Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (15 page)

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 unflinching.

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
.”