13 Hangmen

by Art Corriveau

  “Or like Ann Arbor?” Julia said. “Where I actually have work.”

  “You’ve been looking for ways to ramp up your career as a book designer,” Michael said. “Boston has something like seventy-five colleges. With your portfolio and references, the academic presses will be banging down the door.”

  “But we’re enrolled at Ann Arbor High this fall!” Mikey said.

  “Its varsity baseball team is third best in the state,” Angey added.

  “Why would you ever want to go to boring old Ann Arbor High?” Michael said. “When you could be freshmen at Boston Latin, the oldest and most respected public school in the country? Which, in addition to boasting a nationally ranked varsity team called the Wolfpack, happens to be located about a block from Fenway Park.”

  The twins shot each other a look, not quite sure what to think.

  “Bottom line?” Michael said. “No one’s offering us a free place to live here in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, there’s a gigantic house just sitting empty in Boston’s North End with our name on it. It’s like a gift from heaven. And if we want to take advantage of it, we’ve got to do so before Tony’s thirteenth birthday.”

  “Why?” Julia said.

  “That’s what Zio Angelo stipulated in his will,” Michael said with a shrug.

  They all looked over at Tony.

  “I only met the guy once,” Tony said—an undeniable fact.

  No one knew quite where to go from there.

  “So what’s the North End?” Mikey said.

  “The city’s most historic neighborhood,” Michael said. “Zio Angelo’s town house is over three hundred years old.”

  “What’s a town house?” Angey said.

  “Quintessential Boston living,” Michael assured him. “A brick row house that shares its walls with the neighbors on either side. Zio Angelo’s is just one room wide, and two deep, but four stories tall. It’s in a cobbled cul-de-sac of town houses surrounding a giant old oak. It’s called Hangmen Court. How’s that for a colorful address?” Michael turned to Tony. “You’re awful quiet. What do you think?”

  Tony glanced over at the twins. Mikey and Angey were always ganging up on him, messing with his stuff, ditching him when they went out, excluding him from their secrets. Twins should be outlawed. Or everybody should have one. “Will I get my own room?” he said.

  “Funny you should ask,” Michael said. “That was another weird stipulation of Zio Angelo’s will: that you—and only you—should get his bedroom. It’s the whole top floor of the house. Your own private domain.”

  A shiver ran up Tony’s spine. So that was what Zio Angelo had meant in his birthday card: Give this the place of honor in your new room.

  “Why would he do a thing like that?” Mikey said, reading Tony’s mind.

  “Who knows?” Michael said. “He obviously took quite a shine to Tony at Thanksgiving. Maybe you two shouldn’t have excused yourselves so quickly when he started talking. Or maybe you should have rooted for the Red Sox, like Tony, instead of the Tigers.” Michael turned back to Tony. “Well? Are you up for it?”

  A room with a door he could slam in the twins’ face, then lock?

  “Totally,” Tony said.

  here it is,” Tony said, pointing through the fly-specked windshield at an old-fashioned street sign off to the left:

  HANGMEN CT.

  DEAD END

  “Finally,” Julia said, throwing on the turn signal. “Note to self: Never download Boston driving directions off the Internet.”

  They’d been circling the North End’s narrow one-way streets for a half hour. The guidebook in Tony’s lap clearly confirmed it was the city’s oldest neighborhood. (Originally settled by John Winthrop’s band of Puritans in 1630, but changing hands often to welcome each new wave of immigrants: first to runaway blacks escaping slavery, next to whole Irish clans escaping the potato famine in Ireland, then to Jews escaping persecution in Europe, and most recently to Italian families like the DiMarcos hoping to live the American Dream.) But what Tony had seen of the North End so far looked kind of sketchy and grungy—pretty much the same as downtown Detroit.

  Which was why his very first reaction to Hangmen Court was relief. It was exactly how Michael had described it three weeks ago: a quiet cul-de-sac of beautifully restored Colonial town houses surrounding a grassy oval planted with the largest oak tree he had ever seen. The sidewalks were laid with bricks the same color as the buildings, and an antique gas lamp sputtered in front of every stoop.

  “Sweet!” Mikey said. “We’re rich.”

  “Which one’s ours?” Angey said.

  Tony didn’t care. The twins had done nothing but complain from the backseat since they’d all set off from Ann Arbor early the previous morning: We’re too hot, turn the AC up. We’re too cold, turn it down. We like this song, turn the radio up. We hate this one, change the station. Ohio is boring, how long till we get to upstate New York? Upstate is even more boring, how long till we get to the motel in Albany? This motel doesn’t have a pool, let’s just head for Boston. Unfortunately, Julia had been too exhausted to make the four-hour drive across Massachusetts in the dark. So they had gotten up early. And the twins had started right back in again about Denny’s or McDonald’s for breakfast.

  It was now noon. Tony had a splitting headache. He was desperate for a pee. And he just wanted out of the car. Any of these places would do, in his opinion.

  Until Julia pulled up in front of No. 13.

  “Oh my God,” Mikey said.

  “What have we done?” Angey said.

  For once, Tony agreed with them. There was no other way to put it: 13 Hangmen Court was a total dump. Their town house wasn’t beautifully restored. It was a pile of dirty old bricks on the verge of collapse. “Must be some mistake,” Tony said.

  Nope. There was Michael, grinning and waving, bounding down the uneven steps of a steep front stoop. (Michael had flown ahead to meet the moving van with the family’s stuff.) He didn’t seem at all horrified. In fact, he seemed pleased. Reluctantly, Tony climbed out of the car. His dad ruffled his hair. “Pretty great birthday present, eh Tony? Thirteen must be your lucky number!”

  Tony didn’t reply. He was actually sort of speechless. Today was his birthday. But whenever he had imagined himself turning thirteen, he was always twenty-five pounds lighter. (So far he hadn’t lost anywhere near twenty-five pounds. More like ten. Well, maybe eight. But if he were to be honest, that wasn’t the fault of Julia’s latest dieting strategy of portion control—which was basically to limit everything on Tony’s plate to the size of his clenched fist: a fist-size burger patty without the bun, a fist of mashed potatoes, and a fist of peas—but, rather, the fault of all those fist-size Snickers bars he’d been sneaking on the side.) Then again, Tony had also pictured himself in Chicago, racing around a giant mansion on Lake Michigan, finding the ropes and knives of murderers in real live games of Clue with dozens of junior sleuths from all over America.

  “You want us to live here?” Mikey said.

  “You sure it doesn’t have rats?” Angey said.

  Julia didn’t say anything at all. She just bit her lower lip.

  Michael laughed. “C’mon, I’ll take you on the grand tour. First stop, garden level!” But he didn’t head back up to the weather-beaten front door. He ducked beneath the stoop and opened a small ivy-covered door a few steps below the sidewalk, then slipped into a part of the house that wasn’t quite ground floor, wasn’t quite basement.

  Tony’s eye caught the flutter of lace curtains in the bay window of the supernice place next door. An old man scowled down at him, then vanished.

  Garden level was, as it turned out, the kitchen. Tony peered around a cavernous room of old-fashioned appliances and cupboards. Built into the giant bay window at the front was a funky little breakfast nook. Its table was laden with all the pots and pans Julia had shipped from Ann Arbor. Julia did not, to Tony’s utter amazement, demand that everyone climb into the car so they could hi
ghtail it back to Michigan, where they belonged. Instead, she ran her hands over the greasy gas range—one that reminded Tony of a junkyard Cadillac—and declared she was in love. “But wait, there’s more!” Michael said, beaming. He opened a door to reveal a large pantry lined with shelves. “It’s called the mother-in-law room,” he said. “The perfect place to set up a design studio.”

  “Or torture your mother-in-law,” Mikey mumbled.

  “Or skin a few rats,” Angey added.

  Tony opened the pantry’s back door and peeked out. Nothing but a rotting deck overlooking a weed-infested patio at yet another level below the street. He closed it again, shuddering.

  Julia and Michael didn’t notice; they were too busy kissing. “And it just keeps getting better,” Michael said when they finally came up for air. He opened another door to reveal an ornately carved staircase winding its way to the very top of the house. “Next stop, parlor level!” he said, leading them up to the main floor.

  Parlor level wasn’t, contrary to Michael’s promise, much of an improvement over garden level. In the front there was a musty wood-paneled dining room (not unlike what Tony had been imagining for Chicago, he had to admit), but the Addams Family–style table in the middle of this one had legs carved with gargoyles and was coated in dust. Michael pointed out a smoke-stained marble fireplace. “There’s one in nearly every room,” he said. “And they all work.” He opened an empty wooden cupboard next to it and tugged on a rope. Hidden pulleys squeaked as the shelf inside began to lower. A dumbwaiter, Michael explained, for hoisting hot food up from the kitchen.

  Or freshly skinned mothers-in-law.

  Michael led them down a short passageway, pointing out the antique water closet on the left. That was when Tony remembered how badly he had to go. Michael warned him the toilet was pretty old-school; to flush, you needed to pull the chain dangling from a porcelain tank overhead. “I think I can handle it,” Tony said. Michael laughed—very funny—and told him to rejoin the tour in the back parlor. When Tony yanked down on the chain, though, the toilet didn’t flush. The chain just broke off in his hand. Tony set it on the wooden seat to wash his hands at the tiny sink. Rusty water gushed out of the tap and drenched the front of his white T-shirt with bright-orange blotches. No towels. No toilet paper, even. He had no choice but to wipe his hands on the seat of his jeans and head for the back parlor.

  Why had it suddenly gone so quiet?

  Everyone was staring at the tarnished brass bed in the middle of the room. Tony joined the semicircle of speechless DiMarcos. “OK, so that’s weird,” he said.

  Michael stammered an apology. He had meant to get the bed dismantled and donated to Goodwill before they arrived. Zio Angelo had slept there after he fell ill, when it became too hard for him to make it up to his real bedroom.

  “Wait,” Tony said. “That isn’t where the neighbor, you know, found him?”

  Michael answered by not answering. “Check out that desk!” he said, pointing to a gigantic rolltop in an alcove over by the fireplace. “That’s going straight to my new office on the second floor, which was originally the library, so it already has shelves for all my research books. In fact, let’s head up there now.”

  Everyone trooped up to the second floor—except Tony. He couldn’t take his eyes off the bed. What was that glinting under it? He stooped and tugged a small metal key—the kind Benjamin Franklin might have used to fly on his kite in a lightning storm—out of a crack between the floorboards. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and slipped the key into an empty credit-card slot. He decided not to let anyone know he’d found it—especially not the twins—until he figured out what it opened.

  Everyone was stopped at a recess in the first hairpin turn of the staircase. “Coffin corner,” Michael was explaining. He darted a quick glance at Tony, then hesitated before continuing. “This little niche in the wall prevents, um, furniture from getting stuck when you’re moving it up and down.” No one commented. After seeing that bed in the parlor, it couldn’t have been clearer what kind of furniture he meant.

  The so-called library did indeed boast a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, though Tony worried that setting any books on the shelves might cause the whole thing to tip over on top of Michael and crush him like a bug. In the rear there was a spacious master suite that came with a gigantic four-poster bed plus its own fireplace and bathroom. Julia gave Michael another excited hug.

  Oh, great. No chance of a mutiny now.

  Tony even lost the twins as unlikely allies when they saw their two bedrooms on the next floor. Mikey immediately called dibs on the front one, because it had a wooden sleigh bed and bay window. Angey accepted, as usual, the smaller rear one containing a modest brass bed. But both rooms were connected by a full-size bathroom with a normal toilet and shower. Which caused them to high-five.

  Michael turned to Tony. “Ready to check out the penthouse suite Zio Angelo saved for you?”

  Tony nodded, not so sure.

  He followed his dad up the final flight of stairs to a peeling door. The twins and Julia brought up the rear, discussing what colors they planned to paint their rooms.

  “You go first,” Michael told Tony, stepping aside. “I haven’t even been up here yet myself.”

  Tony nodded again. Bracing himself for the worst, he turned the knob and swung the door open to discover—

  The worst.

  It was just an attic. Bare floors, bare walls, bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; no bay window, no fireplace—no bathroom! From dim wedges of daylight cast by small dormer windows at the front and back, Tony could make out—barely—an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair against one sloping wall, a beat-up dresser against the other, and a bookcase parked in front of some tacky laminated paneling beneath a weird slab of slate. It was a shelf, sort of, that jutted out of the wall.

  “Where’s the bed?” Mikey said over Tony’s shoulder.

  “Down in the parlor,” Angey laughed.

  Michael didn’t deny it.

  “No way,” Tony said.

  Michael nudged Tony into the room, reassuring him that top of the list was buying him a brand-new bed. Meantime—just for a night or two—they might need to move Zio Angelo’s up from the parlor. But they would definitely toss the old bedding straight into the trash. Tony could use his own sheets and comforter from Ann Arbor.

  “No way,” Tony said. “I’ll sleep on the floor first.”

  Mikey and Angey declared they wouldn’t sleep in this room, period.

  Michael suggested the twins head downstairs to the kitchen for some lunch. The fridge was stocked with hummus and tabouleh salad and pita pockets from a health-food store around the corner. He and Julia needed a private word with Tony.

  “No cold cuts?” Mikey said.

  “Not even any tuna fish?” Angey sighed.

  “Sorry, meat wasn’t the first thing that leaped to my mind,” Michael said.

  (Michael had, in fact, been a vegetarian since high school. He didn’t mind if the rest of the family was carnivorous, but he himself wouldn’t even wear leather shoes or belts. He was also a devout Buddhist, which meant that he didn’t believe in killing any living creature—not even a house fly—since its soul might reincarnate into a human being one day. Though admirable, this didn’t help Michael’s geek factor at all.)

  “Tabouleh tastes like kitty litter,” Mikey grumbled. He clomped down the attic steps with Angey at his heels.

  Michael reached over and gave Tony a side hug. “I admit it needs work,” he said. “Let’s face it, the whole house is a little rough around the edges. Poor Zio Angelo. He just wasn’t able to look after it properly toward the end. Nothing a little DiMarco family TLC can’t fix.”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Tony cried. “This whole place should be bulldozed to the ground!”

  “It’s not that bad,” Michael said.

  At that point, Tony melted down. It had been a very long couple of days—it was his birthday—and he coul
dn’t keep it bottled up: Doors squealed open, ceiling paint drifted down on your head like snow, toilet chains came off in your hand, and water gushed orange out of the rusty tap. Hadn’t anyone else noticed the amount of wallpaper stripping and floor sanding it would take to make this house even remotely livable?

  Michael patted Tony’s shoulder. He was positive that once Tony had run the vacuum cleaner, hung a few posters, and laid his own comforter on the bed, he would feel completely different about his new bedroom.

  “Hello?” Tony said. “It’s not a bedroom. It’s the attic. Plus it feels all spooky and haunted and weird. I’m not sleeping here. Ever. That’s final.”

  “Tony’s afraid of ghosts,” Mikey singsonged up the stairwell. Angey burst into a fit of giggles. They had both been eavesdropping, of course, from the third-floor landing.

  Julia told them to beat it—this was a private conversation. They clambered down the rest of the staircase to the kitchen, wailing like banshees. She rolled her eyes and advised Tony to ignore them. Which, in his opinion, wasn’t at all the same as sticking up for him. Meanwhile, Michael reassured him an old house like this one had its own quirky language—creaks and groans he’d eventually get used to and stop hearing. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of all ghosts turned out to be mice in the walls.

  “Not helping!” Tony said. Michael opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Seriously, Dad, what did Zio Angelo have against me? I was actually nice to him at Thanksgiving. Angey and Mikey were the ones who rolled their eyes at his stories. He should have made them sleep up here.”

  Michael laughed. “As weird as it might seem, Zio Angelo actually believed he was doing you a favor by saving you the top floor. He loved this room. He slept up here himself—ever since he was your age—and only decided to move to the parlor when he could no longer manage the stairs.”