Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (11 page)

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:

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.”

I closed the door behind Hugo
and went back to the box I’d been digging around in before he jump-started my nervous system. I was still winded from that.

As I sorted through miscellaneous Katherine-related documents, I wondered again: Who had collected Katherine’s papers and lab reports? Who had locked them in a basement-within-a-basement in a place where no one lived?

Who had hired a detective to watch her, and why?

I made small piles of papers, some from MIT, where Katherine would have gone to college. There were documents from passport offices in France, South Africa, and New York.

I was about to close the box, which seemed to be filled
with personal documents of little importance, when my hand fell on a short stack of cream-colored stationery—just the notepaper, not the envelopes. The paper was heavy, and the dates written in the top left-hand corner were just the day of the week, not the month or year.

I unfolded one of the notes, and to be honest, from the moment I read
My dearest Katherine
, I got a queasy feeling. I had no business reading my sister’s mail.

But it was too late to stop now, right?

The letter was written in blue fine-point marker and read:

What was this? A love letter? Who was P.? Or was that really the initial
D
? The writing was just ambiguous enough that I couldn’t be sure.

So I had to read the next letter in the stack. Wouldn’t anyone in my position do the same?

The second letter looked and sounded similar to the first:

Yes, it was definitely a
P
.

I opened a third letter and a fourth, and in this last letter, I saw something that made me want to throw up. P. wrote,

The ticket was in the envelope, Cape Town to New York. One way. It hadn’t been used, but of course, Katherine hadn’t left Cape Town. And the name of the person who paid for the ticket—I had to read the typing several times before my brain would accept the name Peter Angel.

Uncle Peter. Our father’s
brother
.

I felt the familiar stirrings of revulsion when I thought of Peter, especially as I recalled when he was in our apartment at the same time as Katherine. And that after our parents died and Uncle Peter was our guardian for a short while, he had moved into Katherine’s room, used her desk, slept in her bed.

We all hated that. We all hated
him
.

Had he forced himself on Katherine? Had he raped her? Did he have a sick fascination with her that she didn’t return? Or—please don’t let it be true—did she have feelings for him, too? No. He was pleading with her. She had to have rejected him.

I pocketed the letters from Peter. If anyone confronted me about going into the boxes, I’d shove Uncle Peter’s love letters in their face.

Another mystery had been added to my list, and more questions without answers.

Was Peter angry that Katherine had run off with a lover?

Was that why he had threatened Dominick’s life?

As a person who knew the pain of heartbreak, I wondered if Uncle Peter had been so thoroughly hurt by Katherine’s rejection that he had engineered her death.

It was a crazy theory. But when Angels are involved, crazy is almost
normal
.

So. Clearly there was information in
these heavy cartons,
plenty
of it. If I wanted to understand what had been done to all five of the Angel kids, I had to dive into the hard stuff—and I was way ready. I especially wanted to know more about our uncle Peter’s role in the destruction of our family.

I attacked the docs by sorting them into categories, then subcategories. Hours passed, and I was in the
zone
. I refused to be sidetracked by fatigue or ghosts or ricocheting random thoughts.

After reading through the first huge stack of Angel Pharmaceuticals memoranda and lab reports, I checked my phone. It was after four
AM
. In a few hours, my family
would start moving around upstairs, and someone would surely look for me.

I had to read
faster
.

I plowed through the next pile of documents, then pulled the third stack of papers off the table and sat on the floor with my back against the cold stone wall.

I fastened my attention on a memo to my dad from Uncle Peter, when they were both senior partners at Angel Pharmaceuticals.

The body of the memo read, “Mal. All the reports on nootropics are here. Your conclusion is required by the end of the month. P.”

The table of contents in the attached file listed nootropics, including antidepressants, also hormones, brain cell protectors, and stimulants—my
God
.

My parents had given this stuff to us as
vitamins
.

“Don’t forget to take your vitamins, Tandoori.”

“I already took them, Dad.”

And then I moved on to even scarier stuff: letters and memos to Uncle Peter from
government intelligence agencies
asking about the “K. Angel Experiment.”

Katherine.

Some of the letters were from the CIA, but there were cryptic queries from spy agencies in Russia, France, Japan. And Israel.

Government interest in my sister was shocking and hideous, and it also made me wonder if this high-grade secret intelligence interest was why Jacob had been drawn back into the Angel family web.

I got to my feet and dug around in the very first box I had opened days ago, and found Katherine’s chart. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that the experiments on Katherine had gone way too far, too fast. If drugs had done this for her, I could see the applications for military use. And if there was money to be made, it would be very
big
money. My parents and uncle would have been all for that.

But what if Katherine, with her monumental IQ, had figured this out?

What if she hadn’t liked being a lab animal and a business model combined? What if there had been bad side effects that my father and Peter had ignored, and she wanted to quit? And what if her side trip to Paris when she was on her way to South Africa had been one small act of rebellion, and part of a bigger plan?

Had Katherine’s independence freaked someone out? Had that someone been afraid she might go over to an enemy? Was that why private investigators had been called in?

What if Katherine hid these boxes in Gram Hilda’s house in case something happened to her?

I imagined too many reasons why someone might have targeted Katherine for death. I was afraid I might be on the verge of learning something horrible and too close to home.

I was panting hard enough to be heard upstairs, so I rolled up the chart, grabbed two handfuls of incriminating papers, and left the basement room.

It was time to talk to Jacob.