Confessions of a Murder Suspect

41

Katherine may not have been perfect in my parents’ eyes, but she was a perfect sister. Like her friends, she had a wild streak. She drank too much and had a secret boyfriend who was pierced and tattooed. And even though she lied to my parents—to everyone, really—and thought nothing of it (because she, too, was trained to not have much of a conscience), she was a true inspiration for me. I loved her so much.

Katherine was going to be an engineer and was only fifteen when she was admitted to MIT, probably the best university in the country for the next generation of top-flight scientists.

My parents were so overjoyed that they awarded her the very first “Grande Gongo with an Asterisk.” The asterisk meant that she could have or do anything with her Grande Gongo, without restriction.

Katherine wanted to harvest diamonds in the rough. What an adventure! She had a plan and a finely detailed map, and she said she’d be home in time for the start of school with enough diamonds to make a necklace that would light up a room. She promised me earrings and a ring. Harry wanted an earring, too.

After she turned sixteen she flew to South Africa, and within days she’d panned a large diamond from an alluvial mine. She sent us a picture of the stone, and it was a whopper—estimated at almost seven carats when cut, perfect for a solitaire or a pendant. And it certainly would have been a grand memento of the Grandest Gongo of them all.

Katherine also found a boyfriend in South Africa: Dominick. He was an older man, something that upset my father in particular. But Katherine told me all about him, and he wasn’t a creepy pedophile type. He was just twenty-one, a free spirit, a beautiful boy, and they loved each other passionately.

I had always wondered what that would feel like. To love. Passionately. And in hours-long phone conversations and e-mail exchanges, I would ask Katherine to describe it. I wanted to know every little detail. I guess most people would say that what she told me was TMI, but I needed it. It was deeply fascinating to me.

Then, one horrible day, Dominick was driving a motorcycle, Katherine seated behind him with her arms around his waist. Suddenly he stopped, for no apparent reason. A bus rear-ended the bike, and my sister was thrown into the air. She was crushed under a speeding van coming from the opposite direction. Crushed, gone, extinct.

I have never really forgiven my parents for letting Katherine fly off on that fatal last Gongo. As smart as they were, they should have known her better, should have seen through her bravado and been less dazzled by her success.

Or maybe I should have told them what she was really like, that she was a wild child.

I have been haunted by the vision of my wonderful sister lying dead in the street every day since she died, just as I was that night in my prison cell.

Until that morbid image was hijacked by the sounds of hooting and banging on the iron bars of the jail.

It was just too much.

Tears welled in my eyes again and I bit down on my lip until it bled. There I was, trapped in that horrible place. A prime suspect in a double homicide. But I couldn’t let my circumstances defeat me. My mind was still free, wasn’t it?

I swore to myself, to my dead parents, and to my dear sister that if I had to, I would spend the rest of my life working to clear the Angel name.

I would find out who killed my mother and father.

And I would make whoever it was pay dearly.