The Private School Murders Read online

  “I am leaving Malcolm and Maud $100, because I feel that is all that they deserve.”

  Our parents had told us that Gram Hilda was very rich but didn’t approve of their marriage for reasons they never explained. Even though she’d died just before their wedding, Gram Hilda’s disapproval had been the inspiration to better themselves financially, and they had done it—without her help.

  But wait a minute.

  “Why do you have a picture of Gram Hilda?” Hugo asked, voicing my thoughts.

  “Hilda expected that your parents would have children one day. She gave this photo to your father, who gave it to your uncle Peter, and he asked me to give it to you.”

  He turned the photo over, and I saw that a few lines had been written on the back in blue ink. Jacob read the inscription aloud.

  “ ‘To my grandchildren. Hold yourselves to high standards. Do not disappoint yourselves or me. Hilda Angel.’ ”

  “Yep. That was definitely Dad’s mother,” Harry said bitterly. I’m sure he noticed that she’d left out an important word before her signature: love. Or how about best wishes? We would even have appreciated a sincerely.

  “And now,” said Jacob, slipping the picture onto the table in front of us, “on to the real point of this meeting.”

  6

  Jacob stood, took off his khaki jacket, and hung it over the high back of his stool.

  “There will be house rules. Not too many, but they all must be obeyed.”

  Rules from a military commando. Would they include mandatory morning push-ups?

  “Number one, you must keep your phones on and charged at all times,” Jacob said. “Number two, if I call, you must answer. Number three, there will be no lying whatsoever. Even if it’s a joke, anyone caught deviating from the truth will be punished.” He paused and looked at us, hard. “Please don’t test me.”

  Who the hell did this guy think he was?

  “We don’t lie,” I told him.

  “Well, Hugo does sometimes embellish,” Harry said.

  Hugo and I both shot him looks of betrayal. Harry turned up his palms.

  “Here’s why the rules are necessary,” Jacob said, ignoring our aside. “I intend to protect you until you reach your majority. That’s my job. And I can’t do it if I’m misinformed. Understood?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Hugo leaned forward eagerly in the Pork Chair, looking up at Jacob. “Arm wrestle with me.”

  Jacob’s eyes danced, waiting for a punch line. No one moved. “You’re not kidding?”

  “You just said not to kid,” Hugo said. “Let’s do it. Right here, right now.”

  To my surprise, Jacob smiled indulgently, got down on the Rothko-patterned carpet, and stretched out on his stomach facing Hugo, who assumed a similar, opposing position. They clasped right hands. Harry and I exchanged looks of mild amusement.

  Stranger things have happened in the Angel household.

  “Three, two, one, wrestle!” Hugo shouted.

  Bam! Hugo’s hand hit the floor, the whole thing over in five seconds. Hugo cursed under his breath. Jacob got up, smoothed the front of his shirt, and sat down on his stool. Hugo rubbed his elbow with stubborn respect in his eyes.

  “Moving on,” Jacob said. “You will each have fifty dollars a week for cab fares and lunches. You will have breakfast and dinner at home, where we will take turns preparing meals. So fifty dollars is more than you need—”

  Harry sat straight up in his seat. “You must be joking. Have you ever lived in Manhattan, Jake? New York City is not cheap.”

  “Effective now, we’re on an austere budget, Harry,” Jacob replied. “Get used to it. You’ll get your allowance every Monday morning, and it’s your job to make it last. And finally, for now, I want you home every night by seven for dinner, in bed every night by twelve.”

  “What does any of this have to do with Gram Hilda?” Harry asked, glancing down at the picture.

  “When it’s time to tell you, I will do so,” Jacob said. “No further questions? Good. Discussion closed. Feel free to see me if any questions do arise.”

  Our new guardian walked down the hall to Katherine’s former bedroom, went inside, and closed the door behind him.

  Harry, Hugo, and I shared a silent, impressed, maybe even hopeful look. All in all, Jacob Perlman had been polite and clear. Rules, we could follow. Someone who treated us with respect and dignity, we could handle.

  Uncle Pig might have just done us the biggest favor ever.

  7

  “I get it. The rules, I mean,” Harry said finally. “He needs to keep tabs on us. That’s his job. But I have one question.”

  “What?” I prompted.

  “What’s in it for him?”

  “He gets to live in the Dakota?” I shrugged. “Plus Peter’s paying him, of course.”

  Harry said, “He’s going to be here until we’re eighteen. That’s a two-year job, right? But we’ll probably be evicted for nonpayment in a couple of weeks. So when we’re living in a refrigerator box under a bridge, what’s Jake’s plan for that?”

  Hugo piped up. “Don’t worry, bro. I’m going to write Matthew’s biography. We’ll get a big advance for the book, and then big bucks for the movie rights. I’m going to be Matty’s agent, too, so I’m taking a cut for that. In a couple of weeks we’ll be rolling in it.” He kicked back with his feet on the table, his arms crooked behind him. Underneath his shifting weight, the Pork Chair squealed.

  “You can’t even spell,” I pointed out.

  “That’s what editors are for,” Hugo replied, grinning hugely.

  “Does Matty know about all this?” I asked him.

  “I’m working it out with Philippe,” Hugo said, referring to our attorney, Philippe Montaigne. “I’m drafting a chapter outline right now.”

  “When you’re not working on the website?” I asked, arching my eyebrows.

  Hugo sat forward, his feet slamming heavily into the floor. “Man. I got a lot to do. I’ll be in my room.”

  “First ten-year-old literary agent slash ghostwriter slash Internet-based freedom fighter in the history of the world,” I said to the empty Pork Chair. “But I almost think he can pull it off.”

  “Of course he can,” Harry said. “He’s Hugo.”

  I smiled as loud guitar music shook the photos on the walls of the hallway. Hugo at work.

  “I’ve got a composition due tomorrow,” Harry said, rising from the sofa. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing across the room toward the windows that overlooked the park. “What could possibly be bothering me?”

  A tiny line appeared in the center of Harry’s forehead. “May I make a suggestion?”

  I stood up as well. “All ears.”

  “Let Caputo be the cop,” he said. “He’s got a precinct and a forensics lab behind him. You’re just going to get in his way.”

  “Do you even realize that if it wasn’t for me the truth behind Malcolm’s and Maud’s deaths might still be a mystery?” I asked him.

  “Memo to Tandy,” Harry said, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Adele was not a relative, and she was killed with an actual gun. Murderers? They tend to not like the people who come after them. So I suggest you stay out of it, sis.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said with a sigh.

  He eyed me shrewdly. “But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Not really,” I replied.

  He shook his head and we parted ways. Him to his room and me to mine. I changed into a pair of my mom’s silk pajamas—yellow with red poppies—and got into my king-sized bed, perfect for the restless thrasher I was. I plumped the pillows, stared out at the canopy of leaves across the street, and listened to the variously pitched sounds of traffic.

  I thought about Adele, how she would never see another tree or hear traffic or kiss a boy or anything else. Right now she was on a slab in a cooler at the medical examiner’s office w
aiting for the forensic pathologist to slit her open from clavicle to navel. My empty stomach turned.

  What would Adele have done with her life?

  Who would she have become?

  Why did she have to die?

  CONFESSION

  Since I’ve been so busy listing all the negatives of being off the drugs, I’ve decided to share with you—and only you—one of the positives. I know what you’re thinking. There’s a positive? Then what’s she been whining about all this time? I apologize if I’ve been in a morose frame of mind. But with all the deaths and the jail visits and the random strangers taking over my life, I’m hoping you can forgive me.

  So here it is, the positive: I am starting to remember James. And I’m not talking about the weird dreams. I’m talking about actual memories. At least, I think they are. I hope they are. See, there were always little bits and snippets that I could recall, vague feelings, hazy shadows, flashes of a face or a knee or a hand. But now I was starting to see real 3-D images. I was starting to hear his voice, sense his touch, smell his scent. I was starting to remember that I had been in love.

  Not only that. I had experienced love at first sight.

  There was a party one night about a year ago. A party I, of course, had to sneak out to go to, Malcolm and Maud not believing in fun, as it were. It was exactly what you’d expect from the children of the New York elite. Huge apartment, tons of breakables worth untold thousands, and at least a hundred kids drinking, smoking, and partaking of all kinds of drugs their parents had definitely not formulated especially for them.

  I hate to say “our eyes met across a crowded room,” but they did. But it wasn’t just like “Oh, he’s cute,” or even “That’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.” It was like I knew him. And he knew me. And we just hadn’t seen each other in a really long time. Locking eyes with James felt like coming home.

  We made small talk about travel and school and our families, but what I really remember was all the smiling. All the anticipation. All the skin-tingling uncertainty.

  I had loved every minute of it.

  And then it had happened. Just as I’d started to get that awful, gut-deadening feeling that nothing could possibly come of this—that it was too good to be true—James had leaned in and kissed me. And I had felt it in every inch of my body.

  Me. The girl who never felt anything. The girl who was on so many drugs I’d barely cried when my favorite person in the world—my sister, Katherine—had died. That was how I knew for certain that I was in love.

  After that, sneaking out became a much more common occurrence. But here’s the strangest, most unbelievable part of this: Aside from the clarity of our first meeting, I couldn’t remember most of the time James and I had spent together.

  Because when my parents did find out about us—because eventually they always found out about everything—they’d had my memory purged. Chemically purged, electrically rubbed out, scoured down to the bloody nubs.

  My parents were rich and powerful and connected enough to know people who could do that. They’d not only taken me away from James physically, but done everything they could to make sure I’d never so much as dream of him again.

  But I did now. All the time. Since I’d gone off the drugs, I was finally starting to remember, more and more each day, the details.

  After all this time, I had real and tangible hope that one day I’d remember everything. And that once I remembered, I’d find a way to get James back.

  8

  The next morning, Jacob was actually up before me and had laid out a huge breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes, eggs, sausage, and coffee, which resulted in Hugo’s declaring his undying love for the man. I, however, was kind of annoyed that my morning ritual of breakfast making had been brusquely taken from me without my consent. But that didn’t stop me from eating everything in sight. Which made us late.

  After thanking Jacob, Harry, Hugo, and I charged up Central Park West and across the avenue at Seventy-Seventh Street to our school, All Saints Academy. All Saints is a privately owned, Gothic-style former church, all massive stone walls, stained-glass windows, and soaring roof lines. Our tiger parents had loved this school because of its small and very exclusive enrollment, but they’d also been obsessed with its headmaster, Timothy Thibodaux. The man was highly intelligent, even by Angel standards.

  I had a like-hate relationship with Mr. Thibodaux. He was sharp, of course, but I didn’t trust him. Not since he’d refused to let us return to school once we were under suspicion for our parents’ deaths. Not charged with their deaths, just under suspicion. Yet he’d turned us away at the front door like a bunch of beggars in a Charles Dickens novel. At least he’d apologized for that slight a couple of weeks later when he’d been forced to take us back.

  Even I had to admit that Mr. Thibodaux was good at handling the twenty kids in his class, nearly all of them privileged and untouchable. Harry and I, these days, were the exceptions. Our parents were dead and we were broke. But Mr. Thibodaux hadn’t turned us away again—not yet, at least—because we were paid up through the school year. Next year, of course, I had no idea what would happen.

  Harry and I were panting as we left Hugo at the door to the rectory, where the fifth graders had their classroom, and the two of us trotted up the front steps of the large stone church. We took a right turn off the narthex and climbed the stairway to the choir loft under the vaulted ceiling. This was our classroom, with its stunning long view of the nave and the altar.

  Mr. Thibodaux was waiting at the top of the stairs. He wore an impeccably cut brown suit, green-framed glasses, and a mournful expression.

  “I’m happy you Angels could make it,” he said. And I actually couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  I noticed the grief-shocked faces of our schoolmates as Harry and I took our seats, and I gave C.P. a nod. We stowed our book bags and sat perfectly upright with our hands folded in front of us.

  “Due to your incessant texting, I’m sure you all know that Adele Church has been killed,” Mr. Thibodaux said. “I would be grieving at the loss of any of you, but Adele, in particular, was a very promising student, a talented musician, and a generally sterling person.”

  A few of the kids sitting behind me began to cry. Mr. Thibodaux noticed but went on.

  “You may not know this, but my relationship with my students doesn’t end at graduation. In a way, that’s when it begins. I see all our graduates every year, and I am amazed at how each of them has grown. The brilliant ones don’t always go straight to the top but take a winding and unique path. The slackers sometimes spring into action, and sometimes they turn slacking into a fine art.

  “But whatever my students do, whomever they become as adults, I take pride and pleasure in knowing that we all crossed paths here, that we learned from one another here, that we helped one another become…”

  He trailed off, and one of the girls behind me gulped back a sob.

  “Adele lost her life, and we all lost her. We will never see her become who she was meant to be, but I know we will all always remember our dear, shining Adele.”

  Mr. Thibodaux crooked a finger in front of his lips, holding back tears as he looked across the room at an intricate stained-glass crucifixion scene in one of the windows.

  “Please pray for Adele, keep her in your thoughts, honor her in whatever way you feel appropriate,” he said finally, clearing his throat. “There will be a service for Adele this Saturday at St. Barnabas. Grief counseling will be provided here immediately. If you will all gather at my office door and form a line along the green wall, a therapist will see you forthwith.

  “Class is dismissed.”

  Everyone slowly rose from their seats, but I was frozen in place. Harry looked back at me just as I started to shake.

  “Tandy?” he said.

  Grief counseling. The reason my parents had given for sending me to Fern Haven. At the time I’d believed them, since I couldn’t remember a thing from the months l
eading up to my incarceration. But they’d actually sent me there to have my memories wiped. To have James and everything we’d seen and done together plucked from my consciousness.

  I would never trust a grief counselor again.

  9

  C.P. stood at the end of the line outside Mr. Thibodaux’s office as I walked right by my classmates toward the side door. Harry was the only one missing, so I could only assume he was already pouring his guts out to the shrink. There weren’t many things Harry loved to do more than talk about his feelings.

  “Tandy? Where’re you going?” C.P. asked me. She was wearing a zebra-print coat over a black dress, her short blond hair pushed forward over her forehead and her blue eyes wide.

  “Outside,” I said. “I don’t need grief counseling.” I clenched my fists inside my pockets. “By the way, have the cops interviewed you about Adele?”

  C.P.’s brow knit. “No.”

  I looked down the line of students. “Have the cops interviewed any of you?” I called out to my classmates. They all stared at me, then at one another, blankly.

  I sighed and turned to C.P. “Send them each out to me when they finish in the office, okay?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “This was what you meant yesterday when you said we, isn’t it?”

  “Someone’s gotta find out what happened to her. And clearly it’s not gonna be the NYPD.”

  I waited on a teak bench in the courtyard between the church and the apartment building next door. It was one of those oddly warm winter days, and the sun felt good on my face. Harry was the first to come out, but he didn’t even look in my direction. He just ducked his head and took off for the street, probably planning to go home or to the rehearsal rooms at Lincoln Center to take out his emotions on an unsuspecting piano.