The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(13)

“Did you have any idea?” he asked me.

I shook my head no.

“What’s in the other boxes?”

“Raise your hand if you want to find out,” I said.





I handed Harry the sheet of thumbnail-sized photos of Katherine walking around Paris, seemingly oblivious to the photographer. Harry held them under the bare bulb and burst into tears.

He was crying as he said, “I don’t understand this at all. She wasn’t supposed to be in Paris. Who took these pictures?”

I mumbled, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and after my brother wiped away his tears with the backs of his hands, we looked over the reports with our sister’s name on the covers. Behind the cover sheets, we found letterhead from Angel Pharmaceuticals, the company our father owned with our wretched uncle Peter.

“Bet you a million euros they told Kath she was taking vitamins, like they did with us,” Harry said.

I was opening more envelopes when I found another contact sheet of pictures. Harry grabbed it and held it under the bare bulb. I yelled, “Hey!” then stared at it from behind his shoulder. Katherine’s hair was the same length as in the other photos, but she was wearing a different shirt, jacket, and scarf.

And there was a boy in some of the pictures.

He had his arms around Katherine. He looked at her adoringly. I felt my stomach clench—had James looked at me that way? I blocked that thought.

We knew Katherine had been with a boy named Dominick when she’d been killed in South Africa. But these pictures were taken in Paris.

“That’s got to be Dominick,” Harry said. “Couldn’t be anyone else. Sis, did Kath stop off in Paris before going to Cape Town? Did she meet Dominick here?”

“My questions exactly,” I said.

My eyes burned with tears as I saw my teenage sister with the dark-haired boy. They looked euphoric. Harry had to be right. Dominick had to be the boy Kath had written about while she was on her Grande Gongo—aka a major reward my parents gave for overachieving—in Cape Town. She’d said she loved him.

“Check my memory of this,” I said. “Dominick was never seen after the accident. But it was assumed that he survived the crash, right? I remember Dad going over there, turning the city upside down looking for him.”

“What I mostly remember is how hard you took the news, even with your zero-emotion pills,” said Harry.

I nodded, my throat dry. I don’t think I’ll ever truly get over losing her.

Harry began emptying the third cardboard box. He was flushed and wheezing through his asthma-challenged lungs.

The thing about twins, even ones like us who aren’t telepathic, is that without reading the other’s actual thoughts, we each knew what the other was thinking.

Harry and I both realized we had to get to the bottom of this mysterious cache of documents before Jacob caught us with our hands in the cookie jar.





The brown, letter-sized envelope at the bottom of the third and last box looked dirty. It was rumpled and maybe sticky, as if it had been carried around for a while, possibly rolled up and used to swat flies.

Harry and I went for it at the same time, but I got it first.

I held it out so he could see that there was no address on the front; then I turned it over. A name and address were written faintly in pencil on the back. It was as though the writing was an afterthought.

I read out loud, “ ‘D. Tremaine,’ ” and added, “and there’s a street address in Montmartre.”

There was no cell phone coverage in the cellar, so checking out this lead would have to wait. Meanwhile, I saw that the envelope’s flap had been sealed and opened repeatedly, and while it looked unsavory, it was at the same time irresistible.

Harry hung his head over my shoulder, mouth-breathing as I pulled out the scant contents of the envelope.

The first paper was a bill, an invoice from a detective agency in New York called Private, addressed to Peter Angel at his home address, also in New York. The charges were not itemized, just a flat fee of nine thousand dollars “for services rendered”; the invoice had been stamped PAID.

A private detective had been hired to do what? Why? And why was this invoice in a box of Katherine Angel artifacts secreted in Gram Hilda’s basement?

Had Peter hired this private eye when my father was unsuccessful in his hunt for Katherine’s boyfriend?

I put the invoice down on the table and went back to the brown envelope. I stuck my hand in again and pulled out three individual sheets of paper that were clean and bright. I ran my eyes over them fast, but still, I caught the salient point.

“I don’t believe this,” I said to Harry.

“Show me,” he said, making a grab for the papers, which I yanked out of his reach.

“Just show me!” he shouted.

I did. Each of the three sheets was embossed with letterhead in Hebrew letters. But the typed portions were in English: three individual authorizations for payment to Private for three thousand dollars each. The signature read Jacob Perlman.

I said, “What the hell? Was the Israeli army interested in Katherine? If so, why? And if not the army, what was Jacob’s interest in Katherine?”

Harry said, “We met Jacob for the first time three months ago when Uncle Peter sent him to take over the rotten job of babysitting us. It always struck me as suspicious that a man like Jacob would take that job.”