My vision was narrowing. Harry’s voice was way too loud, and yet I knew he was talking very softly. Was there time to stop this head-bomb with a pill?
I moved toward the monastery table like I was walking underwater. I slid the paid bill from Private along with Jacob Perlman’s authorizations back into the dirty brown envelope. I grabbed the contact sheet picturing Kath and the boy who might have been her lover, and slid that into the envelope, too.
Then I tucked the envelope into the waistband of my skirt and hid it under my blouse.
Meanwhile, Harry was stacking unread reports back inside the boxes. The sound of him pulling tape off the roll was like the roar of a tornado coming at me down a highway.
“You okay?” Harry asked.
“No.”
Harry taped the boxes closed, and when the room looked tidy enough to pass military inspection, he took my hands. “I’m right here, Tandy. Let’s go.”
He turned off the lights and locked up behind us, and we got the hell out of Dodge before the migraine could knock me to the floor.
I was in Gram Hilda’s bed with the lights out when Jacob came into the room again to check on me.
“Feeling better?” he whispered.
I told him my migraine was about the same size but with less intensity behind my eyes.
“Try to sleep. I’ll bring you another ibuprofen in an hour.”
He very gently adjusted the goose-down blankets and curtains, squeezed my hand, and then quietly closed the door.
I did some relaxation exercises, especially the one where you imagine yourself in a place where you were once happy.
I remembered being happy whenever I jumped into Kath’s bed at night after dinner. I’d snuggle up to her while she read histories of Western civilization and philosophy, and she would sometimes say, “Listen to this, Tandy.”
She had told me secrets about boys and her dreams of a life beyond school. And I remembered the way she smelled: Se Souvenir de Moi.
But just before dozing off to pleasant memories, I jumped awake with memories of my mother’s screams the day we found out Katherine was dead. Images followed: Malcolm and Maud, their faces gray as they told their four remaining children what little they knew about our sister’s death. I remembered Matty smashing chairs and glassware as Hugo howled.
I remembered sitting on the floor with my shocked and terrified twin outside the master bedroom door, seeing Maud in bed with a migraine, and Malcolm silently stuffing clothing into a duffel bag, rushing past us with a phone to his face, calling our driver to come around with the Bentley.
The next thing I remembered was Katherine’s funeral. The coffin was closed, of course. I didn’t like to think about that. I spoke at my sister’s graveside, or maybe it would be more accurate to say I stood at my sister’s graveside and, although I had things I wanted to say, I just sobbed. I didn’t remember what anyone said, exactly, but there were dozens of heartfelt good-byes.
But now, in the present, I was awake, and I wanted to know everything about my sister from my current perspective.
Before I opened the cardboard boxes, I’d never thought the story of Katherine’s death was the slightest bit questionable.
Now questions had been raised.
I thought about Katherine in Paris and the boy named Dominick who had never been found dead or alive in Cape Town. I thought of my uncle Peter, the head of Angel Pharmaceuticals. And I pictured Katherine taking the many, many pills that the adults in our family had conspired to give her—for reasons of their own.
Malcolm and Maud held many principles—but honesty wasn’t one of them. They had lied to us about the drugs. They had lied about Maud’s business so that it was an utter surprise of the holy crap kind when we found out that her company was under siege, and the same could be said for Angel Pharmaceuticals.
Now I felt certain we hadn’t been told the whole truth of Katherine’s death. Maybe everything we knew about that was a lie.
The next morning, my head was clear and pain free, but my hands still shook and my legs wobbled. I clutched the banister and hobbled down a flight of stairs to Harry’s room. He’d obviously been working all night. I pushed sheet music off his bed and tickled him awake.
“You said you wanted in on this,” I told him, waving the dirty brown envelope in his face.
“What’s the plan?”
It took about a minute and ten seconds to reach the number listed as belonging to D. Tremaine. Harry’s ear and mine were both pressed hard to a side of my phone when the call was answered.
I asked, “Est-ce Dominick Tremaine?”
“C’est Dominick. Qui est à l’appareil?”
Afterward, Harry and I dressed quickly and neatly. I even put on some lipstick. Jacob was very kind at breakfast. He looked into my face, really studied it. I smiled.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I feel really good.”
He said, “Good recovery, Tandy.” He smiled and sprinkled crushed nuts on my oatmeal. Poured me a big mug of milky coffee.
“We’re going to the Louvre,” I said. “If it’s okay.”
Harry added, “We’re going to rent headsets and do the masters the right way.”
Jacob gave us each some folding money and said, “Your phones are charged, right? Make sure. Call if you need me. Have fun and please be home in time for dinner.”
When we were on the street, Harry and I caught a cab at the queue and sped off to Montmartre. It was an artsy village on a very famous hill that was rife with cafés, street musicians, and landmarks, especially la Basilique du Sacré Coeur, a church with an unparalleled view of Paris out to the horizon.
But Harry and I had no time for sightseeing or leisurely strolls through the postcard vignettes of Paris. We were on a quest, wherever it took us, and with luck, we’d still have time to see the Mona Lisa before dinner.
Dominick Tremaine’s address was on one of the seamier streets in Montmartre; it was narrow, twisting, and, according to my street app, notorious for sex shops and prostitution. Our cabdriver looked at us well-dressed, clean-faced twins in his rearview mirror and asked, “Dois-je attendre?”
“Thanks, but don’t wait. We’ll be okay,” I said in French, hoping it was the truth.
Harry pushed euros into the driver’s hand, and we hopped out of the cab at the foot of a winding street banked by shuttered residential buildings with crummy shops and bistros on the ground floors. I saw a painted sign with a street name and led the way up steps cut into the side of the street until we reached a doorway that listed names of tenants beside corresponding apartment numbers and buttons.
We rang, and the door buzzed open. Harry took the lead as we climbed two steep staircases. I was panting when we reached the top landing, maybe because I suddenly realized what we had done. Harry and I were alone in a strange place. No one knew where we were, and we were knocking on the door of the man who had probably been the last person to see Katherine alive.
Had he been her lover?
Had he gotten her killed?
How would he react to seeing Katherine’s younger sibs?
Harry rapped on the door. I heard the sound of shoes on a hardwood floor, and then the door opened a crack. A dark eye looked at us for long seconds; then the door closed, hard.
“Wait,” I said.
But I’d jumped the gun. A chain slid along a track, and this time when the door opened, there was a very good-looking man in his mid-to late-twenties standing in the doorway.
In fact, he looked the way my brother Matthew had warned me French men all looked.
Dominick’s black hair was uncombed and falling loose to his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and it looked as though he’d slept in his clothes.
But although he looked older, rougher, and, I have to say, sadder, I recognized this man from the photos I’d seen of him with Katherine. I said in French, “We spoke on the phone this morning. I’m Tandy Angel, and this is my brother Harry.”
He said
, “You are alone?”
“Yes.”
He said, “You speak French almost as well as Katherine. S’il vous plaît, entrez.”
Dominick’s flat was as comfy as an old sweater.
The sitting room had three dormer windows, each with a sliver view of Sacré Coeur. The walls were lined with bookshelves, filled with probably five or six thousand books with tattered jackets, either secondhand or just really well read, on subjects ranging from fine art and architecture to history, astrophysics, astronomy, and even poetry.
An orange cat sprawled on a two-seat sofa opposite a lounge chair. Books and manuscript boxes were piled on the floor alongside the chair, and there was another short stack on a side table, along with a laptop and a gang of pill bottles.
Dominick shooed the cat away, offered us the love seat, then brought over an opened bottle of wine and three glasses.
I was pretty sure wine would reignite my headache big-time, but I held the glass in my lap, and in a few sentences, I gave Dominick the shortest credible explanation for why we were in Paris. I explained that our parents had died, that our deceased grandmother had owned a home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, and that our guardian had brought us to Paris to help settle family affairs.
“Not your uncle Peter?” Dominick asked.
“No. Our uncle Jacob. Kath told you about Peter?”
Dominick dipped his head, and his hair fell across his eyes. I couldn’t read him, and by then Harry was saying, “We found your name and pictures of you with our sister in our grandmother’s house.”
Dominick nodded and said, “I’m glad you found me. I’ve had no one to talk to about Katherine. This has been killing me for so long.”
He got up, took a framed photo off the wall, and brought it over to the love seat. Tears jumped into my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The photo was a gasper.
Dominick was astride a big honkin’ motorbike, like a souped-up Harley. His hair was pulled back in a pony, he wore tight black leathers, and his face radiated joie de vivre. Our dear Katherine was on the seat behind him, her arms tightly wound around his waist, a helmet capping her long hair. She looked so happy, and you could just see that she loved and trusted this man.
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.
Hugo came downstairs to tell us, “I taught Jacob how to beatbox. It might not be his calling, though.”
I rubbed Hugo’s head affectionately until he squirmed away. Then we all sat down to a dinner of lamb chops and green beans almondine, finishing the meal with a mousse au chocolat. This dinner Jacob had made with love made me sorry I’d doubted him, and yet I doubted him still.
After dinner had
been cleared away, Jacob mooched around the downstairs rooms, watching the news, taking his computer for a spin, effectively blocking the entrance to the cellar, where unread papers called out to me.
Yes, Jacob had said he would tell me about Katherine, but I wanted answers I could verify before having a chat with my Israeli commando uncle.
Harry said he had some thinking and composing to do, and after he secluded himself in the back garden, I climbed the stairs to my room. I opened a closet and found a silk nightgown and matching robe made of cerise silk. As I put it on, the silk drifted over my head and floated around my shoulders like it had been lonely for me. I got into bed and thought about Katherine and Dominick’s doomed love story, and frankly, it didn’t track.
I do believe it’s possible to be rear-ended and not see the vehicle that struck you from behind. I believe it’s possible that in the inferno that followed, other drivers had been shocked and horrified by the flames and had missed seeing the guilty driver who, after rear-ending Dominick’s motorcycle, sped away.
But why had Uncle Pig threatened Dominick?
Why wasn’t he more concerned for Kath’s boyfriend, the other victim in this accident? Why hadn’t he waited for Dominick to recover and maybe helped him pursue legal matters arising from the accident? That would have been humane. And why hadn’t Dominick been allowed to contact my parents and tell them about Katherine’s last days?
That might have been a comfort to us all.
Instead, we’d had Katherine’s funeral without the boy who loved her. What could be sadder than that? Had Peter been at the funeral? I couldn’t remember.
After our parents died, I’d caught Peter smuggling documents out of my father’s office. He had said the papers belonged to Angel Pharmaceuticals and, therefore, to him.
Now I wondered if those papers were all about Katherine. Was there a connection between Katherine’s drug protocols and her death?
I had to find out.