Confessions of a Murder Suspect

54

It was way after midnight, and the only light in the apartment came from the glowing green of the sharks’ phosphorescent bodies. Everyone was asleep but me.

The writer Colette once wrote, “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” I felt like I’d been beating my head against the wall for four days almost to the minute.

I was next to nowhere in my investigation. There was virtually no evidence, there were no known witnesses, and because my parents had at least a couple hundred million dollars, anyone in line to inherit had a motive to kill. And there were a lot of us. None of us could be counted out. Not even me.

I pulled a chair up next to Robert and switched on the lamp behind him, which illuminated Harry’s new painting of Malcolm and Maud, hanging above Robert’s TV. He called it What Love Looks Like, and he’d depicted our parents in acid green and bloody purple, their arms around each other and their mouths open in silent screams as they confronted the viewer with their stares.

Harry had remarked to me as he hung it: “Our parents were gods and monsters at the same time. Maybe we’re all like that—gods and monsters.”

Harry’s use of extreme light and dark colors allowed for multiple and opposite interpretations of the work, as he’d intended, but in my humble opinion, Harry had deemphasized our parents’ godlike traits while capturing their more monstrous qualities with real feeling.

Maud might have liked this painting, because there was nothing sentimental about it. The style was abstract and expressionistic; it reminded me of Picasso’s weird distortions and Francis Bacon’s gruesome imagery.

Harry’s latest work evoked a very strong emotion in me, attractive and repulsive at the same time. As I stared at the painting, that emotion swelled, and my head started to spin.

What was happening? Was it the drug withdrawal?

And then I hallucinated again. I thought I saw that face, a bit clearer this time. He was handsome.… No. More than that. Deeply attractive. And yet—somehow repellant to me at the same time…

I felt a sudden heaving in my chest, so forceful that I stood up and clutched my heart just to make sure I wasn’t in cardiac arrest.

The ghostly face was gone, but I staggered over to the painting that had triggered the frightening response and snatched it from its hanger.

A nail fell to the floor.

Too easily, as though it had been hammered right through the wall and into an empty space on the other side.

Suddenly, I refocused back on the mystery. Setting the painting down, I remembered the closet on the other side of the wall.

Years earlier, I had seen my father coming out of that closet. When I asked him about it, he told me that he and Maud stored their out-of-season clothing there. And then he locked the door.

I was twelve at the time, old enough to register my father’s strange expression. But I was in middle school, and closets were pretty low on my list of interests.

But now? My father’s secret hiding place had just shot up to the number one position.

I left the living room and moved along the corridor behind the stairs. I stopped where I had seen my father emerge from the closet.

It was the same closet where I’d spent my sleepless night as a Big Chop.

The police had broken off the lock and looked through the closet, as they’d done everywhere in the apartment, but they hadn’t found anything. Then again, they were obviously incompetent.

You see, during that night that I wasn’t allowed to lie down, I’d had time to really search the closet for the secret I knew must be inside. Why else would my father have a lock on a closet door? Why else would he look so strange when he came out of the closet? After hours of looking, I had finally found a door that blended so seamlessly into the wall, you’d never see it without spending hours examining every crack.

Had my father wanted me to find it? I guess I’d never know. It didn’t matter, though, because the door hadn’t budged that night, and I still couldn’t find a way to make it budge.

But there had to be a key somewhere in this house. And I was going to find it.