Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer by Katie Alender Read Free Book Online Page B

floor-length black dress.
    I stumbled backward, and for a moment the mirrored room was like a funhouse. I lost my bearings and couldn’t tell one wall from another.
    Just as my mind began to reel, footsteps came tramping up behind me — a guided tour making its way through the building.
    “Here we have Le Cabinet des Glaces….” The guide’s voice was flat and bored, and it jerked me back to reality. I was more than happy to move aside so the people on the tour could shuffle in and look around. “This room was specially designed so that the windows could be covered, as you see, by floor-to-ceiling panels that could be raised or lowered.”
    “What would be the purpose of that?” I asked.
    The woman frowned at my butting in on her precious tour without permission.
    “Privacy,” she said. “And to have better light at night.”
    “For secret dalliances,” said one of the old ladies in the group, and her friends giggled.
    Ew. Old ladies and secret dalliances were definitely two topics I didn’t need mixing together in my brain.
    I turned to go when one of the tourists lifted her camera and snapped a photo of me.
    “Look, it’s the girl from the picture!” she said, showing the image to her friend. The friend said, “Oh!”
    What picture? What were they talking about? I felt a knot of unease in my belly, but before I could get up the nerve to ask the woman why she’d randomly snapped a photo of me, the group moved on.
    Wait till Mom heard that the strangest people I’d met in Paris were a tour bus full of old American ladies.
    I passed back through the flower bedroom and went downstairs. Outside, I came upon a crisscrossing network of footpaths. A map on the wall showed that they led to something called Le Hameau.
    A five-minute walk left me standing at the edge of a tiny fairy-tale village. There were houses and mills and a tiny duck pond, pink-flowered shrubs, and footbridges with rough wood handrails. It was basically the last thing you’d expect to find on the grounds of Versailles — the polar opposite of the palace itself.
    I walked toward the biggest building. Its windows were blocked with wire mesh, and the door looked like it hadn’t been opened for years. Peeking through the dirty glass, I could barely make out a black and white tile floor.
    Behind the house was a garden, with fat heads of cabbage growing in neat rows. The garden was freshly tended, almost like someone was living there. There was also a round turret attached to the house, with a barred metal gate blocking off its entrance.
    I got the odd feeling that I’d somehow traveled back in time. I half-expected to see a peasant woman come out of the house carrying a heavy wooden bucket to fetch water from the well.
    As I looked around the garden, the eerie sensation hanging over me like a veil, there was a sound:
    Creeeeeeeak.
    It sounded like something very old and very stiff being opened for the first time in a hundred years.
    And turning around to look, I saw that the gate to the turret had crept open a few inches, revealing the spiral staircase inside.
    The locks were obviously there for a very specific reason — to keep tourists out. This was only a fluke, caused by a change in the atmospheric pressure or something, and it wasn’t my place to explore inside the fragile old building. Feeling highly virtuous, I walked forward, intending to close it and then report the malfunction to the next employee I saw.
    But as I went closer to the open doorway, the back of my neck prickled. I felt an almost magnetic pull toward the stairs inside.
    It couldn’t really hurt to go in for a second and see the place from a different perspective … could it?
    I pushed the gate another two inches and slipped inside, stopping at the base of the stairs. Shafts of sunlight, glittering with dust particles, poured in through small rectangular windows. A little round ceiling soared twenty feet above me, supported by wooden beams like the spokes of a wheel.