Confessions: The Paris Mysteries Read online

  I took a panoramic tour without moving an inch. To my left on an easel was an oil painting of a man and woman making love in a great four-poster bed. They were ecstatic. Bedding had been tossed and thrown to the floor, and their faces just radiated pleasure. I gasped a little bit, even covered my mouth. I was starting to think that maybe Gram Hilda wasn’t your typical old granny.

  I could hardly wait to see more.

  I looked straight ahead, all the way down the length of the room to the far window. On both sides of an irregular aisle were casual groupings of upholstered chairs and exotic painted screens. To my right, lined up against the wall, were armoires, closed cabinets holding who knew what—but definitely secrets I was born to uncover.

  I was suddenly struck by a powerful feeling of déjà vu, but it was as elusive as the first notes of a song you haven’t heard in a long time.

  I searched my mind for that ephemeral memory, and then it clicked. The scent in the air reminded me of my older sister, Katherine, who had died years ago.

  And Katherine would have loved this room. Like me, she would have wanted to explore every drawer and cubbyhole.

  I walked softly down the aisle of furniture so I could better see a gallery of photographs that had been hung on either side of the window.

  They were breathtaking.

  My gram Hilda was pictured arm in arm with a string of celebrities: Sting and Harrison Ford and Elton John. She was glamorous and beautiful, and the way these famous people looked at her, I could tell that they, too, thought Hilda Angel was a star.

  There was a huge framed photo of Hilda and my grandpa Max in a formal French rose garden bounded by boxwood, and in a collection by themselves were six, no, seven photos, each of a gorgeous man wearing nothing but a smile or a satisfied look.

  Gram Hilda. Were these men models? Or were they your lovers? Oh, man, oh, man. Didn’t you worry you would bring disgrace upon the family name? I couldn’t help laughing.

  Giggling still, I tore my eyes away from the photographs, and my gaze fell on a corner cabinet that left me breathless. The cabinet was made of gleaming hardwood carved with the most adorable depictions of nude young women—nymphs, maybe—holding flowers in their arms and as parasols above their heads.

  I realized that the floral fragrance was coming from this cabinet, and it freaking begged to be opened.

  I flung the doors wide and ran my eyes across rows and more rows of apothecary bottles, each with a label printed with the name BELLAIRE. And beneath that, handwritten, were the names of precious oils and floral scents: myrrh, ambergris, tincture of tea rose.

  I opened a deep bottom drawer and found a stack of clothbound notebooks stamped BELLAIRE in gold. Inside the books were perfume formulas and descriptions of the moods these ingredients would evoke.

  I quickly deduced that Bellaire wasn’t a home parfumerie. It was a business, with a factory in Le Marais, owned and operated by Hilda Angel.

  My knees almost gave out. I clutched at a chair to steady myself and then sat down with one of Gram Hilda’s books in my hand. I saw myself napping in Katherine’s bed while she did her schoolwork. She wore a fragrance called Se Souvenir de Moi, and the formula for it was written in the book I held in my lap. Se Souvenir de Moi. Remember Me.

  Cue the celestial choir.

  I’d opened a door to my grandmother’s private space and not only glimpsed her secrets, I’d found memories of Katherine as well.

  This was the best day of my life. This one.

  The kitchen was in full production when, unnoticed, I returned Jacob’s keys to his jacket pocket. The boys were at the table, and our uncle was dishing up omelets and pouring juice at the same time. He looked over at me as I took a seat next to Harry.

  “Kids,” Jacob said, “your uniforms are all in the front closet. Please change right after breakfast, because at eight on the nose, Monsieur Pierre Morel will drive you to the International Academy.”

  Academy? Had Jacob said academy?

  We each shouted across the table.

  Me: “Uniforms? I don’t do uniforms.”

  Harry: “We have a driver?”

  Hugo: “Why do I have to go? Didn’t I tell you I’m done with school?”

  Jacob turned up his iPod, slid an omelet onto his plate, poured coffee for me, Harry, and himself, then sat down to eat.

  I got it. There would be no discussion.

  We each found a garment bag with our name on it and whipped off the plastic covering for a look at what not to wear.

  Well, the uniforms could have been worse.

  I dressed in the white shirt, gray vest, gray pleated skirt, knee socks, flat shoes with a wide toe box, and a pale-gray jacket with an insignia on the breast pocket. I brushed my hair and held it back with a band. And when I returned to the parlor, Harry and Hugo were dressed pretty much like me. Trousers, of course, instead of skirts.

  Monsieur Morel was about ninety years old and drove like he was a hundred and fifty. I sat in the backseat between my two brothers and watched the city slowly pass our windows until we pulled up to the school building.

  “This used to be a college,” Monsieur Morel informed us in heavily accented English.

  But my mind was on something else. The International Academy was just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, which had been all lit up when I’d seen it last. James and I had been bumping knees under the café table while electricity zapped our neural networks, and unfortunately it was still zapping mine.

  The headmaster himself, Monsieur Avignon, met us at the door and, after a few words of greeting, hurriedly walked us to our first classes. I was obedient, even polite, but I wished like crazy that I was back in New York. That life was the way it had been before my parents died. Before I met James. When I was still a kid going to All Saints just a few blocks from the Dakota, not knowing that I was odd as hell, and that life was going to deliver some very hard knocks before I finally learned there was no place in the world where I fit in.

  Like a lot of kids on their first day of school, I missed my mom. If I could have, I would have told her no one loved me.

  And what would she have said? “Suck it up, Tandy. Suck it up.”

  My first-period classroom was bright and modern and had five rows of wooden tables and chairs for the students. The math teacher, Madame Mason, had the grace of a ballet dancer as she wrote out equations on a whiteboard.

  I sat in the last row, looking at the gray-jacketed backs and excellent haircuts of the kids of rich and privileged foreigners stationed in Paris. My peers.

  Every few minutes, one of them would turn and look at me like I was the main attraction in the weird-kid exhibit—then snap their head back to the front.

  I’d been an outcast before. Welcome to my world.

  I zoned out within a minute and went to a room in my mind that looked exactly like the room in the Grand Hôtel Voltaire. I began breaking my memories of the hours I’d spent there with James into bite-sized, easy-to-digest little moments. I was thinking of James whispering, “I love you,” when my name seemed to boom loudly in the classroom.

  I did a fast mental rewind and realized that Madame Mason had said, “Mademoiselle Angel, please explain to the class the four ways to prove that these two lines are parallel.”

  Twenty kids swiveled to face me.

  I stood up, hoping words would jump into my mouth, but I was lost. I know geometry cold, but it was as if James had flushed all thoughts about anything but him right out of my head.

  For an extremely long fifteen seconds, I was like an ice statue. I stared at the two lines Madame Mason had drawn on the whiteboard, and I don’t think I even breathed. And then I thawed, and the four solutions to the problem came to me. I summarized the transversal postulate, explained how transverse lines intersecting parallel lines create congruent angles, and gave the answer in excellent French.

  Madame Mason stared at me, dumbstruck, as though I had grown a few more heads.

  I had just tucked m
y skirt under me and retaken my seat when there was a rush of air and movement behind me. It was Monsieur Avignon, who had burst into the classroom. I had noticed when he met us earlier that the man was jittery. Well, he was superhyper now. He pinned me with his jiggly eyes and shouted, “Mademoiselle Angel, come with me. Immediately!”

  I stuffed my laptop into my backpack and followed the headmaster down the hall, through a set of double doors, and out to the gym, with its high echoey ceilings and hardwood floors.

  I saw them immediately.

  There, between workout mats and weights, were my little brother, Hugo, and another kid, who was bigger and older and was curled into a fetal position on the floor. Hugo’s fists were cocked, and the boy on the floor was bloody and crying.

  Hugo shouted the second he saw me.

  “This punk said we killed Malcolm and Maud. I told him to take it back. Or else. He wouldn’t do it, Tandy.”

  The weird, maybe scared looks from my classmates made some kind of sense now. They thought we were killers. A nurse and a doctor ran toward the moaning kid on the floor, and then Harry drifted in and, in no particular hurry, came over to me.

  “Whassup,” said my twin brother.

  His pupils were huge, and he had a dopey expression on his face. What the hell?

  I whispered, “Harry. Are you stoned?”

  “Sit over there,” said Monsieur Avignon, pointing to some folding chairs. “Monsieur Perlman is coming now.”

  Oh, crap. We were really in for it now.

  Jacob stood in the center of the parlor and looked at us with the hard eyes of a commando. When his expression was cold, it meant that under the surface, he was ripping mad, and oh, man, I do not like it when Jacob is mad.

  The three of us had sunk down in square leather chairs, Harry and I guilty by association with Hugo because we’d taken a stand. If Hugo had to leave the International Academy, we’d all go with him.

  And Hugo was defiant.

  “You can’t expect me to let people accuse us of murdering Malcolm and Maud,” our little brother said. “Uncle Jake, would you take that?”

  “I don’t expect you to throw the first punch, Hugo. I don’t expect you to bait other people into throwing the first punch, either.”

  “When you’ve been insulted, the first punch is a technicality,” said Hugo. “And I’m not apologizing to that shit, even if his father is the king of France.”

  “Hugo. All of you. You just don’t get it. Your inheritance is conditional on good behavior. Monsieur Delavergne used his contacts to get you into that school, and now, Hugo, you thanked him by pooping in the punch bowl.”

  Hugo cracked up. He started repeating, “I pooped in the punch bowl,” until he was rolling on the floor with tears in his eyes. Before Jacob seized him by the belt and the back of his neck, I jumped to my feet.

  “Define ‘disgrace,’ Jacob, because I don’t get that. Or is it in the fine print of page one thousand forty-three of that document I signed?”

  “Sit down, Tandy.”

  “I prefer to stand.”

  “Sit. Down.”

  I sighed. I threw myself back down into the chair and looked up at him like, “What?”

  “You want me to define ‘disgrace’? If that boy’s parents go to the media or hire a lawyer, you can bet that’s a disgrace. I have one vote, kids. One vote. If you don’t get yourselves under control, you’re not going to like the repercussions.”

  Harry said, “Maybe we could make the problem disappear, Jacob. If Hugo apologizes, could you ask Monsieur Avignon to give us another chance? If he takes us back, no problem, right? I liked the school.”

  “Of course you did. You bought marijuana outside the front door, and, Harry, that’s not only a disgrace, it’s a crime.”

  “Oh. Monsieur Morel told you. You’re spying on us?” Harry said. “I’d call that disgraceful, Jake.”

  “Go to your rooms,” our uncle said. “Leave your phones on the kitchen table. I’m disconnecting the Wi-Fi.”

  Hugo shouted, “Nooooooooo!”

  Jacob gave me a look that made me feel like a bug. A small bug. About to be squashed. He said, “And by the way, Tandy, don’t go into my pockets again.”

  Jacob went on, “You’re all grounded. Think of this house as lockup until I find a school that will take you.”

  The three of us left the parlor. In disgrace.

  I had no plans to leave the house. After this, I wouldn’t dare, but as I slunk off to my room, I had no idea that before morning, I would be taking a trip into the past. And in the process, I would get one of the greatest shocks of my life.

  I have to prepare you for something I wasn’t prepared for myself.

  I never expected to run into the ghost of my dead sister.

  The night we were kicked out of school was a waking nightmare. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about Gram Hilda’s stiff-necked lawyers and bankers, who looked unforgiving and vengeful.

  I thought about Hugo’s incorrigible fighting, and then Harry buying dope right outside school. It wasn’t exactly the action of a casual smoker. And the worst for me, personally, was Jacob’s disappointment in me for filching that key.

  The three of us had been awful. Jacob didn’t deserve that, and we all knew it.

  I stared at the canopy for hours. I was sweaty and pissed off at myself and beyond restless, and at just after midnight, when I couldn’t lie in bed for another minute, I got up, put on my Converse, and grabbed a flashlight.

  I wasn’t going to borrow any keys, but I was determined to map out my grandmother’s house from the basement to her attic atelier. This was partly my house. So what could possibly be wrong with taking a stroll?

  I crept past Jacob’s room, then tiptoed down the center stairs, and when I got to the kitchen, I took a sharp right. I’d seen a door at the end of the pantry and was pretty sure it opened onto a staircase that led down to the cellar.

  And yes, indeed, it did.

  The pantry door opened easily, and cool air rushed toward me as I went down the stairs. When I got to the bottom, I swung my flashlight around until I found a chain attached to a light fixture in the ceiling.

  I pulled the chain, and the light came on, revealing a stone basement room with a furnace in the corner. To my left was an old door with strap hinges and an old latch. My detective instincts told me there would be something interesting behind it.

  The latch was locked, but I pried it open with a rusty bar, only breaking two fingernails in the process. But I didn’t care at all. The room within a room was a mystery enclosed in an enigma.

  I was standing inside a stone chamber that had once been a wine cellar, but there was no wine. There was something much better.

  Right in front of me was a monastery table made of heavy, hand-cut planks, and on the table, centered and squared, were three cardboard bankers’ document boxes.

  I had to know what was inside those boxes. Why had they been stored in an airless basement room? Would I find more racy photographs inside? Or were they filled with old journals, secret tales by Gram Hilda?

  I walked to the table and put my hand on the box closest to me and turned it so that light fell on the label.

  A name had been written in marking pen.

  KATHERINE

  That was my sister’s name. My sister who had died.

  I was seriously freaked out at reading my sister’s name. I turned the other two boxes around and, yeah, each one was marked katherine.

  They had to belong to some other Katherine.

  My sister had died in a horrific motorcycle crash in South Africa six years ago. Nothing belonging to her could possibly have found its way to my grandmother’s basement. Right?

  Whether that was right, wrong, or something else, I had to find out what was inside these boxes.

  The lids were sealed with transparent packing tape. I grabbed the first box and pulled at the tape with my broken nails—then I lifted the lid.

  Right inside the open
ed box was a large white envelope. There was no writing on it and the flap wasn’t sealed. I worked my fingers into the envelope and pulled out a contact sheet, a page of thumbnail-sized photographs.

  My heart started banging again.

  It was Katherine. My Katherine.

  The overhead lightbulb was perfect for scrutinizing small items, and I closely examined the twenty-four tiny pictures of my beloved sister. She was alone in each snapshot, and in every one of them, she looked as beautiful and as happy as the last time I saw her.

  And snapshot is the right word, as in candid snapshot. None of the pictures were posed. Katherine didn’t seem aware that she was being photographed, so the photographer had to have been hidden. Or else the photographer had captured her on film with a zoom lens, paparazzi-style.

  And that wasn’t all.

  These pictures had been taken in Paris. Not New York, not Cape Town. Paris.

  Had Katherine stopped off here before she’d had the fatal collision with a tractor-trailer in Cape Town? Had she left these boxes, planning to send them home to New York? The stone walls of the subterranean basement room were starting to close in on me. I was in a tomb with the last pictures of Katherine, but I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

  I put the pictures down and plunged my hands into the box.

  There were more envelopes and accordion folders, the kind that hold thick packets of paper. I opened everything hurriedly.

  I saw stacks of papers that had Katherine’s name on the cover sheets, but before I could read them, I saw a chart with her name printed across the top. I’d seen charts like these before. They had been in my father’s home office, labeled with the names of each of my siblings, and of course, there was a chart with my name, too.

  This chart of Katherine’s was dated only weeks before her death.

  There were codes down the left-hand side, numbers across the bottom, dates across the top. I could read these charts in my sleep. I did it now, and I was as far from sleep as I had ever been in my life.

  In a period of one year, Katherine’s IQ had shot up from 133 to more than 180. It was off the charts.