The Paris Mysteries

  As for her physical capacity, Katherine had run a mile in four minutes. Was that a record for a sixteen-year-old girl? It could well be. The next column showed that at her last testing, Katherine had bench-pressed four hundred forty pounds. That was out of the ballpark and over the top.

  I stared at the colored lines on the graph and noted the steep incline of the upward trend. And I had a good idea what had caused all this “progress.”

  A shadow fell across me, and reflexively, I put the chart behind my back as I spun around.

  Jacob said patiently, “We’ll talk about Katherine, you and I. But not tonight, Tandy. You’re going to a new school in the morning, and you’re not going to be late.”

  Monsieur Morel, Jacob’s spy and our ancient chauffeur, stopped the car in front of our second school in two days. It was behind a high stone wall that had a statue of the Virgin Mary atop the pediment. I saw the shape of the building behind the gates. It had a dome with a crucifix on top—and I understood what Jacob had done.

  He had enrolled us in a convent school. We would be going to a school run by nuns.

  School was the last place I wanted to be. Do you know the feeling? And a religious school? That hadn’t even been a blip on my radar.

  I guess our uncle was offsetting our expulsion from the International Academy, maybe trying to score points with Gram Hilda’s board of lawyers and bankers. Or maybe this was the only school in Paris, France, that would take the three Angel kids, who’d been accused of killing their parents.

  Either way, the lesson for the day was “Don’t mess with Jacob.”

  Monsieur Morel opened the rear passenger door for me while Hugo kicked the other one open and spilled out onto the street with Harry. Our Yoda-like driver smiled and said, “I’ll be here at three, Mademoiselle Tandy.”

  I said, “Okay,” but I was wasting none of my charm on Morel. I wanted to get back to the boxes of my sister’s stuff in the basement, but I couldn’t buck Uncle Jacob. Not today.

  The three of us were buzzed through the gates and then entered the convent school of the Sisters of Charity. It was a bare-stone building inside and out. A nun, who didn’t introduce herself, took us to the office of the school administrator, Sister Marie Claire.

  Sister Marie Claire was nothing like the glossy fashion mag she shared her name with. She was about fifty, maybe older, wearing the full nun habit from starched cap to sturdy black shoes. She gave us papers to fill out, then spent an hour explaining the rules of the school. No jewelry, no shouting, no cursing, no phones—it went on and on.

  “Your first class every day will be advanced French, and I will meet with you every afternoon at last period for theology. I am to report any… how do you say?” She searched her memory, and we waited to hear what she had to report.

  “I am to report any ‘shenanigans’ to Monsieur Perlman,” Sister Marie Claire said. “But I am also here as your adviser. You may always come to me.”

  Hugo said, “Yeah, right.”

  The sister walked behind him and slapped the back of his head, hard.

  “Yow! That hurt!” Hugo bellowed.

  I stood up and grabbed Hugo in a protective hug. Sister Marie Claire clutched my biceps with a talon grip and told me, “Take your seat, Mademoiselle Angel. Immediately.”

  I did what she said, shooting glances at Harry and Hugo as I did so. The three of us were flustered and frightened. The sister had only reinforced the fears I’d had from the moment I saw the forbidding walls around this convent.

  Our real life in Paris had just begun.

  Hugo, Harry, and I went to class. We paid attention, and speaking for myself, I did my best to make Jacob proud. Actually, I thought my brothers also got the message, but in the afternoon, when I was aching for a dismissal bell to ring, Sister Marie Claire tapped me on the shoulder and told me to go to the chapel.

  “Father Jean-Jacques is waiting to hear your confession,” said the nun.

  Picture a chapel not much bigger than the parlor in Gram Hilda’s house. An agonized Jesus Christ was nailed to a huge crucifix behind the altar. The gray stone walls and floor chilled the air inside.

  And there was a confessional off to one side. It even had a shaft of prismatic light hitting it from above. Oh, man, I didn’t like the looks of it at all. I was baptized, but our family had never been the kind who went to church or confessed our sins. I’m pretty sure Malcolm and Maud refused to believe they had any to confess.

  I slouched over to the confessional and opened the door, took a seat, and crossed myself. I knew I was supposed to have examined my heart and my sins and experienced genuine remorse, but my conscience, such as it is, had never been cleaner.

  I spoke in French, saying, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” because I knew I was supposed to say that, and then I added, “It’s been about a hundred years since my last confession.”

  A deep voice with a bit of a laugh in it said, “I’ve got all day to hear your century of sins. I am also available tomorrow.”

  Nuts.

  Now I was committed to blowing Father Jean-Jacques’s cassock off, and I was not going to censor myself. I closed my eyes, held my nose, and jumped off the board into the deep end.

  “Well, Father, in the last century, I have spied on people and defied people. I have been rude to the police and have shown them up and proven them wrong. I have bragged about being smart, and separately, I have brought disgrace on the family name. That’s what I’ve been told. And even though my parents and his disapproved, I had a boyfriend. Had. Past tense. But he was my boyfriend, all right. Use your imagination, Father, because I don’t kiss and tell. But I loved him and he loved me and we were together, with all that that implies.”

  There was silence from the other side of the screen, so I continued. Actually, I was missing James again like crazy, and I wasn’t ready to stop talking about him.

  “I earned having a boyfriend, Father, because this boy was my first love, and I had a pretty crappy upbringing disguised as intellectual enrichment. My siblings and I were used as guinea pigs. That’s right. Guinea pigs—as in lab animals.

  “Our parents fed us drugs that were off-the-charts weird, and they made us different from any other kids in the world. You can believe me or not. Make of that what you will. But I’m an original, Father. And if God made me, I was tinkered and tampered with by my parents, who also made me. All of us Angels were messed with, Father. I think we were subjected to sins against nature. For years.”

  I took a breath and croaked out, “If there’s a God, he knows I’m doing the best I can.”

  I was winded and a little bit weepy because I’d never told this story in this way to anyone before. It was plenty of stuff, maybe enough to give Father Jean-Jacques a heart attack.

  But I didn’t hear a heavy thunk on the stone floor.

  The man behind the screen said, “Is that all, child? Is that supposed to be—a dare? Are you daring God to love you?”

  I pondered that for a long time. “Yes, I suppose so, Father.” My voice was so small.

  The priest said, “He loves you. Don’t worry about that.”

  I told the priest I had nothing to be contrite about and added, “I don’t do penance and I never will.”

  I could almost hear the priest thinking what to do with me, maybe throw me out and kick my butt for good measure.

  After a long pause, Father Jean-Jacques said, “While God loves you and forgives you, you must still acknowledge the sin in your heart, and I believe you are doing this, child. I heard how you listed those sins. So I have an idea.

  “For now, rather than penance, please meditate for fifteen minutes a day on things you have done to hurt other people, and I think this may help you heal from your parents’ betrayal against nature. And against you.”

  I was quiet. Choked up, actually, but I didn’t want Father to know.

  “Everyone at the Sisters of Charity is praying for you. God bless you,” he said.

  About
five minutes later, I got into our hired car, and my brothers followed at fifteen-minute intervals, each of them looking quite sober. As if we’d been thrown into cold showers and then rubbed down hard from head to toe with warm towels.

  I don’t know what that looks like, actually.

  But call me surprised. I felt pretty okay.

  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 ren
dered”; 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.