The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(16)

This photo could have been a poster for a romantic comedy slash road-trip movie with a happy Hollywood ending.

Dominick said, “We were in Cape Town. I handed my phone to a stranger on the street and he snapped this. This is the last picture of my dearest love. Your sister, Katherine.”





I held the picture with both hands and stared into my sister’s face. I saw no fear, no premonition that she was about to die. All I could see was that she was in love. That she was having the adventure of her life.

The orange tabby settled onto Dominick’s lap as I asked him to please tell us what had happened the day Katherine died.

Dominick stroked the cat and gave a long sigh.

He said, “I had met Katherine through friends in New York, and when she won the Grande Gongo, she called me. We arranged for her to stop over in Paris, then travel to South Africa together.”

Dominick reminisced about the trip from Paris, the long journey to the alluvial mines outside Karasburg. His face actually relaxed as he told us about the day Kath found a large and enviable diamond “ten carats in the rough.”

“We were on the bike, going from a jeweler in Malmesbury back to Cape Town. We were traveling on a highway, at a safe speed, when without warning—no horn, no sound of brakes—we were slammed from behind. I never saw the bus that hit us,” Dominick said.

He looked dazed as he told us, as if he was repeating a story he’d seen from a distance rather than experienced.

“Much later I was told that we were sent flying over the divider into the oncoming traffic and that a bus rammed into the bike. Mon dieu. I’m sorry to even tell you this now.”

This much of the story I already knew. But what had happened after the collision?

“I must have been thrown free when the bus hit us. I only know that I was in the hospital for a long time.”

He pulled up his pants legs and showed us brutal scars up to his knees. He shook his head violently, remembering.

“I had a concussion, broken bones, internal bleeding, and when I finally woke up, I learned that Katherine had been thrown into a fuel truck, which then exploded. And that she was dead.

“I was given a note from someone who had attempted to see me in the hospital. You know this man,” Dominick said.

“Our father?” Harry asked. We both knew that Malcolm had gone to Cape Town looking for Katherine’s boyfriend.

“Not your father. His brother. It was Peter Angel,” said Dominick. “The note was short and cutting, cursing me, saying the accident was my fault. At first I thought he must be suffering the loss of Katherine as much as I was.”

Dominick was weeping now. He tried to speak, but his sobs overwhelmed him. At last, he said, “To accuse me… I was hit from behind. From behind. The bike flew like a rocket into the truck. Flew. That’s what I was told.”

Tears were rolling down my cheeks, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. Dominick’s story was like an incredibly vivid dream, the worst kind of nightmare. But after we both wiped tears away, I asked him to tell me more about the note.

“Peter Angel wrote that I was never to approach your family for any reason. To keep to myself. To never speak of the accident or of Katherine—or I would pay with my life. He said he had the means to have me killed.

“I was a broken man. I thought of suicide many times, but I knew Katherine wouldn’t have wanted me to do that. My mother would have been destroyed. I have a sister also, and she was about to be married. I couldn’t bear to hurt her.

“I came back to Paris,” Dominick told us. “I stay here at home where I can see the church and hear the bells. And I can remember that Katherine sat where you are sitting. That she found and named this cat when he was a kitten. Red Boy. I remember how we listened to music and laughed.

“I have never stopped loving Katherine,” Dominick said, his voice dissolving again into awkward sobs.

Harry and I were also breaking down, using our sleeves to mop up the tears.





Like a trigger, when Dominick tearfully said he had never stopped loving Katherine, my mind suddenly filled with images of James.

I couldn’t help imagining that James was here in this room now, sitting beside me. This James, the one in my daydream, saw how the loss of love had devastated Dominick. And seeing that, he promised himself—and me—that he would never let me out of his sight.

I saw him in my mind, turning to me, fixing me with his gray-blue eyes, then pulling me to my feet and wrapping me in his arms, holding me so tightly it almost hurt.

And, friend, I could almost hear him say the words I needed to hear and believe.

“I won’t ever let you go again, Tandy. Whatever happens, we’ll face it together.”

I imagined my reply.

“I’m yours, James. Always.”

Would James come back to me?

Was there more to our story?

There had to be. There just had to be more.





Harry and I arrived back home before dinner and told Jacob about the awesome Givenchy and Monet exhibitions at the Louvre, which we’d seen at a really fast run just before the museum closed for the day.

Naturally, we omitted telling our uncle about interviewing Katherine’s earnest and heartbroken boyfriend. And we didn’t tell him we’d stumbled into a mystery that had been so buried in time and erased by fire, I wasn’t sure it could be solved.