by Susan Vaught
Very, very long pause. “I can’t afford to move right now.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve had the electric chair for four years.” I gripped the phone so hard the casing made click-y sounds.
“I know, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Right. You’re sorry on the third floor.” I realized I was talking through my teeth and tried to make myself relax.
My face felt hot.
“Max,” Mom started, and I felt guilty even though I had not said anything really bad. The last time I visited Mom, the fire alarm had gone off in her building, and when we got to the elevator, it wouldn’t work, and for a few seconds I thought—well. Never mind.
It didn’t matter.
Yes, it did.
I thought I would be stuck inside while the building burned down, and it freaked me out completely. Stop thinking about it! More heat in my face. Impulsive . . . quick to anger . . . tramples feelings—yeah. That was me, and it was Mom, at least when we dealt with each other.
“Never mind,” I said, hoping Mom would let it go, so I could.
Mom gave a sigh, kinda like the ones Toppy and I were famous for. “I don’t want to fight with you. How about I just come there and help keep an eye on things?”
My body snapped to rigid. “Don’t you have to work?”
“I’m between assignments right now. Just doing a little photo-painting for a show.”
My brain pulled up images of the black-and-white daguerreotypes at Thornwood Manor, of that life-size Hargrove Thornwood headshot. I imagined it with fangs and dripping blood, and evil golden beams coming out of its eyes.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I told Mom. “Just paint your photos.”
“I’m thinking about visiting, Max.”
“Why?” I yelled, making everyone at the desktop turn around and gape at me. “There’s nothing you can do to help anything!”
Silence. Pause. Then Mom, sounding sad, said, “Let me talk to Dad, okay?”
“Fine.” I jerked the phone away from my ear and very nearly stuffed it into my grandfather’s chest as he came forward to get it. He cleared his throat as he took it from me, shaking his head as he put it to his ear and walked away.
I watched him go and banged my palm on my armrest. I hit it so hard my fingers tingled. My face probably looked like a rotten cherry, and I felt sweat in my hair.
Calm down. Guilt. Then more heat.
Was Toppy over there talking on the phone and agreeing to something, like Mom coming here or me going there? He better not be. My face flamed. I imagined kicking him right in the ankle and making him drop the phone.
No. That was wrong. I didn’t want to hurt Toppy.
I breathed in and out.
I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
I needed to calm down, calm down, calm down. Too many people in the room. All staring at me. Lavender looked worried.
Guilt, guilt, guilt. I used to yell at her, too, and she never deserved it.
Iceman. Ikarus. Illuminati. Illyana Rasputin. Imp. Imperfects. Imperial Guard. In-Betweener. Wait. I forgot one. Oh, yeah. Impossible Man.
Breathe.
Marvel had way too many characters.
Everybody was still staring at me.
I went through J’s and a few K’s, and finally, finally stopped feeling so hot. When I thought I could speak without saying a bunch of words that would get me grounded, I asked Lavender if she found anything on Mom’s website.
“Yep.” Lavender sounded relieved.
She turned to the desktop and clicked on Mom’s home button. Photos loaded slowly at first, then faster. A picture of a bird on the beach. A picture of a California brown pelican in flight. She had updated it this week. Not that I checked that often. Well, maybe I did. Mom might suck at mom-ing, but she took wicked good pictures. I tried to shoot stuff with my iPad, and I wasn’t half bad—but a real camera and good software and lots of practice, it really made a huge difference. Mom’s pictures had been in magazines and on book covers. Sometimes she did shows in California or New York City or other big places.
With another click, Lavender navigated to the contact page. “I found out that her web security stinks. She has a contact page with an e-mail form that doesn’t even use Captcha to sort out people from mass-mailing machines. Her spam folder must explode every day. And look. I can type any old e-mail in the address field.”
I rolled over, threading between Junior, Ms. Springfield, the mayor, and Lavender’s chair. When I got close enough, I pulled the keyboard over, surveyed the web page contact form, and typed [email protected] into the FROM field. In the COMMENTS field, I put, Sorry I scared you. Just kidding, and hit send.
Thanks to her archaic web security, Mom would get an e-mail from the same spoofed address that scared her, only this one would tell her all was well.
“That was devious,” Mayor Chandler muttered. “I’m impressed.”
Junior and Ms. Springfield and Lavender didn’t say a word. When I looked up at Mayor Chandler, her expression seemed sympathetic.
“After school tomorrow, I’ll ask Ellis if there’s any way to trace the IP address off Mom’s website,” I said.
Lavender shook her head. “Hotmail is untraceable.”
“Yeah, but that’s probably not even a real e-mail address.” I felt myself relaxing into my seat cushions. “We might be able to see the IPs for people who used the contact form.”
“Okay,” Lavender said, sounding a little too agreeable and cheerful. Ms. Springfield and Junior Thornwood kept quiet, and so did the mayor—but I couldn’t help noticing they all looked worried.
9
DECEMBER 5
I slid the cup of Earl Grey across the kitchen table and stopped it right next to the bowl of Cream of Wheat I had just served Toppy. Steam rose from the cup and twined with steam from the bowl, making a little cloud in front of my grandfather’s face.
He sat in the red flannel Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer print pj’s I gave him for Christmas four years ago, and he stared down at the Cream of Wheat. “This stuff looks like vomit, Max.”
“It has half the iron you need for the day and no sugar, just honey I added with the butter.” I tapped the table next to his spoon. “It’s better than a packaged cinnamon bun from the convenience store on the way to the station. Try it.”
This earned me my grandfather’s best heavy-browed skeptical look. He huffed for a second, then grumbled, “Butter’s good for me?”
“Not a lot of it, no, but that little bit won’t hurt.” I leaned forward, keeping my eyes locked on his. “Healthy. Delicious. Try it.”
Toppy screwed up his face like a toddler, but he took a bite of the Cream of Wheat. He worked it around in his mouth, then swallowed. “I like oatmeal better. It’s not slick like somebody prechewed it for me.”
“Variety is the spice of life, right?” I had found out that instant oatmeal was iron-fortified like Cream of Wheat, so I told him, “I’ll fix you oatmeal tomorrow. Fiber is good for the bowels.”
Toppy’s head flushed as red as Rudolph’s nose. “Fine. Maybe we could add blueberries to the vomit-butter next time. Flavor and vitamins, and a little something I can sink my teeth into?”
“Okay.” I smiled at him. “If you let me go back in the workshop alone again.”
“Why?” He took a sip of his tea. “So you can use my tools to build a rocket ship or maybe a time machine?” He gave my chair the once-over, absorbing Power and Strong and Steady, the words I had carved into the footrest bars last night using the engraving tool he got me for my birthday. “Wait. I know. You’re going to weld a big unicorn horn dead center on the battery and accidentally blow it up.”
“No blowing up batteries, I promise.”
“Uh-huh.” Toppy didn’t sound convinced. “So, all your friends at school—they impressed with those photos you mailed out about the haunted house?”
“I didn’t mail them. I posted them. And yes. They thought the hole in the floor wa
s seriously wicked.”
Toppy rolled his eyes.
“I put the best ones up on my wall,” I said. “I keep looking at them. Maybe I’ll find a clue.”
Toppy rolled his eyes again.
Outside the kitchen window, dawn broke across Blue Creek, bright and crystal-yellow, spilling into the dark winter morning. For a second, everything got so bright I had to blink, and Toppy looked like he had an angel’s fiery halo right behind his bald head. The smell of his tea tickled my nose, and maybe my eyes, too, because I didn’t like thinking about Toppy as an angel, because that would mean he died, and he wasn’t allowed to die.
“About the workshop. I want to fill in my engravings with some metal paint and work on my chair controls,” I said, my voice a little bit choked. “I bought some wire a few days ago to see if I could increase my speed, but now I think the control box may have a short. The chair turned itself off twice when we were at Thornwood.”
Toppy put down his tea, then lifted a spoon of Cream of Wheat toward his mouth. Before he downed it, he stopped long enough to say, “Has it shut off since then?”
“No.”
“Maybe it was ghosts.”
“Maybe you should let me in the workshop.”
A frown. A few seconds of shoveling Cream of Wheat down the hatch. A sip of tea. Then Toppy looked at me, raised his right hand like he was in court, and said, “On my honor, I won’t build anything illegal or dangerous, or anything that might start a house fire.”
He gazed at me, waiting, hand still in the air.
I groaned, but raised my own hand off the chair controls and repeated the pledge, adding, “And I will do my best not to tear up my chair and cost you a lot of money.”
Toppy put down his spoon. He and thirty or so Rudolphs stared at me, red noses glowing. “Okay. You can use the workshop again after school. Don’t make me regret it.”
“And,” I said, sounding ignorant and hopeful even to my own ears, “I need a cell phone.”
Toppy answered by laughing and going back to eating his buttered vomit with no further complaints.
• • •
Tuesday afternoon Lavender and I had Library Sciences during Language Arts, and we were supposed to be using newly learned research skills to work on our Social Studies paper about Urbanization and Immigration. Instead, we had a corkboard app open on a library Mac, saving to iCloud so we could access it later from home.
So far, we had yellow name cards for suspects tacked at the top for Toppy, Junior Thornwood, Mayor Chandler, and one just labeled ???.
“I think we should add Mom,” I said.
Lavender gave me a sideways oh-really look.
“No, I’m not kidding,” I said. “She was trying to be all Mom-y on the phone yesterday. She may be up to something.”
“Like trying to be a more responsible person?”
“Like trying to get me to come live with her again so she can raid my part of the money we got as a settlement when that truck ran us over and put me in a wheelchair.”
“Oh, yeah.” Lavender chewed on the tip of her pen. “The hacker said she had spent all her settlement money. How much do you have left? Is it a lot?”
All around us in the library, the rest of the class shuffled between shelves and actually taking notes from books. We probably needed to do something soon to look busy with what we were supposed to be busy doing. “I don’t know how much money I have,” I said. “Toppy put it in a trust fund nobody can touch until I turn twenty-two. He won’t use any, and he won’t tell me anything about it.”
This made Lavender put down the pen. “So, you might be rich and you don’t even know how much you’ve got? That totally sucks.”
“I’m sure Mom knows how much I have.” All things obey money. The words carved into Thornwood’s front doors seemed almost prophetic, and the image of Vivienne Thornwood danced in my head. I thought about how she and Mom had the same look in their eyes. “Maybe we’re secretly related to the Thornwoods. Mom got the psychotic greed part, and I got the bad luck bit. What do you think?”
“That’s harsh,” Lavender said. But she made a yellow card and labeled it Callinda Brennan. “And if you were related to the Thornwoods, we’d have read it in some book or other by now. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental—like all the book and movie disclaimers say.”
She placed Mom’s card on the virtual board right before Toppy’s card, because that was alphabetical. She opened a purple card, the color we had chosen for MOTIVE, one of the three elements detectives always looked for when they investigated crimes. She typed Max’s Money on the card, and tacked it under Mom’s name.
I pointed to Toppy’s name. “Put Getting Rid of Max on a motive card for him.”
“No.” Lavender smacked her hand down beside the mouse. “That’s just pathetic. He would never—”
“It’s what the hacker’s been saying.” I stared at my knees, and my hands on my knees, and my feet, and then my wheelchair footplates. “Well, implying. That I’m a big weight on Toppy. And he’s right. I cost Toppy a lot of money, since he won’t use mine. We can’t ignore anything at this point, right?”
“Yes we can, Max,” Lavender said, her voice forceful. “Toppy lives for you.”
I managed to get my eyes to move away from my wheelchair control and upward, in the general direction of Lavender’s left shoulder. “He’s getting older. It’s harder now, probably. Plus, I melted the fuse box and almost destroyed the house and cost him money over that, too.”
Lavender let out a groan. She typed Max Is Pathetic on a purple card and stuck it under Toppy’s name.
Good enough.
We settled on Getting Even with Old Boyfriend for Mayor Chandler’s purple card.
For Junior, I couldn’t decide. “He might just be some twisted freak, you know?”
“A twisted freak who thinks my mom is cute,” Lavender said through clenched teeth. “Why would he just show up here in Blue Creek, right when all this is going on?”
“He says he wants to open a motorcycle dealership.”
“Maybe he wants to sell Thornwood,” Lavender said, “to pay for that?”
“He said he has money. So why would he need to sell Thornwood—and how would the manor being haunted make people pay more money for it?”
Lavender thought about this. “Haunted house publicity. Because that’d get him a lot of business at his new motorcycle lot, right? Even if he didn’t want to sell the old home-place.”
She typed, Publicity and Hype and $ on his motive card.
For the ??? card, we put, Punish Toppy for Arresting, and Get Revenge on Toppy, and Get Rid of Toppy, though we didn’t really know why anybody would want to do that.
Green cards came next for MEANS. We put more ??? under ??? for that. For Mayor Chandler, we argued for a few seconds, then put Good Computer Skills. The same note went under Callinda Brennan, since Mom designed and hosted her own website, but Lavender changed it to “decent” instead of “good,” because Mom’s web security was so bad, and she had fallen for a spoof e-mail address, and probably didn’t even know what that meant.
“Junior had to ask your Mom’s help with his cell phone at the police station,” I said as we tried to decide about his computer savvy.
“That could have been an act.” Lavender sounded really irritable. “I think the whole biker-tough-guy thing is just baloney, so maybe can’t-use-my-phone is phony, too.”
“Okay.” I was so not about to argue and get a mouse stuffed up my nose. “And anyway, he does have some money already, so he could hire someone to do the web stuff even if he can’t find an on switch for any computer.”
Lavender wrote, Unknown Computer Skills, Money to Hire Help on his green card. Then she added, Jerk.
I kept my mouth firmly closed.
We got to Toppy, sat there for a second, then both of us burst out giggling. Toppy. Computer skills. Riiiiight. Lavender put a big X on his green card.
Th
en she opened up white cards for OPPOR-TUNITY, and put an X for Toppy there, too, since he’d been with me or somebody basically every time the hacks had happened. And anyway, after that Facebook page and the first few fake accounts, the hacker had stopped trying to pretend to be my grandfather. We opened Mayor Chandler’s white card, and—
“Well, well, ladies.” Ms. Zevon, our Language Arts teacher, pushed between us, glaring down at the screen. “Must not be working too hard over here, with all that noise.”
She was wearing a black and gold pantsuit, and she smelled like spiced tea. Her face, usually stern but peaceful, had gone all hard.
Lavender tried to click the corkboard closed, but Ms. Zevon patted the top of her hand. “Nope. Just leave that alone.” She leaned in closer and squinted at it, her colorful scarf and pearl necklace dangling forward as she stared. “What kind of game is this?”
“It’s a mystery app,” Lavender mumbled.
“We’re trying to figure out who the hacker is,” I said.
Ms. Zevon stared at us for a few seconds. “You mean that chump on the Internet posting all that embarrassing stuff about your family?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Admirable.” Our teacher stepped back and folded her arms. “I’d even go so far as to say proactive. However, that was not your assignment, was it?”
“No, ma’am,” Lavender and I said at the same time.
She made us repeat our actual assignment, then in a feat of interrogation that would have impressed even Toppy, she got us to confess that we had done exactly nothing on the Social Studies project, which was due next Wednesday, the day before holidays started.
That’s how we left school with shiny new detention slips. Two hours. On Friday afternoon. The week before winter break.
It should have been illegal.
“Mom’s going to murder me,” Lavender said, slumping against the frosted window at the back of the bus, in the seat closest to my wheelchair bay.
I tapped my head on my headrest again and again. “At least she doesn’t do Sappy Holiday Movie Torture. I’ll be writing reports about Prince Santa Claus Rescues the Kittens for a month.”
