Confessions: The Paris Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page B

before morning, I would be taking a trip into the
past
. And in the process, I would get one of the greatest shocks of my life.

I have to prepare you for
something I wasn’t prepared for myself.
    I never expected to run into the ghost of my dead sister.
    The night we were kicked out of school was a waking nightmare. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about Gram Hilda’s stiff-necked lawyers and bankers, who looked unforgiving and vengeful.
    I thought about Hugo’s incorrigible fighting, and then Harry buying dope right outside school. It wasn’t exactly the action of a casual smoker. And the worst for me, personally, was Jacob’s disappointment in me for filching that key.
    The three of us had been awful. Jacob didn’t deserve that, and we all knew it.
    I stared at the canopy for hours. I was sweaty and pissed off at myself and beyond restless, and at just after midnight, when I couldn’t lie in bed for another minute, I got up, put on my Converse, and grabbed a flashlight.
    I wasn’t going to borrow any keys, but I was determined to map out my grandmother’s house from the basement to her attic atelier. This was partly my house. So what could possibly be wrong with taking a stroll?
    I crept past Jacob’s room, then tiptoed down the center stairs, and when I got to the kitchen, I took a sharp right. I’d seen a door at the end of the pantry and was pretty sure it opened onto a staircase that led down to the cellar.
    And yes, indeed, it did.
    The pantry door opened easily, and cool air rushed toward me as I went down the stairs. When I got to the bottom, I swung my flashlight around until I found a chain attached to a light fixture in the ceiling.
    I pulled the chain, and the light came on, revealing a stone basement room with a furnace in the corner. To my left was an old door with strap hinges and an old latch. My detective instincts told me there would be something interesting behind it.
    The latch was locked, but I pried it open with a rustybar, only breaking two fingernails in the process. But I didn’t care at all. The room within a room was a mystery enclosed in an enigma.
    I was standing inside a stone chamber that had once been a wine cellar, but there was no wine. There was something much better.
    Right in front of me was a monastery table made of heavy, hand-cut planks, and on the table, centered and squared, were three cardboard bankers’ document boxes.
    I had to know what was inside those boxes. Why had they been stored in an airless basement room? Would I find more racy photographs inside? Or were they filled with old journals, secret tales by Gram Hilda?
    I walked to the table and put my hand on the box closest to me and turned it so that light fell on the label.
    A name had been written in marking pen.
    KATHERINE
    That was my sister’s name. My sister who had
died
.

I was seriously freaked out at
reading my sister’s name. I turned the other two boxes around and, yeah, each one was marked katherine.
    They had to belong to some
other
Katherine.
    My sister had died in a horrific motorcycle crash in South Africa six years ago. Nothing belonging to her could possibly have found its way to my grandmother’s basement. Right?
    Whether that was right, wrong, or something else, I had to find out what was inside these boxes.
    The lids were sealed with transparent packing tape. I grabbed the first box and pulled at the tape with my broken nails—then I lifted the lid.
    Right inside the opened box was a large white envelope. There was no writing on it and the flap wasn’t sealed. I worked my fingers into the envelope and pulled out a contact sheet, a page of thumbnail-sized photographs.
    My heart started banging again.
    It was Katherine. My Katherine.
    The overhead lightbulb was perfect for scrutinizing small items, and I closely examined the twenty-four tiny pictures of my beloved sister. She was alone in each snapshot, and in every one of them, she looked as beautiful and as happy as the last time I saw