The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(10)

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.