Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (17 page)

Two days after the fire, only
an hour after my release from the hospital, I was in a police interrogation room, where cops were accusing me of torching my grandmother’s house.

They had no evidence, of course, but they’d cooked up a variety of bogus motives for me, which, where I come from, is called a fishing expedition.

They had one suspect, me. And they wanted to hook me, reel me in, and toss me into an ice locker—
today
.

The false accusation was insane, and I was already in an angry depression.

The fire had taken my computer, consumed the last letter from James. Clothes my mother had given me were
destroyed, and so were Katherine’s boxes. And so was Gram Hilda’s gorgeous house and everything in it. I felt as if my grandmother had died all over again.

I looked as bad as I felt.

My skin was red, flash-dried by the fire. A nurse had trimmed the frizz on my head, and I was wearing tacky clothes Jacob had bought for me that morning. Thank you, Jacob, but I looked more like a meth addict than a person who should be taken seriously.

Lieutenant Bouton was pretty and hip. She looked twenty but was probably thirty. I’d thought she would be the
good
cop. But I was wrong. She was as tough as horsemeat.

While her partner, Lieutenant LaMer, sat across from me, Bouton looked for ways to maximize my vulnerability. She slammed a folder on the table and spread the papers around in front of me. They were copies of my file from the New York City police department.

Item number one was the court documents charging me with the deaths of my parents—later
dismissed
. Item numbers two and three were morgue pictures of Malcolm and Maud lying on slabs in the medical examiner’s office, bloodless and gray under a cold light.

I’d seen my parents dead in their bed, so you’d think mere pictures would have no power to hurt me. But they
did. Those photos reopened old wounds, rubbed salt in them, and dug around in them, too, which brought back all the old pain, anger, deep sadness, longing, and regret.

It was all beyond excruciating. I let out a sob. Then reined myself back in.

Bouton walked behind me so that I couldn’t see her face.

She said, “You hate the family of yourself, mademoiselle. You want them all dead. Your father. Your mother. This is your work, is it not? You murdered them. You tricked the police and so you got away. You can run, but how do you say, you cannot hide.”

“No, no, no! Are you an idiot?” I fired back in French. “Read the later reports. Read a few words, why don’t you? And now someone has tried to murder
us
. Don’t you get it?
We all could have died.
”

Bouton flicked the back of my neck with her fingers.

“Hey!” But I was afraid if I got out of my seat, I could give her a reason to really hurt me.

“Killer girl,” said Bouton, “you should tell us how you set this fire. We will find out.”

She began pushing a chair in front of her like it was a baby carriage. Jostled it and banged it down on its back legs. All this was to rattle me. Make me cry and then confess.

When I didn’t react, Bouton parked the chair and sat in
it. She leaned over the table and said sweetly to me, “Why
did
you set fire to the house? The house was insured for millions,
non
?”

“I was asleep,” I said for the fourth time.

“But heh, you cannot prove that. There were no witnesses to you even in your bed. You admit that, correct, Mademoiselle Angel?”

“I slept in the attic. I told you.”

She attacked from another direction.

“You’ve been sad lately,
non
? Your lover, he
dumped
you, and so you were having a mental breakdown.”

“Which would be understandable,” said Lieutenant LaMer. He gave me the good-cop smile.

“I didn’t set the fire,” I said angrily. “I was asleep by myself. On the top floor. Where I almost
died
.”

There was a knock and then a pounding on the door. LaMer opened it for another cop and our family attorney, Monsieur Delavergne, who marched in.

Delavergne said, “Either charge my client now, or I am taking her home.”

Home? What home?

Five minutes later, Delavergne helped me into the backseat of our car. Morel was at the wheel, and Jacob got into the backseat with me. He opened his poor bandaged arms to me and I fell against his chest.

I know I’ve had days as bad as this one in my life, but at that moment, this was as bad as it got. A few months earlier, I thought I was going to have a very big life.

Now I didn’t want to live at all.

Honest to God. What the hell was I going to do?

I had to talk to Jacob,
alone. Urgently.

That night, we sat in padded chairs on the terrace outside my room at the Hotel George V. The Eiffel Tower stood gloriously lit in the distance. But this billion-dollar view of Paris meant nothing to me.

My brothers and I were under siege. I’d been incredibly naïve, and it had taken a destructive fire to snap me to attention. I was shaken and appropriately scared.

I said to Jacob, “You’ve been saying you want to protect us, and you know what? We
need
your protection. We weren’t just targets, you know. Someone was determined to burn us alive.”

“The arson investigation is still ongoing. One good thing: They’re no longer looking at you.”

“I don’t
care
about the investigation. I was stupid. I was watching out for black cars passing by. I didn’t think we were going to get murdered in our sleep. You have to be a psychopath to set fire to a house full of people.”

Jacob nodded. “What are you thinking?”

“Besides the fact that I’m terrified
and
horrified? I found a notebook in the attic, Jacob. Gram Hilda’s handwriting. Almost like a diary.”

“You read it?”

“Cover to cover. And I understood every word. Here’s the instant recap. Gram Hilda created the formulas for the original pills. An early version of them, anyway. She hoped these formulas could improve the lives of impoverished children, but her follow-up of the animal studies told her that the results were unpredictable. And by that, she meant
dangerous
.”

“You’re sure of this, Tandy?”

“The formulas were in her book, Uncle Jake. My dad and Peter had to have found them after Gram Hilda died.”

“Possible,” Jacob said. He said it a couple more times. He was listening to me intently, and he looked sad. He said, “I hate to say this about my own brother, but if the products were dangerous according to Hilda, that
wouldn’t have stopped Peter. Not if he saw big money at the end of the day.”

“I don’t think he has any limits, Uncle Jake. He experimented on children in his own
family
. He’s capable of anything. Are we just going to wait for him to get us? Are we?

“Because I really can’t go along with that.”

I was awake all night long,
listening to a variety of alien sounds coming from above and beneath me in the hotel, as well as street noises that got louder as morning came on.

While my brothers and Jacob slept in the suite next door, I dressed fast and left the hotel. I was living in an Alice in Wonderland world where up was down and down was sideways and converging roads were consumed in fire.

I needed to clear my head.

I walked fast on Rue Clément Marot, shifting my eyes everywhere. I was a couple of blocks from the Champs-Élysées, but I had no destination in mind. I was just moving my legs and hoping that an answer to “What should we do now?” would jump into my head.

And then it
did
.

The answer was dead simple. Paris was over. We’d gotten the best of this city, and it had nothing left for us. Not when someone was trying to kill us all, even Hugo. We had to get on a freaking plane, and I wasn’t even going to ask permission from Jacob.

I dodged foot traffic and made phone calls as I walked. I got routed to phone queues. I spoke to people who had to transfer my call, and I was put on hold many times.

But I did it.

We were booked on a private plane that would depart that night for the United States. Jacob would have to transfer funds and school transcripts, and he’d also have to handle Harry, who would probably go bug-nuts.

As I detailed possible living arrangements in New York, the to-do list grew.

I was crossing a street when, without warning, someone grabbed my arm from behind.

It was a shock right through my heart. I pulled back, and as I opened my mouth to scream, I faced my attacker, expecting to see a brutish thug sent by Royal Rampling.

It was a woman, small, apparently unarmed.

When I was able to hear her, I realized that she was saying, “Tandy. Tandy, it’s
me
.”

I stood there in the middle of the street, looking at this
stranger with dark hair and sunglasses, wearing a dark coat with a hem down to the tops of her boots. Who was she?

I had no idea.

“Hey!”
I shouted, jerking my arm free. “I don’t know you. Leave me alone or I’ll call a gendarme.”

This was bravado. I half expected her to pull a gun from her pocket, that’s how freaked I was. Whoever she was, I wanted nothing to do with her. I may be courageous, but I still know when to walk away and when to run.

The light changed, and dodging traffic, I ran to the other side of the avenue, fast. I felt my heart beat with violent anger in my temples.

Still, the woman called out to me and closed the gap between us.

“Tandy. It’s
me
! It’s
Katherine
.”