Confessions: The Private School Murders (29 page)

This was ten times worse than that.

Bile rose up in the back of my throat and I swallowed it down, trying not to heave on my shoes. Still, my inquiring mind was running over the options.

What had happened here? When Mr. Borofsky supposedly checked out of the Dakota, had he left food and garbage in the upstairs apartment?

If so, he was disgusting.

Gagging, I gripped the flashlight on a level with and perpendicular to my right ear, like it was a spear. Then I forced myself to enter the glass-lined inner room.

I expected to see trash.

Instead I saw a horror movie unfolding before my eyes. The room was crawling with reptiles and spiders. They slithered over and around one another, crawling and sliding and squirming in undulating piles. Terror glued my feet to the floor. If I moved, something could strike. If I moved, I could die.

I stared along the flashlight beam at overturned aquariums and terrariums, shards of broken glass, glowing fluorescent lights that had crashed to the floor. In the center of it all was a heap that looked like a filthy sack of clothes. But on second glance I saw fingers blooming out of the sleeves of a shirt. And then a naked foot.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud, my hand fluttering up to cover my mouth.

I had just registered the fact that the pile of clothing was, in fact, a decomposing body when the body started to move. The scream that came out of my mouth filled the entire room. My mind went weightless, and I clung to consciousness as hard as I could, knowing that if I passed out in here, I was a goner. I inhaled to scream again and saw
that the body wasn’t moving after all. It was the snakes writhing over the body, playing with my mind.

Move, Tandy. You have to move.

Slowly I backed out of the glass enclosure and felt for the front door with my left hand, holding the flashlight with my right. I was afraid to make any sudden movements. My shoes crunched as I went along, and I didn’t even want to know what I was stepping on. Finally, the edge of the door hit me in the middle of my back.

I squirmed backward through the doorway and slammed the door behind me as hard as I could. I felt something crawling on my neck and slapped at it, but nothing was there. There was a skitter on my leg. Another slap. Nothing.

Phantom spiders. I was sure I’d be feeling them for days. Shaking from head to toe, I made my way toward the elevator, trying as hard as I could not to heave, not to cry, not to scream.

Focus, Tandy. Focus on the facts.
That was what Dr. Keyes used to say.

It had to be Mr. Borofsky in there. What if he hadn’t checked out of the Dakota? What if he’d paid the monthly maintenance bill in advance and moved upstairs to the sealed-off suite without telling the board? I could see him stowing away in the building with his venomous zoo, maybe sneaking out the service entrance occasionally to get food.

Maybe he hadn’t meant to squat permanently but just needed a while to smuggle his collection out of the Dakota a few beasts at a time.

God. Who kept a collection like that? Especially under the same roof with other people? Unsuspecting people. It was totally insane and definitely against code. Suddenly, I kind of couldn’t stand Mr. Borofsky.

But I suppose he’d paid for what he’d done. One of his pets had probably bitten or stung him, and then he’d fallen over, taking some of his tanks with him, and died all alone. And pretty unpleasantly. Then, over the course of time, creatures had found ways out of the apartment, through spaces and holes in the walls.

I glanced at the apartment door, shivered, and jabbed the call button again, but the elevator was way downstairs and seemed to be sleeping there. Forget this. I didn’t want to stay in this hallway another minute. So for the first time in a long time, I took the stairs, racing downward on shivery legs, trying to call Jacob the whole way.

63

I was so happy to see
the front door of our apartment open and Jacob coming toward me that I practically flung myself at him.

“What, Tandy? What’s happened?” he asked, putting his arms around me.

“Upstairs,” I said, gasping for breath. “Snakes. And spiders. And dead… dead…”

Jacob held me at arm’s length now, his eyes wide.

“Tandy, have you been bitten?” he demanded.

I shook my head.

“Where are the snakes?” he asked.

“Upstairs, Jacob! Millions of them. In Mr. Borofsky’s apartment, 10F. At the other end of the hall. They’re all
over the place and there are spiders and I don’t know what else.” I took a breath. “And I think Mr. Borofsky is dead on the floor.”

I leaned forward to brace my hands over my knees and realized I was still holding Virgil’s keys and flashlight. I’d need to get them back to him at some point.

“Come inside,” Jacob said, putting his hand on my back. “Let’s get help.”

Six minutes later, an ambulance tore through the front gates, and while it left its engine running, waiting to receive the decaying corpse of Ernest Borofsky, a platoon of green-uniformed men and women piled out of their official SUVs and surged up the fire stairs to the tenth floor.

I didn’t follow them up. I was pretty sure I was never going to the tenth floor again. Soon we could hear banging and scraping overhead, plus a few shouted curses and one unpleasant scream. I guessed the uniforms were caging and bagging critters, tearing off moldings and dismantling cabinetry to find hiding places, and sealing up any egress points to prevent further snake and spider leakage.

Thank God.

Not long after that, the doorbell rang and the chandelier bonged. Jacob opened the door for the investigator
from the New York City Department of Health, plus two uniformed cops.

The investigator said his name was Captain Kaplan and gave Jacob his card. The cops introduced themselves, and we all gathered in the living room and were questioned. Even though Harry, Hugo, and Jacob were there, most of the questions were directed at me.

“Did you know Mr. Borofsky?”

“Only slightly,” I answered. “Like, hello in the elevator. That kind of thing.”

“Did you know about the snakes and other animals in his apartment?”

“Are you
high
?” Hugo asked Captain Kaplan.

He was answered with a serious death glare.

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Could he have had any accomplices?” one of the cops asked, directing a pointed look at Hugo.

“Me?” Hugo grinned. “You think I was an accomplice?”

Clearly, Hugo liked that idea.

“Seriously?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Was anyone helping him subsist illegally in his upstairs apartment?” the officer clarified.

“We didn’t know him,” said Harry. “He was just
the grumpy old dude who lived at the end of the hall. That’s all.”

“Any ideas? Anyone?” the cop asked.

“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “But obsessive collectors can be psychologically unbalanced. Or so they say.”

“Tandy. What you did took guts,” Captain Kaplan said. “You ever want a reference from the New York City health department, you call me. Your neighbors owe you, big-time. You may have saved lives here, and you certainly made it possible for us to wrap up this whole deal to everyone’s satisfaction. So thank you.”

I smiled. “You’re welcome.”

Kaplan stood, walked over to the Pork Chair, and shook my hand. Then Jacob escorted them all to the door.

“I don’t think I can take being woken up in the middle of the night like this anymore,” Harry said, scratching at the back of his head as he rose from the sofa. “Seriously, Tandy. Could you just stay asleep?”

“I kinda like it,” Hugo said, bouncing on his toes. “It’s like living in a movie.”

“To bed. Both of you,” Jacob said, returning from the door.

The boys scattered, leaving Jacob and me alone.

“That was sincere praise from the captain,” Jacob said.

“I know,” I replied, knocking my fists together. “I’m actually kind of proud of myself.”

I felt an itch on my cheek and slapped at it. Jacob’s brow knit.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” My leg squirmed as a phantom snake slid over my toes. “Fine.”

He narrowed his eyes but didn’t press it.

“You were reckless, Tandy. But you were selfless,” he said. “I’d say that’s a pretty good definition of heroism. I don’t have a Seal of Approval for you, but I want you to have this as a token of your bravery.”

He pulled a key ring out of his pocket and detached his keys. The key fob was a silver coin.

“This is a French five-franc piece, quite an old one,” he told me, letting the coin dangle between us. “It belonged to your grandfather Max. He died before you were born, of course, but I think he would have liked you to have this, to keep it with you.”

I took the coin almost reverently. “Thank you so much, Jacob,” I said, running my thumb over the coin’s rough surface. “How did you know my grandparents?”

“I’ll tell you some other time. It’s a good story, but a long one.”

“Promise?” I asked.

He smiled. “Promise.”

I hugged him and went to my room clutching my grandfather’s coin. This had been one of the weirdest nights of my life—ranking up there with the horrific night my parents were found dead. I would never have thought that this one would end with me being really proud of myself.

But not so fast, Tandy. The night wasn’t over yet.

64

Sleep was impossible.

I lay in bed staring at my plain plastered ceiling and imagined making banana bread from scratch, hoping that going through the steps one by one would lull me to sleep. It didn’t.

Because banana bread was one of my favorite treats, but the person who really loved it was Matthew. Subconsciously, I was always thinking about him.

“Matthew, even if you
are
a murderer, you’re still my brother,” I said aloud. “And I still love you.”

I should have said that to his face when I had the chance. Now I just sighed. Since I was already talking to people who weren’t there, my next imaginary conversation was with my dead classmate, Adele Church.

Adele wore a peach-colored strapless Hunter Dixon minidress, and she told me that, yes, she had been very sad lately because she missed her sister, but that she had been taking medication for depression.