The Paris Mysteries (Confessions #3)(8)

I opened a deep bottom drawer and found a stack of clothbound notebooks stamped BELLAIRE in gold. Inside the books were perfume formulas and descriptions of the moods these ingredients would evoke.

I quickly deduced that Bellaire wasn’t a home parfumerie. It was a business, with a factory in Le Marais, owned and operated by Hilda Angel.

My knees almost gave out. I clutched at a chair to steady myself and then sat down with one of Gram Hilda’s books in my hand. I saw myself napping in Katherine’s bed while she did her schoolwork. She wore a fragrance called Se Souvenir de Moi, and the formula for it was written in the book I held in my lap. Se Souvenir de Moi. Remember Me.

Cue the celestial choir.

I’d opened a door to my grandmother’s private space and not only glimpsed her secrets, I’d found memories of Katherine as well.

This was the best day of my life. This one.





The kitchen was in full production when, unnoticed, I returned Jacob’s keys to his jacket pocket. The boys were at the table, and our uncle was dishing up omelets and pouring juice at the same time. He looked over at me as I took a seat next to Harry.

“Kids,” Jacob said, “your uniforms are all in the front closet. Please change right after breakfast, because at eight on the nose, Monsieur Pierre Morel will drive you to the International Academy.”

Academy? Had Jacob said academy?

We each shouted across the table.

Me: “Uniforms? I don’t do uniforms.”

Harry: “We have a driver?”

Hugo: “Why do I have to go? Didn’t I tell you I’m done with school?”

Jacob turned up his iPod, slid an omelet onto his plate, poured coffee for me, Harry, and himself, then sat down to eat.

I got it. There would be no discussion.

We each found a garment bag with our name on it and whipped off the plastic covering for a look at what not to wear.

Well, the uniforms could have been worse.

I dressed in the white shirt, gray vest, gray pleated skirt, knee socks, flat shoes with a wide toe box, and a pale-gray jacket with an insignia on the breast pocket. I brushed my hair and held it back with a band. And when I returned to the parlor, Harry and Hugo were dressed pretty much like me. Trousers, of course, instead of skirts.

Monsieur Morel was about ninety years old and drove like he was a hundred and fifty. I sat in the backseat between my two brothers and watched the city slowly pass our windows until we pulled up to the school building.

“This used to be a college,” Monsieur Morel informed us in heavily accented English.

But my mind was on something else. The International Academy was just across the river from the Eiffel Tower, which had been all lit up when I’d seen it last. James and I had been bumping knees under the café table while electricity zapped our neural networks, and unfortunately it was still zapping mine.

The headmaster himself, Monsieur Avignon, met us at the door and, after a few words of greeting, hurriedly walked us to our first classes. I was obedient, even polite, but I wished like crazy that I was back in New York. That life was the way it had been before my parents died. Before I met James. When I was still a kid going to All Saints just a few blocks from the Dakota, not knowing that I was odd as hell, and that life was going to deliver some very hard knocks before I finally learned there was no place in the world where I fit in.

Like a lot of kids on their first day of school, I missed my mom. If I could have, I would have told her no one loved me.

And what would she have said? “Suck it up, Tandy. Suck it up.”





My first-period classroom was bright and modern and had five rows of wooden tables and chairs for the students. The math teacher, Madame Mason, had the grace of a ballet dancer as she wrote out equations on a whiteboard.

I sat in the last row, looking at the gray-jacketed backs and excellent haircuts of the kids of rich and privileged foreigners stationed in Paris. My peers.

Every few minutes, one of them would turn and look at me like I was the main attraction in the weird-kid exhibit—then snap their head back to the front.

I’d been an outcast before. Welcome to my world.

I zoned out within a minute and went to a room in my mind that looked exactly like the room in the Grand H?tel Voltaire. I began breaking my memories of the hours I’d spent there with James into bite-sized, easy-to-digest little moments. I was thinking of James whispering, “I love you,” when my name seemed to boom loudly in the classroom.

I did a fast mental rewind and realized that Madame Mason had said, “Mademoiselle Angel, please explain to the class the four ways to prove that these two lines are parallel.”

Twenty kids swiveled to face me.

I stood up, hoping words would jump into my mouth, but I was lost. I know geometry cold, but it was as if James had flushed all thoughts about anything but him right out of my head.

For an extremely long fifteen seconds, I was like an ice statue. I stared at the two lines Madame Mason had drawn on the whiteboard, and I don’t think I even breathed. And then I thawed, and the four solutions to the problem came to me. I summarized the transversal postulate, explained how transverse lines intersecting parallel lines create congruent angles, and gave the answer in excellent French.

Madame Mason stared at me, dumbstruck, as though I had grown a few more heads.

I had just tucked my skirt under me and retaken my seat when there was a rush of air and movement behind me. It was Monsieur Avignon, who had burst into the classroom. I had noticed when he met us earlier that the man was jittery. Well, he was superhyper now. He pinned me with his jiggly eyes and shouted, “Mademoiselle Angel, come with me. Immediately!”