Super Max and the Mystery of Thornwood's Revenge

by Susan Vaught

  As I studied the limestone, it started to look even more gray and graveyard-y. Slowly, I steered around the hole, taking and posting pictures, until I reached the doorway that led back to Thornwood Manor’s entrance. Then I backed away from the pit until my wheels crossed the threshold and I was off the creaking boards. That left me facing the back windows directly level with my bedroom. If I squinted across the field, I could see my own window and the top of my desk.

  “This is where I first saw the light, I think,” I said, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear me.

  A bunch of rattling seemed to come from everywhere at once—below, to my left, and above, as everyone shifted around the areas they were exploring. Stairs creaked as Toppy started back downstairs.

  From underneath the floor, Ms. Springfield said, “You sure?”

  Her flashlight beam poked up through the hole as I searched around the room, squinting at the intact pieces of the floor. So dusty. But over across the room, the dust had been smeared around in an area where I hadn’t rolled. It was right in front of the window aligned with my bedroom.

  It looked like smeared footprints, but—yes, there. One that wasn’t smeared. I tucked my iPad against my leg again and leaned forward, trying to get a better look in the gray, wintry afternoon light. Yep. Pretty big print, too. Man-size. I couldn’t see the details from where I was, but I was betting it was from a sneaker, because I could see some patterns in the tread. And beyond it another, and another, like somebody had looped the hole in the floor. Closer to me, it was less dusty, but there were still a few marks where my wheels hadn’t messed them up, maybe partial shoe marks.

  “Definitely a footprint,” I said. “Well, prints! In front of the window, and heading toward where I’m sitting.”

  Lavender and Mayor Chandler and Toppy crowded into the dining room doorway, looking in the direction I pointed.

  “Careful now,” Toppy said. “If there really is a footprint here, I need you folks not to touch anything else or mess up the scene.”

  “Coming!” Ms. Springfield called from the cellar.

  I pulled off my safety belt and leaned even farther out to stare at the footprint. Lavender started into the room, but Mayor Chandler held her back.

  “Toppy said don’t disturb anything,” she said. “And I don’t think that floor’s safe.”

  Toppy glanced at me. Then he startled and his eyes went wide. He was looking behind me.

  My heart gave a lurch, and I lost my grip on the chair arms. My hand hit the chair control. It rolled forward, then shut off suddenly and stopped hard. There was nothing I could do as I pitched onto the broken boards, my iPad tumbling out behind me.

  Pain blasted up through my hands and wrists as I broke my fall, desperate not to flip into the hole in the floor and explode my entire body on the limestone below. The whole house seemed to shake as everyone rushed into the room, skirting around the hole and charging toward me.

  “I’m okay,” I tried to say, but wheezed because the fall had knocked my breath straight out of my lungs.

  Then, before anyone could reach me, big hands slid under my side and rolled me over.

  I found myself looking into square tinted lenses set inside black frames. Big nose. Bald as Toppy, but his head was tan and shiny. Thick brown eyebrows, mustache, a goatee, and pork-chop sideburns that Elvis the King would have envied—and he was big. Like, walking-mountain big, with lots of muscles. He looked younger than Toppy and the mayor, but older than Ms. Springfield. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with a skull on it, and he was wearing a black biker vest with lots of dangly silvery things.

  “You okay, kid?” Mountain Man asked.

  Ugh. His breath smelled like onions.

  Toppy, Mayor Chandler, and Lavender got to my side just as Ms. Springfield clattered through the main doorway. She pulled up short beside the big man, squeaked in surprise, and said, “Junior Thornwood! What on earth are you doing here?”

  8

  The Blue Creek Police Department was a lot warmer than Thornwood Manor, especially as the sun set. It was also crowded with desks, a few cubicles, and corkboards crammed with pictures, maps, lists, and flyers. Once we got past the small front desk with its single bulletproof window, the whole place smelled a lot like ravioli, burned microwave popcorn, and really strong coffee, with a festive holiday lacing of chocolate brownies and peppermint.

  Gag.

  “And that’s about it, Chief,” said the dispatcher, a uniformed woman who looked younger than most of the high school kids I knew.

  “That’s certainly enough.” Toppy patted her shoulder. Then he sighed at the stack of complaints the dispatcher had handed him. I could see a few of them fanned out on top, citizens who called in reports of nasty e-mails with owl pictures on them, nastier reviews of their businesses on Yelp and other commerce-rating sites, mean chat messages, and Blue Creek’s town Facebook page being hacked and filled with owls, bad words, and threats about Thornwood’s Revenge coming soon. The hacker didn’t seem to be pretending to be Toppy anymore, just aggravating people and taunting my grandfather because he couldn’t do anything to stop the harassment.

  Lavender took the stack from my grandfather and dropped them on a desk next to a computer she had switched on. “Leave those for now,” she told him. “Help me instead, please?”

  I had my chair reclined so Mayor Chandler could finish fussing over the few scrapes I got on my arms and face from my fall, before Toppy had picked me up and put me back in my chair. She dabbed at them with an alcohol prep she had retrieved from the station’s first aid kit.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Are you sure my iPad didn’t crack?”

  “The iPad is fine.” She kept blinking too fast as she dot-dot-dotted me with liquid fire. “You’re going to have bruises.”

  Ouch. It hurt to move. “Don’t worry. I get lots of them. Proof that I am not, despite all the rumors, actually a superhero.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Mayor Chandler bit her lip.

  Poke, poke, poke . . . that alcohol stuff really burned. “You didn’t do it,” I told Mayor Chandler. “I’m the one who jumped out of my skin and went splat.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, then glanced across the room.

  That’s where Ms. Springfield was doing her own fussing over Junior Thornwood, handing him coffee and a brownie and asking, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to town?”

  “Wanted to surprise you,” Junior said. When he smiled at her, it lit up his whole face and made him look like a nice guy. It was sort of a relief that he didn’t resemble his skinflint old ancestor. If I’d had to sit in the police station with the image of Hargrove Thornwood, I’d have been totally creeped out.

  “I’d estimate it’s a ten,” Toppy said. “Same size and pattern I saw in the dust on the stairs to the turret.”

  I turned my head to the right to see him and Lavender and the computer, despite loud griping from my stiff neck and more fussing from Mayor Chandler. Lavender moved her mouse and enlarged a photo she must have taken of the sneaker print I had seen in front of the window facing my bedroom.

  “Maybe a ten and a half, or eleven.” Toppy sighed. “Smaller than mine, but the most common shoe size for men in the United States.”

  “What about the pattern?” Lavender pointed at the rows of square spots in the dust.

  “Nike, probably,” Toppy said. “Looks like an Air Max.”

  Lavender gave him a quick, shocked stare until I said, “They have databases of shoeprints. Police, I mean. If he knows what it is without looking it up, it’s a popular type.”

  “Anybody on your suspect list of people getting out of jail wear that size?” I asked.

  Mayor Chandler finally stopped alcohol-ing me. “We don’t really have a suspect list. Came up empty, and the State Police and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations are just getting started, but they don’t have a lot of leads, either.”

  Toppy gave her a get-quiet frown. “That shoe
size could be half the town—or the state. Gets us nowhere.”

  “Except that some guy with size ten feet was in Thornwood Manor.” I lowered my chair back from its recline and sat up straight. “It proves I wasn’t hallucinating.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘proves,’ ” Toppy muttered, but he gave me a wink.

  Lavender leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. “But is it connected to the hacker?”

  “Of course it is.” Toppy snorted. “No such thing as coincidence in law enforcement.”

  I tapped both armrests. “Yeah. Creepy person starts doing creepy stuff on the Internet, covering everything with owls and talking about Thornwood’s Revenge at the exact same moment that creepy things start happening at Thornwood Manor. No coincidences there. But I can’t figure how it’s all connected.”

  “Because that’s my job, not yours,” Toppy told me. “I took you into Thornwood because I thought it would put your mind at ease, but I shouldn’t have done it. Since somebody really has been messing around in there, it’s a police matter now.”

  Oh, great. I grimaced and caught Lavender’s eye, then Mayor Chandler’s. “Police matter” was grandfather code for Stay out of this, little girl, and let the grown-ups do their jobs.

  “At least it’s not your shoe size,” Lavender said. “Max and I can post about it—you know, to reassure everybody you’re not the one doing the hacking.”

  “No,” Toppy said. “Let it be, as of now. I mean it.”

  Across the squad room, Junior Thornwood gave a loud belly laugh. He lifted his cell phone. “Can’t understand these things. Thanks for fixing it. I got left behind when MS-DOS switched to Windows.”

  I looked at his shoes. Well, biker boots. They were leather, black with lots of buckles. And his feet were as big as the rest of him.

  “He’s too tall.” My grandfather came over to me and put his hand on my head. “I’d estimate six feet, four inches. He’ll wear a fifteen, maybe larger. And I just told you, leave it alone.”

  “Police matter,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’m not kidding.”

  “I know.”

  I sighed, because Toppy was right—about Junior’s height being wrong for the shoe, not the “police matter” junk. I wasn’t a rocket scientist (not out of the range of possibilities) or a software designer building huge databases for the police to use (yet) or a criminal profiler for the FBI (very high on my list), but I knew height sort of dictated how big a foot somebody would have. Junior Thornwood was size huge, in everything. Especially that grin he kept giving Ms. Springfield. It was obvious enough to earn a size-huge glare from Lavender, let me tell you.

  “Do you guys have a board started on the hacker?” I asked Toppy, drawing new puzzled expressions from Mayor Chandler and Lavender both.

  “You’re not looking at it,” Toppy told me.

  “Meaning, it’s somewhere around here?” I gave Toppy a sharp stare, but he didn’t answer. To Lavender and Mayor Chandler I said, “Toppy’s old-school, and he and his officers put up crime boards for bigger crimes they’re investigating. You know, to pin up notes and photos and ideas and suspects. It helps them keep track of things.”

  “No,” Toppy said, looking from me to Lavender and back at me again. “Don’t even think about it.”

  Lavender jumped up and went buzzing around the squad room, hopping and standing on her tiptoes to try to see what was on the crime boards that were closest to us.

  “Hey!” Toppy strode toward her. “You stop that, Lavender!”

  “Honey, don’t.” Ms. Springfield went after Lavender, and Junior Thornwood moved his imposing bulk over to me and Mayor Chandler. When he walked up to my chair, I found myself staring straight into the skull on his black T-shirt. It had flames coming out of its eyes.

  “You feeling better, kid?” he asked.

  “My name’s Max.” I studied him for a second, then stuck out my hand. “Do you have a thing for my best friend’s mother?”

  Mayor Chandler coughed. “I’ll uh—I’ll just . . .” She sidled off out of my line of sight.

  Junior swallowed half my arm with his fingers, and very, very gently, shook my hand. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, a slight Northern twang to his voice. “I do like Joy Springfield. Always have, since the first time I saw her again after we grew up. It was four years back, after the cave-in at the manor. When she asked if she could take you guys into the old place today—seemed like a good time for a visit.”

  My eyebrows lifted. Honesty. I hadn’t expected that.

  He grinned at me, but the grin didn’t quite match the glint in his eyes. I stared at him, from his throwback Elvis sideburns to his vest and leather boots. He had a few tattoos on his arms, but I’d seen people with lots more.

  “Are you rich?” I asked him.

  “Max!” That was Toppy, who now had Lavender under one arm, pulling her away from the crime boards while she tickled him and demanded a brownie and some warm cider in exchange for leaving the squad room alone.

  Junior Thornwood’s cheeks flushed. “No, ma’am. Comfortable, because of my family’s money, but I supplement my living by selling motorcycles. They’re my passion.”

  “So, you’re a Thornwood who has been able to make money?” I asked.

  For a split second, Junior’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t speak right away. Toppy always said silence was a powerful weapon when interrogating suspects, so I just watched Junior and waited for more, and he gave it pretty quickly.

  “I put my sales lot in Connecticut on the market last month,” he admitted. “I’ve been thinking about coming down here to open a new one.”

  “Not a lot of people in Blue Creek buy motorcycles,” I told him. “And are you planning to live in a haunted house?”

  “Maybe I could get folks from Nashville to drive up to Blue Creek if my deals are good enough,” he said. “And no to the house. I’m not that brave.”

  He gave me another grin, and this time, the smile reached his eyes. Still, I found myself holding on to my armrests. I wanted to like him, sort of did like him, but something—something felt a little off.

  “Max Brennan, stop asking people rude personal questions or it’ll be movies and reports for you,” Toppy grumped as he stalked past me toting Lavender like a suitcase. He plopped her into the chair nearest me as her mother caught up to them, and he pointed his finger right at Lavender’s nose. “As for you, Miss Marple, this isn’t a television detective show. You just—”

  His ancient flip-phone rang, freezing him midbluster. Ms. Springfield took over on Lavender guard duty as he pulled it out of his pocket, fumbled with the buttons, and finally managed his usual, “Yel-low?”

  The top of his head flushed pink.

  My heart skipped. “Oh, jeez. Is it the hacker again? What now?”

  Toppy closed his eyes. Opened them. And stared right at me. My heart skipped harder.

  “Yep,” he said. “She’s right here.”

  He handed the phone to me.

  Cold dread blanketed my shoulders, but not because of what the hacker might be doing. Toppy had just sold me out. I knew it. My eyes stayed locked on his, and I tried to let him know that I wouldn’t forgive him, that I’d get even, and that he was an evil piece of skunk cabbage and I hoped he got planted in the back garden and a deer ate his ears off.

  “Maxine?” My mother’s voice seemed to echo out of the flip-phone and fill the entire police station. “Honey, are you there?”

  Oh, I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to answer soooo bad. But everybody was staring at me, and I knew she’d just get louder and more worried sounding, so I coughed up a raspy, “Here.”

  “Oh, good.” Her volume dropped enough for me to put the top piece of the phone to my ear.

  “I got this e-mail through my gallery site,” Mom went on. “It said I needed to come get you right away, that somebody’s trying to hurt you and Dad.”

  Words. I needed to think of some, then use them. They just didn�
��t want to happen. It took me a full five seconds to come up with, “No. You don’t need to come get me.” Because that would be a hurricane-level disaster. Maybe even earthquake-level. Tornado during hurricane, while an earthquake was happening and a volcano blew up. “It’s just some hacker being a jerk online.”

  Mom let out a loud breath. “I went to look for those fake pages Dad told me about, and I didn’t see anything.”

  “We got those taken down.” My free hand dropped to my armrest, and I squeezed the snot out of the padding. “Listen, Mom. Who sent that e-mail you got?”

  “It came through the gallery’s contact page,” Mom said. “ThornwoodsRevenge@hotmail.com.”

  I repeated the e-mail address for Lavender to hear, and then added, “Through Mom’s gallery contact page,” cuing Lavender to start looking stuff up on the station desktop. Thankfully, everyone turned to see what she was doing.

  Mom was still talking. “That bothered me a lot. All those old legends about Thornwood’s Revenge—what’s happening there in Blue Creek?”

  “Nothing.” Except cruel, evil Internet stuff. And spooky flickering lights and footprints at Thornwood. “Toppy says all that legend stuff’s just hooey.”

  A pause. “Sounds like him. But, Maxine, maybe you should come stay with me until the police figure out what’s happening. I don’t want you in any danger.”

  “I’m not in danger, and I don’t want to come to California.” I’d rather watch Sentimental Flicks movies while eating Brussels sprouts, spinach, and broiled liver every single night for the next million and two years. “School isn’t out yet, and besides, it’s almost the holidays. It’s supposed to be cold and snow until January. The beach is weird at Christmas—and I don’t exactly fit in your apartment, now that I’m electric.”

  Another pause. This one longer. “The elevator’s been working pretty well lately.”

  “People with kids in electric wheelchairs don’t usually live on the third floor, Mom.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “When that elevator went out two summers ago, I got trapped there. I hated it. I’m not doing that again.”