The Sanatorium

A skier named Jeremie Bisset hikes up the trail behind Le Sommet, looking for a good place to practice. He comes to a clearing outside of the forest, and gets ready to ski, but he hears a noise that sounds like footsteps. Having only gotten a few hours of sleep the night before, he assumes his mind is playing tricks on him. He skis down towards the forest trail, enjoying the untouched snow where no tourists have gone. Then, he sees a copper bracelet in the snow. Near it, he sees fabric and realizes it’s clothing. He tries to pull up the bracelet, but it’s stuck, so he hacks at the snow around it. When he finally frees the bracelet, something else comes up with it, and it causes Jeremie to become sick.

Elin accuses Isaac of joking about Laure being missing, but he insists that he isn’t. He shows Elin Laure’s broken ‘L’ pendant necklace which he found on the floor outside of their room. Her mother gave it to her, and he insists that she wouldn’t just leave it. It reminds Elin of the necklace that she wears: Sam’s lucky crabbing hook cast in silver. She asks what happened the night before, and he says that he last saw her when they went to bed around eleven, but that when they were getting ready to go to dinner, Laure said she wasn’t going. Elin is surprised that Isaac was actually planning to come. They assume that Laure simply left without telling anyone, and remind Isaac that she hasn’t really been missing long. Isaac doesn’t think she’d leave on her own. He says he was angry because she was ditching the dinner for work: “That’s what pissed me off. All she said was that it had to do with the hotel” (72). He leaves to go call her friends, family, and their neighbors in Sierre. Will suggests that it isn’t Elin’s business, and that Isaac and Laure simply had a fight. Elin watches Isaac leave and has a flashback to Sam’s death.

Jeremie looks at the bracelet again, and see that beneath it is human bone, but twisted in a way that doesn’t seem natural. He notices an expensive watch with an engraving on the inside of the strap: Daniel Lemaitre. He recognizes the name of the missing architect and calls the police. 

Elin goes to Isaac and Laure’s room to check on Isaac. She notices that Isaac’s hiking boots are wet and encrusted with ice and that he’s been out looking for Laure. He is in a panic because nobody has seen her, and he has already called the police. Elin notes the mess in the room, but that most of Laure’s stuff is still there, most notably, her cell phone. Elin wonders how the phone could still be there, since she heard Laure talking on the phone the previous night, but she doesn’t tell Isaac. He’s checked her phone and her laptop and found nothing out of the ordinary. Elin notices Isaac slip something into his pocket. She assumes that Isaac has been lying to her, remembering that Isaac was always good at lying.

Isaac asks her why she joined the police force in the first place. She doesn’t tell him that she joined because of what she thinks he did to Sam.

Isaac asks Elin about work, and she admits that she’s on leave. She has a flashback of fingers holding her in dirty water. Isaac asks what happened, and she reluctantly recounts the details of the Hayler case. A murderer had killed two teenage girls by tying their bodies to a boat and letting the propeller chop them up. The police had no evidence to go on, so they had to put out a public appeal asking for any information. They got a tip about a man named Mark Hayler, who had previous convictions, including one for grievous bodily harm. When they found him, instead of radioing for backup, Elin followed him into some caves near the beach. The tide started coming in, and before she could get herself out, Hayler was waiting and hit her with a rock. He held her under the water until she was sure she was going to die. After that, she took sick leave and hasn’t been back to work since.

Isaac apologizes that he didn’t know, and Elin snaps that they hadn’t been in touch. Elin and Isaac argue about him staying away while their mother was sick, and Elin almost confronts him about Sam, but she holds back.

They hear a helicopter over the hotel. Elin notices two 4x4s driving up to the hotel as well. One is an emergency vehicle; the other is a police car. Isaac says they are the Groupe d’Intervention, and that they’re like police special forces. They notice the group putting on helmets and skis and head to the path leading to the forest. They see Lucas Caron talking to the police, and then Elin sees blood on the rug.

Adele awakens to find herself still a captive of the masked person. She realizes that she is blindfolded, her arms and legs are bound, and that she’s sitting on the floor propped against the wall. She assumes that she is going to die, but she quickly tries to suppress the thought and figure out a way to escape. However, the assailant quickly returns. They take the blindfold off, and Adele tries to get a look at her captor. She can’t make out anything but the strange black mask. The captor shows her a photograph. She recognizes the photograph as the mutilated body of a man, and she instantly realizes that this isn’t a random attack. This is revenge. She tries to think of her son as a beacon of hope, but the captor shows her another photo. Then, the captor removes the gag and puts another black mask on her, just like the one the captor is wearing.

Isaac denies having seen the blood stain before, but Elin doesn’t believe him. He then remembers that Laure cut herself shaving and that it bled heavily before they put a bandage on it. He suggests that Laure must have walked across the carpet. Elin assumes he’s lying and begins to suspect that Isaac may have harmed Laure: “He’s done it before. He’s capable” (91).

Elin returns to her room and finds that Will has gone swimming. She tries to connect the dots between Laure’s disappearance, the blood on the carpet, and whatever Isaac pocketed in the bathroom. Suspicious, she gets her laptop and investigates Isaac. She searches for him as a computer sciences teacher at the University of Lausanne, which is where she’d last heard of him working. She doesn’t find him listed on the school’s website. She decides to call the university, and they tell her that Isaac has been dismissed for intimidating other members of the staff. She recalls how Isaac would intimidate her as a child. 

Elin goes to the spa area to question Margot about Laure. Elin asks Margot if Laure’s been through the spa at any point, and Margot says that she has been there since the spa opened and hasn’t seen Laure. Elin says it’s unlikely that she’d go off on her own because they have come to celebrate her engagement. Margo volunteers that Laure may have been feeling unsatisfied in her relationship with Isaac. She plants the seed that Isaac has been aggressive recently. Elin asks if Laure could have been feeling pressure about the job, but Margot insists that Laure loves her job.

Margot tells her that they’ve found human remains on the mountain and that they think it’s Daniel Lemaitre. She recounts that people didn’t like that the building used to be a sanatorium and that they protested the new hotel’s construction. Elin tries to shake the thought that this past crime may have some connection to Laure. 

Elin finds Will doing laps in the pool. She calls to him, and he come to the edge to talk to her. She notices how good he looks in the water. He gets out to talk to her.

Elin tells Will about her conversation with Isaac and that she found blood on their carpet and saw Isaac pocket something before she could see it. Will brushes it off and suggests it was probably just something embarrassing.

Elin tells Will what she found out about Isaac’s job, and Will scolds her for snooping. He insists that nothing has happened to Laure and she’s letting her strained relationship with Isaac get the better of her. Elin reveals that the police have found Daniel Lemaitre’s body, and that she’s worried, considering how close it is to Laure’s disappearance. Will becomes frustrated with how much she insists on letting the past consume her. Will wants to build a happy family with Elin, but he fears he can’t if she can’t let go of her family’s past.

Elin starts to tell Will that Isaac may have had a hand in Sam’s death, but she stops herself. Will suggests that, once Laure comes back, they should leave. Elin doesn’t respond, so Will gets back into the water.

Elin goes into the changing area. She hears a door slam in the changing room, but she doesn’t see anyone there. She checks each door to each individual stall and finds no one. Curious, she pushes the back of one of the stalls and finds that it opens to the other side. She goes back to the pool area to see if anyone went out that way, but she only sees Will swimming there. Elin is suspicious: “Someone was there. Someone was definitely in there. Watching” (108). She goes back into the reception area and asks Margot if anyone came in after her, but no one has. Elin wants to dismiss the whole thing, but she can’t escape the feeling that someone is watching her. 

Elin takes a walk behind the hotel to clear her head. The snow makes it difficult, but Elin continues, stopping at the top of the path. She has a flashback, but she pushes it away.

She takes in the landscape and wonders if Laure had followed the same trail. She notices a town below hidden by a small ridge. She rules out the possibility that Laure walked to town in the icy conditions outside, and that without her purse, she didn’t call a taxi. She decides to look through Laure’s Instagram for possible leads, but she finds it perfectly curated. She decides to look in a place where Laure wouldn’t be curating so perfectly: her office. 

Adele is now lying on a bed. She can’t see anything but the inside of the black mask that the attacker has placed on her. She can’t move her hands, but she shifts enough to see past the strange black tube. Her hands are bound to the bed, and that there’s a portable metal table a few feet away, lined with surgical instruments. She hears the assailant return, and she hears them send a text message from her phone so that nobody will realize she’s missing. The assailant finally speaks to her, and she recognizes the voice. She resigns herself to her fate, and the masked person injects her with something that knocks her out. Just before she passes out again, she can hear the metal instruments clanking against the table as the assailant moves it closer. 

Elin asks Cecile Caron, the hotel manager, if she’s seen or heard from Laure, and she hasn’t. They go into Cecile’s office to talk. Cecile says she used to be a competitive swimmer after Elin notices a photo of Cecile in a swimming costume holding a trophy.

They have checked with friends and neighbors, and nobody has seen or heard from Laure. She asks Cecile to let her into Laure’s office. Elin looks in Laure’s desk and finds a business card for a psychologist named Amelie Frances attached to a printed article about depression. She takes the card when Cecile isn’t looking, and she looks in another drawer, where she finds a purple folder with phone records in it. Cecile says they don’t have work cell phones, and Elin infers that the phone records must be for her personal phone. She notices that the phone records show a different service provider than the one on her personal cell, and she deduces that Laure must have two different phones. She looks at the number on the records that she has been calling repeatedly and realizes that it’s not Isaac’s number, and that Isaac must not have known about the phone.

Elin gets a text from Will that the hotels on the other side of the valley are being evacuated due to weather. She asks Cecile if she can take the phone records, and Cecile agrees, insisting that Elin tell her if she needs anything else. Elin doesn’t quite trust Cecile and decides she needs to watch the people at the hotel very carefully. 

Elin tells Isaac about the depression printout she found in Laure’s desk while they eat in the lounge. Isaac reveals that Laure had been struggling with depression recently and had been on and off since her mother Coralie’s death. Elin didn’t know that Laure had lost her mother when she was young and that her father left as soon as Laure turned 18. Isaac also reveals that Laure had been let go from her previous job.

Elin shares the phone record with Isaac, who doesn’t recognize the number. He calls the phone, but it goes straight to voicemail. He calls the number that she’d called repeatedly, and someone answers but hangs up after he speaks. Isaac feels betrayed and lashes out at the waitress in anger. Elin scolds him and recalls how he’d lash out at Sam when they were kids. Isaac apologizes. He decides that he will call the police again if she isn’t back that night.

He shows Elin a stack of candid photographs that Laure had of Lucas Caron, which he found in her ski bag. Elin tries to reassure Isaac, but she can’t think of an explanation for the photos, either. 

Elin goes back to her room and starts to google Lucas Caron, but she notices an email from Anna asking for a decision about returning to work by the end of the month. She ignores the email and searches for Lucas Caron, finding several articles about him and the hotel. Through reading an article about him, she learns that Lucas was born with a heart condition called ASD (atrial septal defect), and that he had surgery as a child that led to complications and long stays in the hospital. She also finds articles about the controversy surrounding the hotel and about Lucas’s relationship with Daniel Lemaitre before his disappearance.

Will comes back, and Elin tells him about Laure’s photos of Daniel. Frustrated with her insistence on investigating, he suggests she leave it to the police. He insists that they leave ahead of the big storm coming in.

Elin reveals to Will that she can’t leave because she needs to find out the truth about what happened to Sam: “It’s about Isaac. […] I think he killed Sam. That’s why I’m worried about Laure. I know what he’s capable of” (134).

Will is shocked to hear Elin’s accusation, but she recounts that she started having flashbacks that are different from the memories she recounted to the police at the time. The three of them were having a competition to see who could catch the most crabs. Her brothers, she says, were fiercely competitive. Isaac was angry that Sam was winning, and she’d gone off to let them argue near the rock pool. She saw them fighting and broke it up, and the boys made up. She then remembers wandering further towards the cliff, and then she heard Isaac screaming. She ran towards them and saw Isaac in the water next to Sam, trying to drag out his lifeless body. Isaac kept saying “We can help him,” but Elin knew he was dead.

Elin recounts that Isaac says he’d gone to the bathroom and that Sam must have slipped, but then a few months later, she started getting flashes that she couldn’t explain. She could remember seeing blood on Isaac’s hands—Sam’s blood.

Will echoes her worry for Laure, and Elin explains to him that this is why she can’t leave yet. Will notices Elin rub at her head, and he gives her medicine for her headache, and suggests they go to the spa to relax. 

At the spa, Will takes Elin to the hot tub. Elin is nervous, still not ready to enjoy the water after the Hayler case, but Will assures her that the hot tub is safe because it isn’t deep. She pushes aside her worry and relaxes into the water with Will. They share a kiss, but Elin is distracted by a loud thump. She gets the feeling that she’s being watched again. She asks Will if he heard anything, but he didn’t, and he’s frustrated that she can’t seem to relax. Will decides that going to the spa wasn’t a good idea and gets out, offering to walk her back before he heads to the pool. She tells him it’s okay, and he heads to the pool, leaving her alone.

She tries to follow him, but she gets lost and finds the icy plunge pool. She feels someone behind her and assumes it’s Will. She makes a remark joking about him jumping into the plunge pool for her, but there’s no response. She hears feet behind her, and soft breathing. Then, the person shoves her into the plunge pool. 

Elin sinks deep into the plunge pool, and she is disoriented for a moment, struggling to find her way back up. She finally surfaces and gasps for air, trying to pull herself up the ice-cold metal ladder. When she’s finally out, she runs and screams for Will. When she finds him, she tells him that someone shoved her into the plunge pool. He isn’t sure that someone pushed her, and he reminds her that the deck is slippery. She is hurt that he doesn’t believe her and insists that she was pushed. He isn’t convinced, and he takes her back to their room to warm her up.

He brings her a warm cup of coffee, and she tells him how afraid she was that she wasn’t going to be able to come back up. She also tells him of being watched in the changing room while he was swimming. He suggests that they leave, again, and Elin agrees. A slip of paper is pushed under the door, and Will reads it. “They’re evacuating the hotel. We’ve got to leave tomorrow” (146).