The Paris Mysteries

  “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.”

  I slammed on the brakes and whipped around, and without even thinking, I screamed, “Are you crazy? What kind of sick scam is this? Katherine is dead.”

  The woman came toward me.

  “Tandy. I understand. I understand, but it’s really me. Please. Believe me, this is no joke. It’s me, Tandy. Katherine, your sister. I’m alive, I’m really alive.”

  My head began to swim. I got spots before my eyes. Then everything went white.

  A woman’s voice was calling me from what seemed to be a great distance. I heard “Tandy, Tandy, please.” I realized she was right next to me, speaking into my ear. I reached out, gripping her arm, and she said, “Whoa. There you go. Can you stand on your own, Tandy?”

  I tried to reconstruct it. I was there on the street with a woman who was covered up from top to toe who said she was my sister, Katherine.

  Really? Was I going crazy? My eyes burned and my head hurt and I thought I would throw up. This had to be the worst kind of hoax. As much as you might wish that a dear deceased loved one was really alive, it just didn’t happen.

  Katherine was dead.

  But at the same time my nose was telling me that I shouldn’t be afraid or even ripping mad.

  Se Souvenir de Moi.

  “Katherine” indicated a setback between two buildings, a place to talk. The setback was sheltered somewhat from the street and appeared to be safe. I have no memory of walking there. I was in full-blown shock and denial. But there we were, standing together in this niche, when my alleged sister took off her glasses, then peeled off her black wig.

  Unbelievable, but I saw the chestnut glints in her brown hair, same as Hugo’s. She had cheekbones like Maud’s. And her eyes? Light brown with gold flecks and a ring of darker brown around the irises. It was like looking at my own eyes in the mirror.

 
I felt as though I’d been wrenched back through time and then shot forward again. I knew that what I was seeing was real. My knees buckled. I stretched out my hand to the wall of the building and this woman—Katherine—grabbed me into a hug.

  “I’ve got you, Tandoo. Oh my God, I’ve got you.”

  I still couldn’t speak, but I could see her more clearly now. We were the same height, the same build. Her eyes flicked over my features and mine flicked over hers.

  Oh my God. It really was Katherine. It was her.

  Only then did I notice that she was no longer a teenager and looked older than when I’d last seen her. There were lines in the corners of her eyes. Had they come from squinting into the sun? Or did she look older than a woman of twenty-two should look? Oh, no. Was she aging like the other children who’d the taken the pills? No, that couldn’t happen. Not now.

  “You’re too beautiful to be dead,” I said.

  Katherine laughed. It was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard. She said, “Wow, I don’t get to laugh very much. Almost never.”

  I laughed, too. “Me neither.”

  And with that, everything I’d felt in the last few minutes broke loose in a torrent of tears. My sister was back from the grave, alive and well. It was miraculous. A true miracle.

  Katherine was sobbing, too, and as we opened our arms to each other, we both just let it all go.

  I was actually hugging my sister again.

  I didn’t want to stop. It was the best day I’d ever had.

  Katherine wore a blue silk scarf around her neck. She pulled it free and handed it to me.

  “Cover your hair, Tandy. Keep your eyes down, and now let’s walk,” she said. “Keep really close to me, and if I say run, just do it, okay?”

  We weren’t laughing or crying anymore, but we were walking in step as we headed for the Champs-Élysées, burying ourselves in the crowd walking north.

  I said, “I have too many questions.”

  “Some things never change,” my sister said, laughing again, squeezing me around my shoulders. My God, it felt just the same as when I’d seen her half a lifetime ago.

  But I did have questions.

  “Katherine, what about the accident?” I said. “The motorbike and the fuel truck in South Africa. What really happened, Kath? How did you survive?”

  “Let’s keep walking,” said my sister. “We don’t have much time. I’ll tell you everything, but I’m going to skip around, okay, Tandoo?”

  So many memories washed over me as I walked and talked with my sister. I was remembering the cadence of her voice, the length of her fingers, and the particular way she gestured when she talked. Kath had been my greatest booster, and I had been hers. I had mourned her and missed her for years and years, and now she was looking right at me.

  I loved her so much.

  She said, “First and most important, you’re right to be afraid. You should be even more afraid. You shouldn’t even be walking alone on the street, Tandy, and that goes for Harry and Hugo, too. I found you easily, and that means other people can find you, too.”

  I looked up and around. I saw people going to work, traffic moving steadily, nothing suspicious. But if Katherine meant to scare me—mission accomplished. When my eyes met hers, I’m sure she saw the fear lighting me up.

  “Why is this happening to us?” I asked her. “I don’t understand at all.”

  “It all starts and ends with the pills,” she said. “I thought he was just after me, but I see I was wrong.”

  “Uncle Peter.”

  “Yes. He was the drug specialist in our family. He was in charge of my protocols. He kept the records. And he recruited subjects for the tests.

  “Peter took me on trips and tried to make me into some kind of pet, Tandy. He showed me off and then, since he thought he’d made me the person I turned out to be, he tried to take total possession of me. He was getting more creepy and obsessed. And yet Malcolm and Maud refused to see it. That’s why I had to run—and keep running.”

  “And the accident? Was there really an accident?”

  “There was a terrible crash. But it was no accident.”

  Katherine’s expression clouded over as she told me about that life-changing day.

  “My boyfriend was driving our motorbike when we were struck from behind. I was told that I was thrown against a truck in the oncoming lane. That I bounced off the hood and hit the high grasses at the side of the road. Thank God for my helmet, right?

  “I learned later that a man driving behind the truck stopped his car to avoid the collision. He saw that the roadway was going to lock up because of the accident and that an ambulance might not get through in time. So he scooped me up and drove me to a hospital.

  “I was damned lucky,” Katherine told me. “The fuel truck exploded and went up in flames.

  “But I knew nothing of that at the time. I was unconscious for days. And when I woke up, no one knew my name and I remembered nothing.

  “Weeks later, when I was ready to be discharged, the man who saved me… that darling man invited me to stay with him while I recovered from my injuries, and slowly my memories came back. And then one morning, I remembered everything. Even things I didn’t want to remember.”

  Katherine looked so sad. She said, “This is the hard part, Tandy.

  “When I remembered the accident, I knew I had to stay underground. I saw the man who drove his bus into the back of our motorbike. He worked for Peter.

  “I can’t prove any of it, but I’m telling you, the accident was a deliberate attempt to kill me. And I’m sure Peter found out that I didn’t die. Someone else’s remains were sent to New York and buried at my funeral.

  “Peter must have arranged that to maintain the fiction of my death while he hunted for me. After all these years, I’m still being hunted.”

  “But why, Kath? Why does Peter want you dead?”

  “Because I know all about the pills, Tandy. Peter talked incessantly to me during those long trips. He drank and he talked. I know about the experiments on children. I met most of those poor children, and I know how they died.”

  I blurted, “Gram Hilda’s house burned down.”

  “I know, Tandy. I don’t doubt that Peter was behind that. He’s trying to destroy the whole family because we’re all living evidence of his insane experiments.”

  I had my hands over my mouth, but I still managed to say, “Oh God oh God oh God.”

  Kath said, “I think Peter has future plans for those pills. Don’t be surprised if a bad phoenix rises from the ashes of Angel Pharmaceuticals.”

  I still had questions, but Kath had stopped walking, and as clotted crowds of people flowed around us, I sensed that my time with my sister was about to end.

  Her hand was inside the neckline of her coat, and as I watched, she pulled out a gold chain with a pebble the size of a gumdrop hanging from it.

  I gasped—because I knew. The pendant was the diamond Katherine had mined in Africa before she “died.”

  Katherine’s cheeks were wet with tears. She said, “Duck your head, Tandy.” She slipped the chain over my neck and rearranged the silk scarf.

  “It’s yours now, little sister,” she said. “Maybe it protected me. And maybe it will protect you.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders and said, “I’ve changed my name. I don’t live in France, and I hate this, Tandy, but I may never be able to see you again. That goes for Matty, Harry, and Hugo, too. It would just be too dangerous for all of us. I know this is awful, especially after today. But do you understand? We simply can’t take any chances. You can’t tell anyone that you saw me or that I’m still alive. Anyone.

  “And please stop being a detective. This is too big. There’s too much money involved. That’s why there’s no end to the danger. You can’t come looking for me. Promise me you won’t do that.”

  “No. For God’s sake, Kath. How can you ask me to promise that? Don’t disappear from my life again. We can work together.
We can overcome anything or anyone—”

  “Tandy, finding you and seeing you was extremely dangerous, and worth every precious moment. But now I have to go.”

  My feelings of frantic, panicky denial changed into a kind of sickening despair. I understood that Katherine was right, but I was already feeling the terrible loss of her.

  She said, “Say, ‘I promise not to look for you, Kath.’ ”

  I nodded dumbly. And then I said, “I promise, Katherine.”

  We interlaced our fingers like we used to do when we swore to keep a secret. Then she kissed me on both cheeks. I took in her fragrance deeply before she broke away from me, dashed out into the avenue, and disappeared into a taxi.

  I watched the cab shoot ahead—and I felt another meltdown coming on.

  Katherine had come back from the dead. We’d touched, cried, laughed, hugged, renewed all the loving feelings we’d had for each other.

  Now she was gone.

  I stood there on the street, completely devastated. It was not just like losing Katherine all over again, it was almost worse than if she’d never appeared.

  But not quite.

  Katherine had told me I was right to be scared.

  And she’d given me answers.

  I also had more questions. Starting with “Would my brothers and I be safe anywhere?” That answer came to me like a grenade going off in my hand.

  We will never be safe as long as Peter is alive.

  I walked the streets for a couple of hours, sticking to the broad avenues, keeping my eyes on everything as I processed my short time with Katherine.

  She was right when she said not to tell people I had seen her. That would not only be dangerous for her, but who would believe me? I had no picture of her. I had no address. I didn’t even know my sister’s name.

  I could almost talk myself into believing I’d imagined that Katherine was alive. I could almost believe that Katherine was a ghost.

  I rubbed the rough diamond between my fingers.

  Then I called Jacob.