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Liszt—I wasn’t sure which.
    Then he stopped playing and said to Matthew, “Who even knows if that’s true, Matty? You could have used the service elevator, and you could still have a key. No one would have known you were here. And,
Hugo
—your room is right at the foot of the stairs. You had easy access to the penthouse.”
    Hugo put down the weights and jackknifed to his feet.
    “I’m just a
kid
! I couldn’t kill my own parents. What am I supposed to do without them? Get a job? I’m four-foot-eight. I’m in the fifth grade.”
    Then he spun on his heels and pointed his huge index finger at me.
    “Tandy’s got motive, too. She’s the one who got the last Big Chop.”

12
    Are you ready for the story
of the last supper? My last dinner with Malcolm and Maud, the evening they died? I’m about to tell you the whole truth and nothing but. Far more than I told the cops. I’m really starting to trust you, reader.
    The fact is, that night I got in trouble big-time, and I was punished. And it just so happens that punishment was Malcolm and Maud’s specialty.
    As I mentioned earlier, my father had prepared a private dinner for the UN’s ambassador from the Kingdom of Bhutan. His name is Ugyen Panyor, and he believes himself to be directly descended from Ugyen Guru Rinpoche, who brought Buddhism to Bhutan thirteen centuries ago.
    Father had prepared
ema datshi
, the national dish of Bhutan. He substituted feta cheese for the yak cheese in the recipe because yak cheese is very hard to come by, even in Manhattan. But the rest of the meal was authentic, including the excess of chilies combined with tomato and garlic, and the side dish of traditional red rice.
    The ambassador was polite but not effusive in his praise, and I took offense. My father was a serious foodie. He cooked; he savored; he even named me Tandoori, after West Indian cooking that is prepared in a clay stove called a tandoor. We had a restaurant-grade tandoor oven in our own kitchen, which I’d leaned against as I watched my father prepare that night’s meal.
    So when the ambassador didn’t make mention of the obvious perfection of my father’s meal, I decided to bring up a topic that had been expressly forbidden by my parents before the ambassador arrived: the refugees living in UN-supervised camps in Nepal.
    Insurgents had sprung up in these camps, and some believed that they were the intelligence behind the bombings that had pounded the country before the parliamentary elections.
    The ambassador refused to answer my questions about the lack of progress to repatriate the refugees; he just said,with a cheeky smile, “And when did you get your degree in the foreign service, Miss Angel?”
    It was nervy of him to take me on.
    I said, “You don’t behave like an ambassador, sir. You behave like a politician.”
    The look on my father’s face said everything.

13
    After the ambassador had been escorted
to the elevator, with apologies, my parents marched me right into their study—a library with a high vaulted ceiling and bookshelves lining every wall. Two glass-topped desks stood in the middle of the room, facing each other. Samantha’s amazing framed photos of the family decorated the mantel above the fireplace, the only other available surface.
    My mother’s desk held not one, not two, but
six
computer monitors, which she used to track every burp and giggle of domestic, European, and Asian markets so she could trade in nanoseconds.
    My father’s übercomputer had one enormous screen. Itoperated at warp speed and had massive storage capacity so that he could mine the scientific world on every front, synthesize the data, and adapt it to his needs. But neither of them was sitting at their computer that night. Instead, they stood in front of them, arms crossed, staring me down as if they could crush me with their gaze.
    When my father finally began yelling at me for disgracing him in front of an important guest, Harry started banging out