Super Max and the Mystery of Thornwood's Revenge

by Susan Vaught

  I had to stretch to get the receiver, then work not to get tangled in the cord (no, Toppy wouldn’t even do cordless). “Mayor Chandler? I’m on Facebook, but I’m not finding any page for Toppy Brennan.”

  “It’s not under Toppy,” she snapped. “It’s listed under his real name. . . . Oh.” She trailed off, the fire in her tone burning out completely. Once upon a time, a million years ago, Mayor Chandler had dated my grandfather. They were both in high school, before he joined the Army. They hadn’t been together very long, maybe a few months, but long enough that Mayor Chandler knew Toppy never ever went by his legal name. “Interesting. I mean, that’s unusual. I mean, why would—oh, never mind. I’m coming over.”

  She ended the call.

  I hung up the receiver and put my hand on top of Toppy’s crossword.

  He glanced up at me, pencil poised over my third knuckle. “What was all that going-on about Facebook?”

  “Mayor Chandler’s coming over. We’ve got ten minutes, assuming she wasn’t already in her car when she phoned.”

  For the briefest moment, Toppy looked like a mortified SFC heroine just after the hero shows up and catches her in flannel pj’s. Because that’s exactly what Toppy was wearing. Red-checkered no less. With matching red fluffy bunny slippers I had given him for his birthday.

  “The mayor,” I said, hoping to jar him out of stun. “She’s coming here. Right now. I’ll get rid of the tea.”

  My grandfather was seventy-four years old with arthritis in both knees. I never would have known that when he exploded up from the worktable and blew out of our living room, dropping a few not-okay-for-school phrases on his way to his closet.

  2

  When Lavender and I were little, we played superheroes all the time, when we weren’t reading about them. She helped me etch my first ever Superman S into the back of the chair I had a few years back. After that, we welded a searchlight onto one of the push-bars, and I wired it to my battery and used it to stun people while I intoned, “I’m Batman” whenever somebody asked my name. Worked great until the bulb exploded.

  Back when I still believed I’d be Super Max one day, I pretended my chair could go anywhere I wanted it to go, and turn into boats and cars and airplanes and spaceships. I had Batman cleverness, Spider-Man agility, Superman hearing, and Superman laser vision that caught every detail, every nuance of whatever we decided to investigate. Sadly, laser vision, real or pretend, didn’t help much with examining Facebook.

  “Smells like Earl Grey in here.” Mayor Chandler wrinkled her nose as she settled on her knees beside me at the worktable. “My grandmother used to drink that stuff.”

  I couldn’t see Toppy because he was standing behind my chair, but I know he must have turned red in the face. He didn’t want anybody to know he’d swapped his coffee for tea. He thought it made him seem old. As fast as I could, I expanded the Facebook page she told us about and pointed at it to get Mayor Chandler’s attention. I smiled, hoping my face looked completely innocent.

  After reading the Facebook page for a few seconds, my smile gradually shifted to a frown. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble setting this up.”

  “Mmmhmm,” Mayor Chandler agreed.

  As we studied the Facebook page of Thomas Lelliett Brennan, Elvis crooned Welcome to My World in the background. Toppy’s CD player, the one that looked like an old stereo, was on its last legs, and the disc hitched every now and then, skipping to different songs. “Anybody could have snapped that header photo of the Blue Creek Police Department,” I said. “It looks pretty recent, like they took it from Town Square. And I’m sorry. I didn’t choose this music.”

  “Yes about the picture, and I understand about the music,” Mayor Chandler said. Then, “Lelliett?”

  My grandfather stepped up on my right and cut her a side-eye.

  “Family name,” I told her, hoping the two of them didn’t go from zero to brawl in ten seconds flat.

  She pointed to the profile picture of Toppy, wearing his uniform complete with its bright blue hat. “This page has been updated since I saw it. That’s new, and it looks like his departmental identification shot.”

  Toppy shifted from foot to foot. He was wearing pressed black slacks, shiny black shoes, and this year’s winter sweater I bought him, the one with black shoulders, red stripes, and a snowflake in the center. He smelled like a pine tree. Every few seconds, he gave Mayor Chandler a once-over then looked away—then looked back again. Finally, he stared at the muted television as a secret princess galloped through Central Park on her white stallion.

  “Public record, then.” I frowned at a symbol in the upper right corner I couldn’t quite make out, so I expanded it some more. “That looks like—hmm. It’s like a drawing of a bird.”

  “An owl,” Mayor Chandler said. “Carrying something.”

  I squinted at the dark lines and angles. “Thorns,” I said. “It’s carrying a thorny vine, or something. Oh! It’s like a tattoo of the Thornwood Owl!”

  Mayor Chandler’s head automatically turned in the direction of the mansion up the hill from our house. “Okay. That’s a little strange.”

  “So is this,” I said, pointing to the next photo on the timeline. It showed a young woman with blond curls so bright they probably made people see spots. She was wearing a really ugly striped dress and holding a baby.

  The post read, Heartless Widow Chandler won’t escape Thornwood’s Revenge.

  Mayor Chandler winced as I enlarged the picture. “That’s from fifty years ago.” Her hand lifted to her ash blond ponytail, blue eyes narrowing behind her small gold glasses. “Good lord, old photos should just self-destruct after a few decades.” She sighed, then added, “Blue Creek Gazette did that article on my husband’s construction business after we got that big contract with the state parks. I was already running the front office by then.”

  I glanced at her faded jeans and white sweater, and the bomber jacket with its worn elbows. She didn’t wear cartoon-y makeup and striped dresses now. I was glad. She always looked pretty to me.

  “She won’t escape Thornwood’s Revenge,” I said. “Is that a threat?”

  “Everybody’s always citing that old legend,” she said. “It’s just another way of saying I ought to get tortured by a demon—or poisoned by a shallow-dug well. Wasn’t that how Thornwood and his wife died?”

  I had read every book about the Thornwood Manor haunting, most of them more than once. “Yes, ma’am.” I popped open another window on the iPad and clicked the bookmark for my stored copy of the old Thornwood website, the one where people could schedule tours before the floor in the mansion’s main room caved in and the city had to close down everything.

  The Thornwood Owl bloomed into view, winging across a dark night sky with its evil-looking bramble clutched tight to its chest. It faded to a page about how Thornwood lost most of his fortune, turned into the meanest man alive, and then how weird things started happening at his mansion, like noises in the night and his prized possessions disappearing. The last paragraph of the history read:

  The coroner noted odd horizontal stripes on Thornwood’s fingernails and his wife’s also, hinting at arsenic poisoning. The Thornwood Manor well was found to be contaminated. Despite persistent rumors of homicide, a state surveyor pronounced the well to be shallow-dug and contaminated with natural arsenic. No doubt this was due to Thornwood’s penny-pinching and bellicose management of his mansion’s maintenance crew, who hurried in their duties to escape his berating.

  In the end, Thornwood lived and died by his own frequent assertion: In this life, a man well and truly gets what he pays for.

  “I don’t plan to sip from an arsenic-laced well,” Mayor Chandler said, “so we can move on.”

  I closed that page, leaving her old big-hair photo front and center.

  “Library has the Blue Creek Gazette going back to June 1, 1897,” Toppy said. “Scanned it all into their computers. Whoever did this likely got your picture from those archives.”<
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  Mayor Chandler and I both looked at him, because it was the first time he had spoken since she got there. He cleared his throat, and the top of his head turned pink.

  “Do you have to go to Blue Creek Central to search the archives?” Mayor Chandler asked. “Or can you do it through their website?”

  “They don’t have anything but branch hours and community events online.” Toppy ran his fingers through hair he didn’t have, seemed to realize what he was doing, then dropped his hand back to his side. “When an officer needs something, they have to go on over to the Third Street branch.”

  My iPad chimed with a message. It dropped down in a black banner, tagged with Lavender’s purple dragon profile picture.

  Dude. Did Toppy drink too much eggnog? Have you seen Facebook?

  It’s a fake page, I typed back. Mayor’s here. Laterz.

  I swiped off Messenger and checked the next picture. Another shot of the mayor, this time when she won her first election the year after her husband passed. Widow Chandler not much for grieving, the post said.

  “At least my hair was smaller by then,” she groused.

  “I can’t tell who this jerk wants to embarrass,” I said. “He’s going after you and Toppy both.”

  “It’s me,” Toppy said.

  When we looked at him again, he shrugged. “I piss people off every day.”

  After a few seconds, Mayor Chandler said, “Can’t argue that.”

  The laugh popped out before I could stifle it, and it was my turn to get the side-eye from Toppy.

  Mayor Chandler softened her jab with, “We should check your cases and make sure nobody you helped convict just got out of prison or jail.”

  He nodded, and we went back to scrolling through the page. My watch alarm beeped, and I weight-shifted in my chair, moving more onto my right hip and taking pressure off the bottom of my spine. I had to do that every four hours during the day, so I didn’t get pressure sores and die from nonstop sitting. And even if my equipment and appointments cost a lot of money and made things harder for Toppy, I didn’t want to die, especially not from a giant hole in my butt cheek.

  After I settled myself and refreshed the page, it updated with a new picture, and my stomach clenched at the sight of a way-too-familiar mangled Ford pickup, and the high school graduation photo next to it. My grandfather’s hand came to rest on my right shoulder, and Mayor Chandler stood and touched my left shoulder.

  “You don’t have to enlarge that one, honey,” she said.

  I did anyway.

  My mother’s seventeen-year-old face stared back at me, grinning. She had green eyes like Toppy, and reddish-brown hair like his before he went bald. My eyes were dark brown, and my hair, too. Since I didn’t know my dad, I had no idea who I looked like, but it wasn’t Mom or Toppy.

  I had seen this shot about a million times. Maybe a billion. It was the yearbook photo the Gazette had used to report on the wreck Mom and I had on the Pacific Coast Highway near Monterey Bay when I was four years old. Mom was twenty-three by then, but the paper chose a picture locals would recognize.

  I didn’t remember the crash, or anything much about my life before that. Probably not a bad thing. If I could remember walking, I might miss it more.

  Difficult Year for Chief Brennan Continues:

  Granddaughter Seriously Injured in Early Morning Coast Collision

  Two weeks after Toppy’s wife, my grandmother Ada, died from cancer, a tanker truck had come around a curve in Mom’s lane and clipped our front bumper. When we spun into the bank, the ancient pickup Toppy had given Mom came apart like a toy. I couldn’t walk anymore, but at least I could pee for myself and take care of my own business, so all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

  It was an accident. Nobody’s fault. That’s what the article in the Gazette said, but whoever made this new fake Facebook page had scanned the article and trimmed off the text, leaving just the headline and picture. Above the photo, the post read,

  Eight years since disaster, and four years since my daughter blew through her settlement money and pawned off her disabled kid on me. I’ve always let my only child shirk her responsibilities. It’s a wonder Blue Creek trusts my judgment at all.

  “Shirk,” I mumbled. “Who uses words like that?”

  Pawned off . . . disabled kid . . .

  Toppy’s piney aftershave made my eyes water. From a thousand miles away, Elvis told us he was “a steamroller, baby, ’bout to roll all over you.”

  Mayor Chandler X’d out of the enlarged picture and scrolled away from the accident shot. There were a few more photos of her with snotheaded comments in the posts, and then some clips of police department problems from the past. The screen looked a little blurry, but I coughed and wiped my eyes, then shook off both the hands on my shoulders.

  “It’s all photos somebody could get from the library or online,” I said, then got mad because my voice shook, and totally furious when I realized the rest of me was shaking, too.

  Mayor Chandler scrolled back to the top of the page. “People are commenting—and the page already has two hundred and fifty-four followers.”

  Toppy folded his arms. “So? Doesn’t take a genius to see the whole thing’s a bunch of hooey.”

  “Not that simple,” Mayor Chandler muttered, pulling out her phone. “This is social media. Public pages can go viral. People in China might be reading this tomorrow.”

  I ignored Toppy’s grumbling about the page needing a whiny cat picture to be complete, and how viruses were things people got shots for, and reported the whole mess to Facebook. “They’ll probably take it down,” I told him, “but it may be a few days, and a lot of folks in town will see it. Some idiots may even believe it’s yours.”

  Mayor Chandler cleared her throat, and I realized she had been one of those idiots for a minute or two. I wanted to fall through my chair cushion, but before I could apologize, she patted my shoulder.

  “I’d suggest you put a message on the police department phone, Chief Brennan,” Mayor Chandler said. When she saw the look on his face, she tried again with, “Toppy, trust me, some people will fall for it, just like I did. You’ll be getting calls.”

  He scowled at her for a second like he didn’t quite believe anybody would be pathetic enough to pay that silly Facebook page any attention. She held his gaze, matching his stubborn with her own. Seconds ticked by. About three deep breaths later, he relented and picked up the desk unit receiver and started dialing.

  I went to my personal Facebook page and wrote a quick post about the fake account. Then, as Toppy droned on the police department main greeting about having the good sense to ignore social media nonsense, the mayor held out her phone to show me the message she was posting on Blue Creek’s official city page. She used phrases like “ludicrous fraud” and “unconscionable slander” and “catching the perpetrator responsible for this deceitful poison-pen assault.” That ought to do the trick. People would be looking up what she meant for hours.

  Toppy hung up the phone, and it rang almost immediately. Caller ID popped up on the muted television, showing a California area code as the Aloha from Hawaii CD hitched.

  “No,” I said before Toppy could answer it. “Just, no.”

  He answered it anyway.

  Heat rushed through every inch of my body.

  Before he finished his, “Yel-low?” I snatched up my iPad and booked out of the living room without even saying good-bye to Mayor Chandler.

  I rolled so fast I would have overshot my door and punched another accidental hole in the drywall, if I hadn’t practiced being Super Max most of my life. I swung wide better than a NASCAR pro and got my door locked before anybody came after me. It took me another few seconds to stack up my comics and graphic novels, find my headphone jack, jam it into place, stuff the pink buds into my ears, crank the music (anything but Elvis), shut off the lights, and get to my bedroom window.

  Deep breath.

  My jaw hurt, and I realized I had my t
eeth clamped together.

  Deep breath.

  I didn’t want to keep getting madder, because I didn’t like myself when I threw things and said a bunch of ugly stuff to people I loved.

  Deep breath. “Hammer,” I said out loud, starting with the Marvel Comics H-named superheroes, even though I couldn’t hear myself over the music pounding in my ears. “Herbie. Hairball. Hammerhead . . .”

  My teeth unclamped. With each name, I faded more and more into the music, letting myself pick up the song’s rhythm.

  By the time I got to Hulk, I no longer wanted to turn green, triple in size, grow mutant muscles, roar my name a lot, and shred my bedroom. I finished the Marvel H’s for the sake of completionism, and made a mental note to start with the Marvel I heroes next time I needed to recite.

  Then I just stared out into the night and rubbed the sides of my head. The pounding in my temples slowly got better. Then the heat I had been feeling gave way to guilt because I had gotten so mad all of a sudden, and rolled so fast I could have busted holes in the walls with my footplates, like I used to do.

  Bad.

  Bad, bad, bad.

  Just when I thought I had gotten control of my temper, boom. It would hit again. Over something stupid. Usually over something stupid named MOM.

  Let it go, let it go, let it go. . . .

  Toppy hadn’t come to get me and make me talk to Mom.

  That, at least, was good.

  Of course, with the door locked and the lights off and the music loud, I could pretend not to hear him if he knocked.

  Yeah, that would work.

  And then it would be just me, Toppy, and another week’s worth of being grounded and awful puppy-princess movies.

  3

  Super Max wouldn’t let this Facebook stuff get to her, Lavender texted. WWSMD?