Confessions: The Private School Murders (17 page)

To: Tandy Angel, the Dakota, 1 West 72nd Street, Apt. 9G, New York, NY.

All the blood rushed to my head. These postcards were for me? But I’d never seen them before. My eyes automatically darted to the signature.

Love, James.

Suddenly everything went gray. I stumbled back into the cabinet behind me and upended a glass vase, which crashed to the floor. Almost instantly, Phil opened the door.

“What happened?”

I covered the postcards with a file folder.

“S-sorry,” I stuttered, glancing at the shattered glass near my feet. “I tripped.”

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yeah. Not a scratch,” I told him, though if he’d taken a closer look, he would have seen I was shaking like a leaf.

“I’ll go get the dustpan.” He closed the door again and was gone.

I ever so slowly moved the folder off the postcards, as if that cobra from my office was going to jump out and sink its teeth into me. The same tall scrawl covered each of the cards. They were all from James.

He was, in fact, alive.

And he’d been trying to get in touch with me all along.

33

There were no available cabs—
anywhere—so I ran down the steps to the subway. After a bone-rattling fifteen-minute ride uptown, I exited on the north side of Seventy-Second and Amsterdam.

I walked as fast as I could toward the Dakota, and seven minutes later, I blew through the front door of apartment 9G with my five precious cards from James inside my bag, along with my Fern Haven file. I shoved my bag under the bench in the hall, then ran to the kitchen to help Harry with dinner.

I wanted to be alone as soon as possible, and as usual, Harry was on to me. In fact, he kept looking at me like I was wearing a boa constrictor on my head.

Which, given the recent plague of snakes, wasn’t that far-fetched.

“Matty wants to testify for himself,” I said as I put water on for the pasta. I wanted to focus on something other than James, and luckily—or unluckily—I had something pretty damn important to focus on. “Phil is scared. By law, Matty has the right to take the stand, even against his lawyer’s advice, even if he will blow up his case.”

“Someone should talk to him,” Harry said, looking pointedly at me. It was pretty clear who he thought that someone should be.

Over dinner, Harry, Hugo, and I talked to Jacob about Matthew, telling stories of what he was really like and how the press was totally misrepresenting him. We even laughed over a few of Hugo’s accounts of heroic Matty coming to his rescue. Like when Hugo had left the tub on to see if he could fill the entire bathroom with water and swim around in it wearing Malcolm’s scuba gear. It felt good to laugh.

But once the dishes were in the dishwasher, all I could think about was being alone. I fled to my sky-blue sanctuary, locked my door, and took my bag with me into bed.

My hands shook as I handled the cards my parents had obviously confiscated from the mailbox downstairs,
committing a federal offense to keep me from reading what was legally, morally, and ethically mine.

I put the cards in a neat stack in front of me and looked at the top card on the stack, a picture of Wengen, a village in the Swiss Alps. I turned the card over and saw that it was postmarked just a couple of weeks after James and I had been separated. He’d written it while I was still locked up in Fern Haven.

James had covered every bit of available space on the back of the card, even crowding his note into the address box.

He’d written:

My eyes filled with tears.

James was alive. He was alive and was out there somewhere thinking that I didn’t care about him. That I’d cut him off on purpose. My heart felt like it was trying to twist out of my body at the thought.

After all this time, all this silence, he must hate me. What was I going to do? How was I going to fix this? I bit my lip as hard as I could and tried to
think
, not cry. Because crying wasn’t going to do me any good.

I thought about that poem James used—Tennyson’s “Maud”—and how my mother once forced me to handwrite the entire epic as a punishment. But those words, coming from him, felt so different now.… It was all too complicated to process. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t reason. I couldn’t do anything until I finally gave in, flopped down on my bed, and let it all out.

Do you feel everything this way, friend? Is this what your emotional life is like?

I don’t know how you can stand it.

34

After my emotional breakdown subsided
and I’d blown my nose a couple hundred times, I fanned the postcards out on the bed, picture side up. The photos were of Stockholm, Rennes, London, Erfurt, and Wengen. I turned them over again to be sure I hadn’t missed the obvious.

There were no return addresses, but then, James had been traveling when he’d written them, and he must have thought I’d respond to him by e-mail or phone.

He couldn’t have known that my parents had canceled my e-mail account, assigned me a new phone number, eradicated my Facebook page, and stolen my mail.

I took one of the cards into my trembling hand.

Because James had “taken the hint,” he’d stopped writing months ago, and now I had no way to tell him that I’d been locked up at Fern Haven all that time. That my parents were dead. That I missed him and wanted to see him more than anything.

I grabbed my phone with both hands, took a breath,
closed my eyes, and wished as hard as I could that this would work. Then, for the first time since before my brain had been thoroughly washed and tumble dried at Fern Haven, I wrote an e-mail to James Rampling.

James. I just found out today that you wrote to me. If you don’t hate me, please write back. There’s so, so much I have to tell you. Love, Tandy

I launched the e-mail to the address James had provided and held my breath. A moment later, my phone beeped. Mailer-Daemon had returned my e-mail, “Addressee unknown.”

Just like that. The e-mail address was all I had, and just like that, all I had was nil.

I threw my phone across the room. Then Hugo screamed.

“Help! Tandy! Harry! Jacob! Spider!”

35

“Come on, Hugo!”
I shouted through the closed door as I retrieved my thankfully intact phone. “That’s not funny!”

Hugo yelled, “Jacob!”

I pulled myself together and opened my door. At the exact same moment, Harry popped out of his room. His eyes widened at something I couldn’t see, and he lunged for Hugo, wrapping his arms around him and dragging him back down the hallway.

I followed Hugo’s trembling finger and saw something black and hairy and about four inches long, clinging to the door frame at eyeball height.

Hugo wasn’t joking.

It was a spider, all right, and it was huge. From the
corner of my eye I saw another one skitter nervously across the floor. I clapped my hands over my mouth. First snakes. Now spiders. I leaned in for a better look at our new friend on the door frame and recoiled. Not just spiders. Deadly spiders.