Confessions: The Paris Mysteries Read online

  Shortly after our parents’ sudden and gruesome deaths, just weeks before our home and all our possessions were sold to settle their debts and we were this close to becoming homeless, Jacob Perlman had appeared.

  Jacob was an Israeli ex-commando and our father’s long-lost oldest brother. And now he was our guardian. He was the one who had brought us to Paris to live in Gram Hilda’s house and had told us about the inheritance she intended for us.

  He stood in the center of this fantastic, modern-style room until our eyes were fixed on his. Then he said, “Tandy, I’ve told you. Never turn off your phone.”

  “Uncle Jake, believe me, I had a good reason.”

  “There’s no exception to ‘never.’ We’ll discuss it later.”

  Jacob took his wallet out of the back pocket of his khakis.

  “Harry, please go out and bring back lunch for all of us. Hurry. The bankers and lawyers will be here shortly—and, kids, please trust me when I tell you to bring your A-game.

  “Especially you, Tandoori. Snap out of it—whatever ‘it’ is. Good or bad, the results of this meeting will determine how comfortably you live the rest of your lives.”

  At half past one, nine of the seats around the mirror-polished steel table in Gram Hilda’s dramatic, black-lacquered dining room were taken. We kids lined up along one side, Jacob took his seat at the head, and four gray-suited, middle-aged lawyers and bankers sat stiffly across from us.

  The suits were all humorless, well pressed, and rather full of themselves. And the one who looked least likely to eat Popsicles in his underwear or sing and walk on his hands at the same time was the senior man, Monsieur François Delavergne.

  Monsieur Delavergne was fat and bald, with hair shooting out of his cuffs and sprouting like weeds on his knuckles. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said grimly, shaking hands with each of us.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Hugo said.

  Matty grabbed our bad boy by the shoulder. “That was rude, Hugo. Apologize.”

  “Just being honest,” Hugo said. “Matty, are you afraid of this dude?”

  Matty shook his head and said, “Sorry, Monsieur Delavergne. Hugo comes uncensored.”

  “Real, you mean,” Hugo said. “Straight shooter, you mean.”

  He then bet our visitors that he could lift any of them over his head, but got no takers. Once the nonsense stopped and the presentations were under way, I turned my scattered thoughts to my beautiful, brilliant, and somewhat capricious late grandmother, Hilda Angel.

  Although she died before any of us were born, we’d heard stories about her wild summer on a kibbutz when she was seventeen, her intrepid trips abroad on tramp steamers, and her high-flying life in New York and Paris.

  But what we first learned about her came in the form of a scandalous handwritten codicil to her last will and testament that read, “I am leaving Malcolm and Maud $100, because I feel that is all that they deserve.”

  Our father had framed and hung that Big Chop—what our family not-so-affectionately calls our parents’ punishments—in the stairwell near the master bedroom, where we all saw it several times a day.

  Why had Gram Hilda disowned Malcolm? Maud, our very own tiger mom, had said that Hilda hadn’t approved of the marriage. That must have meant Hilda hadn’t approved of her. Maybe that was true. But I often wondered what else we hadn’t been told.

  I tuned back in to the men in gray as they itemized Gram Hilda’s holdings, projected receipts, calculated interest rates, and translated international rates of exchange.

  I followed the back-and-forth up to a point. I asked questions. I made notes, but honestly, the numbers were dense and dizzying, and although I’m a bit of a math whiz, this was a deluge of black ink and fine print with no apparent bottom line. Plus, the millions of questions and doubts about James kept slipping into my thoughts like evil weeds. I tried, but I couldn’t read a single face across the table.

  Were we bankrupt or not? Why were there so many papers for us to sign? Finally, I’d had enough.

  “Excuse me, Monsieur Delavergne,” I said. “Will you summarize, please? Uncle Jacob will explain the details to us later.”

  “Of course, Mademoiselle Angel,” Delavergne sniffed. “Whatever you say. Whatever you want or need.”

  He took out a pen and a notepad from his briefcase. He said, “The grandchildren’s trusts are equal. You four will each inherit”—scratching of pen on paper—“this amount.”

  He held up the pad so we could all see.

  We four kids sucked up all the air on our side of the table. I had hoped there would be enough money in Gram Hilda’s bank account to pay for our food and housing and maybe college tuition for me, Harry, and Hugo.

  My most extreme wish hadn’t even been close.

  Delavergne went on, “But your grandmother was a careful woman. You won’t get this money all at once. In fact, your inheritance will be divided into monthly payments and distributed to each of you over the next, uhh, forty-two years. Your uncle will be your executor until you each reach your majority.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re saying I’ll get a monthly allowance until I’m fifty-eight years old?”

  “Exactly,” said Gram Hilda’s most trusted senior attorney, “unless you disgrace the family name.” He tapped the stack of papers the four of us had to sign.

  “The degree of ‘disgrace’ will be determined by the five of us: Messieurs Portsmith, Simone, and Bourgogne; your uncle Jacob; and me, of course.”

  Really? I would be responsible to four strangers and Jacob for the next forty-two years?

  By the way, our family was not exactly famous for following rules. So what, exactly, was their definition of disgrace?

  “Your inheritance represents both a gift and a challenge,” Delavergne continued, brightening for the first time in three hours. “That was your grandmother’s guiding principle, and we expect it will become yours as well.”

  Once again, thoughts of James seeped into my unwilling mind. What we had was a gift and a challenge from the very beginning. And I was never one to back down from a challenge.

  We celebrated Gram Hilda’s awesome yet mysterious gifts and challenges at Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, a world-class restaurant that had been awarded the maximum number of Michelin stars, and it might have rated more.

  I’ve been to top restaurants before. I’m from New York. But this place was at the pinnacle of its own category.

  My instant impression was that the ornate Louis XV–style dining room was like the inside of a jewelry box. The room was lined with embroidered screens. Crystals hung from wires above our heads, and there was table art on the ivory linens.

  I noticed everything, but my mind was in a James Rampling death spiral, thinking over everything we had said and done, wondering again how James could have made so many promises and then abandoned me—entirely.

  Truth is, this wasn’t my first collision with the unexpected and incomprehensible. My life history is shot through with bizarre events, tricks of fate, blind alleys, rabbit holes, and bonus rounds, but yesterday I had been with someone who I thought loved me unconditionally. A partner.

  I thought my life had changed.

  And now it had changed in a totally different way. We were financially secure, and this was such a relief, I doubt my brothers even noticed that I was underwater, drowning.

  Hugo, for instance, a wildly uninhibited eater, ordered one of everything on the astonishing menu of exquisite dishes.

  He confided to our waiter, “I’m very rich.”

  Our waiter, very smooth in a black jacket, white shirt, and bow tie, laughed and suggested to Hugo that he come to the chef’s table in the kitchen, where he would be served a portion of everything he wanted.

  The rest of us stayed in our seats, and over the next hour we were served outrageous delights: caviar, steamed langoustines, guinea-fowl pie, dishes flavored with “precious herbs and spices.”

  I merely picked at the delicacies, but
I forgot about James for a few exquisite moments when I tasted the OMG wine. A Lafon Montrachet, it only cost about two thousand dollars a bottle.

  “Cheers, Tandy,” said my twin brother, holding up his crystal wineglass. “I really mean it. Cheers, not tears. Please let go and enjoy this spectacular night. Nothing will ever be exactly like this again.”

  I was wrong when I said my brothers didn’t know I was suffering. Harry, sitting on my left, knew. I touched my glass to his and said, “Write me a song.”

  “I can only write what I’m feeling. And that’s happy.”

  “That could work,” I told Harry.

  Matthew was sitting to my right. Fresh out of jail after being accused of double murder—an accusation I’d had a pretty big role in disproving—he was beaming. I made the mistake of wondering out loud what it would be like to live in Paris, and in true big-brother fashion, he doggedly staked out the opposing position.

  “Tandy, you wouldn’t like it here. I’d even say you’d be miserable. You’d have to wear black all the time and diet constantly, like all Parisian women do. And have you seen the young French men? Messy. Scruffy. And they smoke. All of them.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Matty,” I growled. “And now you’re making me mad.”

  Matthew laughed and held up his hands, saying, “Don’t get mad, Tandy, please. Oh, listen up. I have an announcement.”

  As he spoke, dessert was served, and Hugo flew back to our table. Matthew clinked a silver fork against a wineglass, and when we were all staring at him over little pots of chocolate, he said, “Uncle Jacob, Tandy, little bros. My contract with the Giants has been renewed. So woo-hoo, right, guys? I’m playing football again! I’m going back to New York—”

  Hugo yelled with all the air in his lungs, “Noooooooo!”

  He got up on his chair and threw his arms around Matty’s neck. “Don’t gooooo.”

  “I’ll call you every night,” Matthew said. “I promise.”

  “You’re going right now?” Harry asked. “Like tonight?”

  “My flight takes off in three hours. I love you all. Now tell me you love me, too.”

  I was going to miss the hell out of my great, larger-than-life big brother. We told him so.

  Wow. Something amazing just happened.

  We made Matthew cry.

  Late that night, I lay sleepless, sandwiched between goose-down blankets and silk sheets in a huge canopied bed, maybe the same bed Gram Hilda had slept in once upon a long time ago. I’d gotten past hating James Rampling and had moved halfway back to loving him again.

  I couldn’t help it.

  I could still feel his mouth. I could still remember the way he looked at me. I was starting to think I’d been unfair.

  Maybe James hadn’t left me because he didn’t love me.

  He’d said he’d left me because he did. And there was good reason.

  The last time I’d seen James, six long months ago, it had been under circumstances both different from last night and somewhat the same.

  We were alone together, but instead of lying entwined inside a small one-star hotel in Paris, we were walking in the damp sand of the Hamptons. The sea breeze was blowing through my hair, and James and I were cooling off at the edge of the ocean, not quite ready for the bed in the cottage just behind us in the dunes.

  We hadn’t known each other very long, but we were getting close, kissing, sharing secrets, finding out how alike we were—when headlights came out of nowhere and pinned us where we stood. And thanks to my parents and his father, that had been the last I’d seen of him, until yesterday.

  So maybe what James said in his note was all true: that his father was the devil, and I wasn’t safe. If I loved James, I had to trust him, right?

  But would I ever see him again?

  The sky was dark, and there was only the faintest moonlight coming in through the window, just as it had when James and I clutched each other in the small bed at just this time in his room last night.

  I thrashed around in the enormous, luxurious bed, but there were almost too many pillows. And so I used them well, packing myself in between them so that it felt like James was holding me every way I turned.

  I wound my hair around my fingers, twisted it at the nape of my neck. I opened the top buttons of my pajamas, threw the sheets and bedcovers off me. My skin was hot and tingling, and I was thinking about James.

  I wondered if he was lying in bed somewhere thinking about me.

  Friend, I tried desperately to sleep as the night wore on. I couldn’t find the soft spot or the quiet place in my mind, but I tried. I counted backward from a hundred. I changed positions from this way to that. I balled up the pillows. I remade the bed. I did math in my head, and I recited poetry to myself.

  But I confess… no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about James.

  In my own defense, how could I let go of what was clearly unfinished?

  I stared up at the canopy over Gram Hilda’s big bed. In the dark, it glowed softly, like a blank page for writing a letter to James in my mind.

  Dear James,

  It’s me, the very same Tandy who lay beside you last night. The note you left was, as you said, not enough for me.

  You were right.

  I feel lost without a map or a compass or any way to understand what has happened to us—or to find my way home.

  Last night, I held nothing back. You told me you love me, and I said I love you, too. And so I just can’t understand how you could leave me like this.

  We aren’t finished, James. Whatever your father threatens doesn’t matter. Find me and tell me you won’t ever leave me again.

  Tandy

  I imagined my unwritten, unspoken letter wafting through the window and finding its way to James.

  Stranger things than that have happened.

  “Good night, James,” I said to myself in the dark.

  I cried a little bit. Then I clutched the pillows and finally rocked myself to sleep.

  I reached for James—and I got my arms around pillows. Only pillows.

  My eyes flashed open, and with a sickening wave of disappointment, it all came flooding back: the whole twelve-hour drama of dreams fulfilled, just before they crashed, burned, dried up, and blew away, leaving me with a million questions that came down to this one: Why?

  I patted the nightstand until I found my phone. It was a few minutes before six. It was just about this time yesterday morning when I’d stumbled out of the hotel as though I’d been hit with a piano and walked home alone, wondering what had really happened with James. Why had he abandoned me? Where had he gone? Would I ever see him again?

  If he had left me, could I just accept that it was over?

  Or was I going to torture myself with whats and whys for-freaking-ever?

  I sat up in bed and looked around at Gram Hilda’s room with its pale-peach-painted walls, wood-burning fireplace, and antique Aubusson carpets. I shook James out of my head long enough to think about this extraordinary many-roomed stone house, which, like Gram Hilda herself, was an intriguing mystery.

  Well, I’ve never met a mystery I didn’t want to solve.

  I climbed down out of the big bed of many pillows and rooted around in my suitcase. I dressed in a pair of jeans, an NYPD T-shirt, and low-top Converse. Just in case, I grabbed my handy glow-in-the dark LED flashlight.

  Jacob had told me that Gram Hilda’s house had been kept just the way she had left it, the maintenance being borne by the estate. When Hugo turned twenty-one, we could direct the board to keep the house or sell it.

  Meanwhile, we could use the place as we chose, except for Gram Hilda’s private workroom. That was totally off-limits.

  My door opened silently. I left my room, paused a moment, then stepped out into the large hallway. There was a bedroom door in the middle of each of the four walls and a narrow staircase running right through the center of the hall. Satisfied that I was the only one wandering throug
h the house, I took the stairs up to the third floor.

  The staircase ended there, emptying into a smaller hallway just under the mansard roof.

  There was only one door on this floor, and when I tried the knob, it was solidly, profoundly locked. But for every lock, there’s gotta be a key.

  I scampered downstairs to the main foyer and found Jacob’s jacket hanging in a closet. I rummaged in his pockets until I found a set of keys, then—a little bit shocked at myself, and a lot exhilarated—I darted back up to the locked door. I picked through the key ring and finally found one key that appeared to be the right size for the lock.

  I was wrong, so I pawed through the keys again. My second choice fit perfectly, and when I turned the key a few times, the tumblers tripped.

  I opened the door, and I’ve got one word for what I saw: Whoa.

  As soon as the door swung open, I was hit with a powerful wave of something I can only call wonder. It was almost as if a celestial choir had burst into a drawn-out “Ahhhhhhhhhhh.” That’s how dazed and amazed I was.

  The long, airy room was white, with a beamed cathedral ceiling and tall windows on three sides. And through the window directly ahead of me, I could see a church spire behind the back garden. I smelled flowers, an amazing blend of them, and I saw silhouetted shapes of heavy furniture arrayed throughout the large room.

  Gram Hilda’s private workroom felt astonishing in the dark.

  What had she done here? Why was it off-limits? I closed the door behind me and shot the bolt.

  Once the door was locked, I patted the wall until I found the light switch. Four beautiful standing lamps flashed on, all of them topped with hat-shaped amber silk shades. Honestly, it was as though the sun had risen out of the darkness of the last heartbreaking day and night and thrown a handful of sunbeams right in front of me.

  I stood with my back to the door, simply stunned by the sight of what could only be Gram Hilda’s favorite things. Yeah. This room was a Hilda Angel museum.