Confessions of a Murder Suspect

55

My feet hardly touched the treads as I ran up the stairs to my parents’ suite. I dialed up the hallway lights, and even in the pale glow coming from the hall, their room looked blasted and horrifying.

I stood on the threshold, cold sweat beading up all over my body. I actually started to shake. Before I could stop it, my mind had called up the horrific image of my parents’ twisted bodies on the bed.

I felt sick at the thought that they had been betrayed by someone they knew and trusted.

What were they thinking before they died? Did they even know who had murdered them?

Had they tried to save themselves?

I gripped the doorjamb with both hands until my rapid heartbeat slowed. Then I took a tentative step forward and entered my parents’ room. The place where they made babies, the place where they made me.

This most private of rooms had been frozen in the aftermath of the chaos. Belongings had been dumped from dresser drawers and lay in a jumble on the floor. Dead flowers drooped in a vase on the fireplace mantel, and the armoire doors were opened wide, as if they were pleading with me to come in and find the truth.

I was determined to stay until I found it.

After checking out the mantel and the tops of the bedside tables, I went to my parents’ walk-in closet.

My father’s clothing was bunched along the rod on the left side, and my mother’s clothes were crushed together on the right. Designer garments had fallen off hangers and were lying in glittering heaps on the floor.

I went to work.

I frisked every pocket, each article of clothing sending up a flurry of good and bad memories as I touched it: a vintage Chanel suit Maud had worn when she’d taken Katherine and me to the ballet; a coat Father had worn on a snowy day when the bunch of us had played touch football in the park. I’d almost forgotten that day, but the sudden memory of playing football with Matthew sent a rare feeling of warmth through me.

I seized on the jacket my mother used to throw on over her jeans—a sexy, sparkly, spangled navy-blue thing that had once belonged to Madonna.

I put it on and smelled Maud’s ylang-ylang fragrance. My eyes filled with tears, and a few of them spilled over. Maud had loved this jacket. She looked ten years younger when she wore it, maybe because it made her feel ten years younger. She’d never let me wear it. The fact that I could just slip it on now without fearing her wrath made me feel a strange sort of ache inside.

I looked at myself in my mother’s mirror—and I saw a dead girl walking. My eyes were dark and sunken. My hair was lank in my headband. I looked like Alice after she’d taken a tour of Wonderland’s meatpacking plant.

Do not dissolve into mush, Tandy. Do not go there. Come back to the living, bucko.

I put the brakes on my useless trip down memory highway and left the closet. I sifted through the piles of clothing and other miscellany on the bedroom floor. The police had started throwing things into haphazard piles once they’d determined which items should be confiscated. Littered among the sweaters and undergarments were foreign coins, a packet of letters to my father from Gram Hilda, and a gold rattle that had belonged to Harry—but no key to my father’s closet.

I ran my hand behind the flag painting and then, before going through the stack of books on the floor, turned on the light next to my father’s side of the bed.

The lamp is French, an electrified oil lamp from the nineteenth century, made of bronze with a glass ball shade. Its style is seriously at odds with our modern décor. But Gram Hilda gave it to my father, and he loved his mother despite how she’d hurt him. Or maybe because of it? In any case, her gift lit up his bedside every night of his life. On a hunch, I carefully lifted the glass shade and gently shook it.

A key fell out onto the bed.

I stared at it for a few long seconds. Could it really be that easy?

It was just past two in the morning. Time to wake up my twin again.

I knocked on Harry’s door until I heard him groan, then went inside and shook him awake.

“Gah, Tandy. What is wrong with you? What time is it, anyway?”

“You’ve noticed Malcolm’s closet?”

“What? Which closet?”

“The one under the stairs.”

“The police didn’t find anything in it. Now go away. Come back at noon. At the earliest.”

I held up the key, just visible in the light beaming through Harry’s window from the city that never sleeps.

“I think this is important. You have to come with me.”