Confessions: The Paris Mysteries by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

stating what I was pretty sure was obvious. “I can cite you a hundred articles on the deleterious effects of marijuana on the adolescent brain.”
    He looked at me and then cracked up.
    That idiot said, “I think the damage was done before I smoked
this
.”
    He checked out the room. Then he walked up to the closed door on the left, the one with the old strap hinges. And as I had done earlier, he pried open the latch.
    “Whatever you want me to see is in here, right?” he said.
    I pushed him aside, pulled open the door, and grabbed the lightbulb chain.
    Harry went directly to the hand-hewn table and the three cartons with Katherine’s name written in bold black marking pen. He sucked in air and said, “Whoa, Tandy. Katherine? Not
our
Katherine? I’m not sure about this.”
    With my twin right beside me, I opened the first box and pulled out our sister’s chart.
    “Take a look,” I said.
    His eyes got huge and focused. I could see that his dope high was largely gone. He stared at the chart, took it out of my hands, and read the symbols and dates on both the X and the Y axis of the graph. Then he looked at me, completely sobered—and there was no question about what we both knew.
    Katherine had been on the pills, some of the same ones I had been on, some of the same ones that had been fed toHarry and to Hugo. And she’d been dosed with the pills for speed and agility that Matthew had gobbled down all his life.
    Harry’s voice cracked right down the middle when he said to me, “We should have guessed. They did it to her, too.”
    I put my finger on the trend lines and traced their jagged upward climb. “Look at this, Harry. She was smarter than Stephen freaking
Hawking
. She was stronger than Matty and Hugo.”
    “Did you have any idea?” he asked me.
    I shook my head no.
    “What’s in the other boxes?”
    “Raise your hand if you want to find out,” I said.

I handed Harry the sheet of
thumbnail-sized photos of Katherine walking around Paris, seemingly oblivious to the photographer. Harry held them under the bare bulb and burst into tears.
    He was crying as he said, “I don’t understand this at all. She wasn’t supposed to be in Paris. Who took these pictures?”
    I mumbled, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” and after my brother wiped away his tears with the backs of his hands, we looked over the reports with our sister’s name on the covers. Behind the cover sheets, we found letterhead from Angel Pharmaceuticals, the company our father owned with our wretched uncle Peter.
    “Bet you a million euros they told Kath she was taking
vitamins
, like they did with us,” Harry said.
    I was opening more envelopes when I found another contact sheet of pictures. Harry grabbed it and held it under the bare bulb. I yelled, “Hey!” then stared at it from behind his shoulder. Katherine’s hair was the same length as in the other photos, but she was wearing a different shirt, jacket, and scarf.
    And there was a boy in some of the pictures.
    He had his arms around Katherine. He looked at her adoringly. I felt my stomach clench—had James looked at me that way? I blocked that thought.
    We knew Katherine had been with a boy named Dominick when she’d been killed in South Africa. But these pictures were taken in Paris.
    “That’s got to be Dominick,” Harry said. “Couldn’t be anyone else. Sis, did Kath stop off in Paris before going to Cape Town? Did she meet Dominick here?”
    “My questions exactly,” I said.
    My eyes burned with tears as I saw my teenage sister with the dark-haired boy. They looked euphoric. Harry had to be right. Dominick had to be the boy Kath had written about while she was on her Grande Gongo—aka a major reward my parents gave for overachieving—in Cape Town. She’d said she loved him.
    “Check my memory of this,” I said. “Dominick was never seen after the accident. But it was assumed that he survived the crash, right? I remember Dad going over there, turning the city