The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(37)

I looked as bad as I felt.

My skin was red, flash-dried by the fire. A nurse had trimmed the frizz on my head, and I was wearing tacky clothes Jacob had bought for me that morning. Thank you, Jacob, but I looked more like a meth addict than a person who should be taken seriously.

Lieutenant Bouton was pretty and hip. She looked twenty but was probably thirty. I’d thought she would be the good cop. But I was wrong. She was as tough as horsemeat.

While her partner, Lieutenant LaMer, sat across from me, Bouton looked for ways to maximize my vulnerability. She slammed a folder on the table and spread the papers around in front of me. They were copies of my file from the New York City police department.

Item number one was the court documents charging me with the deaths of my parents—later dismissed. Item numbers two and three were morgue pictures of Malcolm and Maud lying on slabs in the medical examiner’s office, bloodless and gray under a cold light.

I’d seen my parents dead in their bed, so you’d think mere pictures would have no power to hurt me. But they did. Those photos reopened old wounds, rubbed salt in them, and dug around in them, too, which brought back all the old pain, anger, deep sadness, longing, and regret.

It was all beyond excruciating. I let out a sob. Then reined myself back in.

Bouton walked behind me so that I couldn’t see her face.

She said, “You hate the family of yourself, mademoiselle. You want them all dead. Your father. Your mother. This is your work, is it not? You murdered them. You tricked the police and so you got away. You can run, but how do you say, you cannot hide.”

“No, no, no! Are you an idiot?” I fired back in French. “Read the later reports. Read a few words, why don’t you? And now someone has tried to murder us. Don’t you get it? We all could have died.”

Bouton flicked the back of my neck with her fingers.

“Hey!” But I was afraid if I got out of my seat, I could give her a reason to really hurt me.

“Killer girl,” said Bouton, “you should tell us how you set this fire. We will find out.”

She began pushing a chair in front of her like it was a baby carriage. Jostled it and banged it down on its back legs. All this was to rattle me. Make me cry and then confess.

When I didn’t react, Bouton parked the chair and sat in it. She leaned over the table and said sweetly to me, “Why did you set fire to the house? The house was insured for millions, non?”

“I was asleep,” I said for the fourth time.

“But heh, you cannot prove that. There were no witnesses to you even in your bed. You admit that, correct, Mademoiselle Angel?”

“I slept in the attic. I told you.”

She attacked from another direction.

“You’ve been sad lately, non? Your lover, he dumped you, and so you were having a mental breakdown.”

“Which would be understandable,” said Lieutenant LaMer. He gave me the good-cop smile.

“I didn’t set the fire,” I said angrily. “I was asleep by myself. On the top floor. Where I almost died.”

There was a knock and then a pounding on the door. LaMer opened it for another cop and our family attorney, Monsieur Delavergne, who marched in.

Delavergne said, “Either charge my client now, or I am taking her home.”

Home? What home?

Five minutes later, Delavergne helped me into the backseat of our car. Morel was at the wheel, and Jacob got into the backseat with me. He opened his poor bandaged arms to me and I fell against his chest.

I know I’ve had days as bad as this one in my life, but at that moment, this was as bad as it got. A few months earlier, I thought I was going to have a very big life.

Now I didn’t want to live at all.

Honest to God. What the hell was I going to do?





I had to talk to Jacob, alone. Urgently.

That night, we sat in padded chairs on the terrace outside my room at the Hotel George V. The Eiffel Tower stood gloriously lit in the distance. But this billion-dollar view of Paris meant nothing to me.

My brothers and I were under siege. I’d been incredibly na?ve, and it had taken a destructive fire to snap me to attention. I was shaken and appropriately scared.

I said to Jacob, “You’ve been saying you want to protect us, and you know what? We need your protection. We weren’t just targets, you know. Someone was determined to burn us alive.”

“The arson investigation is still ongoing. One good thing: They’re no longer looking at you.”

“I don’t care about the investigation. I was stupid. I was watching out for black cars passing by. I didn’t think we were going to get murdered in our sleep. You have to be a psychopath to set fire to a house full of people.”

Jacob nodded. “What are you thinking?”

“Besides the fact that I’m terrified and horrified? I found a notebook in the attic, Jacob. Gram Hilda’s handwriting. Almost like a diary.”

“You read it?”

“Cover to cover. And I understood every word. Here’s the instant recap. Gram Hilda created the formulas for the original pills. An early version of them, anyway. She hoped these formulas could improve the lives of impoverished children, but her follow-up of the animal studies told her that the results were unpredictable. And by that, she meant dangerous.”

“You’re sure of this, Tandy?”