Salomé

by Leslie Baird

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

"Smart, thoughtful, and sensual." —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

A gothic-tinged fever dream that reimagines the young American in France, Salomé follows an adrift journalist who accepts an alluring stranger’s invitation to stay at her home in a small French town, only to uncover a dangerous family history that could bend the course of humanity.

Don’t open your eyes…

Courtney notices Salomé the moment she steps onto the plane. She’s magnetic, quicksilver, and, best of all for incurable Francophile Courtney, French. So when Salomé invites Courtney to her mother’s town in northwestern France, Courtney doesn’t even have to think about it.

But things are, almost immediately, surreal. Despite feeling right at home with Salomé, Courtney is confronted by a house outfitted with cameras and the dark, watchful presence of Salomé's mother. Courtney senses she should leave, but with Salomé she feels as if she’s rediscovered the "French Courtney," an alternate version of herself who made a life in France.

That is, until she starts to experience paralyzing nightmares in which strange voices intone Don’t open your eyes . . . and encounters Salomé’s charismatic stepfather, Marco, whose pyramid-scheme vitamin company offers a tempting segue into an even more insidious group obsessed with eternal life. Or is it an actual cult? And how much does Salomé really know? As a conspiracy unfurls, Courtney is torn between her loyalty to Salomé and what might be the story of a lifetime, the kind that could make a journalist’s career—if it doesn’t kill her first.

A modern reclamation of the original femme fatale whose story, until now, has been almost exclusively told by men, Salomé is a tantalizing, feminist tale exploring power, loyalty, connection, and the measures we’ll take to harness our deepest desires.

Release date: May 19, 2026

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 368

Sample

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In college, I lived in the 18th arrondissement of Paris above a locksmith shop-a serrurerie, which is considered to be the most difficult word for Americans to pronounce in the French language. The verb serrer means to tighten or to squeeze, among other things. Serrure is the lock itself, from the Latin sera: a bolt or crossbar.

The word, for me, took on its own meaning, as words are apt to do. To think of serrurerie placed me so fully in a time and space not exactly in the past or the future, and certainly not the present as I experienced it. Serrurerie became a portal of sorts into an alternative world in which I'd never left Paris. Now I spent most of my time saving up for my next trip back.

Once I'd bought a plane ticket, I ticked the days off on the calendar and wrote serrurerie lovingly in the margins of my notebook, the way people tended to their gardens in anticipation of the harvest. Perhaps that's how everyone felt about vacations-but I would never consider my trips to France as vacations. They were somewhere between a homecoming and a compulsion satisfied.

As I shuffled down the plane's center aisle, stopping to wait for other passengers to lift their bags into the overhead bins, my fingers tapped gently against my thigh. S-E-R-R-E-R. My going-to-Paris word. The two Rs, a double tap on the middle finger, naturally.

I found my row, deep in basic economy. There was a woman around my age in the window seat. I lifted my backpack into the overhead compartment before taking my seat next to her. She was looking down at her hands, which were folded neatly in her lap, her thumbs side-by-side. One thumb slid over to the other and smoothed the nail.

Two tears dripped from her chin and onto her thigh. She must've felt me looking. Her watery eyes turned to me, but she didn't seem ashamed, and maybe only partially aware of how obvious it was that she was crying.

"I'm sad," she said with a small shrug.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I won't bother you." I plugged in my headphones and started a podcast before I realized she was still looking at me. I paused the podcast and removed my earbuds.

"I don't love to fly," she said. She had an accent. She couldn't be French, could she? French people weren't typically as quick as Americans to strike up conversations with strangers.

"Neither do I," I said. "But I love to travel, so I have to."

She angled her body toward me. "Same, same."

"I'm Courtney."

She slipped her hand, soft and cool, into mine. "Salomé." Se serrer la main.

I'd always wanted to meet someone named Salomé.

She was prettier than me, but not by a lot. Her hair was dark blonde, parted down the middle and cut into a long bob with curtain bangs. Each time she tucked her bangs behind her ear, they fell right back out, dusting her cheek. It was more the way she moved that gave me the sense that she was beautiful, some sort of sensual lag behind the beat.

There were a number of normal responses for a situation like this: "Oh, what a lovely name," or even, "I've always wanted to meet a Salomé."

But I said, "You aren't going to behead me, are you?"

Her mouth fell open.

"I'm sorry, you probably hear that all the time."

She tilted her head slightly to the side. "No, I don't. And never before from a young person."

"I'm a recovering Catholic," I said. "And I'm not that young."

She squinted and leaned a little closer. "I think we are the same age."

"I'm thirty-one."

"I'm twenty-nine," she said.

"Well. I'm actually thirty. My birthday is on Sunday. It's Saint John the Baptist Day, which is why I knew that whole thing about your name."

"Joyeux anniversaire," she said.

"Thank you." I didn't want the conversation to switch to French, though it was unlikely she expected it to. It wasn't that my French was rusty. I was afraid to make mistakes.

Salomé lifted the window shade to look down where the airline workers were bustling around the exterior of the plane and immediately closed it again. Somehow, I knew how the next exchange would unfold, though I tried to talk myself out of it at first. I always chose the aisle seat. The window was too claustrophobic, and I could never bring myself to wake a sleeping passenger to slide past to go to the bathroom. But mostly I avoided that seat because in my worst moments of plane anxiety I would imagine the glass bursting open and sucking my body out, where I would still be conscious as I started to fall.

I knew she didn't want the window seat either. I couldn't stop myself; I asked, "Would you like to switch seats?"

She raised her eyebrows in pleasant surprise. "Oh, how did you know? Yes, thank you, I don't like the window. It was the only seat available. I just bought my ticket yesterday."

I almost had the row to myself. And now I was voluntarily giving up my seat because a pretty young woman seemed to want it. How chivalrous. We awkwardly switched seats. My new seat was still warm where her narrower hips had been. One by one, she handed me my cell phone, hand sanitizer, and bottle of water from the seat back pocket so delicately you'd think she was handling butterflies. I did the same with hers.

The last item was the notebook I'd hoped to use as a journal but which was mostly filled with to-do lists. She ran her fingertips over its embossed cover, swirling gold and green. It was a Christmas gift from my dad, who had gotten the idea years before that I liked Celtic stuff, which was neither true nor untrue.

"Pretty," she said, before handing it to me.

The flight attendant came by and pressed the overhead bin closed. The engines rumbled to a new frequency. I spelled serrer across my fingers a few times and tried not to hold my breath. If I used the right distractions, it wouldn't be so bad. I spelled through the flight attendant's safety spiel, first in English and then in halting French, and through the Delta commercial that played involuntarily on our screens. I got my stopwatch ready as the plane rolled forward and picked up speed, and pressed "start" as soon as the wings caught air. The plane tilted dramatically to the left at twenty-two seconds. I just had to keep my eyes trained on the stopwatch for two more minutes. The Concorde flight 4590 crashed on July 25, 2000, two minutes after taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport. So after two and a half minutes, I would consider myself safe until landing.

You need to meditate. That's what they all said. Friends, boyfriends, all of them, and every last drop of advice unsolicited. Meditating involved going in there and that's the last place I ever wanted to be. Imagine it's snowing. You decide to give in to the whimsical moment and open your mouth to let a snowflake land on your tongue. But instead of a snowflake, an entire battlefield's worth of bullets rains down on your open mouth and pummels you into the ground. That's what it felt like to go in there. But it was okay. I'd learned to circumvent the battlefield.

I tried spelling "Salomé" across my fingers, but it didn't fit well. It had a silvery quality, like water moving beneath the surface of a frozen river. What a beautiful name. Was she named after the biblical Salomé, who'd ordered the head of John the Baptist brought to her on a plate? She obviously understood my reference. The name was too distinct to not be deliberate.

Maybe Salomé was thinking of how my name didn't suit me. In French, court means "short." Maybe she could feel my thoughts snaking out like tendrils and filling up the plane. The ones that got close all felt it eventually.

Right at two minutes and thirty seconds, there was a ding. The flight attendant's voice came across the intercom. "On behalf of Delta, we want to thank you for flying with us. Our priority is your safety and comfort . . ."

I stopped my timer and slipped my phone into the seat back pocket. Salomé was watching Bridesmaids with French subtitles.

I often made ridiculous goals for flights, like reading an entire book or writing the first draft of an article, which I was never able to accomplish. It was a demoralizing cycle: I'd make a goal, get too nervous to perform, then feel guilty for resorting to the in-flight entertainment. But Salomé had just gone for it. She probably hadn't worried I'd judge her for her film selection, either.

There was something inviting about her that suggested she wouldn't mind being politely observed-or perhaps that she already assumed she was being observed. I scrolled through the films and chose Bridesmaids with French subtitles.

Not a minute later, I felt her cool fingers on my arm. She pointed to my screen.

"I love this movie," I said.

She paused her screen. "I will wait for you. You are like two minutes behind."

"We can discuss it afterward."

"Yes, like a film club."

"I'm sure this film will require a lot of heavy discussion of themes, you know. It looks pretty dense," I said, right as the electric gate Kristen Wiig had climbed trying to leave her fuckboy's house jolted into motion with her on it.

She nodded, watching my screen for it to catch up with hers.

We laughed at the same parts. When the crew of bridesmaids got food poisoning at a dress fitting, Salomé covered her whole face with her hands and shook her head. A couple of times during a particularly funny moment we looked at each other, and I was struck by how natural it felt to be hanging out with her. My friend in Raleigh had recently adopted the word "vibing" into her vocabulary. I'd thought it was stupid at first, but it seemed to fit here.

The flight attendants rolled dinner carts through the aisles. Salomé got the vegetarian option, and I got the same. I usually thought airplane meals were pretty good, considering. But I was no foodie. Would Salomé be a picky eater and be put off by me eating airplane food?

She didn't peel the film back on her dinner until her drink arrived. She got red wine, and I did too. She turned to me and mimed a little cheers with her plastic cup. She made a face to indicate that it wasn't the world's best wine, but it was a good-natured expression. With synchronized fingers, we unpaused the movie.

I could get used to this dinner and movie club, held somewhere above the North Atlantic, en route to France. I'd gladly endure the stress of takeoff for this.

When the credits scrolled, we both removed our headphones.

"What did you think?" I asked.

"I liked it. Very funny. But you know, this jealousy is weird. Like, can you not have more than one friend?"

Before I could respond, the plane hit a patch of turbulence so rough that the woman behind us screamed. Wine leapt over the lip of my plastic cup and pooled onto my tray table. The seat belt light dinged on and a flight attendant hurried down the aisle to get back to her seat. A baby wailed. Salomé wiped up my spilled wine with her napkin.

I watched the napkin turn purple as her hand moved back and forth. My vision tunneled backward, blackening at the edges. My hands were going numb. I spelled serrer, not even trying to hide the movement in my fingers.

"Do you play the piano?" Salomé asked.

It took me a second to realize why she was asking. I shook my hands at the wrists. "Oh, no."

The plane lurched again, dropping my stomach. Our hands instinctively found each other. Mine were so sweaty, I was sure she regretted touching me.

"Let's just talk a little while," she said. I pulled my attention to her. There was a small spatter of freckles on the bridge of her nose, with three dark ones that formed a perfect isosceles triangle.

"Where are you from?" She kept her eyes fixed on mine, a spotlight guiding a tightrope walker to the other end of the wire.

"Raleigh." I hoped she couldn't hear how my voice wavered over the sound of the engines. "Where are you from?" We hadn't actually established that she was French; I just assumed. She could be Belgian or Swiss or something.

"I'm from Paris. But I am going to stay with my mother in a little town called Châteaubriant. Do you know it?"

I shook my head.

"I would think it very weird if you knew it," she said.

"Where is it?"

"It is between Rennes and Nantes. Southwest of Paris."

I wasn't very familiar with that region. "What were you doing in the States?"

She made a very French expression, blowing a puff of air upward. "Bah, well. Nothing. I was in Raleigh since three months, and there, I did nothing. Some babysitting." She put the emphasis on the second syllable of Raleigh.

"What brought you to Raleigh?"

"I went to stay with my boyfriend."

"Is he going to come see you in France?"

She looked at her thumbnail, and that's when I remembered the crying. "No, I will not see him again. He decided it was too difficult, with the distance. But before I am even on the plane, he has another woman. It's terrible. It sucks."

Granted, I'd only known her for three hours, but I couldn't imagine someone rejecting her. This did, however, give us something in common, if you considered someone remaining devotedly neutral about you for months as rejection. "His loss," I said.

"His what?"

"Loss. He's an idiot," I said.

She cut me a glance from under her bangs. "He's an eediot."

"That's why you're sad?"

"Mostly."

"If it makes you feel better, I recently got my feelings hurt by a guy, too. And you know what always helps? Talking about why he sucks. What's the most annoying thing about him?"

"Justin . . . 'e was allergic to everything. Flowers, bees, grass. I am surprised not air."

"So he's an indoor kid. Are you an indoor kid?"

She laughed. "Me, I am not like that. I like to be outside. I love to be with nature and animals. Justin could not have a pet."

"Yeah, so see, maybe it wasn't a good match."

Her eyes roamed down to my chin and back to my eyes. She hesitated, but didn't say whatever she was thinking. I realized the turbulence was over. We let go of each other's hands.