Free Midnight Train to Paris by Juliette Sobanet

In all of the pictures, my sister is dressed impeccably in long, silky gowns, dangly diamond earrings, and three-inch heels.
    A pang of jealousy hits me as I mull over the fact that over the past eight years, Isla has created a life that I know nothing of. A life that she didn’t want me to take part in.
    Of course she didn’t want me here in her new glamorous world. I was a reminder of her dark past. Of the atrocities that had happened to her when she was only a teenager.
    Of the fact that she had suffered tremendously more than I had. While all along, I’d been completely oblivious.
    I push away the familiar rage that threatens to boil over inside me as I continue scrolling through her photos.
    At the bottom of the page, I spot a picture file labeled Charity Gala , dated December 21, only a day before Isla disappeared. Opening up the file, I scroll quickly through the slideshow. About halfway in, I find a photograph that makes me feel like I must be going insane. But as I examine it closely, I realize that the scene before me is not an optical illusion.
    Frédéric is smiling a cheeky grin, looking stuffy and arrogant as hell in his tux, with one arm around his father, and the other around a man with thinning gray hair and a husky, round face that I could never, ever forget.
    It’s Senator Parker Williams—the sick, perverted man who I’ve been working tirelessly to expose for running a child prostitution ring and murdering two innocent sisters in D.C..
    What in the hell was he doing here with the Morel men, only three days ago?
    And what was Isla doing taking a photograph of him?
    I notice then that Senator Williams is the only man not smiling in the photo. In fact, he looks nervous, like he’s been caught.
    Suddenly my mouth goes dry and my vision blurs. My hands begin trembling so fiercely that I’m unable to scroll through the rest of the photos.
    All I can see are Parker Williams’s big, rough hands fondling my thirteen-year-old sister, ripping off her clothes, then covering her mouth every time she tried to scream.
    He didn’t want me. I wasn’t the sexy one. He only wanted Isla.
    At thirteen, my innocent twin sister had been Williams’s first conquest with a young girl. It was before he became a senator. He’d started off sleeping with my mother, paying her for sex just like all the other wealthy men who traveled to the other side of the tracks from their rich D.C. neighborhoods, looking for something more exciting than their cookie-cutter wives. After our dad left, there was a different man in our mother’s room every night. When we were little, she lied, telling us they were just “playing games,” but Isla and I weren’t stupid.
    Williams was one of my mother’s regulars, but when he caught Isla prancing home from school early one day, wearing the short jean skirt that used to drive the junior high boys wild, that sick man dropped my mom so fast, she almost went blind with jealousy.
    Our mother hated Isla from that day forward, but she allowed it to go on. And she continued collecting money from Williams every time he slept with her thirteen-year-old daughter.
    I was too busy working at the school newspaper every day after school to know what was going on in my own home, to my own sister.
    And Isla lied to me too. She was ashamed, horrified, and embarrassed.
    We’d been best friends up until that point.
    But after her first encounter with Parker Williams, she was never the same, fun-loving twin sister I used to know. She became moody, angry, secretive, and distant.
    And I didn’t know why until it was too late.
    I shake away the memories of the horrific day that stole our innocence forever and promise Isla that I won’t be too late this time.
    I know who is behind my sister’s abduction, who took that young, lovely Italian girl, and who killed the ambassador’s innocent daughter, Emma Brooks.
    I wonder if Senator Williams knew about the 1937 train abduction. Maybe in his warped mind, he