“Please join us, Samantha,” I said. “Harry and I have a question that only you can answer.”
Did you kill our mother and father?
52
Samantha had also spent the previous night in The Tombs. She had since washed her hair and changed her clothes, but there were inky circles under her eyes, as if she’d stood with her back to the wall all night, fearing for her life.
Which was okay with me. According to what I knew of police practices and procedures, a suspect under pressure was a suspect more likely to tell the truth.
And I would accept nothing less.
When Samantha sat down in the living room, I held up the locket, letting it swing so that light bounced off the diamond.
“I found this in your room,” I said. “Recognize it? I’m sure you do. The inscription says ‘Sammy, love forever—Maud.’ That’s pretty mushy for my mother. In fact, it’s so unlike her that I’d like you to tell me what she meant.”
“I don’t like your tone, Tandy. It’s none of your business, and furthermore, it was very, very wrong of you to pry into my personal things.”
“This is one of those situations where the ends justify the means, don’t you think, ‘Sammy’?”
Samantha heaved a long sigh. She tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling over the fireplace until I said, “Well?”
“Okay, Tandy, okay. You’re right,” Samantha said. “Your mother and I… had a relationship. It just happened… and both of us were taken by surprise. But the longer it went on, the more we realized we loved each other.”
“There’s a difference between loving each other and being in love.” I was surprised by the authority with which I said it. Katherine had told me that once, I guess. “Which was it?”
“We were in love,” Samantha said. “We never wanted any of you kids to know.”
“I’m going to run away and join the circus,” Harry said to his shoes. “Wait—I already live in the circus.”
I pressed Samantha. “Who knew about your relationship? Did Malcolm know you were involved with my mother, Sammy? Did you know anything about my father and Tamara Gee?”
“I found a great place to live,” Samantha said, changing the subject. She swept her long hair back with her hands. “It’s a studio on Ninety-second and Amsterdam. I can see you whenever you like. I can babysit Hugo. I’d like to do that, actually—”
“What were your plans before the murder?” I asked her. “Yours and Maud’s?”
“We didn’t have any plans. Hugo is still young. We would never have done anything to hurt anyone. Please don’t ask me any more questions, Tandy. I’m grieving. I feel gutted. I don’t expect you to understand or even to care, but please respect what I’m going through. To be quite honest, I’m the only one here who’s really lost someone they deeply loved.”
Ouch. I resisted the strange and sudden temptation to slap her. I know what it feels like to lose someone you love. How dare you…
Then: Deep breath in through the nose. Out through the mouth.
“Actually,” I said calmly, and the words sounded and felt strange even as they were coming out of my mouth, “I do care.”
As if on cue, Hugo came through the front door, with Philippe Montaigne right behind him. Hugo had on the same clothes he’d been wearing when we were sent to jail: cut-off jeans and an orange LIFE IS GOOD T-shirt with the secondary slogan ENJOY THE RIDE. He also had a black eye.
Phil said, “He ran away from the unsecured detention in Midtown and went looking for Matthew. The police found him sleeping on the grass in Bryant Park.”
“I’m starving,” Hugo said, grinning as only a ten-year-old can. “I could eat an alligator. The whole thing. By myself.”
I had to agree with Harry. I did already live in the circus. And it was a five-ring affair.
53
Hugo wasn’t the only one who was hungry, so we went to Shun Lee West, our favorite restaurant in the neighborhood. Once there, we sprawled in the black leather embrace of our usual booth. We’d even invited Samantha, and honestly, I did care about her feelings.
Matthew met us there, and I was stunned to see my handsome brother’s face so tired, his eyes so dull. The news about Tamara had clearly shocked him, and it seemed that the media glare was getting to him. Harry and I hugged him even harder than we had after our parents died.
Twenty minutes later, Hugo was cramming spicy Sichuan alligator into his mouth. He was very happy now. He was the only one who was.
The familiar place, the routine, and the comfort food were just a cover for our seething anxiety. We were all out of jail, but we were not free by any means. As Philippe had told me, Sergeant Caputo was taking this case personally, for some reason I couldn’t understand. He wasn’t going to give up.
I wasn’t giving up, either.
In fact, I had a new agenda.
Having dinner with my siblings and Samantha gave me the opportunity to question everyone at once. Maybe I could persuade or trap someone into making a confession.
Matthew sucked down his third glass of Tsingtao beer, then said, “I overheard a couple of cops saying they think we did it together, that the murders were a conspiracy.”
“Some people think you did it,” said Hugo. “I know how people get pregnant—duh—and if Malcolm did that to your girlfriend, that must have made you really, really mad.”
Matty smiled wanly at Hugo, and tousled his hair, but remained silent.
I waited as the server refilled our water glasses, then said, “At this point, family secrets could take all of us down. Matty, I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I think it’s fair to ask you to clear up this story. Is Tamara pregnant? By”—I gulped—“Malcolm?”
Hugo and Harry gagged a little. I didn’t blame them. Samantha pressed her lips together in a pained expression of distaste.
My brother fixed me with his bug-eyed stare. “How am I supposed to know? I haven’t seen any DNA test. I didn’t know she was pregnant until I saw her on the news. Can you believe that? I still don’t know anything. She’s not at the apartment. She won’t answer her phone.”
I knew this hurt Matty, but my weakly developed conscience allowed me to press on with the questioning. I practiced stating the horrible facts without any emotion whatsoever.
“Matty, please answer the question. Was Tamara sleeping with Malcolm?” Gags rippled around the table again. “There’s no way Tamara told the channel six news and didn’t tell you.”
“Really? And how well do you know Tamara?” Matthew shouted at me. “How do you know what psycho ideas she gets? And here’s another question, Tan-doori: Who appointed you Lord High Executioner?”
Samantha put her hands to her face. “Calm down, everyone. Calm down.” Her voice wobbled.
And then she fell apart.
“I miss Maud so much,” she cried.
We all looked at Samantha, who was now bawling noisily. Oh, geez. It was bad. All of it, all the time.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Please don’t cry.”
Samantha only cried harder.
Just then, a hush sucked the ambient sound right out of the restaurant. I looked up and saw that nearly all the other diners were staring at us.
Hugo dropped his fork, flicked his eyes back and forth, and then said in a really loud voice, “Haven’t you people ever seen someone cry before?”
The stares continued for a moment, until a bald guy in a plaid jacket started to laugh. A few more people joined in; apparently they found this scene hilarious. I didn’t see anything funny about it, though, and Hugo must’ve felt the same way, because he stuck his pinkie fingers in his mouth and whistled for attention.
When he got it, he flipped the bird at the bald guy.
Harry grinned.
Then Harry gave everyone in the restaurant the finger, and then so did Matthew. I couldn’t be left out of this, so my middle finger went up, too. Samantha dabbed at her eyes, then joined us in flipping off the diners at Shu
n Lee.
Five middle fingers.
We all laughed hysterically, out of control. The server rushed over to Matthew, brandishing the check, basically begging us to leave, and we were all overcome by another bout of uncontrollable laughter.
You have to take your yuks where you can find them, right? Especially if the justice system wants to hang you and your sibs for murder.
54
It was way after midnight, and the only light in the apartment came from the glowing green of the sharks’ phosphorescent bodies. Everyone was asleep but me.
The writer Colette once wrote, “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” I felt like I’d been beating my head against the wall for four days almost to the minute.
I was next to nowhere in my investigation. There was virtually no evidence, there were no known witnesses, and because my parents had at least a couple hundred million dollars, anyone in line to inherit had a motive to kill. And there were a lot of us. None of us could be counted out. Not even me.
I pulled a chair up next to Robert and switched on the lamp behind him, which illuminated Harry’s new painting of Malcolm and Maud, hanging above Robert’s TV. He called it What Love Looks Like, and he’d depicted our parents in acid green and bloody purple, their arms around each other and their mouths open in silent screams as they confronted the viewer with their stares.
Harry had remarked to me as he hung it: “Our parents were gods and monsters at the same time. Maybe we’re all like that—gods and monsters.”
Harry’s use of extreme light and dark colors allowed for multiple and opposite interpretations of the work, as he’d intended, but in my humble opinion, Harry had deemphasized our parents’ godlike traits while capturing their more monstrous qualities with real feeling.
Maud might have liked this painting, because there was nothing sentimental about it. The style was abstract and expressionistic; it reminded me of Picasso’s weird distortions and Francis Bacon’s gruesome imagery.
Harry’s latest work evoked a very strong emotion in me, attractive and repulsive at the same time. As I stared at the painting, that emotion swelled, and my head started to spin.
What was happening? Was it the drug withdrawal?
And then I hallucinated again. I thought I saw that face, a bit clearer this time. He was handsome.… No. More than that. Deeply attractive. And yet—somehow repellant to me at the same time…
I felt a sudden heaving in my chest, so forceful that I stood up and clutched my heart just to make sure I wasn’t in cardiac arrest.
The ghostly face was gone, but I staggered over to the painting that had triggered the frightening response and snatched it from its hanger.
A nail fell to the floor.
Too easily, as though it had been hammered right through the wall and into an empty space on the other side.
Suddenly, I refocused back on the mystery. Setting the painting down, I remembered the closet on the other side of the wall.
Years earlier, I had seen my father coming out of that closet. When I asked him about it, he told me that he and Maud stored their out-of-season clothing there. And then he locked the door.
I was twelve at the time, old enough to register my father’s strange expression. But I was in middle school, and closets were pretty low on my list of interests.
But now? My father’s secret hiding place had just shot up to the number one position.
I left the living room and moved along the corridor behind the stairs. I stopped where I had seen my father emerge from the closet.
It was the same closet where I’d spent my sleepless night as a Big Chop.
The police had broken off the lock and looked through the closet, as they’d done everywhere in the apartment, but they hadn’t found anything. Then again, they were obviously incompetent.
You see, during that night that I wasn’t allowed to lie down, I’d had time to really search the closet for the secret I knew must be inside. Why else would my father have a lock on a closet door? Why else would he look so strange when he came out of the closet? After hours of looking, I had finally found a door that blended so seamlessly into the wall, you’d never see it without spending hours examining every crack.
Had my father wanted me to find it? I guess I’d never know. It didn’t matter, though, because the door hadn’t budged that night, and I still couldn’t find a way to make it budge.
But there had to be a key somewhere in this house. And I was going to find it.
55
My feet hardly touched the treads as I ran up the stairs to my parents’ suite. I dialed up the hallway lights, and even in the pale glow coming from the hall, their room looked blasted and horrifying.
I stood on the threshold, cold sweat beading up all over my body. I actually started to shake. Before I could stop it, my mind had called up the horrific image of my parents’ twisted bodies on the bed.
I felt sick at the thought that they had been betrayed by someone they knew and trusted.
What were they thinking before they died? Did they even know who had murdered them?
Had they tried to save themselves?
I gripped the doorjamb with both hands until my rapid heartbeat slowed. Then I took a tentative step forward and entered my parents’ room. The place where they made babies, the place where they made me.
This most private of rooms had been frozen in the aftermath of the chaos. Belongings had been dumped from dresser drawers and lay in a jumble on the floor. Dead flowers drooped in a vase on the fireplace mantel, and the armoire doors were opened wide, as if they were pleading with me to come in and find the truth.
I was determined to stay until I found it.
After checking out the mantel and the tops of the bedside tables, I went to my parents’ walk-in closet.
My father’s clothing was bunched along the rod on the left side, and my mother’s clothes were crushed together on the right. Designer garments had fallen off hangers and were lying in glittering heaps on the floor.
I went to work.
I frisked every pocket, each article of clothing sending up a flurry of good and bad memories as I touched it: a vintage Chanel suit Maud had worn when she’d taken Katherine and me to the ballet; a coat Father had worn on a snowy day when the bunch of us had played touch football in the park. I’d almost forgotten that day, but the sudden memory of playing football with Matthew sent a rare feeling of warmth through me.
I seized on the jacket my mother used to throw on over her jeans—a sexy, sparkly, spangled navy-blue thing that had once belonged to Madonna.
I put it on and smelled Maud’s ylang-ylang fragrance. My eyes filled with tears, and a few of them spilled over. Maud had loved this jacket. She looked ten years younger when she wore it, maybe because it made her feel ten years younger. She’d never let me wear it. The fact that I could just slip it on now without fearing her wrath made me feel a strange sort of ache inside.
I looked at myself in my mother’s mirror—and I saw a dead girl walking. My eyes were dark and sunken. My hair was lank in my headband. I looked like Alice after she’d taken a tour of Wonderland’s meatpacking plant.
Do not dissolve into mush, Tandy. Do not go there. Come back to the living, bucko.
I put the brakes on my useless trip down memory highway and left the closet. I sifted through the piles of clothing and other miscellany on the bedroom floor. The police had started throwing things into haphazard piles once they’d determined which items should be confiscated. Littered among the sweaters and undergarments were foreign coins, a packet of letters to my father from Gram Hilda, and a gold rattle that had belonged to Harry—but no key to my father’s closet.
I ran my hand behind the flag painting and then, before going through the stack of books on the floor, turned on the light next to my father’s side of the bed.
&nbs
p; The lamp is French, an electrified oil lamp from the nineteenth century, made of bronze with a glass ball shade. Its style is seriously at odds with our modern décor. But Gram Hilda gave it to my father, and he loved his mother despite how she’d hurt him. Or maybe because of it? In any case, her gift lit up his bedside every night of his life. On a hunch, I carefully lifted the glass shade and gently shook it.
A key fell out onto the bed.
I stared at it for a few long seconds. Could it really be that easy?
It was just past two in the morning. Time to wake up my twin again.
I knocked on Harry’s door until I heard him groan, then went inside and shook him awake.
“Gah, Tandy. What is wrong with you? What time is it, anyway?”
“You’ve noticed Malcolm’s closet?”
“What? Which closet?”
“The one under the stairs.”
“The police didn’t find anything in it. Now go away. Come back at noon. At the earliest.”
I held up the key, just visible in the light beaming through Harry’s window from the city that never sleeps.
“I think this is important. You have to come with me.”
56
I had started to shiver again, maybe because I was afraid I might actually solve this mystery soon.
I opened the closet door, turned on the light, and walked over to where I remembered finding the door. It took me a few minutes to locate it again.
“Tandy, what are you doing?” Harry asked, shivering a little himself. He sat on an old suitcase near the door.
“There’s something here. I just have to figure out how to open it,” I replied. I felt around the outline of the door. Could I have just imagined it? Maybe it was nothing. I put my face up against the cold wall and looked closely at every tiny bump, searching for anything that looked uneven. That’s when I saw the tiny slot.
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