The Private School Murders Read online

  Cliff Anderson was the next to emerge. He was a tall, square-shouldered son of a Wall Street tycoon with an ego bigger than Manhattan. He eyed me warily as he approached.

  “C.P. said I’m supposed to talk to you…?”

  “Have a seat.”

  He did, sitting as far away from me on the bench as possible without hitting the ground.

  “I’m working with the NYPD on solving Adele’s murder,” I began.

  “Seriously?” I’d piqued his interest. “That’s… kinda cool.”

  “So, where were you when Adele was shot?” I asked him.

  Cliff’s jaw dropped. “You think I did it?”

  “It’s a standard question,” I replied.

  He glowered. “I was with my girlfriend at Dylan’s Candy Bar.”

  I jotted that down.

  “And your girlfriend’s name?”

  He gave it, the school she attended, and her phone number.

  “Did you notice anything off about Adele lately?” I asked. “Was she worried about anything? Fighting with anyone?”

  “She was depressed, actually,” Cliff said, gripping the bench with both hands. “Her brother moved out to go to BU last semester, and the two of them were really close. Adele didn’t exactly love her parents, you know? I think it was like the two of them against Mom and Dad, so once she was alone…”

  I could imagine how much that would suck. If Malcolm and Maud had still been alive and all my brothers had moved out… wow. I wasn’t sure I could have survived that.

  “Thanks, Cliff.”

  Next up was Kendra Preston. She had transferred to All Saints this year, and I knew she still had friends at the Doyle School across town. I asked about her alibi, then got down to business.

  “Do you know anyone who might want to do something like this to Adele?” I asked her.

  “No, but did you know that two other girls our age have been shot to death in the last month?” she replied.

  “What?” I gasped.

  “Yeah.” Her eyes were wide. “Scary, right? This friend of a friend from Doyle, Lena Watkins, died just outside her apartment a couple of weeks ago. They said it was suicide because she’d been depressed about a breakup, but everyone she knew was shocked that she would actually kill herself.”

  I wrote everything down as quickly as I could. “And the other girl?”

  “Her name was Stacey Something-or-Other… Stacey Brown or Stacey Black or”—she snapped her fingers—“Stacey Blackburn! That’s it. She went to Manhattan Day. There was a holdup at a liquor store in the Sixties and she was apparently in the way as the guy tried to escape.”

  “So three girls from three different private schools have all died of gunshot wounds in the past three weeks.”

  Kendra shivered inside her black coat. “Kinda makes you not want to leave the apartment anymore, huh?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” I agreed.

  If someone was actually targeting private school girls, then any of us—all of us—could be in danger. Had Caputo linked these three dots together? Or was this connection my very own bolt of lightning?

  Either way, I had work to do.

  10

  I saved my money, and instead of catching a cab, I walked home from school as quickly as I could, cutting around joggers, bike messengers, jaywalkers, and eddies of lost tourists traveling against the flow.

  Three dead private school girls. There had to be a connection. There just had to be. I couldn’t wait to get to my private home office.

  I opened the door to our apartment and passed under the UFO chandelier, then stopped in my tracks. Standing in the center of the living room was a tall woman with a sprayed helmet of blond hair, wearing a tight blue suit and very high heels. I could smell her heavy perfume from fifteen feet away.

  It was strong enough to knock mosquitoes out of the air.

  “Can I help you?” I snapped, getting a bit tired of finding strangers in my house every time I came home.

  The blond woman tapped a few notes into an iPad before looking up.

  “Oh. Hello,” she said. Then she snapped a picture of Mercurio, our larger-than-life sculpture of a merman, which hung from a hook in the corkscrew opening under the spiral staircase.

  “Excuse me,” I said, taking a few steps into the room. That was when I saw that she wasn’t alone. Uncle Pig stood in the corner, sporting his signature baggy Burberry and looking disheveled like always with his flyaway ginger hair.

  He turned his tiny pig eyes on me.

  “Oh, hello, Tandoori. Magda? This is my least favorite and only niece, Tandoori Angel, a psycho terror who is my late brother’s daughter. Tandoori, this is Ms. Magda Carter. She’s in estates and consignments.”

  “How fantastic for you,” I said to the woman. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m pricing your possessions for the estate sale.” She almost smacked her lips. “It’s in two weeks, you know. So much to do, so little time.”

  My fingers curled into fists as she ran her gaze covetously over our parents’ things—our things.

  “Jumping the gun, aren’t you, Uncle Peter?” I said. “The estate hasn’t been settled yet.”

  Uncle Peter ignored me. Shocker. “Any questions about the artwork, Magda?”

  “I think I’ve got it all,” she said. “We’re listing the piano, that darling little pig chair, the merman, and… this?”

  She placed her palm atop Robert’s head. Robert, the TV-watching Oldenburg sculpture in the living room.

  My mouth went dry. As sick as it may have sounded to a normal person, Robert was like part of my twisted family.

  “Definitely,” Uncle Peter said with a sneer.

  “Hey,” I snapped. “Did you hear me?”

  Uncle Peter jerked around as if he’d forgotten I was standing there.

  “My apologies, Magda. Clearly my niece is out of sorts,” he said. “You haven’t seen the Aronstein flag in the master suite. Why don’t you go upstairs and I’ll join you in a moment?”

  He waited as Magda clacked up the spiral staircase and then turned his beady eyes on me.

  “Don’t be so shocked, Tandy,” he said in his most imperious tone. “You know that Royal Rampling is first in line to take over this twenty-million-dollar apartment, and the estate must document everything of value.” Hearing the name Rampling coming from my uncle’s mouth made me want to puke on his shoes. “Oh, wait. I remember now,” he said in a cloying tone. “Mr. Rampling’s son was a special friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Suddenly, a memory hit me with such force it almost knocked me off my feet—James and I happily cuddled up in a booth at a roadside McDonald’s upstate. A troop of black-clad henchmen tearing us away from each other. And Uncle Pig. Uncle Pig standing in the parking lot, watching it all with a triumphant smirk.

  “You were there,” I breathed.

  “I was where?” he asked.

  “You were there!” I blurted, rage burbling up inside me. “At the McDonald’s that day! When James and I were taken. When I was dragged to Fern Haven. You were there!”

  Uncle Pig’s face was blank. “You’ve never been inside a McDonald’s in your life. Or any of those awful fast-food places, for that matter. If you’d ever consumed that processed poison, your parents would have had simultaneous coronaries.”

  I squinted, the memory quickly fading—going sideways, fizzling and shifting. Suddenly, James and I were on a beach. It was dark. It was dark and windy when the commandoes arrived.

  “But I—”

  Uncle Peter’s face twisted in disgust. “Your parents really did screw with your awful little mind, didn’t they?”

  My throat clenched and I swallowed hard, but my mind had been turned to mush by the conflicting memories, by the confusion, by the humiliation. What really happened, and why did I suddenly remember things differently? There was no comeback to be had. I turned on my heel and swept out, trying to keep my head high.

  He was sti
ll laughing as I stormed down the hall to my room.

  CONFESSION

  I wished my uncle would wander into a bad neighborhood, never to be heard from again. Or suffer a life-ending aneurysm. Or fall out a ninth-story window. I’d always believed he’d abused Katherine, and maybe even had something to do with her death.

  There was no forensic evidence to prove that Uncle Peter had anything to do with either crime. Just my instincts. But my instincts had always been sharp.

  He had, after all, moved into Katherine’s room as if it somehow belonged to him.

  It made me want to put my fist through a window actually, when I thought about it. That sounds frighteningly like something Matthew Angel would do, I know. So instead, I focused on Katherine.

  Katherine Angel was my big sister, my idol, my best and closest friend—an even closer friend than Harry.

  Katherine was hilarious, a prankster as well as a brilliant scholar, and if that wasn’t enough, she was beautiful, too. She looked exactly like Maud when she was young. Sometimes, when we put photos of the two of them side by side, the only way to tell the difference was the style of their clothes.

  My sister was sixteen when she died. We were told it was an accident, but I’ve never been sure. She was riding on the back of a motorcycle, her arms around the waist of her boyfriend, Dominick—a new boy we hadn’t met, but whom, according to her letters, she was completely, mind-bogglingly in love with—when a bus rear-ended the bike and tossed my sister into oncoming traffic. Just like that, this person who had been so full of life, so adventurous and kind and seemingly untouchable, was dead.

  The boy Katherine loved was never found. He simply picked himself up and disappeared. Kind of suspicious, no?

  Maybe he was just terrified. Or felt guilty. Or both. Maybe Katherine’s death was just an accident. But maybe, just maybe, her death had been arranged.

  Yet another horrible mystery, for another horrible day.

  But one thing is absolutely certain: I wished Katherine was here now. I wished I could talk to her about James and my muddled brain. I knew she would have found a way to make me feel better.

  To make it all make sense.

  11

  It was dinnertime in apartment 9G at the Dakota—the eccentric, luxurious, very cloistered building with a gossip-column present and a sensational past—and I was in the kitchen, preparing tandoori chicken, the Indian dish for which I was named. Yes, I was named after a type of poultry preparation. My parents had been foodies with a weird sense of humor.

  Harry had fired up the tandoor oven, and Hugo was vigorously washing the broccoli, his contribution to the rather ambitious five-dollars-a-head austerity dinner.

  Jacob finished expertly chopping the carrots for the salad, laid his knife down, and cleared his throat.

  “Children, there’s something you should know,” he said. “There was a filing today before Judge Warren’s probate court, and all I can tell you is that sometimes when a door closes, another door opens.”

  “What does that mean?” Harry asked, looking up from his history text.

  “What does it mean, literally?” Jacob asked him.

  “No, Jake. I understand the aphorism,” Harry replied sarcastically. “What door is opening?”

  Hugo shook the broccoli, creating a little local rainfall, and said, “I hope if a door is opening, it’s not the one to this apartment, because I don’t want to move.”

  Jacob took the broccoli from Hugo and put it in a steamer. “I would tell you…”

  “But then you’d have to kill us?” I asked, eyeing the knife in front of him, wondering if he’d ever actually used one to kill a man.

  “No, Tandoori. I would tell you, but it’s just a filing,” he replied, taking a sip of his sherry. “Let’s wait a little longer and see if we have good news or bad. To tell you more would be cruel.”

  I walked over to the counter where Jacob was standing, picked up the bottle of sherry, and took a swig, staring into his eyes the entire time.

  “Then why bring it up at all?” I asked. “Trying to let us know you have something over us?”

  Jacob blinked and wiped his hands on his apron. “No. Of course not. You’re right, Tandy. I shouldn’t have said anything yet if I wasn’t intending to tell you everything.” He looked around at the boys. “I apologize.”

  I took another sip of sherry, and Jacob removed the bottle from my hand.

  “That’s enough.” He set the bottle aside and reached for the knife again.

  “Are you a spy, Jacob?” I asked him.

  He sighed and smiled, cutting into a cucumber.

  “Of course you are,” I continued. “But a spy for whom? Uncle Peter? Or maybe the dead?”

  “What a wonderful, vivid imagination you have, Tandy.”

  I narrowed my eyes. A vivid imagination or razor-sharp instincts? Only time would tell.

  12

  After dinner the four of us scattered like billiard balls, Hugo to his room and his manuscript, Harry to the piano in the living room, Jacob to Katherine’s room. Once everyone was safely tucked away, I headed down the hallway to the room that had at one time been so secret, I hadn’t even known it was there until after my parents died. I used the key I kept on a long chain around my neck to open the door, closed it quietly behind me, and hit the switch.

  Light filled the room, illuminating my father’s file cabinets and his glittering chemistry equipment. His graphs still hung on the walls, those colorful bars that had charted the effects of the pills on his guinea pig children. This had once been his lab, but now it was my office.

  My very own PI headquarters.

  I had kept the charts so that I would never forget what had been done to us, but I’d restocked the lab with my own equipment and books on forensic science.

  I booted up my computer and had just typed the name Stacey Blackburn into the search engine when there was an urgent knock on the hidden door. I opened the lock, and Hugo barreled in.

  “Not now, Hugo. I’m working.”

  “I’m here to help,” he said. He went to the second computer and logged in.

  “I thought you were working on Matty’s biography.”

  “I’m taking five,” he replied. “Tell me what you need.”

  I blew out a sigh and went back to my workstation. “Lena Watkins,” I said. “Age about sixteen, lived on the Upper West Side, died last month of a gunshot wound.”

  Hugo bent over the keyboard and tapped a few keys. He knew how to hack into the NYPD computer system and get out without getting caught. It was a skill that could come in handy.

  Hugo read, “ ‘Lena Watkins, Ninety-Second and Amsterdam, gunshot to the temple at close range.’ Sound right?”

  I nodded. “Witnesses?”

  “No. Uh, her mother said Lena had been depressed. She was found dead with a gun in her hand, so…”

  “They think suicide,” I finished. “Send that page to me, okay, Hugo? I’ll go over the rest myself.”

  My computer beeped, and I settled in to read. The first oddity that caught my eye was the fact that the gun was unregistered. An unregistered gun was a pretty weird thing for a wealthy sixteen-year-old Manhattanite to have in her possession.

  “Lena was on antidepressants, but her parents said the pills were working,” I said to Hugo. “Not only that, but she never talked about killing herself. She had been down but was coming out of it, and it says here that she didn’t leave a suicide note. Which is kind of odd.”

  “If I offed myself, I’d leave a note,” Hugo said, glancing at my father’s charts on the walls. “Unlike some people.”

  “Tell me about it,” I replied, facing him. “Also, get this: Lena had put a down payment on a new car and had gotten accepted early to Smith College. This doesn’t really add up to suicidal depression. Not as I see it.”

  I turned back to the computer, but I could feel Hugo’s eyes still on me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You know I kin
d of idolize your ability to multitask, Tandy. But why don’t you try saving Matthew before you go figuring out a whole mess of other murders? I mean, at least Matty’s still alive.”

  I glanced at him sharply, feeling a thump of guilt and sorrow.

  “Please?” he added, looking, for the first time in a long time, like a regular little boy.

  Hugo looked up to Matthew the way I’d adored Katherine, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth—that Matthew himself thought he might be guilty. And that I had to focus on as many things as possible right now just to keep myself from focusing on that.

  “Hey, I can do both,” I said gently. “I promise.”

  Hugo rolled his eyes and started rummaging through a file drawer at the bottom of a cabinet. “Whatever.”

  Then, out of nowhere, he suddenly fell back and screamed.

  “Tandy!” he shouted, scuttling back on his hands and feet like a crab, a look of sheer terror on his face. “Run!”

  13

  Hugo knocked over the computer stand, which crashed to the floor. I was already running to my brother’s side, but something stopped me cold. It was oily and slick and was pouring onto the floor in a slithering black tube. Suddenly it stopped and reared up, a good twelve inches off the floor.

  The thing unfurled a hood at the back of its neck. Hugo flinched. It was a snake. A cobra, to be more precise. And this cobra was pissed off.

  “Don’t. Move,” I said through my teeth.

  I knew a lot about snakes. For instance, I knew that any movement was guaranteed to agitate the cobra. I also knew that if it struck Hugo, neurotoxins would likely kill him before an antivenom could be found.

  “Tannnnnnndy!” he cried. “Help meeeeeee!”

  “I’m thinking,” I replied, my heart slamming against my ribs. “Just don’t move.”

  “You said that already,” he replied.

  The snake began to sway. A very bad sign. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and called Jacob. He answered on the first ring. I tried to stay calm, but my voice was in its highest register.