Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (4 page)

As soon as the door swung open,
I was hit with a powerful wave of something I can only call wonder. It was almost as if a celestial choir had burst into a drawn-out
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh.”
That’s how dazed and amazed I was.

The long, airy room was white, with a beamed cathedral ceiling and tall windows on three sides. And through the window directly ahead of me, I could see a church spire behind the back garden. I smelled flowers, an amazing blend of them, and I saw silhouetted shapes of heavy furniture arrayed throughout the large room.

Gram Hilda’s private workroom felt astonishing in the
dark
.

What had she done here? Why was it off-limits? I closed the door behind me and shot the bolt.

Once the door was locked, I patted the wall until I found the light switch. Four beautiful standing lamps flashed on, all of them topped with hat-shaped amber silk shades. Honestly, it was as though the sun had risen out of the darkness of the last heartbreaking day and night and thrown a handful of sunbeams right in front of me.

I stood with my back to the door, simply stunned by the sight of what could only be Gram Hilda’s favorite things. Yeah. This room was a Hilda Angel museum.

I took a panoramic tour without moving an inch. To my left on an easel was an oil painting of a man and woman making love in a great four-poster bed. They were ecstatic. Bedding had been tossed and thrown to the floor, and their faces just radiated pleasure. I gasped a little bit, even covered my mouth. I was starting to think that maybe Gram Hilda wasn’t your typical old granny.

I could hardly wait to see more.

I looked straight ahead, all the way down the length of the room to the far window. On both sides of an irregular aisle were casual groupings of upholstered chairs and exotic painted screens. To my right, lined up against the
wall, were armoires, closed cabinets holding who knew what—but definitely secrets I was born to uncover.

I was suddenly struck by a powerful feeling of déjà vu, but it was as elusive as the first notes of a song you haven’t heard in a long time.

I searched my mind for that ephemeral memory, and then it clicked. The scent in the air reminded me of my older sister, Katherine, who had died years ago.

And Katherine would have loved this room. Like me, she would have wanted to explore every drawer and cubbyhole.

I walked softly down the aisle of furniture so I could better see a gallery of photographs that had been hung on either side of the window.

They were breathtaking.

My gram Hilda was pictured arm in arm with a string of celebrities: Sting and Harrison Ford and Elton John. She was glamorous and beautiful, and the way these famous people looked at her, I could tell that they, too, thought Hilda Angel was a star.

There was a huge framed photo of Hilda and my grandpa Max in a formal French rose garden bounded by boxwood, and in a collection by themselves were six, no, seven photos, each of a gorgeous man wearing nothing but a smile or a satisfied look.

Gram Hilda. Were these men models? Or were they your lovers? Oh, man, oh, man. Didn’t you worry you would bring disgrace upon the family name?
I couldn’t help laughing.

Giggling still, I tore my eyes away from the photographs, and my gaze fell on a corner cabinet that left me breathless. The cabinet was made of gleaming hardwood carved with the most adorable depictions of nude young women—nymphs, maybe—holding flowers in their arms and as parasols above their heads.

I realized that the floral fragrance was coming from this cabinet, and it freaking begged to be opened.

I flung the doors wide and ran my eyes across rows and more rows of apothecary bottles, each with a label printed with the name
BELLAIRE
. And beneath that, handwritten, were the names of precious oils and floral scents: myrrh, ambergris, tincture of tea rose.

I opened a deep bottom drawer and found a stack of clothbound notebooks stamped
BELLAIRE
in gold. Inside the books were perfume formulas and descriptions of the moods these ingredients would evoke.

I quickly deduced that Bellaire wasn’t a home
parfumerie
. It was a business, with a factory in Le Marais, owned and operated by Hilda Angel.

My knees almost gave out. I clutched at a chair to
steady myself and then sat down with one of Gram Hilda’s books in my hand. I saw myself napping in Katherine’s bed while she did her schoolwork. She wore a fragrance called Se Souvenir de Moi, and the formula for it was written in the book I held in my lap. Se Souvenir de Moi.
Remember Me.

Cue the celestial choir.

I’d opened a door to my grandmother’s private space and not only glimpsed her secrets, I’d found memories of Katherine as well.

This
was the best day of my life. This one.

The kitchen was in full production when,
unnoticed, I returned Jacob’s keys to his jacket pocket. The boys were at the table, and our uncle was dishing up omelets and pouring juice at the same time. He looked over at me as I took a seat next to Harry.

“Kids,” Jacob said, “your uniforms are all in the front closet. Please change right after breakfast, because at eight on the nose, Monsieur Pierre Morel will drive you to the International Academy.”

Academy? Had Jacob said
academy
?

We each shouted across the table.

Me: “Uniforms? I don’t do uniforms.”

Harry: “We have a driver?”

Hugo: “Why do I have to go? Didn’t I tell you I’m done with school?”

Jacob turned up his iPod, slid an omelet onto his plate, poured coffee for me, Harry, and himself, then sat down to eat.

I got it. There would be no discussion.

We each found a garment bag with our name on it and whipped off the plastic covering for a look at what not to wear.

Well, the uniforms could have been worse.

I dressed in the white shirt, gray vest, gray pleated skirt, knee socks, flat shoes with a wide toe box, and a pale-gray jacket with an insignia on the breast pocket. I brushed my hair and held it back with a band. And when I returned to the parlor, Harry and Hugo were dressed pretty much like me. Trousers, of course, instead of skirts.

Monsieur Morel was about ninety years old and drove like he was a hundred and fifty. I sat in the backseat between my two brothers and watched the city slowly pass our windows until we pulled up to the school building.

“This used to be a college,” Monsieur Morel informed us in heavily accented English.

But my mind was on something else. The International Academy was just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, which had been all lit up when I’d seen it last. James and
I had been bumping knees under the café table while electricity zapped our neural networks, and unfortunately it was still zapping mine.

The headmaster himself, Monsieur Avignon, met us at the door and, after a few words of greeting, hurriedly walked us to our first classes. I was obedient, even polite, but I wished like crazy that I was back in New York. That life was the way it had been before my parents died. Before I met James. When I was still a kid going to All Saints just a few blocks from the Dakota, not knowing that I was odd as hell, and that life was going to deliver some very hard knocks before I finally learned there was no place in the world where I fit in.

Like a lot of kids on their first day of school, I missed my mom. If I could have, I would have told her no one loved me.

And what would she have said? “Suck it up, Tandy. Suck it up.”

My first-period classroom was bright and
modern and had five rows of wooden tables and chairs for the students. The math teacher, Madame Mason, had the grace of a ballet dancer as she wrote out equations on a whiteboard.

I sat in the last row, looking at the gray-jacketed backs and excellent haircuts of the kids of rich and privileged foreigners stationed in Paris. My peers.

Every few minutes, one of them would turn and look at me like I was the main attraction in the weird-kid exhibit—then snap their head back to the front.

I’d been an outcast before. Welcome to my world.

I zoned out within a minute and went to a room in my mind that looked exactly like the room in the Grand Hôtel
Voltaire. I began breaking my memories of the hours I’d spent there with James into bite-sized, easy-to-digest little moments. I was thinking of James whispering,
“I love you,”
when my name seemed to boom loudly in the classroom.

I did a fast mental rewind and realized that Madame Mason had said, “Mademoiselle Angel, please explain to the class the four ways to prove that these two lines are parallel.”

Twenty kids swiveled to face me.

I stood up, hoping words would jump into my mouth, but I was lost. I know geometry cold, but it was as if James had flushed all thoughts about anything but
him
right out of my head.

For an extremely long fifteen seconds, I was like an ice statue. I stared at the two lines Madame Mason had drawn on the whiteboard, and I don’t think I even breathed. And then I thawed, and the four solutions to the problem came to me. I summarized the transversal postulate, explained how transverse lines intersecting parallel lines create congruent angles, and gave the answer in excellent French.

Madame Mason stared at me, dumbstruck, as though I had grown a few more heads.

I had just tucked my skirt under me and retaken my seat when there was a rush of air and movement behind me. It
was Monsieur Avignon, who had burst into the classroom. I had noticed when he met us earlier that the man was jittery. Well, he was superhyper now. He pinned me with his jiggly eyes and shouted,
“Mademoiselle Angel, come with me. Immediately!”

I stuffed my laptop into my backpack and followed the headmaster down the hall, through a set of double doors, and out to the gym, with its high echoey ceilings and hardwood floors.

I saw them immediately.

There, between workout mats and weights, were my little brother, Hugo, and another kid, who was bigger and older and was curled into a fetal position on the floor. Hugo’s fists were cocked, and the boy on the floor was bloody and crying.

Hugo shouted the second he saw me.

“This punk said we killed Malcolm and Maud. I told him to take it back. Or else. He wouldn’t do it, Tandy.”

The weird, maybe scared looks from my classmates made some kind of sense now. They thought we were
killers
. A nurse and a doctor ran toward the moaning kid on the floor, and then Harry drifted in and, in no particular hurry, came over to me.

“Whassup,” said my twin brother.

His pupils were huge, and he had a dopey expression on his face. What the hell?

I whispered, “Harry. Are you
stoned
?”

“Sit over there,” said Monsieur Avignon, pointing to some folding chairs. “Monsieur Perlman is coming now.”

Oh, crap. We were
really
in for it now.

Jacob stood in the center of
the parlor and looked at us with the hard eyes of a commando. When his expression was cold, it meant that under the surface, he was ripping mad, and oh, man, I do not like it when Jacob is mad.

The three of us had sunk down in square leather chairs, Harry and I guilty by association with Hugo because we’d taken a stand. If Hugo had to leave the International Academy, we’d all go with him.

And Hugo was defiant.

“You can’t expect me to let people accuse us of murdering Malcolm and Maud,” our little brother said. “Uncle Jake, would
you
take that?”

“I don’t expect you to throw the first punch, Hugo. I
don’t expect you to bait other people into throwing the first punch, either.”

“When you’ve been insulted, the first punch is a technicality,” said Hugo. “And I’m not apologizing to that shit, even if his father
is
the king of France.”

“Hugo. All of you. You just don’t get it. Your inheritance is
conditional
on good behavior. Monsieur Delavergne used his contacts to get you into that school, and now, Hugo, you thanked him by pooping in the punch bowl.”

Hugo cracked up. He started repeating, “I pooped in the punch bowl,” until he was rolling on the floor with tears in his eyes. Before Jacob seized him by the belt and the back of his neck, I jumped to my feet.

“Define ‘disgrace,’ Jacob, because I don’t get that. Or is it in the fine print of page one thousand forty-three of that document I signed?”

“Sit down, Tandy.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Sit.
Down
.”

I sighed. I threw myself back down into the chair and looked up at him like, “What?”

“You want me to define ‘disgrace’? If that boy’s parents go to the media or hire a lawyer, you can bet that’s a disgrace. I have one vote, kids. One vote. If you don’t get yourselves under control, you’re not going to like the repercussions.”

Harry said, “Maybe we could make the problem disappear, Jacob. If Hugo apologizes, could you ask Monsieur Avignon to give us another chance? If he takes us back, no problem, right? I liked the school.”

“Of course you did. You bought marijuana outside the front door, and, Harry, that’s not only a disgrace, it’s a crime.”

“Oh. Monsieur Morel told you. You’re spying on us?” Harry said. “I’d call
that
disgraceful, Jake.”

“Go to your rooms,” our uncle said. “Leave your phones on the kitchen table. I’m disconnecting the Wi-Fi.”

Hugo shouted, “Nooooooooo!”

Jacob gave me a look that made me feel like a bug. A small bug. About to be squashed. He said, “And by the way, Tandy, don’t go into my pockets again.”

Jacob went on, “You’re all grounded. Think of this house as lockup until I find a school that will take you.”

The three of us left the parlor. In disgrace.

I had no plans to leave the house. After this, I wouldn’t dare, but as I slunk off to my room, I had no idea that before morning, I would be taking a trip into the
past
. And in the process, I would get one of the greatest shocks of my life.