Author stuff: After much wait, here's chapter two! I still don't know how long this baby's going to be. Everyone's positive reactions so far is giving me tippy-tappy toes, so thank you!
Fun fact! This was partially written while watching Teen Wolf, New Girl, and Boys Over Flowers. Thanks, mom, for hijacking the TV to watch a k-drama you rolled your eyes at ten years ago. That's a great feeling.
Possible trigger warning! COVID-19 is briefly mentioned and, ultimately, the lockdown that came with it as well. (I'll try to post all trigger warnings at the top here. If I don't, give me a shout. I'm pretty easily accessible on the websites I post on.)
Episode 2
Two years ago, Emilie Agreste vanished without a trace. Her car was found abandoned on the side of the road, just outside of Paris. All of her things were still inside.
No one has seen or heard from her since that night.
The police are officially calling it a missing person's case.
I am your host, Adrian Agreste, and I plan to use this podcast docu-series to find out what happened to my mother and prove to the world that my father killed her.
This all kind of started with Taylor Swift.
You know, country music star turned pop singer turned alt-folk-rock singer? The one who's won an award for almost every album she's ever released? Yeah, that Taylor Swift.
And you can blame some of my classmates on this, too. Specifically, Mylene and Rose.
I've always been a Swiftie. Her music helped me to actually learn quite a bit of English. And my mom used to like singing her music with me, so Taylor kind of has been… important in my life, I guess you can say.
As a Swiftie, I was perfectly obligated to join my classmates in our discord chat to stream the albums together. Because, you know, COVID-19 is a thing.
[Future Adrien here! Hey, if you're from the future and listening to this, first off, hello! Second, thanks for stopping by. Third, yes, I made this podcast during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was a… questionably strange time. Of being isolated to my house once again — we'll talk about that later in the series.
Anyway, back to the show!]
Classes were over for the day, and we were all just helping each other get through our homework. As I said before, Mylene and Rose kind of started it.
And everyone went along with it, because they're Mylene and Rose. They're just… I can't really explain it. You just can't say no when they ask to stream the latest Taylor Swift album over discord for everyone to listen to.
I don't think anyone was really paying attention to the music much at first, we were just talking over it. I actually didn't really notice "No Body, No Crime" until the chorus came in for the last time.
I ended up buying the album later that night and relistening to the whole thing while I was supposed to, umm, be working on my English. Which, technically, I was. Just not in a way that was approved by my English language instructor.
Anyway, "No Body, No Crime" kind of stuck out to me. And it stuck with me. For a while.
And it got me thinking about my mom again. About how she was never found, and no matter how hard they searched, no new information was ever uncovered. How her case is still open and unsolved.
Okay, so I think about my mom a lot, just in general, but I was thinking about the night she disappeared and how everything played out after that.
Something… something just didn't sit right with me. I couldn't place what, but just that something had been off.
Things just didn't add up.
So, like any sane person, I ordered a transparent dry erase board and markers. I also printed out all the information I possibly could when I had some spare time.
And I looked over all of the details that had been available to the media and, essentially, the public. As well as the conspiracies that can be found on Reddit and other forums.
We'll, uh, we'll get to the conspiracies in a later episode. Those kind of deserve their own episode. They really, really do.
Where was I?
Oh, right. Getting everything in order.
I ended up recruiting outside help. Not just my friends, like Nino who is my producer and editor, or Marinette who actually designed a really cool logo for this podcast. I'm actually getting help from one of Paris's akuma-fighting heroes — Chat Noir!
[Dude, when did you even get a chance to talk to Chat Noir?]
Oh, uh, a couple of days ago.
[Alya is going to freak out. You know that, right?]
Yeah, I, uh, kind of figured she would.
I should… probably explain who Alya is and why she'd freak out. Alya loves superheroes. More than me and Nino, and trust me when I say we binged the entire Marvel and DC movie universes. So many hours…
Anyway, Alya.
Alya runs a blog — the Ladyblog — that reports on Paris's own superheroes, mainly Chat Noir and… and Ladybug. She's been faithfully reporting on everything since day one. News reporters all over the world rely on her for not only information but live footage from every battle.
She has actually been really useful in helping me organize everything.
And it's because of Alya that I finally figured out what was so wrong with my mother's case. The thing that had been nagging me at the back of my mind.
The investigation on my mother's disappearance wasn't that deep of an investigation. It barely scratched the surface. It was all for show.
No one was putting in any effort to find out what happened to her. But why?
Author stuff cont'd.: So! This being kind of a story told through a podcast was heavily inspired by a few true crime podcasts. Most notably In the Dark (both the Jacob Wetterling case and the Curtis Flowers case) and Up and Vainished (the Tara Grinstead case), as well as To Live and Die in LA (the Adea Shabani case).
