life via her social media profile and those that encountered her here. I could see how it would work with our show, too: ragging on law enforcement always draws listeners, so we could condemn the local police, too corrupt or incompetent to find the guy in the car or examine the video before it spawned a legion of online vigilantes.
I was also the only journalist with enough guts to sneak into that hospital and make my way past the nuns. As a former Catholic-school girl, I’m not scared of nuns, which served me well when I encountered the severe-looking nun manning the hospital’s reception desk. When I asked what room Quinn Perkins was in, she muttered something dismissive in French. I could see she was tough, probably prides herself on getting rid of people; but then, I pride myself on being a professional liar.
“Could you please repeat that in English?” I said with a smile, holding my ground.
“Family only allowed here,” she barked, “no person else.” Then she paused, glaring at me over her half-moon specs. “You are a family member of Quinn Perkins?”
What, because we’re both blond and American? I thought. It was lucky for me that she made that assumption. A little too lucky perhaps. I fought off the impulse to look over my shoulder when I smiled back at her and answered, “Yes.”
JULY 30, 2015
I felt bold in my lie, but I expected to be found out any moment. I followed the receptionist’s directions to the girl’s room as quickly as I could without looking as if I was hurrying. I came to the room, and stopped at the threshold.
From the newspaper stories, I’d imagined she would be in a tent of plastic, tangled in tubes and wires, barely visible; but she lay unfettered by machinery, neatly tucked under starched white sheets. Her face was bruised from the accident, her head shaved on one side. A run of stitches tattooed her scalp like railroad tracks: the place the car hit, the blow that knocked her clean from this world into dreamland, some gray space where she couldn’t be reached.
It always happens when I’m working on a new story: that moment when the person I’ve been researching transforms from a news item into a human being. I’m used to it, so I’m not sure why it hit me harder this time. Maybe because I was far from home and she was, too: the girl in the bed, the girl called Quinn Perkins, was all too real to me now. Bill had told me to take some footage with the little hidden camera he bought me years ago for my undercover work. It was pinned to my lapel, switched on and filming. He’d asked me to find a chart if I could and photograph that—to document the room, the nuns, the state the girl was in.
Instead, I found myself turning off the camera and, almost as if in a dream myself, falling into the plastic bucket seat next to her bed. I sat watching the rise and fall of her chest, even and slow, and felt a strange peace descend, like watching a child sleep. With her bruised face, her half-shaven head, and black scabs crusting the stitches, she looked worlds away from the fresh-faced teen in the photographs.
I found myself pondering all over again how she came to be walking out of the woods that gray July morning. I imagined how her legs would have been bare and dirty, her feet cut to shreds when she wandered down the middle of the dirt road, her blond hair stringy with blood. Why? This question intrigued me far more than the driver of the car.
The video footage the German tourists took of her was so shocking it looked like something from a handheld horror movie. That, and the mystery of her identity, seemed to be why the video spread so far so fast. Stills taken from clips ended up on the front pages of French papers. Soon “La fille Américaine inconnue” bled through Reuters and Google Translate, becoming “Mysterious American Girl Found.”
Eventually her father, on holiday in Tahiti with his very pregnant fiancée, recognized the face of his daughter and called up to claim her. She was given a name: Quinn Perkins of Boston. She had come to St. Roch as part of a study abroad program that placed her with a local family called the Blavettes—a schoolteacher mom, her son and daughter—presumed to be away visiting an ailing relative in some mountain area with no phone reception. Their name came out when the police released details of the case.
The news feed on my phone said Quinn was running out of time, that after the first twenty-four hours of a coma the chances of waking plummet. From the chart at the end of her bed, I could see that this particular coma had been rated a “7.” Google told me that made her chances of recovery about fifty-fifty. She should have had relatives there, talking to her, playing her music, stroking her hand. But the visitor list near the door told me she had no one—Professor Perkins hadn’t yet rushed to her side, which was odd. Not just odd, heartbreaking. A plane would get him here quickly from anywhere in the world.
They say that sometimes the feeling of touch, the sound of speech, can jolt a person from this dream state, wake them like a kiss in a fairy tale. And so I found myself reaching for her hand, taking it in mine. I touched her hand almost reverently. Time unspooled until I didn’t know how long I’d been in that room with the softly bleeping machines, the sleeping girl, her mystery sealed inside, pristine. All of a sudden, her hand twitched, the fingers wriggling inside mine. I squeezed it again, but this time nothing happened. Still, I couldn’t help thinking, She moved.
“Only you know how you got here,” I said softly.
A hand touched my shoulder. As startled as if I’d been sleeping myself, I looked up to see the habit of a nun, crisp white folds around a surprisingly young face.
The nun’s brow was creased. Her pale eyes looked nervously down at me through frameless specs. “Poor thing, she has been alone. We are so glad her family is here finally.”
“Yeah.” I smiled, hoping she didn’t want to know exactly what family I was.
She checked the charts, the machines, making little ticks on a chart as she did. Faintly, I heard her singing a French song under her breath. I sat tensed, wondering if I should make my excuses now and leave before she started asking me questions I couldn’t answer.
She was in the middle of adjusting Quinn’s sheets when she turned to me and said in very precise English, “Have you heard? It is so terrible. Now they think the family of Blavette is missing.”
“The family she was staying with?” I asked, managing to sound genuinely shocked because I was. “I thought they were visiting some