Confessions of a Murder Suspect (25 page)

My father’s clothing was bunched along the rod on the left side, and my mother’s clothes were crushed together on the right. Designer garments had fallen off hangers and were lying in glittering heaps on the floor.

I went to work.

I frisked every pocket, each article of clothing sending up a flurry of good and bad memories as I touched it: a vintage Chanel suit Maud had worn when she’d taken Katherine and me to the ballet; a coat Father had worn on a snowy day when the bunch of us had played touch football in the park. I’d almost forgotten that day, but the sudden memory of
playing football with Matthew sent a rare feeling of warmth through me.

I seized on the jacket my mother used to throw on over her jeans—a sexy, sparkly, spangled navy-blue thing that had once belonged to Madonna.

I put it on and smelled Maud’s ylang-ylang fragrance. My eyes filled with tears, and a few of them spilled over. Maud had loved this jacket. She looked ten years younger when she wore it, maybe because it made her feel ten years younger. She’d never let me wear it. The fact that I could just slip it on now without fearing her wrath made me feel a strange sort of ache inside.

I looked at myself in my mother’s mirror—and I saw a dead girl walking. My eyes were dark and sunken. My hair was lank in my headband. I looked like Alice after she’d taken a tour of Wonderland’s meatpacking plant.

Do
not
dissolve into mush, Tandy. Do
not
go there. Come back to the living, bucko.

I put the brakes on my useless trip down memory highway and left the closet. I sifted through the piles of clothing and other miscellany on the bedroom floor. The police had started throwing things into haphazard piles once they’d determined which items should be confiscated. Littered among the sweaters and undergarments were foreign
coins, a packet of letters to my father from Gram Hilda, and a gold rattle that had belonged to Harry—but no key to my father’s closet.

I ran my hand behind the flag painting and then, before going through the stack of books on the floor, turned on the light next to my father’s side of the bed.

The lamp is French, an electrified oil lamp from the nineteenth century, made of bronze with a glass ball shade. Its style is seriously at odds with our modern décor. But Gram Hilda gave it to my father, and he loved his mother despite how she’d hurt him. Or maybe because of it? In any case, her gift lit up his bedside every night of his life. On a hunch, I carefully lifted the glass shade and gently shook it.

A key fell out onto the bed.

I stared at it for a few long seconds. Could it really be that easy?

It was just past two in the morning. Time to wake up my twin again.

I knocked on Harry’s door until I heard him groan, then went inside and shook him awake.

“Gah, Tandy. What is
wrong
with you? What
time
is it, anyway?”

“You’ve noticed Malcolm’s closet?”

“What? Which closet?”

“The one under the stairs.”

“The police didn’t find anything in it. Now
go away
. Come back at noon. At the earliest.”

I held up the key, just visible in the light beaming through Harry’s window from the city that never sleeps.

“I think this is important. You have to come with me.”

56

I had started to shiver again
, maybe because I was afraid I might actually solve this mystery soon.

I opened the closet door, turned on the light, and walked over to where I remembered finding the door. It took me a few minutes to locate it again.

“Tandy, what are you doing?” Harry asked, shivering a little himself. He sat on an old suitcase near the door.

“There’s something here. I just have to figure out how to open it,” I replied. I felt around the outline of the door. Could I have just imagined it? Maybe it was nothing. I put my face up against the cold wall and looked closely at every tiny bump, searching for anything that looked uneven. That’s when I saw the tiny slot.

“I knew it!” I crowed. Harry looked startled, but he approached as I slipped the key into the slot and turned it. I pushed open the door.

And I was shocked to the core, as if I’d stuck my worst expectations into a water-soaked light socket.

“Tandy… what is this?” Harry asked, peering inside.

This was no secret closet. It was a secret room, maybe fifteen feet long and five or six feet wide, with a low, slanted ceiling. It was lined with built-in cabinetry and countertops that were crammed with beakers and scales and computer equipment. I saw what seemed to be a centrifuge in one corner.

It was astounding, beyond the limits of my imagination. This hidden room was a
laboratory
.

Old Victorian buildings like the Dakota sometimes have eccentric architecture, and odd rooms-behind-rooms are often walled off during renovations. But Malcolm had preserved this, the forgotten space under the stairs.

“Am I hallucinating?” I asked Harry. Given how strange I’d been feeling and acting since my parents’ deaths, I thought there was a fair chance that I was.

“If you’re tripping, then both of us are,” Harry replied. “I believe we’ve found Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.”

There was just too much to absorb in one glance. Harry and I gaped until I finally thought to close the closet door
behind us, and then we gaped some more as we ducked into the room and walked the length of it.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I spotted something that clearly wasn’t just about business or science.

It was about
us
.

There was a chart rail on one wall, lined with graphs labeled with the Angel kids’ names. I think I stopped breathing as I advanced toward the chart bearing my name.

This is what my chart looked like, friend. Along the bottom line, the X-axis, were all the years of my life. Down the left-hand side, the Y-axis, were letters and acronyms that I didn’t recognize—XL, Num, SPD, HiQ, Znth, ProMax, and Lazr. A zigzagging trend line tracked unnamed data points from the bottom left to the top right.

“
Harry
,” I called out to my twin. He came to my side, and I didn’t even need to look at him to register his disbelief. “Malcolm was tracking something about us here. The lines in this chart show some kind of growth or volatility. And tell me what you think of the letters on the Y-axis. It’s code. And I don’t get it. At all.”

My brother wasn’t listening to me. He had pulled a chair up to a computer and was tapping at the keyboard, saying, “Oh my
God
, oh my
God
.”

I went to Harry and looked over his shoulder.

“Put your nerd brain on this, will you, Tandy? It’s the key to the colored lines, and also to those letters. They have to be acronyms for some kind of chemicals.”

He had to be right. It came to me in a flash.

“Those chemicals are drugs, Harry.
Our
drugs. These letters stand for the names of our pills. The colors match the colors of our pills. And these data points indicate how we responded to those pills. Gotta be our performance. Our aptitude. Whatever Malcolm was trying to track. God—he was studying us like a family of little rats.”

Harry had enlarged his chart on the monitor. “It looks like Malcolm changed my pills all the time,” he said. “See?”

I saw what he meant. Where my chart had staggered lines and a rising trend line, the lines on Harry’s graph crisscrossed, shot up into peaks, plunged into troughs, and then staggered again.

“He was experimenting with my life,” Harry said. “He switched out my pills regularly. I always thought…”

“That they were vitamins,” I finished for him. “Maybe steroids for Matty and Hugo.”

“He was trying out new formulations,” Harry said, pointing out the numbers and combinations of colored lines. “No wonder I’m so emotional. Apparently he just couldn’t figure out how to fix me. How to make me right. Like a real Angel.”

I wanted to soothe Harry and tell him it wasn’t true, but in my gut I knew he was right. “Well, then, Harry, you were a perfect experiment.”

“He loved a challenge, didn’t he?” Harry shook his head. “He was running experiments on us. And with me… Well, he never did end up fixing me. And now he never will.” Harry grunted woefully. “We’re doomed, aren’t we, Tandy?”

57

Harry and I were breathless,
panting like marathon runners near the end of the race. We were freaking out—because we were
freaks
.

We’d always known it, but until now, we hadn’t known
why
we were so different from everyone else. And now we knew.

Our parents had been dosing us with pharmaceutical drugs, messing with our minds and bodies our whole lives.

Harry stayed at the computer, opening files and reviewing them and sending things to his own e-mail address. And then he stopped on one file.

“Tandy, listen to this. Here’s a memo from dear old Uncle Peter to dear old Dad.”

So Uncle Peter knew about this, too?

“ ‘Regarding escalating drug protocols and increasing the percentage of SPD for Matthew.’ SPD for Matthew. Do you think that stands for
speed
?”

“XL could be
excel
,” I said, reading farther down the open page. “It says here that I was taking XL, Znth, Num, ProMax, and Lazr. Maybe Lazr stands for
laser
.”

“As in laser focus?”

“Could be, right?” I said.

“What did they
do
to us, Tandy? What did they
do
? ‘Are we not Men?’ ” Harry was quoting one of his favorite writers, H. G. Wells. In his novel
The Island of Doctor Moreau
, animals were changed into humans in a laboratory called the House of Pain—and if the animals didn’t obey the laws of the lab, they got really Big Chops.

So the Angel kids are bona fide characters in a science-fiction story? Even though I already had my suspicions about the pills, I felt dizzy with the shock of the truth. I grabbed a countertop to steady myself against the rush.

No, we were not men.

We’d been exploited, used without our knowledge or permission. We were lab rats to Malcolm and Peter, scientific works in progress, and there was no excuse in the world for it, even if they thought the drugs were for our own good.