Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (6 page)

After blowing up our enrollment at
the International Academy, we knew enough to follow the overly strict and somewhat arbitrary rules at the convent school.

Our first school week was short, but
sooooo
boring, it seemed like it went on forever. We knew the course work, yeah, even Hugo knew his. Our parents, with all their faults, hadn’t raised stupid children.

One good thing is that I’ve been following the priest’s orders to meditate on how I’ve hurt people. It’s helped me recognize that we can’t help but make mistakes, even when our intentions are good. Of course, my parents took that way too far, but maybe I’ll be able to completely forgive them one day. I never thought I’d say that, so that’s progress.

And that is absolutely all I can say for the start of my junior year under the heavy thumbs of the Sisters of Charity.

That Friday afternoon, after making sure Jacob wasn’t home, I took Harry down to the basement. I jerked the chain on the light fixture that lit up the empty cellar, and Harry pulled out a joint from his back pocket. Before I could stop him, he lit up.

“Are you
crazy
?” I shrieked at him.

“Well, yeahhhhhh. It runs in the family,” he said mildly. “I thought you knew that.”

“Put it out. It’s going to stink down here. Jacob is going to know, and he’s going to make us very sorry.”

Harry inhaled deeply, then pinched out the end of the joint and put it back in his pocket. I glared at him as he finally exhaled, but he wasn’t contrite.

Recently, I’d sensed that Harry was becoming bolder, more sure of himself. He was writing a lot, definitely composing music, and given his extraordinary talent, he was probably creating something quite special. When I asked him what he was working on, all he said was “Stuff is cooking, sis. But it’s not done yet.”

“Weed is bad for you,” I went on, stating what I was pretty sure was obvious. “I can cite you a hundred articles on the deleterious effects of marijuana on the adolescent brain.”

He looked at me and then cracked up.

That idiot said, “I think the damage was done before I smoked
this
.”

He checked out the room. Then he walked up to the closed door on the left, the one with the old strap hinges. And as I had done earlier, he pried open the latch.

“Whatever you want me to see is in here, right?” he said.

I pushed him aside, pulled open the door, and grabbed the lightbulb chain.

Harry went directly to the hand-hewn table and the three cartons with Katherine’s name written in bold black marking pen. He sucked in air and said, “Whoa, Tandy. Katherine? Not
our
Katherine? I’m not sure about this.”

With my twin right beside me, I opened the first box and pulled out our sister’s chart.

“Take a look,” I said.

His eyes got huge and focused. I could see that his dope high was largely gone. He stared at the chart, took it out of my hands, and read the symbols and dates on both the X and the Y axis of the graph. Then he looked at me, completely sobered—and there was no question about what we both knew.

Katherine had been on the pills, some of the same ones I had been on, some of the same ones that had been fed to
Harry and to Hugo. And she’d been dosed with the pills for speed and agility that Matthew had gobbled down all his life.

Harry’s voice cracked right down the middle when he said to me, “We should have guessed. They did it to her, too.”

I put my finger on the trend lines and traced their jagged upward climb. “Look at this, Harry. She was smarter than Stephen freaking
Hawking
. She was stronger than Matty and Hugo.”

“Did you have any idea?” he asked me.

I shook my head no.

“What’s in the other boxes?”

“Raise your hand if you want to find out,” I said.

I handed Harry the sheet of
thumbnail-sized photos of Katherine walking around Paris, seemingly oblivious to the photographer. Harry held them under the bare bulb and burst into tears.

He was crying as he said, “I don’t understand this at all. She wasn’t supposed to be in Paris. Who took these pictures?”

I mumbled, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and after my brother wiped away his tears with the backs of his hands, we looked over the reports with our sister’s name on the covers. Behind the cover sheets, we found letterhead from Angel Pharmaceuticals, the company our father owned with our wretched uncle Peter.

“Bet you a million euros they told Kath she was taking
vitamins
, like they did with us,” Harry said.

I was opening more envelopes when I found another contact sheet of pictures. Harry grabbed it and held it under the bare bulb. I yelled, “Hey!” then stared at it from behind his shoulder. Katherine’s hair was the same length as in the other photos, but she was wearing a different shirt, jacket, and scarf.

And there was a boy in some of the pictures.

He had his arms around Katherine. He looked at her adoringly. I felt my stomach clench—had James looked at me that way? I blocked that thought.

We knew Katherine had been with a boy named Dominick when she’d been killed in South Africa. But these pictures were taken in Paris.

“That’s got to be Dominick,” Harry said. “Couldn’t be anyone else. Sis, did Kath stop off in Paris before going to Cape Town? Did she meet Dominick here?”

“My questions exactly,” I said.

My eyes burned with tears as I saw my teenage sister with the dark-haired boy. They looked euphoric. Harry had to be right. Dominick had to be the boy Kath had written about while she was on her Grande Gongo—aka a major reward my parents gave for overachieving—in Cape Town. She’d said she loved him.

“Check my memory of this,” I said. “Dominick was never seen after the accident. But it was assumed that he survived the crash, right? I remember Dad going over there, turning the city upside down looking for him.”

“What I mostly remember is how hard you took the news, even with your zero-emotion pills,” said Harry.

I nodded, my throat dry. I don’t think I’ll ever truly get over losing her.

Harry began emptying the third cardboard box. He was flushed and wheezing through his asthma-challenged lungs.

The thing about twins, even ones like us who aren’t telepathic, is that without reading the other’s actual thoughts, we each knew what the other was thinking.

Harry and I both realized we had to get to the bottom of this mysterious cache of documents before Jacob caught us with our hands in the cookie jar.

The brown, letter-sized envelope at the
bottom of the third and last box looked dirty. It was rumpled and maybe sticky, as if it had been carried around for a while, possibly rolled up and used to swat flies.

Harry and I went for it at the same time, but I got it first.

I held it out so he could see that there was no address on the front; then I turned it over. A name and address were written faintly in pencil on the back. It was as though the writing was an afterthought.

I read out loud, “ ‘D. Tremaine,’ ” and added, “and there’s a street address in Montmartre.”

There was no cell phone coverage in the cellar, so checking out this lead would have to wait. Meanwhile, I saw that the envelope’s flap had been sealed and opened repeatedly, and while it looked unsavory, it was at the same time irresistible.

Harry hung his head over my shoulder, mouth-breathing as I pulled out the scant contents of the envelope.

The first paper was a bill, an invoice from a detective agency in New York called Private, addressed to Peter Angel at his home address, also in New York. The charges were not itemized, just a flat fee of nine thousand dollars “for services rendered”; the invoice had been stamped
PAID
.

A private detective had been hired to do what? Why? And why was this invoice in a box of Katherine Angel artifacts secreted in Gram Hilda’s basement?

Had Peter hired this private eye when my father was unsuccessful in his hunt for Katherine’s boyfriend?

I put the invoice down on the table and went back to the brown envelope. I stuck my hand in again and pulled out three individual sheets of paper that were clean and bright. I ran my eyes over them fast, but still, I caught the salient point.

“I don’t believe this,” I said to Harry.

“Show me,” he said, making a grab for the papers, which I yanked out of his reach.

“Just show me!”
he shouted.

I did. Each of the three sheets was embossed with letterhead in Hebrew letters. But the typed portions were in English: three individual authorizations for payment to Private for three thousand dollars each. The signature read
Jacob Perlman
.

I said, “What the hell? Was the Israeli army interested in Katherine? If so, why? And if not the army, what was Jacob’s interest in Katherine?”

Harry said, “We met Jacob for the first time three months ago when Uncle Peter sent him to take over the rotten job of babysitting us. It always struck me as suspicious that a man like Jacob would take that job.”

“I don’t know why Jacob was kept as a big dark secret,” I said slowly. “Why didn’t Malcolm ever tell us he had an older brother?”

“We have to think of Jacob with a big question mark over his head from now on,” said Harry.

I suddenly felt faint and nauseous. I stood so that my back was against the wall, the flats of my hands pressing the cold, rough stone. I saw flickering lights that weren’t
really there and felt like an ice pick was pushing through my brain toward the back of my right eye.

I’d only had a migraine once before, and I quickly realized I’d been exposed to a bunch of triggers that could set one off: extreme stress, lack of sleep, change of diet, even change of environment, like the dry air in this basement room.

My vision was narrowing. Harry’s voice was way too loud, and yet I knew he was talking very softly. Was there time to stop this head-bomb with a pill?

I moved toward the monastery table like I was walking underwater. I slid the paid bill from Private along with Jacob Perlman’s authorizations back into the dirty brown envelope. I grabbed the contact sheet picturing Kath and the boy who might have been her lover, and slid that into the envelope, too.

Then I tucked the envelope into the waistband of my skirt and hid it under my blouse.

Meanwhile, Harry was stacking unread reports back inside the boxes. The sound of him pulling tape off the roll was like the roar of a tornado coming at me down a highway.

“You okay?” Harry asked.

“No.”

Harry taped the boxes closed, and when the room
looked tidy enough to pass military inspection, he took my hands. “I’m right here, Tandy. Let’s go.”

He turned off the lights and locked up behind us, and we got the hell out of Dodge before the migraine could knock me to the floor.

I was in Gram Hilda’s bed
with the lights out when Jacob came into the room again to check on me.

“Feeling better?” he whispered.

I told him my migraine was about the same size but with less intensity behind my eyes.

“Try to sleep. I’ll bring you another ibuprofen in an hour.”

He very gently adjusted the goose-down blankets and curtains, squeezed my hand, and then quietly closed the door.

I did some relaxation exercises, especially the one where you imagine yourself in a place where you were once happy.

I remembered being happy whenever I jumped into Kath’s bed at night after dinner. I’d snuggle up to her while she read histories of Western civilization and philosophy, and she would sometimes say, “Listen to
this
, Tandy.”

She had told me secrets about boys and her dreams of a life beyond school. And I remembered the way she smelled: Se Souvenir de Moi.

But just before dozing off to pleasant memories, I jumped awake with memories of my mother’s screams the day we found out Katherine was dead. Images followed: Malcolm and Maud, their faces gray as they told their four remaining children what little they knew about our sister’s death. I remembered Matty smashing chairs and glassware as Hugo howled.

I remembered sitting on the floor with my shocked and terrified twin outside the master bedroom door, seeing Maud in bed with a migraine, and Malcolm silently stuffing clothing into a duffel bag, rushing past us with a phone to his face, calling our driver to come around with the Bentley.

The next thing I remembered was Katherine’s funeral. The coffin was closed, of course. I didn’t like to think about that. I spoke at my sister’s graveside, or maybe it would be more accurate to say I stood at my sister’s graveside and, although I had things I wanted to say, I just
sobbed. I didn’t remember what anyone said, exactly, but there were dozens of heartfelt good-byes.

But now, in the present, I was awake, and I wanted to know everything about my sister from my current perspective.

Before I opened the cardboard boxes, I’d never thought the story of Katherine’s death was the slightest bit questionable.

Now questions had been raised.

I thought about Katherine in Paris and the boy named Dominick who had never been found dead or alive in Cape Town. I thought of my uncle Peter, the head of Angel Pharmaceuticals. And I pictured Katherine taking the many, many pills that the adults in our family had conspired to give her—for reasons of their own.

Malcolm and Maud held many principles—but honesty wasn’t one of them. They had lied to us about the drugs. They had lied about Maud’s business so that it was an utter surprise of the
holy crap
kind when we found out that her company was under siege, and the same could be said for Angel Pharmaceuticals.

Now I felt certain we hadn’t been told the whole truth of Katherine’s death. Maybe everything we knew about that was a lie.