The Private School Murders Read online

  Bile rose up in the back of my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. I turned to Harry and pressed my face into his shoulder, biting down hard on my lip as I tried not to cry.

  This was one of those moments. One of those moments when I would have given anything not to feel. I couldn’t wrap my brain around why anyone would want to kill sweet, totally innocuous Adele. I wanted to strangle every member of the growing crowd of tourists who were angling to get a better view of her poor broken body.

  Most of all I wanted to scream at her to just get up. That this couldn’t have happened. Not to someone I knew. Not to someone our age.

  Not to one of the very few people at school who were occasionally nice to me.

  “Take a breath, Tandy,” Harry whispered, which was odd, considering he was usually the one on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not me. “Focus on something else. What do you think happened to her?”

  Harry knew me so well. Piecing together evidence would focus me. It would make me feel like there was something I could do. I was all about productivity.

  I turned to look at the body, trying to force myself into cool indifference, and drilled down deep into my analytic left brain.

  “There’s a lot of blood,” I said under my breath. “She didn’t die instantly. Three shots and her heart was still pumping after at least two of them. She knew what was happening. She knew she was—”

  I paused and cleared my throat. I didn’t want to go there.

  “I wonder if she saw the shooter.”

  Harry frowned ponderously. He was about to ask me something when police sirens blew in bursts, startling everyone. The crowd separated as cruisers and unmarked cars streamed onto the scene of the crime. When the first cops to arrive got out of their gray Chevy, I froze. It was Sergeant Capricorn Caputo and his partner, Detective Ryan Hayes—the two cops who had been first on the scene of my parents’ deaths.

  Sergeant Caputo was tall and gangly, with a severe jawline, slick black hair, and an all-black wardrobe. Plus he was a total ass. He prided himself on being the tough guy, and his behavior could skew anywhere from rude to downright mean. Still, if you were as observant as I was, you might notice the checkered socks showing under the cuffs of his pants, which took the edge off his hard-core persona. While Detective Caputo was a general pain, he was focused. He lived his job.

  His partner, Detective Hayes, was the opposite: a solid man, competent and kind, the sort of guy who put you totally at ease. Hayes was a good soul, and I was glad he would be on Adele’s case, too. Even though, technically, he hadn’t solved our parents’ “murders.”

  I had.

  “Sergeant Caputo!” I called.

  He spotted me and narrowed his beady eyes, never taking them off my face as he picked his way carefully around Adele’s body. “You’re under arrest, Taffy.”

  Caputo had no problem remembering my name, but he loved to mess with me.

  “Wow. Still going with that joke, huh? It stopped being funny about three months ago.”

  His gaze flicked over Harry, then back at me. “Please. You don’t have a single funny bone in your entire skinny body.”

  I sighed. “So do you want to know what’s going on here, or do you want to waste some more time coming up with lame nicknames?”

  “You know this girl?” he asked, interested.

  “Her name is Adele Church,” I told him.

  “We went to school with her,” Harry added.

  “What else do you know about Miss Church?” Caputo asked, flipping open his notebook and scribbling down her name.

  “She was a sweet person,” I said. “She lived up on Seventy-Ninth, I think. Her older brother graduated last year.”

  “She played the flute,” said Harry. “And pretty much kicked ass in sociology.”

  “Any idea why someone would want to hurt her?” Caputo asked.

  We heard more sirens with deeper whooping sounds as the coroner’s van arrived. More cops were getting out of cruisers, stringing a yellow-tape perimeter around the body and shooing the onlookers back.

  “Everyone liked her,” I said. “I think she saw her killer, though. Maybe she knew him.”

  Caputo’s face flattened with unsuppressed scorn. “I’ve got no time for your amateur-night theories, Tallulah.”

  “You know better than that, Caputo.” I gave him my card. “I want to help.”

  He glanced at my card and scoffed. “ ‘Tandy Angel, Detective. Mysteries Solved. Case Closed,’ ” he read. “I was wrong. You’re actually hilarious, T-bone.” He glanced from me to Harry and pocketed the card. “Nice seeing you.”

  “You should call me,” I shouted after him as he turned away. “Consultations are free for all clueless detectives named Caputo!”

  He just kept walking.

  “That man is going to break into our apartment and kill you in your sleep, you know,” Harry said.

  I smirked. “I’d like to see him try.”

  CONFESSION

  I may have seemed confident to Caputo and to Harry while I was handing over my card, but I wasn’t. In fact, the second my card touched Caputo’s chalky, dry fingers, something inside me swooped, like the way your heart feels when you jump off a bridge with nothing but a bungee cord tied to your feet.

  Because that was when I realized: Maybe I wasn’t a good detective. Not anymore.

  Yes, even Capricorn Caputo would have to admit that without me, the mystery of my parents’ deaths might never have been solved. But that was then. When I was still full of Num, Lazr, Focus, and other secret Angel Pharmaceuticals concoctions. Now that I was off the drugs, I was feeling everything, but did I still have the sharp and rational mind of an ace detective?

  My grades seemed to indicate that I did. But anyone could get straight As. Most of the kids I knew were technical geniuses, if you believe in IQ scores. Even C.P. Probably even Adele. But something had been going on lately that was starting to seriously bother me.

  I was having these dreams. Dreams about James. And whenever I woke up from one of these dreams, I had a hard time figuring out whether it was really a dream, or if it was actually a memory.

  That’s my deepest, darkest secret, my friend. I think my mind was starting to play tricks on me. And I had a feeling I knew who to blame. My parents. And Fern Haven. And that awful Dr. Narmond.

  But that’s a story for another time.

  3

  I looked at Harry as we walked back to the Dakota. Harry and I were both dark-eyed and dark-haired, and we were fiercely loyal to each other. Two people couldn’t be tighter friends and confidants than we were. Still, I wished we had that twin telepathy thing you always hear about, but we didn’t. Probably because aside from the superficial physical traits and the aforementioned loyalty, we couldn’t have been less alike.

  Harry was quiet. He was mopey. He had this tendency to slouch. He was asthmatic, and he slept long and late every day when he could. Harry was also kind.

  Yes, much to my parents’ disappointment, Harry was born an emo, and even though he was a world-class pianist who could bring an audience at Lincoln Center to tears, Malcolm and Maud described him as sensitive, sentimental, and weak. He had never won a Gongo or gotten a chop, and not even a billion emotion-quashing pills had ever dimmed a single ray of his brilliance.

  According to me, he got major points for that.

  I was Harry’s flip side. I was up at dawn. I sometimes cooked elaborate breakfasts of apricot-and-chai oatmeal and fresh-squeezed orange juice before anyone else was even stretching their arms above their heads. I lived for a complex chemistry experiment and checked over my dad’s financial books for fun—at least I had, back when he let me. I was known for being high-strung, and occasionally my sharpness was interpreted as, well, rudeness. I never danced around anything when I could cut to the chase, and no one had ever called me kind.

  My parents gave me major points for that.

  I’d also studied forensic science as a hobby since I was about six years o
ld and had solved every mystery I’d ever read or seen on TV since I was eight. Now I just hoped I still had that talent. That quitting the drugs hadn’t taken it from me.

  Harry held the gate open for me, and we slipped inside the courtyard, ignoring the camera flashes popping all around us. Instead of thinking about me or Harry or Matthew, I thought about Adele. Adele, who listened well and laughed easily. Adele, who played in the orchestra and wore pink constantly and hung photos of composers and film directors in her locker. She could have gone on to do anything, be anyone, have a great big life.

  Now she would never have another day. Another minute.

  Call me crazy, but I wanted—no, I needed—to do something about it. I just hoped that the new and maybe-improved drug-free me still could.

  4

  I put my key in the lock of apartment 9G, the duplex where Harry, Hugo, and I had once lived with our parents but now suffered daily with our horrible uncle Peter until the courts decided what was to become of us. But before I turned the knob, the door opened, and a tall, dark, and drop-dead-handsome man of maybe fifty said hello.

  My shoulders coiled. Stranger in my apartment equals not good. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Jacob Perlman,” he said calmly. “Call me Jacob. Peter has brought me in as your guardian.”

  Harry gave Jacob a dubious look. “I thought Uncle Peter was our guardian.”

  “He was. Now I am,” Jacob said, his brown eyes free of guile. “Would you like to come in?”

  “To our own home?” I snapped. “Sure. Thanks.”

  Jacob smiled slowly and stepped back to let us through. Harry, sensing that I’d flipped into set-to-pop mode, quickly disappeared down the hallway and into his room.

  “Peter installed a stranger in our house to look after us?” I said, looking up at Jacob and noting the small scar near his ear, the perfect hairline, the razor-sharp shave. “Is that even legal?”

  He smirked. “Tandoori, right?”

  He had an accent I couldn’t quite place, which was odd considering I’d been most places and spoke most languages. The wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes looked like squint lines more than laugh lines. He was lean and muscular, but not like he’d been working out in a gym. More like he’d had a physically demanding life.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I replied. “Where’s Uncle Peter?”

  Jacob folded his hands in front of him. “He didn’t say.”

  Great. So not only had he left a stranger in our house, he’d left him here alone. How was I supposed to know this guy was even who he said he was? There could be a team of ninjas hanging out in the kitchen just waiting to gut me.

  Considering my family’s history, it wasn’t much of a stretch.

  “You won’t mind if I just… give him a call,” I said, angling one foot toward the still-open door.

  “Feel free,” Jacob said. He was so sophisticated and smooth that the UFO chandelier hovering over his head—the one that had decorated our foyer my whole life—looked suddenly out of place.

  He was a man of few words. That, at least, I liked. I speed-dialed my uncle, hating with every fiber of my being that I had to consult him on anything.

  Uncle Peter was my father’s totally despicable brother. He was intolerant and so rude that he made me seem like Miss Manners. In fact, we all hate him and call him Uncle Pig, sometimes to his face.

  Peter had moved into our house when my parents died, had taken over my sister’s room, which had been strictly off-limits up to that point, and had started treating the Angel kids like the dirt under his grubby fingernails.

  He picked up on the fourth ring. “Yes, Tandoori, Jacob is your new guardian. Yes, it’s legal. If you’d like to see the paperwork, ask him. I’m busy.”

  He hung up before I could even get out a word. Jacob raised an eyebrow. I cleared my throat.

  “All right, then,” I said grudgingly. “Looks like you’re legit.”

  “I’m glad of that,” Jacob told me. “I’d like to have a family meeting. Shall we gather in the living room in, say, twenty minutes?”

  A family meeting was actually in order. I had to report on my awful conversation with Matty. But I wasn’t sure yet that I wanted to include Jacob Perlman in that.

  “Where will you be staying?” I asked him as we turned toward the living room.

  “I’ll move into Peter’s room.”

  “Don’t call it that,” I snapped. “It’s Katherine’s room.”

  “I apologize,” Jacob said immediately. “Katherine’s room.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I have some work to do.”

  “Twenty minutes,” he reminded me.

  “I’ll be there.”

  I stalked off to my sky-blue bedroom, with its leafy ninth-floor view of Central Park and shelves of sea coral. If I stood at the windows and got up on my toes, I could just about see where Adele Church’s body had been lying, her dead eyes turned skyward.

  I flopped down on my bed and called C.P.

  “You read it? Tell me you read it,” she said hungrily. “Wasn’t it just awful?”

  “Actually, I haven’t had time,” I told her. “C.P.… Adele Church is dead. She was shot. They found her body in the park about two seconds before I got home.”

  “What?” C.P. demanded. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I just figured I should tell you,” I replied.

  “Oh my God.” The tears were clear in her voice. “Tandy… oh my God. Do they know who did it?”

  “Not yet,” I told her. “But we’ll figure it out.”

  “What’s this we stuff?” she asked.

  “I’ll explain later,” I told her. “And I promise, at some point, to read your latest favorite book porn.”

  C.P. sighed. “Oh, forget it,” she said sadly. “All the fun’s gone out of it now.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I’ll text you later?”

  “Sure.”

  We hung up, and I rolled over onto my stomach, pulling my laptop across my bed to see what Google might turn up about Jacob Perlman. Uncle Peter had brought him into my house, so there was no way I was about to trust him without a thorough background check.

  Turned out Google was full of Jacob.

  And nearly every word about him was mind-blowing.

  5

  Jacob Perlman was a retired Israeli commando.

  Yes, you read that right. A commando.

  There was a whole New York Times profile on the guy. He’d rescued hostages from terrorists, disarmed and killed a suicide bomber he’d caught trying to blow up a marketplace, and evacuated a whole mess of kids from a school mere minutes before it was hit by a rogue Palestinian missile.

  So basically, if anyone tried to mess with the Angel kids from now on, they were gonna get a beat-down. That much was comforting.

  But why would a man who swatted down terrorists like they were houseflies want to babysit three bratty private school kids in New York City? And how did Uncle Pig even know someone like him? Most of our uncle’s acquaintances were as sniveling and pointless as he was.

  I went next door to Harry’s room, which was spacious and modern, with one of his own amazing paintings of angels adorning the ceiling. He was, of course, passed out facedown on his king-sized bed. Harry needs a lot of downtime to refresh his brilliant mind, but I thought it was odd that he could sleep with the specter of Jacob Perlman looming.

  I shook him awake, relayed my intel on Jacob, and told him we were having a family meeting. Then I found Hugo in his bedroom, sitting on his mattress on the floor with his laptop on. After Malcolm and Maud died, Hugo trashed just about everything he owned—the vintage toy cars, his four-poster bed—and now only his Xbox, desk, and chair were left standing. Hugo had the strength of a full-grown man and wore his hair in long curls, Samson style. He was upbeat and forgiving, and he exaggerated every time he opened his mouth. He was also fearless. His favorite person in the world, bar none, was our football superstar b
rother, Matthew. Honestly, Hugo’s behavior when it came to Matty bordered on worship.

  “Was Matty wearing one of those hockey masks so he couldn’t bite or spit?” Hugo asked, still typing as he spoke.

  “Matthew is not Hannibal Lecter, Hugo.” I sat down next to him on the mattress. “What’re you up to?”

  “I’m setting up a website,” he informed me. “I’m going to raise money for his bail.”

  That was my ten-year-old brother for you. Always thinking. I reached out to ruffle his hair, then lay back on the mattress next to him and just listened to him type as I went over the bizarre events of the day.

  Matthew, possibly a killer. Adele, dead for no apparent reason. A stranger running my household. Could my life get any more dramatic?

  A few minutes later, Jacob paged us on the intercom, and we assembled in the living room: Harry and I taking up most of the red leather sofa, Hugo in the Pork Chair—a pink chair with hooves for feet that he loved—and Jacob perched above us on a kitchen stool he’d brought in for the meeting.

  I wondered what Jacob thought of Maud’s décor. She had favored huge pieces of artwork and had designed our place so that it looked like a hyperrealism exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. It was all bold colors, life-sized statues, Pop Art canvases, and crazy kitschy furniture. We loved it. But then, it was all we knew. Somehow Jacob seemed like a guy who’d prefer a more minimalist style.

  “First, I’ve e-mailed you the court order making me your legal guardian,” he said, looking directly at me. “And second, there is this.”

  He slipped a hand into the inside breast pocket of his khaki jacket and removed a four-by-six photo. He held it along the edges with both hands so we could see the faded color portrait of a woman in her fifties. Her hair was upswept. She wore a blouse with a deep neckline and a necklace of baroque blue pearls the size of melon balls.

  I recognized her, of course. She was my father’s mother, elegant and beautiful, a tough-love matriarch who had died before the Angel kids were born. But we still referred to her familiarly as Gram Hilda. A framed note and envelope from Gram Hilda hung on the wall of the staircase that led up to my parents’ master suite. The note was handwritten, stamped by a notary, and was a companion to Gram Hilda’s will. The letter was short and not too sweet.