Confessions: The Private School Murders (18 page)

Was this why our parents had forced us to memorize every species of every creature on earth? Just in case our cloistered apartment building was one day randomly attacked by exotic wildlife?

Hugo was still screaming when Jacob came loping down the hallway with a bath towel in his hands. He flicked the towel at the spider and, when the arachnid dropped, stomped on it with his desert boots.

“There’s another one!” Hugo shouted. “What
is
it?”

“It’s a Sydney funnel-web spider,” I told him, sidestepping the crawling monster. “It’s exclusive to Australia and one of the most venomous spiders on earth. They don’t run away. They attack. Be careful, Jacob.”

Jacob threw the towel again and again, but the spider evaded it and ran up his leg.

Hugo, Harry, and I all screamed, but Jacob just calmly flicked the spider off his leg, then ground it under his sole.

We all stood around him, bug-eyed and trying to catch our breaths. It was pretty incredible how one guy could
be all touchy-feely one minute and bad-ass commando the next. Jacob was really growing on me.

“Do any of you know anything about this rash of creatures?” he asked. “Anything at all? Even the ghost of a suspicion?”

“They can’t just be living loose in this building,” I said. “They had to have escaped from someone’s collection or something.”

Jacob said, “Then this apartment must have a tunnel or some kind of access to wherever they’ve been living, and we don’t know if we’ve gotten them all. Keep your eyes open. Shake out your clothes and your bedding. Tandy—”

“I’ve got Pest Control on speed dial,” I said, lifting my phone.

“Good. Call them, and while we wait, let’s gather in the living room,” said Jacob.

“Excellent,” said Harry. “Perfect time to have a family meeting. I think Tandy should tell us why she’s been jittery, throwing things, and crying.
All the time
.”

36

Did I want a family meeting,
my friend? About as much as I wanted a monster zit to sprout on the tip of my nose. But I was surrounded. There was no escape.

And the last thing I wanted was to be alone when the next Sydney funnel-web spider attacked.

After I hung up with Pest Control, we gathered in our living room. When clustered in the seating area, we had 360-degree views, so any big, hairy spiders would find it hard to sneak up on us.

I dropped down onto the shiny red sectional sofa; Jacob pulled up a dining room chair, and Hugo took the Pork Chair, crossing his legs and looking at me as if I was about to read him a story. Harry sat at the far end of the
sofa and leaned toward me with his arms resting on his knees.

“You’re the definition of a hot mess, Tandy,” he said. “What, in particular, is stressing you out?”

“Do you really have to ask?” I asked. “Matthew is on trial for murder, several private school girls exactly our age are dead in the morgue, there are venomous creatures swarming in our apartment, and we’re scheduled to be homeless in the very near future. Should I go on?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Go on. And tell the truth.”

I threw a sigh that should have moved the curtains hanging across the room.

“It’s personal, okay? And I’m not in any danger,” I said, shooting a placating look at Jacob. “I have a right to my privacy, don’t I?” I added in a wobbly voice.

I stood up and looked for a way out, my bedroom or the front door or a wormhole into another dimension, I didn’t care. But I was confronted by three people standing up to head me off.

It was like they were staging an intervention.

“Tandy, sit,” said Jacob. “Please? Sit down and tell us what’s bothering you.”

He seemed legitimately concerned, but I really didn’t want to talk about James with Jacob. What if he thought it was trite? Some teenage girl moaning about a lost love?
The man killed terrorists. He shot venomous snakes. He squashed deadly spiders. Besides, when it came down to it, I hardly knew him.

Harry said, “Sit, Tandy.”

“Sit down or else,” said Hugo.

I laughed nervously at my little brother, then threw myself back down onto the couch.

“Well, Jacob, this is the whole terrible story. Are you ready?”

He said, “Don’t be afraid. You’re safe with us.”

So I told him. I told him about James and my collision with true love. I told him about waking up in a white room in some kind of hospital, my head, actually my entire body, aching like I’d done the slalom course at the Winter Olympics. I told him about the buzzing snowstorm in my mind where my memories had once been. And then I filled him in on our startling discovery that the vitamins our parents had been feeding us since we were babies were actually specially formulated concoctions to help them control our bodies and minds.

When I was done, Jacob looked like he’d been slapped across the face.

“You poor girl. Fern Haven? Peter said you were sent to a spa.”

“That’s hilarious,” I said flatly. “Unless spas are offering
electroshock treatment, aggressive talk therapy, and mind-numbing pills these days.”

Even Harry, who knew just about everything, went pale. He slid over and wrapped me in his arms.

“I could kill them,” he said, clearly meaning Malcolm and Maud.

“Too late,” I replied.

“Can you go on, Tandy?” Jacob asked me.

“Sure.”

Once I’d started, I didn’t feel like stopping. But I didn’t want to linger any longer on the broken recollections of Fern Haven. So instead, I skipped ahead to the present.

37

Night was upon the city,
but it was never really dark in the heart of New York. The streetlights below threw wide cones of light on the sidewalks, and traffic zoomed up and down the avenue, headlights blazing.

Jacob turned on the torch lamp behind the sofa and flipped the switch that lit the sconces along the windowed wall.

“Do you need anything?” he asked me. “Water?”

I shook my head. I was eager to move past my recent and painful past.

“After school today, I went to Phil’s office and went through four big boxes that the crime-scene techs took away after Malcolm and Maud died,” I told them. “I
found the medical file from when I was at Fern Haven, and inside that, I found some postcards from James.”

“Say that again,” Harry said incredulously.

“I found five postcards from James that I’d never seen before,” I said. “Our parents never gave them to me.”

“Figures,” said Harry. “Control freaks.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Jacob muttered.

“The good news is James loves me,” I said miserably. “At least, he did. The bad news is I have no idea where he is or how to get in touch with him.”

This brought a moment of silence.

“I understand how you must feel, Tandy,” Jacob said finally. “First love is so powerful. So indelible. For me, it was a woman named Shira. She was a soldier and very brave. She died in a firefight. She was only twenty. We were only twenty.”

If my math was accurate, Shira had died more than thirty years ago.

“Were you with her when she died?” I asked him.

He nodded. “I couldn’t save her.”

He was clearly still grieving after so many years. But before he could say more, there was a loud knock on the front door, and when the doorbell was pressed, the UFO chandelier in the foyer tootled the theme song from
Close
Encounters of the Third Kind
. It kind of killed the sharing vibe we had going.

Hugo ran to the foyer and, ignoring the peephole above his head, opened the door. A squad of Pest Control investigators poured in.

“I guess chat time is over,” I said under my breath as Jacob stood up to greet them.

I bet we were the only family in America to have a serious heart-to-heart interrupted by a search for venomous spiders. The investigators spent the next three hours interrogating us and searching for spiders, finding nothing but the two flattened eight-legged corpses Jacob had laid out on a bath towel.

Much later, ensconced in soft bedding, I clutched my postcards from James and looked out at the moonlight caressing the treetops in the park.

I imagined I was holding hands with James, the two of us looking up at the moon together.

“Did you know there’s a mineral named after the
Apollo 11
astronauts?” I asked James in my fantasy. “It’s called armalcolite.”

James laughed. “You are a
huge
geek.”

I rolled over to face him. “Then you’re in love with a huge geek.”

He lifted his shoulders. “And I will readily admit it to anyone who asks.”

Then I closed my eyes and let the imaginary James kiss me. I concentrated as hard as I could, until I could feel the smoothness of his lips against mine, and just like that, I wasn’t entirely sure. I wasn’t sure if I’d just made this moon-watching scene up, or if it was another memory, another real event, coming back to me.

This was what Fern Haven had done to me. I was never going to trust my memory again. But there is one thing I can tell you for absolute certain, my friend.

I’m more determined than ever to find James.

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