Confessions of a Murder Suspect

56

I had started to shiver again, maybe because I was afraid I might actually solve this mystery soon.

I opened the closet door, turned on the light, and walked over to where I remembered finding the door. It took me a few minutes to locate it again.

“Tandy, what are you doing?” Harry asked, shivering a little himself. He sat on an old suitcase near the door.

“There’s something here. I just have to figure out how to open it,” I replied. I felt around the outline of the door. Could I have just imagined it? Maybe it was nothing. I put my face up against the cold wall and looked closely at every tiny bump, searching for anything that looked uneven. That’s when I saw the tiny slot.

“I knew it!” I crowed. Harry looked startled, but he approached as I slipped the key into the slot and turned it. I pushed open the door.

And I was shocked to the core, as if I’d stuck my worst expectations into a water-soaked light socket.

“Tandy… what is this?” Harry asked, peering inside.

This was no secret closet. It was a secret room, maybe fifteen feet long and five or six feet wide, with a low, slanted ceiling. It was lined with built-in cabinetry and countertops that were crammed with beakers and scales and computer equipment. I saw what seemed to be a centrifuge in one corner.

It was astounding, beyond the limits of my imagination. This hidden room was a laboratory.

Old Victorian buildings like the Dakota sometimes have eccentric architecture, and odd rooms-behind-rooms are often walled off during renovations. But Malcolm had preserved this, the forgotten space under the stairs.

“Am I hallucinating?” I asked Harry. Given how strange I’d been feeling and acting since my parents’ deaths, I thought there was a fair chance that I was.

“If you’re tripping, then both of us are,” Harry replied. “I believe we’ve found Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.”

There was just too much to absorb in one glance. Harry and I gaped until I finally thought to close the closet door behind us, and then we gaped some more as we ducked into the room and walked the length of it.

I stopped dead in my tracks when I spotted something that clearly wasn’t just about business or science.

It was about us.

There was a chart rail on one wall, lined with graphs labeled with the Angel kids’ names. I think I stopped breathing as I advanced toward the chart bearing my name.

This is what my chart looked like, friend. Along the bottom line, the X-axis, were all the years of my life. Down the left-hand side, the Y-axis, were letters and acronyms that I didn’t recognize—XL, Num, SPD, HiQ, Znth, ProMax, and Lazr. A zigzagging trend line tracked unnamed data points from the bottom left to the top right.

“Harry,” I called out to my twin. He came to my side, and I didn’t even need to look at him to register his disbelief. “Malcolm was tracking something about us here. The lines in this chart show some kind of growth or volatility. And tell me what you think of the letters on the Y-axis. It’s code. And I don’t get it. At all.”

My brother wasn’t listening to me. He had pulled a chair up to a computer and was tapping at the keyboard, saying, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

I went to Harry and looked over his shoulder.

“Put your nerd brain on this, will you, Tandy? It’s the key to the colored lines, and also to those letters. They have to be acronyms for some kind of chemicals.”

He had to be right. It came to me in a flash.

“Those chemicals are drugs, Harry. Our drugs. These letters stand for the names of our pills. The colors match the colors of our pills. And these data points indicate how we responded to those pills. Gotta be our performance. Our aptitude. Whatever Malcolm was trying to track. God—he was studying us like a family of little rats.”

Harry had enlarged his chart on the monitor. “It looks like Malcolm changed my pills all the time,” he said. “See?”

I saw what he meant. Where my chart had staggered lines and a rising trend line, the lines on Harry’s graph crisscrossed, shot up into peaks, plunged into troughs, and then staggered again.

“He was experimenting with my life,” Harry said. “He switched out my pills regularly. I always thought…”

“That they were vitamins,” I finished for him. “Maybe steroids for Matty and Hugo.”

“He was trying out new formulations,” Harry said, pointing out the numbers and combinations of colored lines. “No wonder I’m so emotional. Apparently he just couldn’t figure out how to fix me. How to make me right. Like a real Angel.”

I wanted to soothe Harry and tell him it wasn’t true, but in my gut I knew he was right. “Well, then, Harry, you were a perfect experiment.”

“He loved a challenge, didn’t he?” Harry shook his head. “He was running experiments on us. And with me… Well, he never did end up fixing me. And now he never will.” Harry grunted woefully. “We’re doomed, aren’t we, Tandy?”