A light wind made the branches quiver; sunlight glittered on the deck. For a few seconds I was magically transported back to the early nineties. In the sun’s rays filtering through branches, I saw Vinca’s ghost appear before me, heard the echo of our heated conversations. I could hear her talking to me eagerly about The Lover and Dangerous Liaisons. I would respond with Martin Eden and Belle du Seigneur. This was the table where we would discuss for hours the movies we watched on Wednesday afternoons at the Star in Cannes or the Casino in Antibes. She was obsessed with The Piano and Thelma and Louise. I liked A Heart in Winter and The Double Life of Véronique.

The song began to fade. The ghostly Vinca put on her Ray-Bans and sipped Cherry Coke through a straw; from behind the tinted lenses, she gave me a wink. Her image dissolved and vanished completely, bringing our enchanted interlude to an end.

Gone was the heat of the carefree summer of ’92. I was alone, sad and breathless from chasing the dreams of my lost youth. It had been twenty-five years since I had seen Vinca. Twenty-five years, in fact, since anyone had seen her.

3.

On Sunday, December 20, 1992, nineteen-year-old Vinca Rockwell ran off to Paris with her twenty-seven-year-old philosophy teacher, Alexis Clément, with whom she was having a secret affair. They were last seen the following day in a hotel in the seventh arrondissement near the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde. After that, all trace of their presence in Paris was lost. They never reappeared, never contacted friends or family. They quite literally vanished.

That, at least, was the official version.

From my pocket, I took out the crumpled copy of the article from Nice-Matin I had read a hundred times. Although on the face of it, it seemed banal, it nonetheless contained a piece of information that would upend everything that people knew about the story. These days, everyone talks about truth, about transparency, but truth is rarely what it seems, and in this specific case, it would bring no comfort, no closure, no real justice. Truth would leave in its wake only calamity, a manhunt, and slander.

“Oops! Sorry, m’sieur!”

A loutish teenager running between the tables had just knocked over the Cherry Coke with his backpack. I managed to catch the glass before it hit the ground and shattered. I wiped down the table with a wad of paper napkins, but my pants were spattered. I walked through the café to the bathrooms. It took me a good five minutes to get rid of the stains and five more to get my pants dry. Best not to show up at a school reunion looking like I’d pissed myself.