“Sorry we keep missing each other, Tandy, but look. I have the boxes. They belonged to your parents, who were my clients. Without their express permission, I can’t give them to you. I’m sorry.”
I gripped the phone. “Sonofa—”
I called Phil again. His voice mail picked up, of course. I held the phone in front of my lips and shouted. “I want those boxes, Phil! Malcolm and Maud don’t need their old files anymore, and as one of their heirs, I’m entitled to their stuff!”
Then I took a deep breath and called Jacob. “I’m stopping by our lawyer’s office on the way home. I’m not grounded from our lawyer’s office, right?”
“No. I think that’s a reasonable place to go. Any chance you’ll tell me why?” Jacob asked.
“Nope. But I’ll be home for dinner.”
Luckily, Jacob didn’t argue. My destination on William Street was one of many featureless gray office buildings that form tall canyons shading the streets of downtown Manhattan. By the time I arrived at Phil’s address, the elevators were disgorging personnel leaving work for the day. I hoped Phil’s office wasn’t already closed.
When I arrived on the twentieth floor, I followed the arrows until I was outside the glass door that read P. MONTAIGNE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW. I pushed at the door and it opened. I exhaled a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
“Phil? It’s Tandy.”
And there he was, standing in the doorway to his interior office, looking at me with very sad eyes.
“Tandy, I can’t do it. Can you just trust me on this?”
“Not a chance,” I replied, gearing up for a fight. “Those boxes are mine.”
He gave me this look like I’d just hauled off and punched him.
“I’m sorry, Phil. I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” he interjected. “I have to tell you something about Matthew.”
That brought me up short. Here I’d been obsessing about James and my love life and my supercontrolling mother and I hadn’t even asked how the trial was going.
“What? What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“He wants to testify in his own defense, Tandy,” Philippe told me. “If he takes the stand, it will be a disaster.”
“How big a disaster?” I asked.
“I’m afraid if he takes the stand… we’ll lose.”
31
Philippe snapped on the lights in the conference room, and we sat in padded swivel chairs across from each other at the glossy blond-wood table.
I was sweating through my clothes and feeling sick over bulldozing my way into Phil’s office and ordering him around, especially when he was concerned about my brother. I pictured Matthew lying on a narrow slab in his cell, his hands balled into fists, angry, helpless to do anything except commit suicide on the witness stand.
I said to Phil, “What can I do to help Matty?”
“I don’t know, Tandy. Reasoning with him only makes him more belligerent, more entrenched. If there was a weak prosecution, his testimony might move the jury. But it’s Nadine Raphael and she’ll vaporize him. My guess is that he’s having posttraumatic shock from so many deaths: your parents, Tamara, and his unborn son. I think he just wants to blow everything up.”
A long silence followed as we both visualized the attack by the aggressive assistant DA and what would remain of my brother’s defense when she’d finished detonating him.
I ached for my brother. He didn’t deserve this. Any of this.
I wanted to see Matthew run down a field with a football tucked under his arm. I wanted to hear him laugh and see him bounce Hugo on his shoulders. I wanted him back in the apartment with the rest of us. A family.
I wanted him to be free.
Phil said, “Matthew is my problem, Tandy. I’ve had a chance to think about yours. You can look at those file boxes as long as you do it here, in this conference room, now.
“Tomorrow I’m sending the whole lot to climate-controlled storage along with your parents’ other papers so that I will always have whatever I may need to protect you from future lawsuits. Agreed?”
I was so excited my fingertips tingled. “Yes. Of course.”
“I’ll be right back.”
It felt like he was gone for hours. When he finally did come back, he was pulling a dolly loaded with four cardboard cartons.
“Here’s your one and only chance, Tandy. Make the most of it.” He gave me a bottle of water, a notepad, and a box cutter, then left the room and closed the door.
Unfortunately, my one and only chance had a cutoff time. I’d told Jacob I’d be home by seven.
32
I had about forty minutes to go through the boxes and get out to the street. And actually, with rush-hour traffic running up, down, and across Manhattan, I was cutting my travel time close.
It was go time.
I lifted the first heavy box onto the conference table. I sliced through the tape, pulled up the flaps, and peered inside.
Dozens of stuffed file folders proved, upon inspection, to be full of stock brokerage sell orders, buy orders, order confirmations, and monthly statements. I opened the second box and the third, finding similar bundles of brokerage-house litter. These papers might be critical to future legal actions, but they meant nothing to me.
I was looking for something personal. A journal, a confession, an envelope marked To Tandy, re James Rampling. But of course, that would’ve been too easy.
As I flipped through the file folders, I was starting to think that this whole thing was futile. But I couldn’t quit until I’d searched the last box. I slit the tape on box number four, hoped there was anything in it other than financial files, then pulled on the flaps.
Damn. More files. But then something caught my eye. A blue folder with a white tab, different from all the green and tan. I tugged it out, and my heart all but stopped.
The typed tab read: FERN HAVEN: TANDOORI.
I shook as I pulled the folder into my lap. Did I really want to know what was inside? Did I want to know what had actually been done to me?
Answer: Hell yeah.
I flipped open the folder and hungrily scanned the pages. A barrage of frightening phrases jumped out at me. Phrases like Experimental treatment. Test case 33. Psychotic break. And my favorite, Possible side effects include prolonged amnesia, inconsistent recall, hallucination, catatonia, coma, depression, suicide.
Fantastic. My parents had wanted to eradicate their enemy’s son from my life so completely, they were willing to risk my life for it.
Quaking with fury, I glanced at the closed office door. There was no way in hell I was leaving this folder in a box to be placed in storage. This was about my life. My health. I folded it in half and went to stuff it into my bag. When I did, a stiff cardboard envelope slipped out and fell to the floor at my feet.
I shoved the file into my bag and grabbed the envelope.
“What’s this, Maud?” I muttered. “X-rays of my scrambled egg–style brain?”
Bracing myself, I opened the envelope. Inside were five postcards of European city scenes. I flipped the first one over.
To: Tandy Angel, the Dakota, 1 West 72nd Street, Apt. 9G, New York, NY.
All the blood rushed to my head. These postcards were for me? But I’d never seen them before. My eyes automatically darted to the signature.
Love, James.
Suddenly everything went gray. I stumbled back into the cabinet behind me and upended a glass vase, which crashed to the floor. Almost instantly, Phil opened the door.
“What happened?”
I covered the postcards with a file folder.
“S-sorry,” I stuttered, glancing at the shattered glass near my feet. “I tripped.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah. Not a scratch,” I told him, though if he’d taken a closer look, he would have seen I was shaking like a leaf.
“I’ll go get the dustpan.” He closed the door again and was gone.
I ever
so slowly moved the folder off the postcards, as if that cobra from my office was going to jump out and sink its teeth into me. The same tall scrawl covered each of the cards. They were all from James.
He was, in fact, alive.
And he’d been trying to get in touch with me all along.
33
There were no available cabs—anywhere—so I ran down the steps to the subway. After a bone-rattling fifteen-minute ride uptown, I exited on the north side of Seventy-Second and Amsterdam.
I walked as fast as I could toward the Dakota, and seven minutes later, I blew through the front door of apartment 9G with my five precious cards from James inside my bag, along with my Fern Haven file. I shoved my bag under the bench in the hall, then ran to the kitchen to help Harry with dinner.
I wanted to be alone as soon as possible, and as usual, Harry was on to me. In fact, he kept looking at me like I was wearing a boa constrictor on my head.
Which, given the recent plague of snakes, wasn’t that far-fetched.
“Matty wants to testify for himself,” I said as I put water on for the pasta. I wanted to focus on something other than James, and luckily—or unluckily—I had something pretty damn important to focus on. “Phil is scared. By law, Matty has the right to take the stand, even against his lawyer’s advice, even if he will blow up his case.”
“Someone should talk to him,” Harry said, looking pointedly at me. It was pretty clear who he thought that someone should be.
Over dinner, Harry, Hugo, and I talked to Jacob about Matthew, telling stories of what he was really like and how the press was totally misrepresenting him. We even laughed over a few of Hugo’s accounts of heroic Matty coming to his rescue. Like when Hugo had left the tub on to see if he could fill the entire bathroom with water and swim around in it wearing Malcolm’s scuba gear. It felt good to laugh.
But once the dishes were in the dishwasher, all I could think about was being alone. I fled to my sky-blue sanctuary, locked my door, and took my bag with me into bed.
My hands shook as I handled the cards my parents had obviously confiscated from the mailbox downstairs, committing a federal offense to keep me from reading what was legally, morally, and ethically mine.
I put the cards in a neat stack in front of me and looked at the top card on the stack, a picture of Wengen, a village in the Swiss Alps. I turned the card over and saw that it was postmarked just a couple of weeks after James and I had been separated. He’d written it while I was still locked up in Fern Haven.
James had covered every bit of available space on the back of the card, even crowding his note into the address box.
He’d written:
Tandy, My e-mails bounce back. Your phone goes straight to voice mail. I’m going crazy not talking to you. You know my number. Please call me. I’m so worried about you, and I think about you all the time. I’m no poet, so I have to borrow the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
“She is coming, my life, my fate; / The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’/ And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’ / The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’/ And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’ ”
Love, James
My eyes filled with tears.
James was alive. He was alive and was out there somewhere thinking that I didn’t care about him. That I’d cut him off on purpose. My heart felt like it was trying to twist out of my body at the thought.
After all this time, all this silence, he must hate me. What was I going to do? How was I going to fix this? I bit my lip as hard as I could and tried to think, not cry. Because crying wasn’t going to do me any good.
I thought about that poem James used—Tennyson’s “Maud”—and how my mother once forced me to handwrite the entire epic as a punishment. But those words, coming from him, felt so different now.… It was all too complicated to process. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t reason. I couldn’t do anything until I finally gave in, flopped down on my bed, and let it all out.
Do you feel everything this way, friend? Is this what your emotional life is like?
I don’t know how you can stand it.
34
After my emotional breakdown subsided and I’d blown my nose a couple hundred times, I fanned the postcards out on the bed, picture side up. The photos were of Stockholm, Rennes, London, Erfurt, and Wengen. I turned them over again to be sure I hadn’t missed the obvious.
There were no return addresses, but then, James had been traveling when he’d written them, and he must have thought I’d respond to him by e-mail or phone.
He couldn’t have known that my parents had canceled my e-mail account, assigned me a new phone number, eradicated my Facebook page, and stolen my mail.
I took one of the cards into my trembling hand.
Dear Tandy,
I guess I should take a hint. You don’t want to see me anymore and I understand. What we did was wrong. Your parents are furious. I brought so much trouble into your life. But still, I thought… at least I hoped… that you would at least write to me to say good-bye.
E. M. Forster wrote this in A Room with a View: “It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
I love you, Tandy. I wish I could forget you, but I can’t.
Eternally yours, James
He’d written his e-mail address at the bottom with a note next to it in tiny letters: Just in case.
Because James had “taken the hint,” he’d stopped writing months ago, and now I had no way to tell him that I’d been locked up at Fern Haven all that time. That my parents were dead. That I missed him and wanted to see him more than anything.
I grabbed my phone with both hands, took a breath, closed my eyes, and wished as hard as I could that this would work. Then, for the first time since before my brain had been thoroughly washed and tumble dried at Fern Haven, I wrote an e-mail to James Rampling.
James. I just found out today that you wrote to me. If you don’t hate me, please write back. There’s so, so much I have to tell you. Love, Tandy
I launched the e-mail to the address James had provided and held my breath. A moment later, my phone beeped. Mailer-Daemon had returned my e-mail, “Addressee unknown.”
Just like that. The e-mail address was all I had, and just like that, all I had was nil.
I threw my phone across the room. Then Hugo screamed.
“Help! Tandy! Harry! Jacob! Spider!”
35
“Come on, Hugo!” I shouted through the closed door as I retrieved my thankfully intact phone. “That’s not funny!”
Hugo yelled, “Jacob!”
I pulled myself together and opened my door. At the exact same moment, Harry popped out of his room. His eyes widened at something I couldn’t see, and he lunged for Hugo, wrapping his arms around him and dragging him back down the hallway.
I followed Hugo’s trembling finger and saw something black and hairy and about four inches long, clinging to the door frame at eyeball height.
Hugo wasn’t joking.
It was a spider, all right, and it was huge. From the corner of my eye I saw another one skitter nervously across the floor. I clapped my hands over my mouth. First snakes. Now spiders. I leaned in for a better look at our new friend on the door frame and recoiled. Not just spiders. Deadly spiders.
Was this why our parents had forced us to memorize every species of every creature on earth? Just in case our cloistered apartment building was one day randomly attacked by exotic wildlife?
Hugo was still screaming when Jacob came loping down the hallway with a bath towel in his hands. He flicked the towel at the spider and, when the arachnid dropped, stomped on it with his desert boots.
“There’s another one!” Hugo shouted. “What is it?”
“It’s a Sydney funnel-web spider,” I told him, sidestepping the crawling monster. “It’s exclusiv
e to Australia and one of the most venomous spiders on earth. They don’t run away. They attack. Be careful, Jacob.”
Jacob threw the towel again and again, but the spider evaded it and ran up his leg.
Hugo, Harry, and I all screamed, but Jacob just calmly flicked the spider off his leg, then ground it under his sole.
We all stood around him, bug-eyed and trying to catch our breaths. It was pretty incredible how one guy could be all touchy-feely one minute and bad-ass commando the next. Jacob was really growing on me.
“Do any of you know anything about this rash of creatures?” he asked. “Anything at all? Even the ghost of a suspicion?”
“They can’t just be living loose in this building,” I said. “They had to have escaped from someone’s collection or something.”
Jacob said, “Then this apartment must have a tunnel or some kind of access to wherever they’ve been living, and we don’t know if we’ve gotten them all. Keep your eyes open. Shake out your clothes and your bedding. Tandy—”
“I’ve got Pest Control on speed dial,” I said, lifting my phone.
“Good. Call them, and while we wait, let’s gather in the living room,” said Jacob.
“Excellent,” said Harry. “Perfect time to have a family meeting. I think Tandy should tell us why she’s been jittery, throwing things, and crying. All the time.”
36
Did I want a family meeting, my friend? About as much as I wanted a monster zit to sprout on the tip of my nose. But I was surrounded. There was no escape.
And the last thing I wanted was to be alone when the next Sydney funnel-web spider attacked.
After I hung up with Pest Control, we gathered in our living room. When clustered in the seating area, we had 360-degree views, so any big, hairy spiders would find it hard to sneak up on us.
Confessions: The Private School Murders Page 9
