Confessions of a Murder Suspect (19 page)

Katherine may not have been perfect
in my parents’ eyes, but she was a perfect sister. Like her friends, she had a wild streak. She drank too much and had a secret boyfriend who was pierced and tattooed. And even though she lied to my parents—to everyone, really—and thought nothing of it (because she, too, was trained to not have much of a conscience), she was a true inspiration for me. I loved her so much.

Katherine was going to be an engineer and was only fifteen when she was admitted to MIT, probably the best university in the country for the next generation of top-flight scientists.

My parents were so overjoyed that they awarded her
the very first “Grande Gongo with an Asterisk.” The asterisk meant that she could have or do anything with her Grande Gongo, without restriction.

Katherine wanted to harvest diamonds in the rough. What an adventure! She had a plan and a finely detailed map, and she said she’d be home in time for the start of school with enough diamonds to make a necklace that would light up a room. She promised me earrings and a ring. Harry wanted an earring, too.

After she turned sixteen she flew to South Africa, and within days she’d panned a large diamond from an alluvial mine. She sent us a picture of the stone, and it was a
whopper
—estimated at almost seven carats when cut, perfect for a solitaire or a pendant. And it certainly would have been a grand memento of the Grandest Gongo of them all.

Katherine also found a boyfriend in South Africa: Dominick. He was an older man, something that upset my father in particular. But Katherine told me all about him, and he wasn’t a creepy pedophile type. He was just twenty-one, a free spirit, a beautiful boy, and they loved each other passionately.

I had always wondered what that would feel like. To love. Passionately. And in hours-long phone conversations and e-mail exchanges, I would ask Katherine to describe
it. I wanted to know every little detail. I guess most people would say that what she told me was TMI, but I needed it. It was deeply fascinating to me.

Then, one horrible day, Dominick was driving a motorcycle, Katherine seated behind him with her arms around his waist. Suddenly he stopped, for no apparent reason. A bus rear-ended the bike, and my sister was thrown into the air. She was crushed under a speeding van coming from the opposite direction. Crushed, gone, extinct.

I have never really forgiven my parents for letting Katherine fly off on that fatal last Gongo. As smart as they were, they should have known her better, should have seen through her bravado and been less dazzled by her success.

Or maybe I should have told them what she was really like, that she was a wild child.

I have been haunted by the vision of my wonderful sister lying dead in the street every day since she died, just as I was that night in my prison cell.

Until that morbid image was hijacked by the sounds of hooting and banging on the iron bars of the jail.

It was just too much.

Tears welled in my eyes again and I bit down on my lip until it bled. There I was, trapped in that horrible place. A prime suspect in a double homicide. But I couldn’t let my circumstances defeat me. My mind was still free, wasn’t it?

I swore to myself, to my dead parents, and to my dear sister that if I had to, I would spend the rest of my life working to clear the Angel name.

I would find out who killed my mother and father.

And I would make whoever it was pay dearly.

42

My incarceration was, in some ways,
a disconcerting metaphor for my whole life. I’d been raised in one of the most luxurious homes in Manhattan, and yet somehow I was seeing myself in the caged women surrounding me. There were even a few younger girls, like me, banging on the bars, screaming for dinner.

A guard in a green uniform came down the narrow tier pushing a food cart, shoving white-bread sandwiches through the slots in the iron bars.

When she got to me, she said, “How’re you holding up?”

“Never better,” I said.

“Court’s over for the day. So take it easy. Try to sleep.”

I ate my crap-cheese-and-mystery-meat sandwich and then lay down on my board. I wondered exactly which pill from Malcolm’s pastel-colored assortment had produced the stumplike sleep that now eluded me.

I had a moment of desperate craving for those pills.

I swung wildly between being overwhelmed with emotion—and actually sort of liking the catharsis of it—and feeling like the pain of my situation was too much to bear.

A wave of self-pity hit me, and I wished more than anything that I were back in my room, watching the prisms in my windows bend the light into rainbows, listening to my parents move around in their suite upstairs.

A pill could make this all go away
, I thought.
Like magic.

I bit my hand so that I wouldn’t cry and forced myself into an exercise I’d learned from Dr. Keyes that I thought might actually help me—the one she called FOF, or Focus on the Facts.

I concentrated and thought of everyone who lived in the Dakota, calling to mind the names and faces of every resident on every floor. I reviewed every insult I could remember, every grudge, and considered who among our neighbors might be a stealthy killer with a key.

I also considered each of my siblings as the possible murderer. I even wondered if
I
was the guilty party.

Was I a sleepwalking homicidal maniac? Could I have killed my parents and kept the terrible secret from myself? I’d been trained in burying trauma. Could I have poisoned them? What did I stand to gain? Or was it revenge?

Not revenge for having to do a Big Chop while standing on my head. I mean revenge for something else, something much bigger, something that maybe I don’t remember.

Quick as lightning, a face flashed before my eyes. A boy’s face. It gave me a warm feeling, then a painful one, then an angry one. Then it disappeared as fast as it came.

FOF, Tandy.
I blinked three times just to make sure the face was really gone.
Focus on the Facts.

And that boy, that face, that thing—it was just a ghost.

Or a demon.

CONFESSION

I’m sure it was the good doctor
who made me forget the identifying details of that face. She must be the only one who understands why I can’t seem to linger on its beauty long enough to really remember the person it belongs to. Why I can’t study it long enough to understand the pain and anger I associate with it.

It took months of therapy, which Malcolm and Maud preferred to call “coaching,” to get me to bury what started at the party that night, as well as everything that happened afterward—like, for instance, being institutionalized. If I hadn’t been thrown in prison, I might never have remembered that.

Some days I worshipped Dr. Keyes for giving me sanity. Peace. And that very phlegmatic conscience. And sometimes I hated Dr. Keyes for it—as much as I was able to hate, anyway.

Allowing myself to feel pain would have been the one way to keep the boy behind the face alive in my heart.

I knew my transformation was complete when Dr. Keyes asked, “How are you feeling today, Tandy?” and I responded, “I’m not.”

Freedom.

And by the way, my freedom wasn’t exactly free. It cost about $250 an hour.

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