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knew was shocked that she would actually kill herself.”
    I wrote everything down as quickly as I could. “And the other girl?”
    “Her name was Stacey Something-or-Other… Stacey Brown or Stacey Black or”—she snapped her fingers—“Stacey Blackburn! That’s it. She went to Manhattan Day. There was a holdup at a liquor store in the Sixties and she was apparently in the way as the guy tried to escape.”
    “So three girls from three different private schools have all died of gunshot wounds in the past three weeks.”
    Kendra shivered inside her black coat. “Kinda makes you not want to leave the apartment anymore, huh?”
    “It can’t be a coincidence,” I agreed.
    If someone was actually targeting private school girls, then any of us—all of us—could be in danger. Had Caputo linked these three dots together? Or was this connection my very own bolt of lightning?
    Either way, I had work to do.

10
    I saved my money,
and instead of catching a cab, I walked home from school as quickly as I could, cutting around joggers, bike messengers, jaywalkers, and eddies of lost tourists traveling against the flow.
    Three dead private school girls. There had to be a connection. There just had to be. I couldn’t wait to get to my private home office.
    I opened the door to our apartment and passed under the UFO chandelier, then stopped in my tracks. Standing in the center of the living room was a tall woman with a sprayed helmet of blond hair, wearing a tight blue suit and very high heels. I could smell her heavy perfume from fifteen feet away.
    It was strong enough to knock mosquitoes out of the air.
    “Can I help you?” I snapped, getting a bit tired of finding strangers in my house every time I came home.
    The blond woman tapped a few notes into an iPad before looking up.
    “Oh. Hello,” she said. Then she snapped a picture of Mercurio, our larger-than-life sculpture of a merman, which hung from a hook in the corkscrew opening under the spiral staircase.
    “Excuse me,” I said, taking a few steps into the room. That was when I saw that she wasn’t alone. Uncle Pig stood in the corner, sporting his signature baggy Burberry and looking disheveled like always with his flyaway ginger hair.
    He turned his tiny pig eyes on me.
    “Oh, hello, Tandoori. Magda? This is my least favorite and only niece, Tandoori Angel, a psycho terror who is my late brother’s daughter. Tandoori, this is Ms. Magda Carter. She’s in estates and consignments.”
    “How fantastic for you,” I said to the woman. “What the hell are you doing?”
    “I’m pricing your possessions for the estate sale.” She almost smacked her lips. “It’s in two weeks, you know. So much to do, so little time.”
    My fingers curled into fists as she ran her gaze covetously over our parents’ things—
our
things.
    “Jumping the gun, aren’t you, Uncle Peter?” I said. “The estate hasn’t been settled yet.”
    Uncle Peter ignored me. Shocker. “Any questions about the artwork, Magda?”
    “I think I’ve got it all,” she said. “We’re listing the piano, that darling little pig chair, the merman, and… this?”
    She placed her palm atop Robert’s head. Robert, the TV-watching Oldenburg sculpture in the living room.
    My mouth went dry. As sick as it may have sounded to a normal person, Robert was like part of my twisted family.
    “Definitely,” Uncle Peter said with a sneer.
    “Hey,” I snapped. “Did you hear me?”
    Uncle Peter jerked around as if he’d forgotten I was standing there.
    “My apologies, Magda. Clearly my niece is out of sorts,” he said. “You haven’t seen the Aronstein flag in the master suite. Why don’t you go upstairs and I’ll join you in a moment?”
    He waited as Magda clacked up the spiral staircase and then turned his beady eyes on me.
    “Don’t be so shocked, Tandy,” he said in his most imperious tone. “You know that Royal Rampling is first in line to take over this twenty-million-dollar