Confessions of a Murder Suspect

42

My incarceration was, in some ways, a disconcerting metaphor for my whole life. I’d been raised in one of the most luxurious homes in Manhattan, and yet somehow I was seeing myself in the caged women surrounding me. There were even a few younger girls, like me, banging on the bars, screaming for dinner.

A guard in a green uniform came down the narrow tier pushing a food cart, shoving white-bread sandwiches through the slots in the iron bars.

When she got to me, she said, “How’re you holding up?”

“Never better,” I said.

“Court’s over for the day. So take it easy. Try to sleep.”

I ate my crap-cheese-and-mystery-meat sandwich and then lay down on my board. I wondered exactly which pill from Malcolm’s pastel-colored assortment had produced the stumplike sleep that now eluded me.

I had a moment of desperate craving for those pills.

I swung wildly between being overwhelmed with emotion—and actually sort of liking the catharsis of it—and feeling like the pain of my situation was too much to bear.

A wave of self-pity hit me, and I wished more than anything that I were back in my room, watching the prisms in my windows bend the light into rainbows, listening to my parents move around in their suite upstairs.

A pill could make this all go away, I thought. Like magic.

I bit my hand so that I wouldn’t cry and forced myself into an exercise I’d learned from Dr. Keyes that I thought might actually help me—the one she called FOF, or Focus on the Facts.

I concentrated and thought of everyone who lived in the Dakota, calling to mind the names and faces of every resident on every floor. I reviewed every insult I could remember, every grudge, and considered who among our neighbors might be a stealthy killer with a key.

I also considered each of my siblings as the possible murderer. I even wondered if I was the guilty party.

Was I a sleepwalking homicidal maniac? Could I have killed my parents and kept the terrible secret from myself? I’d been trained in burying trauma. Could I have poisoned them? What did I stand to gain? Or was it revenge?

Not revenge for having to do a Big Chop while standing on my head. I mean revenge for something else, something much bigger, something that maybe I don’t remember.

Quick as lightning, a face flashed before my eyes. A boy’s face. It gave me a warm feeling, then a painful one, then an angry one. Then it disappeared as fast as it came.

FOF, Tandy. I blinked three times just to make sure the face was really gone. Focus on the Facts.

And that boy, that face, that thing—it was just a ghost.

Or a demon.