Confessions: The Paris Mysteries Read online

  I had Peter’s e-mail address. I could have easily sent this bomb right to his in-box, but I didn’t do it.

  I had two reasons.

  One, all he would do was laugh.

  Two, I didn’t want to tip him off. If Peter had anything to do with Katherine’s death, I wanted to nail him.

  I hit the delete key.

  Of course, the program asked, Are you sure you want to delete this e-mail?

  Yes. I’m sure. Damn him.

  Delete.

  I woke to the sound of Jacob screaming.

  Jacob never screams.

  I realized I had fallen asleep, fully clothed, with my shoes on, so I ran downstairs in yesterday’s school clothes to the sound of Uncle Jake shouting at the top of his lungs in his guttural mother tongue.

  I didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark outside the windows and that a pool of light filled the downstairs area at the bottom of the staircase.

  When I reached the landing above the foyer, I saw a bunch of kids, maybe ten of them, most a few years older than Harry and me. They were in various stages of dress and undress, and from the lazy way they were stumbling around, I was sure they were stoned.

  The front door was open, and Jacob was holding a boy by the shoulder with one hand and by the waistband with the other and shoving him out the door.

  Other kids, heavily inked and pierced and made up, music types maybe, grumbled and shouted at Jacob and collected their possessions at their leisure, as Jacob ranted—at Harry.

  I got to the ground floor in a hurry. The parlor was trashed. Bottles and bongs and items of clothing were everywhere. The leather furniture was wet and stained. Someone had puked on the carpet.

  Harry was sweaty and shirtless—no tattoos, thank God—but he looked wild-eyed, and he was grinning. He was saying, “Jacob, you’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

  Picture Jacob’s intense glare as he tried not to smack Harry for talking back.

  “Nothing? You didn’t have permission to bring people here.”

  “It’s my house, right, Jacob? I mean, it’s a jail, but it’s my jail. You can’t have control over every single thing I do.”

  Kids were laughing, leaving the house in singles and pairs. The more the room emptied, the more I saw: smears on the walls, stains on the expensive furniture, beer puddled in the carpets, a broken lamp that had probably been worth ten thousand dollars.

  Jacob didn’t even notice that I was there. And now Hugo was standing behind me.

  Jacob said to Harry, “You’re an ingrate.”

  “I have a producer now,” Harry said. “I have an agent.”

  “You could be in an actual jail now,” Jacob said. “You could be waiting for a lawyer to take your case. Hoping he was good enough to get you out on bail.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Harry. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  But his face belied what he was saying. His eyes were huge. A tall blond girl walked by, patted his butt, and said in French, “Good party, Harrison. See you very soon, chéri.”

  Jacob said to Harry, “Do you understand that I had a life of my own six months ago? I had friends and family and a community of respectable people who held me in high regard.”

  “Oh,” said Harry.

  Jacob went on, “I volunteered to guide you children, take care of you and protect you. To make sure you got a fair chance at success. I saved your ungrateful butt just this week, Harry. I asked the board not to cut years off your inheritance. I had to beg.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Jacob.”

  “Are you, Harry? Because last week, a friend of yours died. Then you were taken to the hospital because of a weak heart. Now you are taking substances and bringing strangers here while your siblings are in their beds. You are also disgracing the memory of your grandmother.”

  “I’m a wretched person, Jake. But I meant no harm.”

  The parlor was finally empty. Jacob closed the door and locked it.

  “I was never popular,” Harry said. “Now people want to be with me. I recorded my own composition and it aired in Paris. It was a big thing for me, Uncle Jake. How could I say no to people who wanted to celebrate with me?”

  “Learn to say no to self-destructive compulsions,” Jacob said. “Be smart, Harry. Make the best of your privileged situation, because in two years, I won’t be your guardian. You will be free to stand on your own feet, or fall down. That will be up to you.

  “But not today. In a few hours, you will go to school and you will be on time.”

  Harry said, “I’m sorry, Uncle Jake. I really am.”

  He plucked his shirt from where it hung on a lamp finial, then passed me and Hugo as he headed up the stairs. I followed him, whispering at him fiercely, “I know you took some of those pills. Why are you lying to me, Harry? I know you. I know you as well as I know myself.”

  He didn’t deny it. But then, he didn’t say anything.

  God, oh God, I don’t want my brother to die.

  Jacob said exactly six words to me as he steered me out of the house the next morning.

  “No school today, Tandy. Road trip.”

  I asked why, but his body language told me he was in a galaxy far, far away and didn’t even hear me.

  We got into Jacob’s tidy white Fiat, and within a couple of minutes we were tearing south through Paris at warp speed. I grabbed on to the armrest on one side and the console on the other and held on tight.

  What the hell was this road trip? Where were we going? Could I even trust that I was safe?

  I kept my eyes straight ahead, feeling every intersection as a potential collision site, watching for black cars, maybe a bunch of them barricading the road.

  Jacob drove like a robot until we hit the outskirts of Paris. Finally, braking the car at a stoplight, he turned to me with a superintense look.

  “You want answers, Tandy? You’re going to get answers.”

  “What kind of answers?”

  “The kind you like. Complicated.”

  Well, thanks for clearing that up, Jacob.

  The light changed, and we were off again. I read Jacob’s mood as fiercely determined, like whatever we were driving toward was against his better judgment. That scared me a ton.

  I juggled hypothetical scenarios as we sped through Fontainebleau, and then the landscape changed and we hit the really rural vineyard area of Thomery. Jacob took dust-raising corners on two wheels and never consulted the GPS.

  Suddenly, he veered onto the verge of a country road and stopped the car outside an isolated hobbit house made of brick and wood, with a roof that sagged in the middle. In front of the house was a crazy-wild garden that hadn’t been tended in years.

  The whole place looked like a girl who had crashed after a wicked party and woken up with smeared makeup and her hair sticking out every which way.

  Who lived in this tumbledown house? And why had we come here? I asked the boss, putting a little anger into it.

  “Be patient, Tandy. You’ll know shortly. But I’ll tell you this right now. I used up a lot of personal favors to find these people. It’s taken me years.”

  What people? Why had he looked for them?

  I got out of the car and followed Jacob’s regimental walk up a dirt path through tall weeds to a bare wooden front door.

  He knocked. He knocked again, and then the door creaked open on rusted hinges. I held my breath, wondering if the person who opened it would be an enemy. Had I been led into a trap?

  Two old people stood in the doorway.

  The gentleman’s face was heavily lined. He had a wide nose, cracked hands, a thatch of gray hair, and a bent back. His clothes were simple denim work clothes and looked like they’d been laundered a thousand times.

  Standing right in front of him was a small woman about the same age, same general work-worn appearance. She wore a man’s long-sleeved work shirt over baggy gray pants. Her gray hair was short and roughly cut, and her eyes were gray, too, and unflin
ching.

  The elderly man said, “Bonjour, Jacob.” Then he dropped his gaze to look at me.

  The woman, who I assumed was his wife, fixed her gaze on me and said, “Vous êtes la soeur de Katherine, n’est-ce pas?”

  When the old woman asked me if I was Katherine’s sister, it was as if a whirling, sucking vortex had opened on the doorstep. There was no escape. I plunged down into this well of nauseating fear I couldn’t name.

  I steadied myself against the door frame and managed to say weakly, “Oui, Katherine was my sister.”

  Jacob introduced me to Étienne and Emmanuelle Cordeaux, and I kept flashing on what he’d said to me at the stoplight: You want answers, Tandy? You’re going to get answers. The kind you like. Complicated.

  The sickening feeling of dread was tied to that. Like I was about to learn what had happened to Katherine, or maybe the truth about my whole family—and I wasn’t going to like it.

  The old couple showed us into a teeny sitting room with a low-beamed ceiling, a couple of ancient chairs, and a sofa covered with a horse blanket. A big old shaggy dog slept in front of the wood-burning fireplace.

  While Madame Cordeaux fixed tea, about a hundred questions lit up in my mind.

  The top three: How did these people know Katherine? Why had Jacob taken years and used favors to get to the Cordeaux? And third, how was I going to sit through small talk without jumping out of my seat and demanding explanations—right now?

  As I looked around the room, a tableau on the mantel reached out and grabbed my attention. There were three gilt-framed pictures of a boy about ten, long-limbed, smiling mischievously. A kid with joie de vivre and a sense of humor.

  In the first photo, he romped with a shaggy, long-legged puppy. In another, he was laughing as his father carried him on his back. In the third picture, he was wearing a stiff little suit, standing on a stage, shaking the hand of an older man, who was giving him a trophy.

  “Our sons,” Étienne Cordeaux said in French. “Christian, Laurence, Charles. They would be twenty-four years old now.”

  Did he say sons, plural? Was this boy in fact three boys? And they were all dead?

  Madame Cordeaux returned from the kitchen with a tray, and as she poured tea, she said, “Yes, triplets. My three beautiful, identical sons. They were good children. We thought they would work in the vineyard, have families one day…”

  Monsieur Cordeaux said, “But then we were discovered, or perhaps you know this, Mademoiselle Tandoori.”

  “No. I don’t. This is all news to me.”

  Jacob said, “It’s okay to tell her, Étienne. She wants to know it all.”

  The old gentleman paused as he organized how and what he was going to tell me. I could almost see him thinking and see what he was feeling, too. His features crumpled.

  At last he said, “When Emmanuelle and I were young, we worked in the lavender fields for a lady in Paris. Madame Hilda Angel. Very kind. Ten years ago, a man from Angel Pharmaceuticals came here. He brought Katherine with him. She was a striking girl in every way.”

  Madame Cordeaux said, “Pardonnez-moi. Come, Bernard.” The dog got to its feet and followed her into the front garden.

  Monsieur Cordeaux said, “Emmanuelle… cannot bear to talk about the boys.”

  When the door had closed, I used the interruption to ask, “Who was the man with Katherine?”

  I was scared to hear the answer. Had it been my father? Or Jacob? Was that how he knew the way to this house by heart?

  “He was Madame Hilda’s son Peter Angel,” said Monsieur Cordeaux. “I didn’t like him very much, but I was instantly drawn to Katherine, who was about the same age as our sons.

  “But Katherine was very different from my boys or any child I had ever met. She spoke several languages. She picked up the front end of my truck. She explained the genetic makeup of a virus affecting our grapes. She sang—now, there was an angel’s voice. And then she went off with the boys to play.

  “While they were gone, Monsieur Angel told me of an extraordinary opportunity for our boys, saying they could have better lives than we could give them. He said he would supply the pills—‘harmless herbal supplements’ that could raise the boys’ intelligence and other things I don’t even want to remember.”

  But Monsieur Cordeaux couldn’t forget. He stopped speaking and lowered his head. Jacob looked as stricken as Monsieur Cordeaux, and I felt that vortex sucking me down again. What had those harmless supplements done to the Cordeaux children? And were they the so-called vitamins my sibs and I had been given?

  Monsieur Cordeaux began to speak again. He said that Peter offered money for the children’s education and that he and Emmanuelle had agreed to put their boys in the program. With Peter’s own niece taking the pills, they were obviously safe.

  “They did become smarter,” Monsieur Cordeaux told me. “They each had a different regimen of pills, and they each became superior in a different way. The day Laurence picked up a young horse, mon dieu. We were… astonished.

  “But then they began to age rapidly, even after we stopped giving them pills.”

  Monsieur Cordeaux looked at the pictures on the mantel, then got up and straightened the little shrine to his sons’ memory. Jacob asked him if he could continue, and the bereaved father nodded and returned to his chair.

  “There was nothing to do for them, Mademoiselle Tandoori. They withered. And after long illnesses, they died. Our pleas to the Angel company went unanswered. We are poor people, and they simply shut us out. Our feeble lawsuits died as our boys had died.

  “Our boys had been perfect just as they were,” he said. “We blame ourselves for ever believing that man. Your uncle. He took everything we loved.”

  He looked up with his sad, tear-reddened eyes and showed me the palms of his empty hands.

  “He left us with nothing.”

  We had been with Monsieur and Madame Cordeaux for only an hour, but because the visit had come with long and twisted strings attached to two families, it seemed that I had known them for years.

  I felt the most sickening shame and grief, for Emmanuelle and Étienne Cordeaux and for the deaths of their three innocent children. I couldn’t hide from the devastating knowledge that Peter had found this family and seduced the parents with money and my sister Katherine’s charm.

  And I couldn’t help also worrying that my brothers and I had been permanently harmed by the pills.

  As we drove back to Paris, Jacob explained that he had begun looking into our family years ago, to find out who his long-lost brothers were. Much of what he had learned was so disturbing, he had kept his distance until recently.

  I asked Jacob, “Did Malcolm and Maud know about those boys?”

  “I don’t know about Maud, Tandy,” he said. “Malcolm had access to all the data at Angel Pharmaceuticals. From what I’ve learned over the years, the Cordeaux boys weren’t the only guinea pigs. I’ve met other families, even a few survivors.”

  “And?”

  “Some seemed to thrive. You and your siblings, for instance. Others, as Étienne said, aged fast. They died. I have theories, but no actual proof of who knew and did what. Not yet.”

  More shame washed over me. Tears rolled down my face, and I was so bereft, I didn’t lift a finger to wipe them away. I’d mistrusted Jacob, and I’d been wrong. It was absolutely clear that he really was trying to protect us.

  I found a tissue in my pocket. I took a moment, and then I asked, “Were all the experiments on children?”

  “Yes. A lot of the kids were multiples.”

  Sure. In an experiment, you have a guinea pig and a control subject to compare it with. If I got the pills, maybe Harry only got placebos. Was that why my twin brother was not athletic, not intellectual, actually nothing like me or Hugo or Matty or Katherine?

  Has Harry been taking placebos all along?

  Was this the real reason our parents had never had any interest in him?

  “The boxes in the basement,
” I said.

  “I put them there for safekeeping. I hired the detective to follow Katherine. He took those photos of her in Paris. I was trying to watch out for her, Tandy, but I failed. God help me. I failed.”

  Jacob and I were both depressed beyond words when we got back to Gram Hilda’s house.

  Harry was in the big, spotless kitchen with its painter’s view of the rose garden. He was making a big, meaty sandwich for himself, and I was struck by how young he looked, how shiny and untouched by anything gross or ugly or bad.

  “Heyyyyy,” he called out to Jacob and me. “Guess who’s performing live tonight? Guess. Never mind. It’s me.”

  I was in Harry’s bedroom watching him freak out. He was hyper and totally unfocused. In short, he was a red-hot mess.

  He was going through drawers, tossing garments over his shoulder, saying, “Michael—my agent—”

  “Tall guy. Dreads. I met him, remember?”

  “Okay, yeah. Michael called me like a minute before you walked in the door. He sounded weird.”

  Harry found a pair of tight black jeans. He hopped around getting them on while I waited to hear what was weird.

  “He’d been negotiating but told me not to hope too much, you know? And then everything went out of control really fast…”

  Harry pulled on a vintage I HEART NEW YORK T-shirt over the jeans. He jerked open his closet doors and grabbed a jacket, an iridescent coat of many colors. He put it on; it was an interesting look, both gaudy and very cool, and the colors reminded me totally of Harry’s shimmery paintings.

  But I was still in the dark.

  “What, Harry? What went out of control?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  “Say something that has a fact in it somewhere.”

  He laughed. “I told you. I’m going to perform live. Tonight. How’s my hair? Do you like it doing its own thing?” He roughed it up with both hands. “Or do you think this makes me look older?”

  He grabbed a fistful of his longish curly hair and held it in a bunch at the back of his neck.