The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(39)

“I’ve got you, Tandoo. Oh my God, I’ve got you.”

I still couldn’t speak, but I could see her more clearly now. We were the same height, the same build. Her eyes flicked over my features and mine flicked over hers.

Oh my God. It really was Katherine. It was her.

Only then did I notice that she was no longer a teenager and looked older than when I’d last seen her. There were lines in the corners of her eyes. Had they come from squinting into the sun? Or did she look older than a woman of twenty-two should look? Oh, no. Was she aging like the other children who’d the taken the pills? No, that couldn’t happen. Not now.

“You’re too beautiful to be dead,” I said.

Katherine laughed. It was the most glorious sound I’d ever heard. She said, “Wow, I don’t get to laugh very much. Almost never.”

I laughed, too. “Me neither.”

And with that, everything I’d felt in the last few minutes broke loose in a torrent of tears. My sister was back from the grave, alive and well. It was miraculous. A true miracle.

Katherine was sobbing, too, and as we opened our arms to each other, we both just let it all go.

I was actually hugging my sister again.

I didn’t want to stop. It was the best day I’d ever had.





Katherine wore a blue silk scarf around her neck. She pulled it free and handed it to me.

“Cover your hair, Tandy. Keep your eyes down, and now let’s walk,” she said. “Keep really close to me, and if I say run, just do it, okay?”

We weren’t laughing or crying anymore, but we were walking in step as we headed for the Champs-élysées, burying ourselves in the crowd walking north.

I said, “I have too many questions.”

“Some things never change,” my sister said, laughing again, squeezing me around my shoulders. My God, it felt just the same as when I’d seen her half a lifetime ago.

But I did have questions.

“Katherine, what about the accident?” I said. “The motorbike and the fuel truck in South Africa. What really happened, Kath? How did you survive?”

“Let’s keep walking,” said my sister. “We don’t have much time. I’ll tell you everything, but I’m going to skip around, okay, Tandoo?”

So many memories washed over me as I walked and talked with my sister. I was remembering the cadence of her voice, the length of her fingers, and the particular way she gestured when she talked. Kath had been my greatest booster, and I had been hers. I had mourned her and missed her for years and years, and now she was looking right at me.

I loved her so much.

She said, “First and most important, you’re right to be afraid. You should be even more afraid. You shouldn’t even be walking alone on the street, Tandy, and that goes for Harry and Hugo, too. I found you easily, and that means other people can find you, too.”

I looked up and around. I saw people going to work, traffic moving steadily, nothing suspicious. But if Katherine meant to scare me—mission accomplished. When my eyes met hers, I’m sure she saw the fear lighting me up.

“Why is this happening to us?” I asked her. “I don’t understand at all.”

“It all starts and ends with the pills,” she said. “I thought he was just after me, but I see I was wrong.”

“Uncle Peter.”

“Yes. He was the drug specialist in our family. He was in charge of my protocols. He kept the records. And he recruited subjects for the tests.

“Peter took me on trips and tried to make me into some kind of pet, Tandy. He showed me off and then, since he thought he’d made me the person I turned out to be, he tried to take total possession of me. He was getting more creepy and obsessed. And yet Malcolm and Maud refused to see it. That’s why I had to run—and keep running.”

“And the accident? Was there really an accident?”

“There was a terrible crash. But it was no accident.”





Katherine’s expression clouded over as she told me about that life-changing day.

“My boyfriend was driving our motorbike when we were struck from behind. I was told that I was thrown against a truck in the oncoming lane. That I bounced off the hood and hit the high grasses at the side of the road. Thank God for my helmet, right?

“I learned later that a man driving behind the truck stopped his car to avoid the collision. He saw that the roadway was going to lock up because of the accident and that an ambulance might not get through in time. So he scooped me up and drove me to a hospital.

“I was damned lucky,” Katherine told me. “The fuel truck exploded and went up in flames.

“But I knew nothing of that at the time. I was unconscious for days. And when I woke up, no one knew my name and I remembered nothing.

“Weeks later, when I was ready to be discharged, the man who saved me… that darling man invited me to stay with him while I recovered from my injuries, and slowly my memories came back. And then one morning, I remembered everything. Even things I didn’t want to remember.”

Katherine looked so sad. She said, “This is the hard part, Tandy.

“When I remembered the accident, I knew I had to stay underground. I saw the man who drove his bus into the back of our motorbike. He worked for Peter.