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apartment, and theestate must document everything of value.” Hearing the name Rampling coming from my uncle’s mouth made me want to puke on his shoes. “Oh, wait. I remember now,” he said in a cloying tone. “Mr. Rampling’s son was a
special
friend of yours, wasn’t he?”
    Suddenly, a memory hit me with such force it almost knocked me off my feet—James and I happily cuddled up in a booth at a roadside McDonald’s upstate. A troop of black-clad henchmen tearing us away from each other. And Uncle Pig. Uncle Pig standing in the parking lot, watching it all with a triumphant smirk.
    “You were there,” I breathed.
    “I was where?” he asked.
    “You were there!” I blurted, rage burbling up inside me. “At the McDonald’s that day! When James and I were taken. When I was dragged to Fern Haven. You were there!”
    Uncle Pig’s face was blank. “You’ve never been inside a McDonald’s in your life. Or any of those awful fast-food places, for that matter. If you’d ever consumed that processed poison, your parents would have had simultaneous coronaries.”
    I squinted, the memory quickly fading—going sideways, fizzling and shifting. Suddenly, James and I wereon a beach. It was dark. It was dark and windy when the commandoes arrived.
    “But I—”
    Uncle Peter’s face twisted in disgust. “Your parents really did screw with your awful little mind, didn’t they?”
    My throat clenched and I swallowed hard, but my mind had been turned to mush by the conflicting memories, by the confusion, by the humiliation. What really happened, and why did I suddenly remember things differently? There was no comeback to be had. I turned on my heel and swept out, trying to keep my head high.
    He was still laughing as I stormed down the hall to my room.

CONFESSION
    I wished my uncle
would wander into a bad neighborhood, never to be heard from again. Or suffer a life-ending aneurysm. Or fall out a ninth-story window. I’d always believed he’d abused Katherine, and maybe even had something to do with her death.
    There was no forensic evidence to prove that Uncle Peter had anything to do with either crime. Just my instincts. But my instincts had always been sharp.
    He had, after all, moved into Katherine’s room as if it somehow belonged to him.
    It made me want to put my fist through a window actually, when I thought about it. That sounds frighteningly like something Matthew Angel would do, I know. So instead, I focused on Katherine.
    Katherine Angel was my big sister, my idol, my best and closest friend—an even closer friend than Harry.
    Katherine was hilarious, a prankster as well as a brilliant scholar, and if that wasn’t enough, she was beautiful, too. She looked exactly like Maud when she was young. Sometimes, when we put photos of the two of them side by side, the only way to tell the difference was the style of their clothes.
    My sister was sixteen when she died. We were told it was an accident, but I’ve never been sure. She was riding on the back of a motorcycle, her arms around the waist of her boyfriend, Dominick—a new boy we hadn’t met, but whom, according to her letters, she was completely, mind-bogglingly in love with—when a bus rear-ended the bike and tossed my sister into oncoming traffic. Just like that, this person who had been so full of life, so adventurous and kind and seemingly untouchable, was dead.
    The boy Katherine loved was never found. He simply picked himself up and disappeared. Kind of suspicious, no?
    Maybe he was just terrified. Or felt guilty. Or both. Maybe Katherine’s death
was
just an accident. But maybe, just maybe, her death had been arranged.
    Yet another horrible mystery, for another horrible day.
    But one thing is absolutely certain: I wished Katherine was here now. I wished I could talk to her about James and my muddled brain. I knew she would have found a way to make me feel better.
    To make it all make sense.

11
    It was dinnertime
in apartment 9G at the