Confessions: The Private School Murders (16 page)

My mind was revving
like a race car engine as I joined my brothers in the kitchen that morning. I had left Philippe a message at 4:36 am. So far, I hadn’t heard back. I glanced at the clock on the stove. It was now 7:57.

I reached for the coffee and almost knocked it over. Harry gave me the squinty eye, trying to assess my body language and read my mood. After a couple of minutes of me fidgeting and his eyes getting narrower, he actually took away my coffee, emptied it into the sink, and brought me a glass of milk.

“What’s with you?” I asked.

“What’s with
me
? You’re like a zombie on crack.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “A zombie on crack. What would that look like, Harry?”

Hugo stuck his arms out in front of him, fixed his eyes on nothing, and took a few speedy laps around the dining table. He was still going at it when Jacob entered.

“I don’t even want to know,” our guardian said in a lighthearted way.

Harry and I laughed, and I was glad when Harry didn’t press me on what I’d been obsessing about. At this point, I had nothing more than an idea—a hope. Even if the boxes were safe, I didn’t know where they were, what they might contain, or if I could get my hands on them.

I drank my milk and ate my oatmeal while Jacob quizzed Hugo on the Spanish-American War.

Ten minutes later, Jacob stood at the front door and hugged each of us good-bye. I’d never been hugged good-bye in my life, and I started to squirm. I mean, group hugs after arguments are one thing, but this was a tad outside my comfort zone. Jacob, however, wasn’t having it. He gripped my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said: “Have a good day, Tandy. I’ll be right here when you get home.”

“Good to know,” I told him. But inside, I did feel a little bit squishy. No one had ever promised me that before, either.

Hugo and Harry took their hugs and promises like men, and then we hightailed it to the elevator.

I got through the morning at my desk in the choir loft at All Saints, asked sharp questions, and even stood up to present my opinion of the effects of electronic communication on the teenage brain.

“Not good, but highly necessary.”

But the whole time, a huge chunk of my mind was fixated on an image of four cardboard boxes.

At lunch, I sat on the stone front steps of the school with traffic whizzing by and texted Phil. He was in court with Matthew, of course, but he texted me back half an hour later, while I was in class.

Call me when you can.

I texted back.

Just tell me if u have the boxes

His text back was almost immediate.

Call me. Too long for text.

Ugh. I texted back.

So leave me a vm!!!!

By the time the dismissal bell rang, Phil
had
left me a voice mail. I clapped my phone tight against my ear and heard the murmur of crowds moving around him in the courthouse corridor, breaking up his words. I could just barely make out what he said.

“Sorry we keep missing each other, Tandy, but look. I have the boxes. They belonged to your parents, who were
my clients. Without their express permission, I can’t give them to you. I’m sorry.”

I gripped the phone. “Sonofa—”

I called Phil again. His voice mail picked up, of course. I held the phone in front of my lips and shouted. “I want those boxes, Phil! Malcolm and Maud don’t need their old files anymore, and as one of their heirs, I’m entitled to their stuff!”

Then I took a deep breath and called Jacob. “I’m stopping by our lawyer’s office on the way home. I’m not grounded from our lawyer’s office, right?”

“No. I think that’s a reasonable place to go. Any chance you’ll tell me why?” Jacob asked.

“Nope. But I’ll be home for dinner.”

Luckily, Jacob didn’t argue. My destination on William Street was one of many featureless gray office buildings that form tall canyons shading the streets of downtown Manhattan. By the time I arrived at Phil’s address, the elevators were disgorging personnel leaving work for the day. I hoped Phil’s office wasn’t already closed.

When I arrived on the twentieth floor, I followed the arrows until I was outside the glass door that read
P. MONTAIGNE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
. I pushed at the door and it opened. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Phil? It’s Tandy.”

And there he was, standing in the doorway to his interior office, looking at me with very sad eyes.

“Tandy, I can’t do it. Can you just trust me on this?”

“Not a chance,” I replied, gearing up for a fight. “Those boxes are mine.”

He gave me this look like I’d just hauled off and punched him.

“I’m sorry, Phil. I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s okay,” he interjected. “I have to tell you something about Matthew.”

That brought me up short. Here I’d been obsessing about James and my love life and my supercontrolling mother and I hadn’t even asked how the trial was going.

“What? What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

“He wants to testify in his own defense, Tandy,” Philippe told me. “If he takes the stand, it will be a disaster.”

“How big a disaster?” I asked.

“I’m afraid if he takes the stand… we’ll lose.”

31

Philippe snapped on the lights
in the conference room, and we sat in padded swivel chairs across from each other at the glossy blond-wood table.

I was sweating through my clothes and feeling sick over bulldozing my way into Phil’s office and ordering him around, especially when he was concerned about my brother. I pictured Matthew lying on a narrow slab in his cell, his hands balled into fists, angry, helpless to do anything except commit suicide on the witness stand.

I said to Phil, “What can I do to help Matty?”

“I don’t know, Tandy. Reasoning with him only makes him more belligerent, more entrenched. If there was a weak prosecution, his testimony
might
move the jury. But
it’s Nadine Raphael and she’ll vaporize him. My guess is that he’s having posttraumatic shock from so many deaths: your parents, Tamara, and his unborn son. I think he just wants to blow everything up.”

A long silence followed as we both visualized the attack by the aggressive assistant DA and what would remain of my brother’s defense when she’d finished detonating him.

I ached for my brother. He didn’t deserve this. Any of this.

I wanted to see Matthew run down a field with a football tucked under his arm. I wanted to hear him laugh and see him bounce Hugo on his shoulders. I wanted him back in the apartment with the rest of us. A family.

I wanted him to be free.

Phil said, “Matthew is my problem, Tandy. I’ve had a chance to think about yours. You can look at those file boxes as long as you do it here, in this conference room, now.

“Tomorrow I’m sending the whole lot to climate-controlled storage along with your parents’ other papers so that I will always have whatever I may need to protect you from future lawsuits. Agreed?”

I was so excited my fingertips tingled. “Yes. Of course.”

“I’ll be right back.”

It felt like he was gone for hours. When he finally did
come back, he was pulling a dolly loaded with four cardboard cartons.

“Here’s your one and only chance, Tandy. Make the most of it.” He gave me a bottle of water, a notepad, and a box cutter, then left the room and closed the door.

Unfortunately, my one and only chance had a cutoff time. I’d told Jacob I’d be home by seven.

32

I had about forty minutes
to go through the boxes and get out to the street. And actually, with rush-hour traffic running up, down, and across Manhattan, I was cutting my travel time close.

It was go time.

I lifted the first heavy box onto the conference table. I sliced through the tape, pulled up the flaps, and peered inside.

Dozens of stuffed file folders proved, upon inspection, to be full of stock brokerage sell orders, buy orders, order confirmations, and monthly statements. I opened the second box and the third, finding similar bundles of brokerage-house litter. These papers might be critical to future legal actions, but they meant nothing to me.

I was looking for something personal. A journal, a confession, an envelope marked
To Tandy, re James Rampling
. But of course, that would’ve been too easy.

As I flipped through the file folders, I was starting to think that this whole thing was futile. But I couldn’t quit until I’d searched the last box. I slit the tape on box number four, hoped there was anything in it other than financial files, then pulled on the flaps.

Damn. More files. But then something caught my eye. A blue folder with a white tab, different from all the green and tan. I tugged it out, and my heart all but stopped.

The typed tab read:
FERN HAVEN: TANDOORI.

I shook as I pulled the folder into my lap. Did I really want to know what was inside? Did I want to know what had actually been done to me?

Answer:
Hell yeah
.

I flipped open the folder and hungrily scanned the pages. A barrage of frightening phrases jumped out at me. Phrases like
Experimental treatment. Test case 33. Psychotic break.
And my favorite,
Possible side effects include prolonged amnesia, inconsistent recall, hallucination, catatonia, coma, depression, suicide.

Fantastic. My parents had wanted to eradicate their enemy’s son from my life so completely, they were willing to risk my life for it.

Quaking with fury, I glanced at the closed office door. There was no way in hell I was leaving this folder in a box to be placed in storage. This was about my life. My health. I folded it in half and went to stuff it into my bag. When I did, a stiff cardboard envelope slipped out and fell to the floor at my feet.

I shoved the file into my bag and grabbed the envelope.

“What’s this, Maud?” I muttered. “X-rays of my scrambled egg–style brain?”

Bracing myself, I opened the envelope. Inside were five postcards of European city scenes. I flipped the first one over.