Confessions: The Paris Mysteries (5 page)

I have to prepare you for
something I wasn’t prepared for myself.

I never expected to run into the ghost of my dead sister.

The night we were kicked out of school was a waking nightmare. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about Gram Hilda’s stiff-necked lawyers and bankers, who looked unforgiving and vengeful.

I thought about Hugo’s incorrigible fighting, and then Harry buying dope right outside school. It wasn’t exactly the action of a casual smoker. And the worst for me, personally, was Jacob’s disappointment in me for filching that key.

The three of us had been awful. Jacob didn’t deserve that, and we all knew it.

I stared at the canopy for hours. I was sweaty and pissed off at myself and beyond restless, and at just after midnight, when I couldn’t lie in bed for another minute, I got up, put on my Converse, and grabbed a flashlight.

I wasn’t going to borrow any keys, but I was determined to map out my grandmother’s house from the basement to her attic atelier. This was partly my house. So what could possibly be wrong with taking a stroll?

I crept past Jacob’s room, then tiptoed down the center stairs, and when I got to the kitchen, I took a sharp right. I’d seen a door at the end of the pantry and was pretty sure it opened onto a staircase that led down to the cellar.

And yes, indeed, it did.

The pantry door opened easily, and cool air rushed toward me as I went down the stairs. When I got to the bottom, I swung my flashlight around until I found a chain attached to a light fixture in the ceiling.

I pulled the chain, and the light came on, revealing a stone basement room with a furnace in the corner. To my left was an old door with strap hinges and an old latch. My detective instincts told me there would be something interesting behind it.

The latch was locked, but I pried it open with a rusty
bar, only breaking two fingernails in the process. But I didn’t care at all. The room within a room was a mystery enclosed in an enigma.

I was standing inside a stone chamber that had once been a wine cellar, but there was no wine. There was something much better.

Right in front of me was a monastery table made of heavy, hand-cut planks, and on the table, centered and squared, were three cardboard bankers’ document boxes.

I had to know what was inside those boxes. Why had they been stored in an airless basement room? Would I find more racy photographs inside? Or were they filled with old journals, secret tales by Gram Hilda?

I walked to the table and put my hand on the box closest to me and turned it so that light fell on the label.

A name had been written in marking pen.

KATHERINE

That was my sister’s name. My sister who had
died
.

I was seriously freaked out at
reading my sister’s name. I turned the other two boxes around and, yeah, each one was marked katherine.

They had to belong to some
other
Katherine.

My sister had died in a horrific motorcycle crash in South Africa six years ago. Nothing belonging to her could possibly have found its way to my grandmother’s basement. Right?

Whether that was right, wrong, or something else, I had to find out what was inside these boxes.

The lids were sealed with transparent packing tape. I grabbed the first box and pulled at the tape with my broken nails—then I lifted the lid.

Right inside the opened box was a large white envelope. There was no writing on it and the flap wasn’t sealed. I worked my fingers into the envelope and pulled out a contact sheet, a page of thumbnail-sized photographs.

My heart started banging again.

It was Katherine. My Katherine.

The overhead lightbulb was perfect for scrutinizing small items, and I closely examined the twenty-four tiny pictures of my beloved sister. She was alone in each snapshot, and in every one of them, she looked as beautiful and as happy as the last time I saw her.

And
snapshot
is the right word, as in
candid snapshot
. None of the pictures were posed. Katherine didn’t seem aware that she was being photographed, so the photographer had to have been hidden. Or else the photographer had captured her on film with a zoom lens, paparazzi-style.

And that wasn’t all.

These pictures had been taken in Paris. Not New York, not Cape Town.
Paris.

Had Katherine stopped off here before she’d had the fatal collision with a tractor-trailer in Cape Town? Had she left these boxes, planning to send them home to New York? The stone walls of the subterranean basement room were starting to close in on me. I was in a tomb with the last pictures of Katherine, but I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

I put the pictures down and plunged my hands into the box.

There were more envelopes and accordion folders, the kind that hold thick packets of paper. I opened everything hurriedly.

I saw stacks of papers that had Katherine’s name on the cover sheets, but before I could read them, I saw a
chart
with her name printed across the top. I’d seen charts like these before. They had been in my father’s home office, labeled with the names of each of my siblings, and of course, there was a chart with my name, too.

This chart of Katherine’s was dated only weeks before her death.

There were codes down the left-hand side, numbers across the bottom, dates across the top. I could read these charts in my sleep. I did it now, and I was as far from sleep as I had ever been in my life.

In a period of one year, Katherine’s IQ had shot up from 133 to more than 180. It was off the charts.

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.