The Paris Mysteries

  There was more shrieking in my right ear, and this time, I held the phone away. Truth is, I didn’t want to have to talk about James, and that was why I hadn’t called her right away.

  “You really saw him?” C.P. asked. “Oh my God. Tell me everything.”

  I was evasive at first, edging around the corners of the thing. Then I started talking for real, telling her almost everything—and couldn’t stop until the end of the entire sick story when I found James’s note on the floor of his room.

  “Tell me word for word what he wrote,” C.P. said, “and don’t tell me you don’t remember. You have a photographic memory. We both know that.”

  So I swallowed and then quoted the letter, including the last line James had written:

  “Don’t ever doubt that I love you. And always will.”

  Those last words were like shards of glass in my throat. I started crying, and C.P. was snuffling, too, and I’d like to say that by the time I hung up the phone, I felt better.

  I could say that.

  But it would be a damned lie.

  I know it’s hard to believe, but I loved my parents. Because even though they did heinous things to us, I’m pretty sure—no, I’m absolutely sure—that despite their craziness, they wanted us to become extraordinary.

  They just didn’t realize they were also turning us into freaks. Or maybe they believed the end justified the means.

  The pills they gave me were supposed to hone and heighten my analytical mind, and at the same time, they were designed to quash pesky, distracting, irrelevant emotions.

  I didn’t feel much—anger, sadness, joy—and I didn’t know what I was missing.

  When I met James, our love pushed through what years of experimental drugs had blocked. No wonder I was thunderstruck. To the core. This was first love of the epic kind.

  Meanwhile, my mother convinced her biggest client—Royal Rampling—to invest heavily in Angel Pharmaceuticals, which was going bankrupt. It was as though a ginormous sinkhole had opened up and the family business fell through.

  Mr. Rampling lost fifty million dollars because of my parents, and he had sued the Angels for every nickel.

  After I’d said good-bye to C.P. on the phone, while I was washing my face and putting my clothes away, I thought about my reunion with James in Paris, the absolute best and worst twenty-four hours of my life. I remembered how he had reeled me in—only to smash my heart into subatomic particles.

  I had always assumed that, like me, James was a victim of his terrible father.

  Was it possible that James was not a victim? Had he set me up to hurt me as payback for what my parents had done to his family? Had he snuck into my heart under the cover of love and purposely shattered it?

  Had James Rampling been my enemy all along?

  After my hilarious but emotional conversation with C.P., and my postconversation depression, the week whizzed by, drama free. No word from James. No fights at school. No trouble from Harry’s heart or Gram Hilda’s apparently merciful board of judgment. And no one died.

  Then we had a half-day school holiday—yay!

  While Harry went to a studio to practice piano and Monsieur Morel drove Jacob and Hugo to watch a soccer camp practice game, I made a call. Then I dressed in skinny pants and heels and a fierce narrow-waisted checked jacket, and I pulled my hair back in a braided band. I put on makeup, too, for the first time since the Sisters of Charity got hold of me.

  I caught a cab at the taxi stand down the street, and twenty minutes and eight kilometers later, my royal-blue Fiat taxi slowed to a crawl along a charming, narrow street in Le Marais.

  We stopped in front of a two-story powder-blue building with high, sparkling windows and gold letters on the awnings over the glass-and-brass front doors.

  We were at the Parfumerie Bellaire, my grandmother’s company and the prettiest shop I’d ever seen.

  I walked through the doorway into a dazzling showroom, almost like a stage set in a theater. Clerks, not much older than me, wore colorful smocks over tights, with chunky jewelry and stylish hair fascinators. Behind the showcases, the walls were paneled with luminous photos of sunlit fields of flowers: lavender and roses and blue-eyed grass.

  My grandmother had created this. This had been her passion.

  I told a clerk my name, and the young woman clasped my hands in hers and said, “Monsieur Laurier is waiting for you. He asked me to bring you right in.”

  The laboratory behind the showroom was a bright, open space with skylights overhead, furnished with wooden tables around the perimeter and tall, narrow shelves holding flasks and vials and copper beakers. Workers in pale-blue lab coats and gold net caps used little glass pipettes to blend tiny portions of fragrant oils. Wow, the air smelled absolutely heavenly.

  Monsieur Laurier came downstairs from his office on the mezzanine. He strode toward me, introduced himself, shook my hand, and then—he hugged me.

  He was a very handsome man of at least seventy. How can such an old dude be so gorgeous? I can only say that he was.

  “Bonjour. I’m honored to meet you, Tandy. I am so glad for the chance to show you Bellaire.”

  Monsieur Laurier walked me through the lab and explained that the young people at the tables had all been specially trained.

  “They spent nine months learning to recognize a minimum of five hundred fragrances and must spend five more years in their apprenticeships before they can identify four thousand scents—and become a recognized ‘nose’ for Bellaire.

  “Your grandmother was a great woman,” said Monsieur Laurier. “She inspired so many people—myself included.”

  As we walked, Monsieur Laurier stopped at various stations to introduce me and to place drops of fragrant oil on fabric for me to smell. I sniffed vanilla and lemongrass, ylang-ylang and musk, sandalwood and amber, and all the while Monsieur Laurier was watching me, showing me, teaching me.

  And he told me, “Your grandmother was an extraordinary nose. She had a genius for creating new fragrances that we still sell today. Even now, there is no one like her.”

  A shadow crossed Monsieur Laurier’s face. Sadness or nostalgia, and suddenly I thought I’d seen him before. Was he one of the nude men in the photos I’d found in Gram Hilda’s locked attic room?

  I asked, “Monsieur Laurier, how well did you know my grandmother?”

  He smiled, and it was almost as if he was glad I had figured it out.

  “Would it surprise you if I said I was in love with her?”

  Later, when Monsieur Laurier walked me out to the taxi, he gave me a beautiful powder-blue box tied with gold ribbons.

  “This is a collection of Hilda’s favorite parfums,” he said. Then he kissed me on each cheek and wished me a bonne journée.

  I clutched the package as the driver headed toward Gram Hilda’s house. And I actually picked out one fragrance wafting through the package.

  Maybe I had inherited my Gram Hilda’s nose.

  The fragrance was Se Souvenir de Moi.

  Remember me.

  I sat back in the rear seat of the taxi and watched the grand, timeless architecture of one of the world’s great cities go by. As the cab sped along the Quai des Tuileries, the driver said to me, “By chance, do you know the car behind us?”

  I turned my head and saw a black SUV.

  “How long has this car been following us?” I asked.

  The driver said, “I think I saw him waiting at the corner when you got into my taxi. I cannot be sure. Anyway, there he goes.”

  The black car sped past us on the inside lane as we went through an underpass. I couldn’t see the driver or anyone in the black car, but inside the sudden deep shadow of the tunnel, I felt a chill.

  Had James told me the truth when he said his father was more dangerous than I knew?

  I pulled my phone from my bag and called Jacob. But my call went to voice mail—twice. And then my taxi was drawing close to home. I looked out the back window—no one was behind us. I checked
out the main streets and the side streets and saw no idling cars, no men under streetlamps. I saw nothing suspicious at all.

  The driver stopped at Gram Hilda’s front gate, and to my tremendous relief, I saw lights on inside the house. I paid the driver and thanked him, and after entering the front garden, I trotted up the walk and turned my key in the front door.

  Jacob was in the parlor.

  He whipped around when he saw me, and there was something frightening in his expression.

  “Tandy, I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Hugo is missing.”

  “Jacob, what do you mean?”

  Jacob said, “One minute he was beside me at the soccer field. He said he wanted to go to the bathroom—and then—he was just gone. Monsieur Morel is looking for him all around the field. I’ve called the police, but he’s only been gone for three hours. Not quite three hours, but he has never done this before. I have never been this frightened.”

  “Maybe he’s with Harry?”

  “Harry hasn’t seen him or heard from him. Harry is on his way home now.”

  Jacob, who rarely panics, was panicked now. And that only made me more afraid. Had whoever was in the black SUV captured Hugo? Was my little brother a prisoner?

  Jacob’s Israeli accent was now so thick, it was hard to understand him.

  He said something like, “Let’s put our heads together, Tandy. Say he’s just having a good time. That he’s not in trouble. Say he’s not thinking that he’s giving us heart failure because he’s missing. Where would he be?”

  I forced myself to stop thinking about black cars and a little boy in the back with a hood over his head, hands and feet duct-taped together.

  As soon as I put the fear away, a very different picture appeared in my mind. Of a confident, impetuous, no-rules-apply kid who had the strength of a grown man.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but at least it’s an idea.”

  Having known Hugo his whole life, I had pretty good insight into what he might be thinking.

  On our third night in Paris, Hugo had discovered Ladurée, a famous pastel-green-painted tea and pastry salon with seductive confections in the window on the magnificent Champs-Élysées.

  We had gotten lucky that night, Hugo, Harry, Jacob, and I. There had been a table available on the first-floor terrace. We had a terrific meal, but rather than taking in the outrageously gorgeous crème de Paris view, we were fascinated by Hugo.

  I could still see him that first time at Ladurée. My little brother gorged on dinner, then doubled down on dessert: a dozen of the house specialty macarons, which are like rainbow-colored meringue Oreos stuffed with jam, cream, or chocolate.

  I think that for Hugo that meal was a peak experience.

  Hugo had begged to go back to Ladurée almost every night since that first time, but we were grounded most nights, and when we weren’t eating Jacob’s home-cooked dinners, there were other places to try. We were in Paris.

  But Hugo had fallen hard for Ladurée.

  Only minutes after Jacob called him, Harry’s arrival at Ladurée coincided with ours and the three of us made a plan. Jacob interviewed the maître d’ and pressed some bills into his hand, and then we spread out and searched the establishment for a kid with chocolate on his face.

  I took the ground floor, Harry frisked the five rooms upstairs, and Jacob checked out the kitchen and all the bathroom stalls.

  We met up again in the main salon—empty-handed.

  “He’ll be here,” I said. “I just know it.”

  No one believed me, but still, we took seats at a table in the front room, and Jacob called Monsieur Morel, asking him to go to the house and wait there in case Hugo came home.

  I called the waiter to our table.

  “We need a platter of chocolate croissants, s’il vous plaît,” I said, pointing to a heap of them in the display case. “And pots of hot chocolate. Pots.”

  I had no appetite, but ordering chocolate was like baiting a trap for Hugo. When the croissants were just a buttery smear on the plate and Hugo still hadn’t arrived, my fluttering uncertainty was growing into full-fledged panic. Harry leaned forward and said, “You can’t be right all the time, sis.”

  “I hate to do it,” Jacob said, “but we have waited long enough. We must go to our nuclear option. I’m calling Monsieur Delavergne. He may be able to fire up the police.” He picked up his phone and began pressing the dreaded numbers.

  It was the right thing to do, but I felt that once our lawyers were in play, we were lost. This would be the last straw for them. I felt a tightness in my throat and a watery feeling in my guts. I was one second from a weepy public meltdown; then I saw a kid in a red All Saints lacrosse shirt rounding the confections counter.

  I jumped up, grabbed Hugo roughly by the arm, and angrily demanded, “Hugo! Are you all right? What’s wrong with you? Where the hell were you?”

  God, I was mad.

  Hugo trudged ahead of me toward the table, looking defiant. Which was totally nuts.

  “I went to the bathroom,” he said. “And then I went to the locker room to look around, and when I came out, Uncle Jacob, you were gone.”

  “I was looking for you,” said Jacob. “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you wait?”

  “I lost my phone, so I looked for Monsieur Morel. And then this black SUV zoomed toward me. It was scary… like it was waiting for me. I thought it was going to run me down.”

  I wanted to throw up. Another black car. Waiting, zooming. I reached for my little brother, but he didn’t want comforting.

  “Wait, so let me tell you. I ran into a bookstore, and when I went out the back door, the black car was gone.”

  Hugo went on, “And then I got into the Métro and here I am. You should stop thinking of me as an ordinary little kid, you know? I can get around really well.”

  In the speechless silence around the table, Hugo eyed the empty plates.

  “You guys were hungry, too? I need macarons, really bad.”

  Jacob said, “Two words, Hugo.”

  “Let me guess. ‘You’re grounded.’ ”

  “Correct.” Jacob signaled to the waiter.

  “You’re so predictable,” said Hugo.

  “Yes, and predictability is exactly what you kids need in your lives right now. Tandy, good call.”

  Then our uncle put down his phone and closed his eyes. Jacob might have been an Israeli commando, but it was obvious that babysitting the Angels was one of the harder missions he’d ever undertaken.

  It was late, sometime after one.

  The house was dark except for the small room tucked inside the basement. No light escaped that dungeon, and yeah, Jacob wouldn’t like me being there. But in my not-so-humble opinion, my needs were greater than his.

  Katherine was my sister. And I was going to go through her boxes. I had the right to do it.

  The last few weeks had thrown out too many questions without answers.

  The mystery that nagged me night and day was Katherine’s death in South Africa. I hadn’t questioned what I’d been told until Dominick said Uncle Peter had threatened his life.

  Why had Peter done that?

  What didn’t Peter want anyone to know?

  The threat against Dominick was just one in a pattern of threats.

  Besides Uncle Peter’s, there were Royal Rampling’s multiple warnings and the ongoing danger James had warned me about.

  And now I was questioning everything.

  I reached into a box and lifted out a large unsealed envelope that was filled with loose documents of all sizes and colors. I spilled the enclosed papers onto the monastery table and was sorting them out with my fingertips when a letter with a drawing on the bottom grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go.

  I recognized that letter. Because I had written it to Katherine. In my clear genius-in-training handwriting, I had written:

 
Dear Kath,

  I hope you find the diamonds you want to make into a necklace that will light up a room. And if you find smaller diamonds that light up a smaller room and look good on a ten-year-old, please bring them home to me.

  Love, your very adorable sister,

  The Amazing Tandoo

  At the bottom of the page, I’d drawn a picture of myself and Kath with marking pens, both of us wearing blue dresses and diamond necklaces with rays shooting out of the stones, both of us with big dopey smiles.

  I had loved Katherine so much. The way Hugo adores Matty. Wanted to wear her clothes. Wanted her approval. Wanted to grow up to be just like her. And damn, I teared up again.

  This happened too often since I stopped taking the pills. I’m amazed at the strength of my feelings and totally scared of them at the same time. I’m just not prepared for floods of emotions that I can’t control. I’m like an ice girl who has just come in from the cold.

  This is what I was thinking when the door behind me opened. I screamed and jumped back—but it was only Hugo. He’d always been good at finding hiding spots.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  After I caught my breath and was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have a heart attack, I showed Hugo the letter I’d written to Katherine.

  “Do you remember her, Hugo?”

  “Sure,” he said. “She used to carry me around the apartment. She smelled good. Hey. You smell like her. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Good nose, bro.”

  I laughed, and we hugged.

  “I’m sorry I scared you today,” he said. “I was so freaked out myself, I didn’t think about you guys worrying that I’d been killed or something. This is my formal apology, Tandy.”

  He looked so serious, I cracked up.

  “I accept,” I said.

  “O-kayyyy. I love you, you know?”

  “I love you, too, you little monster. Now, go back to bed. Please? I’m working.”