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her.
    And
snapshot
is the right word, as in
candid snapshot
. None of the pictures were posed. Katherine didn’t seem aware that she was being photographed, so the photographer had to have been hidden. Or else the photographer had captured her on film with a zoom lens, paparazzi-style.
    And that wasn’t all.
    These pictures had been taken in Paris. Not New York, not Cape Town.
Paris.
    Had Katherine stopped off here before she’d had the fatal collision with a tractor-trailer in Cape Town? Had she left these boxes, planning to send them home to New York? The stone walls of the subterranean basement room were starting to close in on me. I was in a tomb with the last pictures of Katherine, but I couldn’t leave. Not yet.
    I put the pictures down and plunged my hands into the box.
    There were more envelopes and accordion folders, the kind that hold thick packets of paper. I opened everything hurriedly.
    I saw stacks of papers that had Katherine’s name on the cover sheets, but before I could read them, I saw a
chart
with her name printed across the top. I’d seen charts like these before. They had been in my father’s home office, labeled with the names of each of my siblings, and of course, there was a chart with my name, too.
    This chart of Katherine’s was dated only weeks before her death.
    There were codes down the left-hand side, numbers across the bottom, dates across the top. I could read these charts in my sleep. I did it now, and I was as far from sleep as I had ever been in my life.
    In a period of one year, Katherine’s IQ had shot up from 133 to more than 180. It was off the charts.
    As for her physical capacity, Katherine had run a mile in four minutes. Was that a record for a sixteen-year-old girl? It could well be. The next column showed that at her last testing, Katherine had bench-pressed four hundred forty pounds. That was out of the ballpark and over the top.
    I stared at the colored lines on the graph and noted thesteep incline of the upward trend. And I had a good idea what had caused all this “progress.”
    A shadow fell across me, and reflexively, I put the chart behind my back as I spun around.
    Jacob said patiently, “We’ll talk about Katherine, you and I. But not tonight, Tandy. You’re going to a new school in the morning, and you’re
not
going to be late.”

Monsieur Morel, Jacob’s spy and our
ancient chauffeur, stopped the car in front of our second school in two days. It was behind a high stone wall that had a statue of the Virgin Mary atop the pediment. I saw the shape of the building behind the gates. It had a dome with a crucifix on top—and I understood what Jacob had done.
    He had enrolled us in a convent school. We would be going to a school run by nuns.
    School was the last place I wanted to be. Do you know the feeling? And a religious school? That hadn’t even been a blip on my radar.
    I guess our uncle was offsetting our expulsion from theInternational Academy, maybe trying to score points with Gram Hilda’s board of lawyers and bankers. Or maybe this was the only school in Paris, France, that would take the three Angel kids, who’d been accused of killing their parents.
    Either way, the lesson for the day was “Don’t mess with Jacob.”
    Monsieur Morel opened the rear passenger door for me while Hugo kicked the other one open and spilled out onto the street with Harry. Our Yoda-like driver smiled and said, “I’ll be here at three, Mademoiselle Tandy.”
    I said, “Okay,” but I was wasting none of my charm on Morel. I wanted to get back to the boxes of my sister’s stuff in the basement, but I couldn’t buck Uncle Jacob. Not today.
    The three of us were buzzed through the gates and then entered the convent school of the Sisters of Charity. It was a bare-stone building inside and out. A nun, who didn’t introduce herself, took us to the office of the school administrator, Sister Marie Claire.
    Sister Marie Claire was nothing like the glossy fashion mag she