Jon continued to pace up and down Madeleine's small office as he waited for her return.
"Can you stop doing that, please?" Simone asked, trying not to show how worried she had become during the time the two of them had spent sitting in the small room waiting for Madeleine to return with news.
"Sorry, how long has she been gone now?" Jon asked.
"About ten minutes, I think," Simone answered after looking at the clock on the office wall. She did not think that the watch she was wearing was telling the right time. It showed the time as 2:50 PM. She knew that could not be right. If it was, she would not have left Rue Véron yet, so there was no way it could be correct.
"How much longer do you think she is going to be?" Jon asked. He was becoming more and more worried about Karyn. There had to be something he could do.
"I don't know, but I am sure she is being as quick as she can," Simone said, trying to reassure the young American while at the same time reassuring herself that this was all some kind of joke.
It had to be.
Doors that froze time? It sounded absurd. But if it was, her friends had to be involved. That was the only thing that could explain how they had treated her. But how had they managed to get her into these clothes? That was something she could not answer no matter how hard she tried.
"I will give her a little longer, but if she is not back soon, I will speak to Karyn myself."
"But you will not be allowed into the dressing room while the others are getting ready for Le Jardin des Plumes," Simone told him.
"I don't care," came the abrupt reply.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the corridor.
It had taken Madeleine all of five minutes to solve the problem with Élise Moreau. Somehow, the performer had misplaced her lucky garter, which Madeleine found after only a brief search. At least the problem had been simple enough to solve, and she still needed to speak to the American girl.
At least that should have been the case if Élise had not insisted that Madeleine stay for a quick glass of absinthe as a thank-you.
A few doors farther along the same corridor, somewhere between the two rooms.
The costume felt unlike anything Karyn had ever worn before.
The first thing she noticed was how structured it was. The pink bodice wrapped tightly around her torso, the rhinestones catching every stray glimmer of light from the dressing-room mirrors. It did not feel like ordinary clothing at all. It felt engineered, built to shape her into something she was not entirely sure she recognised anymore.
The satin gloves stretched almost to her elbows. Beneath the bodice, fishnet tights covered her legs. The heels on her feet forced her to stand straighter somehow, whether she wanted to or not.
Then there were the feathers.
They seemed to surround her from every direction. The enormous pink bustle swayed with the slightest movement. On her head sat a feathered headdress that rose high into the air, with even more rhinestones and plumes making her seem taller and more conspicuous than she had ever felt in her life.
Everything shimmered.
Everything sparkled.
Everything seemed designed to draw attention.
The strangest part was how perfectly it all fit. Nothing felt borrowed or improvised. The costume sat against her body as though it had been made specifically for her, and that thought unsettled Karyn more than the feathers, the heels, or the rhinestones ever could.
How the hell had she ended up in this outfit?
She had thought she was only being helpful when the younger of the French women had handed her the costume. Perhaps she was supposed to hold it while they fixed something for someone else. That idea had disappeared the moment they had started helping her into it.
She really wished she could understand what they were saying to her. Maybe then she could have stopped them from dressing her in an identical costume to the other twenty or so women crowded into the room.
She thought they must all be feeling as embarrassed as she was, showing almost as much skin as she would have worn in a swimsuit at the beach.
If they were, however, they were not showing it.
"Allez, mesdemoiselles, finissez de vous préparer. Vous devez être prêtes à monter sur scène dans moins de dix minutes. " (Come on, girls, finish getting ready. You need to be ready to go on in less than ten minutes.) came the voice of the woman Karyn had come to think of as Claudette. She was not entirely sure that was her name, but she did seem to answer to it.
A short while later, Claudette's voice cut across the room again.
"Allez, mesdemoiselles, finissez de vous préparer. Vous devez être prêtes à monter sur scène dans moins de ten minutes. " (Come on, girls, finish getting ready. You need to be ready to go on in less than ten minutes.)
Wait. Had Claudette just said "ten minutes"? No. That could not be right. The woman did not speak English. Karyn knew that. She had spent long enough trying—and failing—to make Claudette understand a single word she said.Yet somehow she was certain she had understood those two words.
Ten minutes. Not the whole sentence. Just those two words.
For a moment they seemed to stand out from the stream of French surrounding them.
Maybe it had only sounded like English.
Maybe she was imagining things.
Either way, it did not get her out of the costume.
