The Twenty Missing Minutes
by Hélène Vandermeer
The same route, the same habits. But that morning, twenty minutes were missing — and the next day a stranger was waiting for her.
Claire Baumann runs five kilometres along the Doubs six mornings out of seven, and she knows exactly how long it takes her: forty-six minutes, door to door. On the ninth of October her watch reads twenty-six minutes of running. It is not the first time. The next day a woman is waiting on the towpath and says: “Yesterday you asked me not to believe you today.” Five days later Claire finds, in the pocket of a jacket she has not worn for six days, a brass key stamped AL-4. What she pieces together over five weeks has nothing to do with her watch or her memory: it has to do with a woman who disappeared on the second of October, four hundred metres from her route, and with a man the whole town is watching.
Chapters
- 1 Forty-Six Minus Twenty-Six
- 2 Do Not Believe Me
- 3 Auto-Pause
- 4 A Key That Isn't Mine
- 5 Delphine Arnoux, 38
- 6 Cold Sweats
- 7 It Did Not Rain
- 8 The Smallest Gap
- 9 Neither Sleepwalking nor Drugged Premium
- 10 The Word Premium
- 11 Ateliers Lumière Premium
- 12 Three Times Premium
- 13 What a Witness Statement Is Worth Premium
- 14 The Dog Handler Premium
- 15 Family Subscription Premium
- 16 The Audit of the 6th Premium
- 17 The Watch Erased Nothing Premium
- 18 Why He Was Watching Premium
- 19 Unit 4 Premium
- 20 What the Key Does Not Prove Premium
- 21 The Protocol Premium
- 22 Five Sentences Premium
- 23 What It Costs Premium
- 24 Three Characters Premium
- 25 Four Boxes Premium
- 26 Five Weeks Premium
- 27 What I Could Do Premium
- 28 Perpignan Premium
- 29 The Medical Board Premium
- 30 The Case He Withdraws Premium
- 31 What People Believe About a Woman Premium
- 32 A Morning in March Premium
