Confessions of a Murder Suspect (22 page)

If you saw your father whispering sweet nothings into the ear of your brother’s girlfriend, and if you saw her giggle in response and nuzzle your father’s face and neck, and if you saw him smile and laugh and basically encourage the whole disgusting exchange, it would freak you out, right?

What would you do? Would you pretend you didn’t see it and just barge in, saying, “Excuse me, I need to get into the fridge!” Or would you say, “What the hell are you
doing
?” Would you hold them accountable for their actions? Would you turn around and quietly leave? Would you tell your brother?

I didn’t know what to do. And thanks to Dr. Keyes and her great skill in teaching us to shatter our crippling memories, the flicker of this particular memory is so faded and gray, I’m not certain it ever actually happened. I could easily have dreamed it.

And since I will only ever act on the facts, I’m sure I never told Matthew.

But… I
should
have, shouldn’t I?

48

Harry looked beaten down.
Actually,
stomped
might be a better word. As if Matthew’s football-playing teammates had used him as the playing field.

He took a carton of milk out of the fridge and poured himself a drink with a shaking hand, sloshing the liquid over the glass, onto the counter and the floor. Harry stared at the puddle of milk as if it might be the one tiny thing that would finally break him completely—the last straw, as they say.

He took his inhaler out of his pocket and sucked at the mouthpiece. Then, with a wheeze in his voice, he said, “Last night. It was like trying to sleep in hell.”

“At least hell would have been warmer,” I said, remembering the cold of my cell.

“I didn’t sleep the night before, either. Did you?”

“In thirty-second winks, between hours and hours and hours of staring up at the ceiling.”

“I’m taking this,” Harry said, holding up a square red pill. He tossed it back and chased it with the milk. Then he said, “I’m going to bed now, and no one had better bother me, because if I don’t sleep I’ll go over the edge. And I might not come back.”

“Which pill is that?” I asked sharply.

“Angel Pharma’s red pill for sleep and sweet dreams. I think it’s hibiscus. You want one?”

I was sorely tempted. Suddenly I became aware that my hand was starting to shake. Life was easier on the pills, somehow. And sleep sounded like such a heavenly, peaceful escape from this nightmare.…

But no. I needed to meet Tandoori Angel—the real one. The one who wasn’t molded, beaten down and perked up, and supernaturally enhanced by drugs.

“I want to get off the pills,” I forced myself to say. “All of them. And you should, too. I thought you told me you were quitting.”

“What, do you want
me
to die, too, Tandy? Like our
parents? Because I’m telling you, I can’t live without sleep right now.”

I resisted the urge to slap him, an urge I’d never felt before. I hated it. Hated it. Was this the real Tandy?

I decided to go back to the Tandy I knew. FOF Tandy.

“Tamara Gee’s probably lying,” I said, changing the subject.

“Actually, I believe her,” Harry said. He put up a hand, then coughed and coughed, trying to get a good breath. After his coughing fit, he set his empty glass on the counter and slouched out of the kitchen.

“Sleep like a stump,” I called after him.

I hit the rewind button on the DVR and watched Laurie Kim’s interview with Matty’s so-called girlfriend, Tamara Gee, again. It was impressive. Tamara made good eye contact with Ms. Kim. She didn’t fidget. She looked confident—and truthful.

But Tamara Gee is an actress.

She could probably lie convincingly about how many thumbs she has. And if she was lying about being pregnant with my father’s baby, the only reason that made sense was that she hoped to land a big settlement from the overstuffed Angel estate.

And then a new thought came to me, like a train pulling
into Grand Central Terminal: Had my mother known of this affair? If she knew, she would have borne the pain—and hidden it completely, of course—in order to keep our family intact and avoid public humiliation.

Maud had few friends, but she had a confidante in her assistant, Samantha Peck. If Maud had known about Malcolm and Tamara, she might have told Samantha.

And Samantha had, after all, told me that my mother was a woman of many secrets.…

Was this one of them?

I was going to try to find out.

49

Not only was Samantha intelligent,
but I truly believed she genuinely liked my mother. If Maud had told Samantha that my father was having an affair, Samantha would have kept her confidence as a matter of principle.

I left the kitchen and went down the hall to Samantha’s room. I knocked, and when she didn’t answer the door, I turned the knob, entered her very organized room, and got to work.

Half of the space was a tidy pink bedroom; the other half was an efficient little office with a bank of file cabinets, a wooden desk that held a laptop and a printer, and a swivel desk chair.

I was not surprised to find that the computer was password-protected and my random guesses wouldn’t get me in.

Aside from the computer and printer, there were only a few items on Samantha’s desk: a heavy-duty stapler, a set of Russian nesting dolls, and a crystal bowl filled with peppermint candies.

I unwrapped a peppermint and sucked on it as I opened the desk drawer.

Apparently Samantha liked little boxes, as the top drawer was full of them: candy tins, enameled pillboxes, porcelain heart-shaped containers, and a sturdy little box made of stone.

Inside the stone box was a bunch of small keys. Was this
it
? Far too easy. Working quickly, I opened the thirty file drawers, one at a time. What were my mother’s secrets? Would there be a record of them here?

I thumbed through a lot of files filled with paid bills, memos, and tax returns. I found receipts for furniture and for artwork, and I came across a file of birthday cards from all of us kids to Maud. I thought it was uncharacteristically sentimental of her to have saved them.

I spotted my self-conscious nine-year-old handwriting in one card:

Even
I
could tell that was not normal. Not in the least.

Then I found a whole standing file case relating to my mother’s company, as well as full drawers concerning Royal Rampling, the man who was suing Maud. Did he have an interest in seeing my mother dead? It was certainly my investigative responsibility to study these files in painstaking detail.

But I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Please don’t ask me why.

Instead, my fingers started nervously flipping through the folders, my eyes scanning faster and faster until I got to the back of the bottom drawer. I halted when I spotted some familiar writing. I recognized it as having come from my own hand. The folder was labeled
J.R.

Did I want to look at this?

Yes, Tandy
, a little voice told me.
Go ahead.

I can’t call what was in front of me “my” handwriting per se, because it was done in calligraphy. At least a hundred pages, all written with an old-fashioned flat-nib pen and a bottle of ink. I’d copied the more than ten thousand words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem “Maud.” In Germanic gothic script. It had been a wicked Big Chop, I remember that much.

But for what? The whole point of a Big Chop was to make certain that you would never, ever again make the mistake you made to merit the chop.

What had I done to deserve this specific punishment?

I wasn’t ready to go back to that place yet.

I quickly flipped through the first fifty pages, scanning the poem. Many of the words themselves chilled me:
“Villainy somewhere! Whose? One says, we are villains all.…”
But what chilled me even more was remembering how I’d felt when I wrote those words: like a traitor.

Shivers started shooting up and down my spine to the point that I felt nearly paralyzed.

I shut the folder and slammed it back into the drawer.

Not now, Tandy. This is distracting you from the real mystery
, I reminded myself.
Leave it alone.

50