by Susan Vaught
“No.” I sighed. “Mom, I’m not made out of glass. I don’t get hurt all the time.”
She blinked. Managed to keep the sort-of-smile frozen on her face. Stayed really still in the chair at the kitchen table where Toppy usually drank his tea and ate whatever breakfast I made for him. “Your chair okay after that run across so much grass?”
“Yes.”
“I know you didn’t really want me to visit.” Mom bent toward me and put both of her hands on her knees. She didn’t seem to notice when I leaned back to keep from getting too close to her. “I felt like I needed to be here while Dad’s dealing with all this. And you, too. You know, to help.”
“Okay.” Love her for who she is, Max. Toppy’s voice in my head. Awesome. I hated the day a little harder. “Yeah, so, the stuff at the school was pretty scary. Help might be good.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Mom said, and she sounded like she meant it.
My eyes betrayed me by trying to cry. I didn’t dare talk right that second, so I just sat still. It’s not your fault. Those words didn’t come out. It really wasn’t her fault. I mean, I was in Blue Creek because she didn’t want me, so that part was her fault, but the hacker attacking Toppy, and then me getting scared at school, not so much.
“Dad says you and Lavender have been investigating, too—that you poked around in Thornwood, even.” Mom’s smile came back, less fake this time. “I used to hang out up there when I was your age. Creepy, cool old place. Sad how it’s starting to fall apart.”
“There’s a big hole in the floor and the porch popped today like it might implode.” I could make words again. Nice, safe words. “And the old pictures in the main hall are spooky, the black-and-white ones.”
“I know! Those pictures are why I took up art and photography.” Mom put a hand on my knee, and I didn’t knock it off. “I kept wondering what it would be like to paint on shots like that. Add color, try to bring a little of that history into the present. Maybe Junior Thornwood and Joy Springfield would let me get some close-ups and try it on some prints.”
Thornwood Manor turned my mom into an artist? Who knew? And why did that feel like more than I ever really knew about her before? I still hadn’t knocked her hand off my knee. Toppy would be proud.
Mom seemed to notice me looking at her fingers. “Is this okay, Max? I really don’t want to make you mad.”
I swallowed past a growing lump in my throat, then managed to nod.
“I hear Dad and Margaret Stetson are talking again.” Mom waggled her eyebrows like Toppy always did when he was making a silly joke.
“Who—? Oh. Mayor Chandler.”
“Stetson’s her family name. Lots of history in Blue Creek, the Stetsons.” Mom’s expression shifted to something wistful and far away. “Once she married into the Chandler family, people just saw her as part of that clan. Change a name, change your life, I guess. I always wondered if they might take up again after Mom died.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘taking up.’ It’s more like a truce. They’re not threatening to kill each other every day.”
“Well, that’s progress. Dad’s due a little companionship in his life.”
“Okay, wait.” I didn’t shove Mom’s hand off me, but I did move it. “What am I for companionship? Nothing? It’s not like I have no brain. I can have conversations and be good company and stuff.”
“Of course you can. That’s not what I meant.” Mom eased back in Toppy’s chair, folded her arms, and turned her face toward the ceiling. I thought I saw tears rimming the bottom of her eyes. “I always say the wrong things, don’t I?”
“Yes.” I chewed on my bottom lip to keep my mouth shut, and felt seriously guilty.
Mom looked at me again, not crying but red-eyed. “Maybe if we talked more, I’d learn what you like to chat about.”
My anger punched my nervousness right in the nose. “Chat about this, then. Do you still live on the third floor of a building I couldn’t escape in a fire if the elevator didn’t work?”
“I—you know I do.” Mom’s sad face switched over to something else. Maybe mad. Maybe defensive. Maybe confused. “My studio’s there, and I get the morning light. I know you don’t like that elevator, but it—”
“Can I get my wheelchair into whatever car you’re driving now?”
Mom’s mouth came open. “Well, no. But that’s because—”
“Stop.” Heat. So much of it. So fast. I couldn’t think of a single superhero name to start a list. I didn’t even want to. “It’s because I don’t fit in your life. Have you ever thought that maybe you don’t fit in my life, either?”
And before she could say anything to that, I rolled off to my room, right past all the company, even Lavender.
BANG.
I slammed the door.
But it didn’t make me feel any better.
15
DECEMBER 10
This is a bad idea,” Lavender said, fooling with her phone apps, still trying to unblur the pictures of Toppy’s crime board.
I squinted at the soldering iron, leaning hard against the metal worktable as I tried not to lose the tiny wire. My grandfather’s protective goggles slid sideways because the strap was too big, but I did my best to ignore the lump of nosepiece blocking half my vision.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Lavender’s disgusted expression. After a few seconds, she put the phone on the worktable, then went running across the concrete floor of the giant aluminum building that doubled as Toppy’s workshop and garage. She had on two layers of warm-up pants, bright blue today, and two loose blue sweaters. The sweaters flapped as she executed an impressive tour jeté.
After she landed halfway across the room, she raised her voice to be heard over the low rumble of the salamander heater I had fired up so we wouldn’t get frostbite while I worked. “Messing with your driving controls again is maybe the worst idea in your history of bad ideas—and that’s saying something.”
“Hey, I built a control box just like my real one, a model, and I tried the idea on the model first.”
“Uh-huh.” Lavender didn’t sound impressed or convinced.
“Just. A. Little. More. There.” I switched off the little red tool and carefully put it in its stand on the metal worktable. The workshop seemed to go still as I examined my altered wheelchair drive box. “That should work. Went perfectly when I tested it on the model control. And with the bigger wheels I put on this morning, I can get more speed with less acceleration, and now the field and armature have independent controls, and by reducing the field current—”
“Aaaaaaaah!” Lavender smacked her hands against her ears. “I hate electricity!”
I rolled my eyes so high my head almost hurt. “Look, electricity isn’t always bad. Most people don’t try to chew through plugged-in lamp cords. I can’t help it if you got shocked because you were being stupid.”
“I was three. Speak English, please, not electricity-ese.”
“Fine.” I reached to my right and pulled the top to my modified drive box out of an array of jars, boxes of switches, cans full of wires, toolboxes, and discarded chunks of plastic. When I got the top fitted over the joystick, I snapped it into place and made sure the chair would still power up.
The lights on my control panel flickered immediately. I grinned and pointed to the new toggle to the right of the joystick. “All of my fuses have been replaced, and I now have a turbo switch. No more fritzing out when I’m trying to drive, and the next time somebody chases me when they’re trying to burn down a school, I can run. We just have to test it.”
“Forget that.” Lavender started prejump stretches. “Toppy and Mom still aren’t over the manure thing in your backyard last year. I got grounded for a week, and I didn’t even do anything, and if we make them think about grounding, they’ll remember we’re supposed to be on lockdown because of that detention. Which they may do anyway, when they get back from the meeting at Mayor Chandler’s.”
> “It wasn’t manure, it was compost, and I didn’t break any bones. You gotta admit, the lift on my chair’s tilt function got a lot more efficient after I tweaked the hydraulics.”
Lavender twirled a few times, enjoying the space the workshop gave her. “If you like being fired into a pile of cow dung by a ballista. Problem is, Blue Creek’s all out of castles to storm.”
“That depends on your definition of castle.” I wiggled my eyebrows at her.
She quit spinning and folded her arms. “You’re evil, and you just want to get away from your mother.”
I gave her my best pitiful look. “My chair only shut off at Thornwood. I want to know if it’s fixed. Besides, if something freaky happens, you can climb on and I can speed us away. Pllleeeeaaase. Maybe we could find some dirt on Junior if we really look.”
“E-V-I-L. And why didn’t you get another clown-nose for your joystick? I liked that thing, plus it made people move in the hallways when you were trying to get by.”
I eyed the larger black rubber tip I had glued on to replace the tip that used to hold the clown-nose. “I don’t know. Not feeling clown-y right now, I guess.”
“You’ll feel clown-y when you run over somebody’s poor cat in that souped-up monstrosity. I don’t know why you have to try to change every chair you get.”
“I—um.” Well. I didn’t have a good comeback to that. Because I could always think of ways my chair could be better? Because I wanted to be stronger and faster?
You can’t always make something haul the load you want it to, Max. I ran my fingers over the arms of my chair.
“Maybe I’m tired of reading about superheroes,” I said. “Maybe I want to be super, all on my own. Otherwise, I’m just another boring person in a boring wheelchair.”
The look Lavender gave me was as evil as she accused me of being. “What, you don’t want to be all gentle and noble and long-suffering like the wheelchair kids we read about?”
I headed toward her. “I’m running over your foot for that.”
She bounced out of my way, laughing. “You aren’t boring, Max. And definitely not noble.”
“Both feet. Be still.”
She darted away again, settling back in front of the heater.
“Seriously, Lavender.” I drove forward and turned, putting my back to the door. The salamander roared away behind her, making an orange haze around her blue clothes. “I need to be super for Toppy right now. He’s meeting with Mayor Chandler and some friends to try to save his job, all because some freak won’t lay off him on the Internet—and I keep feeling like we’re missing something at Thornwood, or something about it.”
“Okay,” she said. “But what?”
“The hacker’s whole theme is Thornwood’s Revenge. He’s been in that mansion. I know it. If we just go look better, more carefully, maybe we can find out who he is, or how to stop him before things go any further.”
I quit talking because Lavender’s eyes had gone wide, and her arms went slack. She focused on something directly behind me.
Or someone.
I turned.
Mom was standing just inside the doorway, wearing jeans and one of Toppy’s red flannel shirts. It went to her knees. A really fancy camera hung from her shoulder by a black strap. She had her hands in her pockets and her hair loose.
“So, do you two have a way to get into Thornwood?” Mom’s voice seemed to echo in the workshop despite the dull roar of the salamander. She wasn’t smiling. Her eyes seemed bright and intense, and I didn’t get any sense that she was trying to be all cool and win me over, even if she probably was.
Lavender walked over to the heater and switched it off. It went out in fits and burbles, flames jetting, then poofing until nothing was left but the soft popping of its metal torpedo tube. The faint smell of gas drifted around us as Lavender reached beneath the neckline of her bottom blue sweater and lifted up her necklace.
A silver key dangled from the chain, glittering in the bright workshop lights.
• • •
The woman in the red-striped gown hadn’t changed since I saw her last time. Vivienne Thornwood favored me with her mysterious smile.
Out in the hallway behind me, Mom said, “These old photos are just as amazing as I remember.”
“Have you ever done any research on Vivienne Thornwood?” I called to Lavender, who had headed off through the kitchen.
“No,” she yelled back. “Never thought about it. The stories usually focus on Thornwood himself, and that one kid who died even though Vivienne helped her escape.”
I gazed at the portrait—and then I sat up straighter. “How?”
“What?” Lavender called.
“How did Vivienne get her youngest daughter out of Thornwood?”
Silence.
And then, “I don’t know.”
“What about that basement room—wait. No stairs. No doors.” I banged my hand on the chair arm. Something tickled the edges of my brain. Something I should be seeing. Something I should be understanding. But what?
I closed my eyes, seeing Vivienne Thornwood’s curls and red gloves like burned images on my eyelids. She snuck a child out of the house right under Thornwood’s nose, risking his wrath to save something from her husband’s madness. He was really awful to her, and to everybody she loved. Vivienne Thornwood was the one who had a right to revenge—on Thornwood. If I were her, I’d have been mad to the power of infinity at Thornwood, and at the people of Blue Creek, too, who never really helped her.
Mom mumbled something about needing a sharper angle. I opened my eyes, held back a drama-queen sigh, and told myself not to roll out to see what she was doing.
And then I rolled out to see what she was doing.
As I sat in the hall doorway and watched, Mom contorted herself to take a picture of a picture, then checked her display and frowned.
“How do you keep from getting a glare when there’s glass on the daguerreotypes?” I asked as she let the camera dangle at her shoulder and went and tugged two lamps out of a side room.
“It’s lighting and camera settings,” she said as she set the lamps into place, plugged them in, and twisted the switches, lighting up Thornwood’s picture. “With the right perspective, the right angle, you can get past what’s in the way.”
I fiddled with my chair controls, backing away from Thornwood, because I still didn’t like him and couldn’t forget how that picture seemed to have eye beams when I got scared in the house last time I was here. Mom went on for another few minutes about how to take shots of totally glass items with backlighting, and how to get good pictures of metal and shiny stuff like watches and glasses and grandfather clocks with big glass faces. I hadn’t meant to be talking photography with her, and I didn’t want to find it interesting, but it sort of was.
“You okay, Lavender?” I called out, wrecking the chilled silence and forcing myself away from Mom.
“Uh-huh,” Lavender said from the general direction of the gigantic hole in the floor.
From outside on the front porch, the trooper guarding us coughed, then stomped his boots against the wood, probably warming up his feet. Trooper Nelsen hadn’t complained or even laughed at us when we marched up here. He just followed us in his patrol car, then stood stone-faced and alert as Lavender and I made a few mistakes, but finally got the code right and made the key turn in the clunky, rusted lock.
When I rolled into the kitchen to check on Lavender, I found her lying at the edge of the busted spot, shining a flashlight around the dank black cavern below. The stairs that had been there before were gone. I figured Junior moved them.
I motored carefully through the door, but couldn’t get close enough to see what Lavender was looking at without putting the weight of the chair on questionable boards. As it was, when I pulled my hand off my joystick, the floor gave a big creak, then a loud pop.
“Uh, we okay here?” I asked Lavender.
“Maybe,” she muttered.
Behind me, in the
hallway, I heard lamps being shuffled, then the whirr-snap of Mom’s shutter. The grave-dirt smell from the hole washed across my senses, and I shivered even though I was determined not to get spooked. I mean, it was broad daylight, and we had Trooper Nelsen right outside. Thornwood might be old and weird, but it was just a big old house, and I refused to be a colossal wimp in front of my mother.
“This room definitely looks like a priest hole,” Lavender said. “Yet, not. It’s too big. Maybe a deluxe priest hole?”
“That still sounds just . . . wrong,” I said. “But if it’s not a priest hole, what is it?”
“I don’t know.” She flicked her light left, then right. “I just can’t figure it, at least not without more information.”
“Maybe it’s a root cellar, or an old wine cellar, or something like a vault. Maybe Thornwood kept valuables down here?” I leaned as far forward as I could, squinting at the dark stone below. “I mean, he thought everybody was stealing from him—but how did he use the room if there weren’t any stairs?”
“Maybe it wasn’t enough that the room was hidden. If he used a ladder that he took in and out, it would be even harder for people to get into his hidden room,” Lavendar said.
I pondered this for a few seconds. “So it had a grate or a trapdoor leading to it, you know, hidden in the part of the floor that’s not here anymore.”
“It would be dust now,” Lavender said.
“And the websites and your mom said nothing was found in the priest hole after the cave-in,” I reminded her. “Just dirt and rocks. If Thornwood kept anything in there, it was gone.”
“He was so paranoid, he might have just made it for himself to hide if the villagers came for him with pitchforks, or something.”
That made me laugh. “You watch too many vampire and Frankenstein movies.” My watch alarm beeped, so I stopped leaning and shifted my weight. “You know, when I saw that light over here—maybe the hacker was doing like my mom’s doing right now,” I said. “Getting the lay of the place. Getting the right perspective.”
Lavender switched off her flashlight. “Maybe he was scoping out important things.”
