Confessions: The Private School Murders (42 page)

Maybe it wasn’t him.

But then the figure waved. He seemed to be haloed in sunlight. I squinted as he started across the street and the figure of this beautiful boy came into focus.

It was him. It was really, really him.

I waved back and James started to run. He dodged
traffic, leapt over a railing, and then he was with me, right in front of me, smiling his now oh-so-familiar smile.

He was exactly as I remembered him. Exactly.

“Hey,” he said with a grin.

“Hi,” I replied, as casually as I’d have done if we’d been meeting after school at the Starbucks on the corner of West Seventy-Sixth Street.

And then I fell hard against him, murmuring, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…” and he held me in his arms and buried his face in my hair.

It felt like we stood clutching each other like that for hours. Nothing else mattered. Not the people trying to brush by us, or the insanity of the past few weeks, or even what our parents had done to us. All that mattered was this pure connection. It was still there, exactly as it had always been. It hadn’t been erased by lasers at Fern Haven. Or by time and distance.

Nothing could change this love. Nothing.

I inhaled the scents of warm leather and earthy evergreen shampoo and held him even tighter.

Finally, James pulled back. He cupped my face in his hands. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s really you.”

“Why?” I asked, my heart thumping dangerously. “Do I look different?”

He grinned and touched the streak in my hair. “I like the hair.”

I reached up to the nape of his neck. “I like yours, too.”

We gazed at each other for a moment, the beaming smiles on our faces full to overflowing. And at that moment, we communicated this telepathically, I know:
There is just so much to say to you right now, I don’t even know where to start.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said instead. “I
just
got off the train and came right here.”

“I don’t care,” I told him, looking up into his gray-blue eyes, the palm of my hand now lingering on his cheek. “I would’ve waited all day.”

James smiled. He lifted my palm and kissed it. “You have absolutely no clue how much I missed you, Tandy.”

James pulled me to him, and with my heart pounding fiercely against his chest, he kissed me, shyly first, then hungrily. At the touch of his lips, something inside me exploded. All the longing and hoping and wishing, all the confusion and anger and fear I’d been clinging to burst like fireworks.

And then, because we were in the Place du Carrousel in Paris and it couldn’t have been more perfect, James lifted me off my feet and swung me around and around. I could feel tourists watching us, a few sentimental bursts
of applause from the romantics, not to mention a lot of annoyed or indifferent people skirting around us, but I didn’t care.

I just laughed and laughed, until I was crying.

Finally, James placed my feet firmly on the ground. “I love you,” he whispered into my ear.

“I love you, too,” I replied.

But when his radiant gaze flicked over my shoulder a moment later, his expression went slack.

“What’s wrong?” I whirled around.

I saw that a black car had pulled up on the plaza. Three men got out, and with a sharp, visceral shock, I realized that I had seen at least one of them before.

The broad-shouldered man with clipped graying hair and a flattened nose was one of the men who had handled me so roughly in the SUV that dumped me at Fern Haven.

And I recognized another man from pictures.

He was tall, at least six-foot-two, and had thick black hair that was pure white at the temples. He wore a black trench coat and was carrying a briefcase and a camera case by a strap over his shoulder. He looked focused. And he looked mean.

“James,” he called out. “We have to talk, son.”

James spun me around so that I was looking only at him. “It’s my father, Tandy. You have to run.”

“No. Absolutely not. I’m not leaving you.”

His grip on my shoulders tightened. “Where are you staying?”

I gave him the name of the hotel.

“Please. I’ll find you again. I will,” he said desperately. “But if he gets his hands on you, he’ll hurt you. He’ll crush you, Tandy. Just run.”

There was no way. No possible way that after everything I’d been through, after everything
we’d
been through, I was going to let another psychotic parent tear us apart. I reached for James’s hand and looked into his eyes.

“I have a better idea.”

With that, I turned to face Royal Rampling. I stood my ground. I knew now what I was capable of. I knew who I was. I had survived Royal Rampling and worse. Maybe he could hurt me, but no one had the power to crush me. Not ever again.

I focused on James’s father and shouted, “We’re not afraid of you!” I pointed at him and looked around at the crowd. “Kidnapper!
Kidnapper!
”

James caught on to the plan and started yelling, too. “I’m not your property. I don’t belong to you!”

Concerned citizens started to gather, streaming toward the scene we were creating. Camera phones pointed at
Royal Rampling, and I saw more than one bystander hastily dialing a phone or raising it like he or she was about to record the scene on video.

It was working. If I had to guess, I’d say the gendarmes would arrive soon.

Royal Rampling and the huge oafs who worked for him stopped cold. Rampling faked a smile, then told his henchmen to stand down. I could hear James’s ragged breathing as we faced off with his father.

“
Ce n’est pas fini jusqu’à ce que je dis c’est fini
,” Rampling called out. “It’s not over until I say it’s over.”

Then, with a wicked smile, Royal Rampling got into his car, and it peeled out into the chaotic Parisian traffic.

And I was left, for now, in the arms of his beautiful son.

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1

I have some really bad secrets
to share with someone, and it might as well be you—a stranger, a reader of books, but most of all, a person who can’t hurt me. So here goes nothing, or maybe everything. I’m not sure if I can even tell the difference anymore.

The night my parents died—after they’d been carried out in slick black body bags through the service elevator—my brother Matthew shouted at the top of his powerful lungs, “My parents were vile, but they didn’t deserve to be taken out with the
trash
!”

He was right about the last part—and, as things turned out, the first part as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Please forgive me.… I do that a lot.

I’d been asleep downstairs, directly under my parents’ bedroom, when it happened. So I never heard a thing—no frantic thumping, no terrified shouting, no fracas at all. I woke up to the scream of sirens speeding up Central Park West, maybe one of the most common sounds in New York City.

But that night it was different.

The sirens stopped
right downstairs
. That was what caused me to wake up with a hundred-miles-an-hour heartbeat. Was the building on fire? Did some old neighbor have a stroke?

I threw off my double layer of blankets, went to my window, and looked down to the street, nine dizzying floors below. I saw three police cruisers and what could have been an unmarked police car parked on Seventysecond Street, right at the front gates of our apartment building, the exclusive and infamous Dakota.

A moment later our intercom buzzed, a jarring
blatblat
that punched right through my flesh and bones.

Why was the doorman paging
us
? This was
crazy
.

My bedroom was the one closest to the front door, so I bolted through the living room, hooked a right at the
sharks in the aquarium coffee table, and passed between Robert and his nonstop TV.

When I reached the foyer, I stabbed at the intercom button to stop the irritating blare before it woke up the whole house.

I spoke in a loud whisper to the doorman through the speaker: “Sal? What’s happening?”

“Miss Tandy? Two policemen are on the way up to your apartment right now. I couldn’t stop them. They got a nine-one-one call. It’s an emergency. That’s what they said.”

“There’s been a mistake, Sal. Everyone is asleep here. It’s after midnight. How could you let them up?”

Before Sal could answer, the doorbell rang, and then fists pounded the door. A harsh masculine voice called out, “This is the police.”

I made sure the chain was in place and then opened the door—but just a crack.

I peered out through the opening and saw two men in the hallway. The older one was as big as a bear but kind of soft-looking and spongy. The younger one was wiry and had a sharp, expressionless face, something like a hatchet blade, or… no, a hatchet blade is exactly right.

The younger one flashed his badge and said, “Sergeant
Capricorn Caputo and Detective Ryan Hayes, NYPD. Please open the door.”

Capricorn Caputo?
I thought.
Seriously?
“You’ve got the wrong apartment,” I said. “No one here called the police.”

“Open the door, miss. And I mean
right now
.”

“I’ll get my parents,” I said through the crack. I had no idea that my parents were dead and that we would be the only serious suspects in a double homicide. I was in my last moment of innocence.

But who am I kidding? No one in the Angel family was ever innocent.

2