The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(24)

This is what I was thinking when the door behind me opened. I screamed and jumped back—but it was only Hugo. He’d always been good at finding hiding spots.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

After I caught my breath and was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have a heart attack, I showed Hugo the letter I’d written to Katherine.

“Do you remember her, Hugo?”

“Sure,” he said. “She used to carry me around the apartment. She smelled good. Hey. You smell like her. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Good nose, bro.”

I laughed, and we hugged.

“I’m sorry I scared you today,” he said. “I was so freaked out myself, I didn’t think about you guys worrying that I’d been killed or something. This is my formal apology, Tandy.”

He looked so serious, I cracked up.

“I accept,” I said.

“O-kayyyy. I love you, you know?”

“I love you, too, you little monster. Now, go back to bed. Please? I’m working.”





I closed the door behind Hugo and went back to the box I’d been digging around in before he jump-started my nervous system. I was still winded from that.

As I sorted through miscellaneous Katherine-related documents, I wondered again: Who had collected Katherine’s papers and lab reports? Who had locked them in a basement-within-a-basement in a place where no one lived?

Who had hired a detective to watch her, and why?

I made small piles of papers, some from MIT, where Katherine would have gone to college. There were documents from passport offices in France, South Africa, and New York.

I was about to close the box, which seemed to be filled with personal documents of little importance, when my hand fell on a short stack of cream-colored stationery—just the notepaper, not the envelopes. The paper was heavy, and the dates written in the top left-hand corner were just the day of the week, not the month or year.

I unfolded one of the notes, and to be honest, from the moment I read My dearest Katherine, I got a queasy feeling. I had no business reading my sister’s mail.

But it was too late to stop now, right?

The letter was written in blue fine-point marker and read:

Thursday

My dearest Katherine,

I know you as well as I know my own face, feel your feelings as if they were my own. I’m sorry I’ve upset you. I didn’t mean to do it. I suggest we meet again so we can talk everything over. I think we owe each other that.

Fondest love,

P.





What was this? A love letter? Who was P.? Or was that really the initial D? The writing was just ambiguous enough that I couldn’t be sure.

So I had to read the next letter in the stack. Wouldn’t anyone in my position do the same?

The second letter looked and sounded similar to the first:

Monday

My dearest Katherine,

Seeing you, today, well… Thank you for seeing me. You are the most precious person on earth to me. And I know some people would say it’s wrong, but I think we both know that when it’s right, only the people involved have the right to say.

All my love,

P.



Yes, it was definitely a P.

I opened a third letter and a fourth, and in this last letter, I saw something that made me want to throw up. P. wrote,

I’ve enclosed your ticket, my Angel. I’ll meet you in Cape Town. And I promise you, this time will be special and will reveal the future.

All my love,

P.



The ticket was in the envelope, Cape Town to New York. One way. It hadn’t been used, but of course, Katherine hadn’t left Cape Town. And the name of the person who paid for the ticket—I had to read the typing several times before my brain would accept the name Peter Angel.

Uncle Peter. Our father’s brother.

I felt the familiar stirrings of revulsion when I thought of Peter, especially as I recalled when he was in our apartment at the same time as Katherine. And that after our parents died and Uncle Peter was our guardian for a short while, he had moved into Katherine’s room, used her desk, slept in her bed.

We all hated that. We all hated him.

Had he forced himself on Katherine? Had he raped her? Did he have a sick fascination with her that she didn’t return? Or—please don’t let it be true—did she have feelings for him, too? No. He was pleading with her. She had to have rejected him.

I pocketed the letters from Peter. If anyone confronted me about going into the boxes, I’d shove Uncle Peter’s love letters in their face.

Another mystery had been added to my list, and more questions without answers.

Was Peter angry that Katherine had run off with a lover?

Was that why he had threatened Dominick’s life?

As a person who knew the pain of heartbreak, I wondered if Uncle Peter had been so thoroughly hurt by Katherine’s rejection that he had engineered her death.

It was a crazy theory. But when Angels are involved, crazy is almost normal.





As I tore through the cartons, I whispered out loud to my poor dead sister.

“Kath, it’s me.

“I think you left these boxes—for me. I’m here now. I’m reading. I’m learning. I’m using the best of my analytical abilities. I’m going to figure out what happened to you. And if your death wasn’t accidental, someone will pay. So help me.