Confessions of a Murder Suspect (8 page)

Soon, I noticed that Hugo’s breathing had slowed. He wasn’t in a state anymore.

“It was late, Hugo, and you were asleep. Whoever killed them was intent on being silent and invisible. If Malcolm and Maud had screamed, you would’ve been right there. All of us would have.”

A few minutes later Hugo was asleep, half on me, half on the unloved stuffed pony. And he left me alone with a question:

Why hadn’t my parents screamed?

15

After everything that had happened,
it was hard to believe I’d be able to sleep. But I dozed off as soon as I crawled back into my bed, only to wake up sweating and feeling like I’d traveled very far—but also like I’d been tied to a bungee cord and yanked back to my bed, hard.

I’d had a dream, and like most of my dreams, it was a memory, complete in every detail.

My twin brother, Harry, and I had just turned three.

Maud was carrying Harry piggyback and Malcolm was carrying me. I had my fingers twisted in my father’s hair and my legs were hooked around his chest. I was grabbing onto his shoulders and pulling up because I was so excited, kicking him in the ribs to make him go faster.

I could already recite Victorian poetry from memory, but right then I only had one thing to say: “Harry, Mommy, lookit meeee, lookit meeee.”

The four of us were at the small boardwalk amusement park at Coney Island, where Malcolm and Maud had come as kids before they got married.

Maud looked beautiful in this memory, if that’s indeed what it was. She was wearing a butter-yellow sundress and her dark hair was curling around her face and she was beaming at Malcolm and me as she said to my brother, “You’re going to love this, my angel. This is going to be a wonderful experience. I wish that
I
were going on the rollercoaster for the first time.”

Oompah music was coming from the merry-go-round, and bright-eyed, happy people swarmed all around us. Other kids were on their parents’ shoulders or holding their hands or giggling and weaving through the crowd at high speed. And there was the pervasive and incredibly delicious first-time smells of burnt sugar and popcorn.

We joined the line for the Cyclone, and as we reached the front, the train of roller-coaster cars braked with a loud metallic squeal. A man in a striped shirt and suspenders pulled a lever and the lap bars came up, releasing the people who had been on the ride. They spilled giddily down the ramp past us.

Now, no three-year-old would ever be legally allowed to ride on a coaster like the Cyclone, but Malcolm and Maud thought their children were up to the task. The man looked at us and shook his head, pointing to the height requirement. My father pulled out his wallet and quickly remedied the situation; several hundred-dollar bills, at least, must have changed hands. The man’s face broke into a smile, and he tore our tickets and remarked on what pretty children we were. Our parents placed us next to each other in one of the seats, and then took the seat behind ours.

The metal bar came down across our laps and locked with a loud
clank
—although there was still a considerable amount of space between our bodies and the bar. The train began to roll forward. “Here we gooooo,” Malcolm sang from behind me. “Hang ooooooon.”

The car rolled slowly at first, chug-chug-chugging as it went up the incline. For a moment we hung over the boardwalk. We could see the moving dots of color below, and the other rides, and even the beach and the horizon.

And then, with a breathtaking and shocking suddenness, it all dropped away. My stomach flipped over and my eyes watered and I gripped the lap bar with both hands.

It was the most incredible feeling.

I was
flying
.

As the car hurtled toward the boardwalk, Harry let out
a piercing scream that could be heard over the shrieks of our fellow passengers—and probably across the whole island. I looked at him and saw that his face was crumpled, completely transformed by terror.

I turned away.

I could see myself as if from above, leaning into the wind, looking into the next dip and rise, feeling one with the roller coaster, seeing everything. I didn’t want it to stop.

But it
did
stop—because of Harry’s wailing, blubbering, unceasing meltdown. The man in the striped shirt slowed and then stopped the roller coaster as it pulled into the station.

The bars went up.

Malcolm reached toward me to lift me out of the seat, but Maud picked me up instead and said to Malcolm, “You take
him
.”

We left Coney Island in a hurry. I wrapped my legs around Maud’s waist and pressed my face against her sunny yellow bust. Harry clutched Malcolm’s hand and was being dragged along, sobbing the whole way.

My father said sternly, “Buck up, son.”

I never heard our mother call Harry “my angel” again. And for a long time, he was referred to as “the boy we found on the boardwalk.”

I was three, and three was all about
meeeee
. But do I regret that I hated my brother for being afraid?

Profoundly.

After the murders I was consumed by sadness for my brilliant and lovable twin, who had never been considered good enough, and would never be able to confront our parents as an adult.

I wanted to give in to my grief for Harry, and for my mother and father, too. But no tears would come.

What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I cry?

16

The day after my parents were murdered
was a Saturday. For the first Saturday morning that I could remember, Malcolm wasn’t in the kitchen whipping up something green and stinking to infuse our brains with oxygen and steep our bodies in trace minerals.

There were also no calisthenics, no foreign-language drills, no pop quizzes on geopolitics or the state of the global economy.

The very atmosphere had changed.

It was as if one of the elements of the planet had disappeared; not water, air, fire, or earth, but something else. Maybe it was the rule of law, as Malcolm would call it.

I opened my computer and did a search for
sudden
deaths
and
black tongues
and found terrible things that raised my eyebrows as high as they could go. I began a folder of questions with both answers and hypotheses and was still absorbed in my detective work when the police arrived for a surprise visit at 7:30
AM
.

Again, I was the one who heard the buzzer and let them in.

We stood in the hallway, under a chandelier shaped like a sci-fi UFO, and the police began to grill me right there under its bright, blinking lights.

Detective Hayes looked as though he hadn’t changed his clothes from the night before. Sergeant Caputo wore a short-sleeved shirt and black slacks that stopped short of his black sneakers. He looked down at me as though I were a bug mounted in a lab.

“You didn’t tell me you had a guest for dinner last night. Why did you withhold information, Toodles?”

Some people might have been embarrassed at being caught in a lie of omission by a crude cop with a tattoo of a goat on his wrist, but it didn’t bother me. My parents had repeatedly told me that I had a “phlegmatic” conscience—which basically means it doesn’t work overtime—and that that was a good thing. Was either part of that true? I had no idea.

I fake-smiled and said, “Are you pretending you don’t
know my name, Sergeant Caputo? Or is jabbing a suspect an interview technique of yours? I really want to know. I’m learning your craft, and I’m a fast learner.”

“You cost us valuable time, Candy. If we had known, we would have interviewed Ambassador Panyor last night.”

“I’m not supposed to speak to you without my attorney, but I’ll give you this for free,” I said. “The ambassador didn’t kill my parents. My father prepared all of the food, and I helped him. The meal was served in big bowls, family-style. My brother Harry and I ate everything my parents ate, drank everything they drank. We’re both perfectly fine, and apparently so is the ambassador. You can’t arrest him, anyway. He has immunity.”

“You should have told me, Tidbit. I’m moving you to the top of my list,” Caputo said.

He answered his phone, then opened our front door for a couple of CSIs. The three of them went upstairs to what I still thought of as my parents’ room.

We had truly been invaded by aliens. Rude and very nasty ones. And there was nothing we could do to stop them from infesting our home planet.

17