Diving deep into pages about urban planning of the eighteenth century, I search the table of contents for words in French I recognize. I move to the next shelf and barrel into a young woman. We each cry out before sharing a laugh at our mutual reaction. I apologize, Pardon, but she dismisses it before I can breathe the second syllable. Pas de problème, she says. Confusion tenses my mouth. She’s not annoyed I knocked her book to the ground and kicked it under a shelf? Dark hair falls from her ponytail as she bends down like it’s the most normal thing in the world, bumping into a stranger in the library weeks after grief and violence struck here. She smiles again and shrugs small shoulders. Without another glance, she turns down the next aisle.

Another fifteen minutes offers nothing of use before I realize the catacombs will be closing soon. Regret tinges my second goodbye to Angela’s university, along with the nagging thought that I’m missing something.

Crowds ebb and flow while I stand across the street from the green toolshed, observing like the voyeur I am. At the front of the line, a Japanese couple uses animated gestures while speaking to the cashier. They pay, then pass through the revolving turnstile and into the informative foyer. People’s expressions alternate between excitement and obvious dread. Individuals cast longing glances toward where I stand, far from the entrance, beside a terrace table belonging to an Irish-themed bar.

On Thursday Angela went straight from her apartment to the catacombs around ten in the morning. She came home around six for dinner with Seb. A whole day was spent underground doing work on her dissertation, like a less athletic version of Lara Croft. The archaeology director, Dr. Leroux, told Valentin he saw Angela come in; they had lunch together around one o’clock, right when his belly started to rumble. Otherwise, she left around five. In the interim she photographed piles of bones relevant to her research. She was a staple often seen belowground at that point, going on nine months of interning. According to Valentin, the director implicitly trusted her with everything down there, both to ask if she needed help and to respect the significance, the history of the tunnels.

From outside, everything looks the same as it did two days ago. I didn’t see anything significant aboveground or below when I did the self-guided tour with Seb, and I have no intention of descending again on the off chance I missed another sign. As Seb explained, the catacombs are two hundred miles long. If there is some clue buried one hundred and fifty miles in, in the dark, behind a stack of skeletons (a stack identical to the dozens of others down there), it’s as good as nonexistent for me.

Without a more specific idea of where to look, I was hoping some intuition would strike me outside the entrance.