Deprivation House

by Franklin W. Dixon

“Veronica, it’s very important—,” Frank started.

  Mitch arrived. “Take these two to your quarters. Stay with them. Don’t let them out of your sight. They aren’t slinking home until tomorrow. I want footage.” Veronica turned on her heel and left the three of us standing there.

  Frank turned to Mitch. “She wouldn’t listen to us. You need to. There’s a bomb in that mower.”

  Mitch immediately went over and looked. He let out a long, low whistle. “Things are getting way too intense around this place. I just wanted to make a little money.”

  “You’re going to tell her, right?” I asked.

  “Definitely. Then I’m going to stay far away while somebody who knows how to deal with those things gets that bomb out of there,” he answered. “But look, I’ve got to take you over to my place. Veronica is going to flip if I don’t. Then nobody will be able to talk to her.”

  He led the way to a little guest cottage out of sight of the main house. “Pretty sweet, huh?” he said. “There are a few of these places scattered around, and I got assigned one.”

  Mitch unlocked the door and ushered us inside. “I’m not going to lock you in or anything. But stay put until Veronica recovers and I talk to her. Make yourselves at home. I have some drinks in the fridge. There are some glasses in the cupboard. To living through it, right?” He gave us a half salute and left.

  I sank down on the blue-and-white-striped sofa. Frank took the armchair across from me. “I can’t believe she wouldn’t listen.”

  “She practically stuck her fingers in her ears. She’s a nut job,” I agreed. “At least Mitch is cool.” I shoved myself to my feet. “I think I am going to get something to drink. You want one?”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Frank said.

  I found the kitchen, grabbed some sodas, decided to skip the glasses, and headed back to the living room. Frank didn’t even complain that I was making him drink out of the can. That’s how wiped he was.

  I raised my can toward him. “To living through—”

  “Whatever it is,” Frank joined in, finishing our toast. Suddenly he sat straight up. “We came up with that our first day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Joe, that was before Mitch started working on the show,” Frank said.

  “Maybe he saw some film from that day,” I suggested. “That’s probably part of his job, searching through it for usable stuff.”

  “But they didn’t get any outdoor footage the first day. There was some technical mess-up,” Frank reminded me.

  “Right. That PA said something to Veronica about it, and Veronica practically turned her into an ice sculpture.” I took a slug of soda, my mind whirling. “That means Mitch was there the night before Leo died. He was there the night before there was any way he could have known there was a job opening.”

  “Unless he knew he was going to kill Leo,” Frank said.

  “For a job?” I shook my head. “That’s extreme.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t the motive. Maybe he didn’t kill Leo. All I know is that I don’t want to sit around waiting for him to come back.” Frank stood up.

  “I’m with you, my brother.” I drained my soda and headed out the door.

  The night was dark, but everything went darker.

  Everything went black as pain exploded in the back of my head.

  And I was falling. . . .

  Mad as a Hatter

  All I knew at first was that I definitely wasn’t at home. Then I realized I shouldn’t be at home. Then I realized I wasn’t in my bunk bed in the villa. And then I basically remembered everything and realized I was lying on the floor of what I thought was Mitch’s place. I was tied back-to-back with somebody I assumed was Joe, and as I blinked, I realized daylight was coming in through the window. Whoa, it was already morning? We’d been out all night?

  Maybe it had something to do with the fuzzy feeling in my head—my eyes scanned the room, and sure enough, landed on a syringe in the corner.

  Mitch must have pumped us with sedatives after knocking us out, to keep us out of play for all this time.

  A pair of boots clomped by. “You’re awake,” Mitch said. “Sorry I had to knock you guys out. But I told you to stay in the cabin, and less than five minutes later, you come sneaking out. You didn’t give me a choice. You’ve seen how Veronica is.”

  Okay, so Mitch didn’t hear us talking about him, I thought. That was something. We had a little bit of an edge as long as he didn’t know we were suspicious of him. It wasn’t much of an edge, though—since we were tied up on the floor.

  “Yeah, Veronica.” I cleared my throat. “We didn’t want to deal with her. Weren’t trying to get you in trouble.”

  “Well, you would have,” Mitch shot back.

  As he rattled off a list of what Veronica would have done to him if we’d managed to escape, Joe started up a silent conversation with me. Tapping out a Morse code message against my side. It took awhile for him to dot-and-dash out what he had to say: “Big mirror near me.”

  I remembered a big mirror in Mitch’s living room. “So?” I Morsed back.

  “Roll hard. My go,” Joe Morsed. Out loud, he apologized to Mitch.

  I didn’t know what Joe’s message meant exactly. But it involved rolling on Joe’s signal. Rolling toward the mirror, I was pretty sure.

  Joe coughed loudly. “Something reeks over here,” he said. “It’s foul.” He gave me a nudge.

  “Let’s not talk,” said Mitch. “I’ll just turn the TV on while we wait for Veronica to get here. She wants to get some footage of you with the other kids. Their faces when they hear you were cheating and all that.”

  I thought I knew where Joe had been going with the “foul” comment. I remembered Kit teasing Mitch about smelling foul not too long before the dog-washing contest. Joe was thinking Mitch had something to do with giving the bad-smelling jimson-weed to Captain.

  “It does smell nasty. Maybe you aren’t getting a whiff up there, but it’s like jimsonweed,” I said as Mitch started flipping channels.

  Bringing up the jimsonweed was a risk. Right now, Mitch didn’t realize we were suspicious of him. But mentioning the jimson could tip him off. Or he might just think—and this is what we were hoping—that we honestly just smelled the jimson in his place and didn’t have any idea jimsonweed had been fed to the dog.

  “It grows around here. I bet you tracked some in,” Joe said. “You’ve got to let us up.”

  “Uh, I don’t think so,” Mitch told him.

  “You don’t get it,” Joe went on. “Most people think that stuff is only poison if you eat it. But if it releases spores in an enclosed space, it can kill you too. Just more slowly.”

  “We have our noses right in it. We have to with the way it smells down here,” I added.

  “Do you know the symptoms, Frank?” Joe asked.

  I went into the rhyme. “Mad as a hatter, red as a beet, dry as a bone, the heart runs alone.”

  “I’m definitely dry. It’s like I have no saliva in my mouth,” Joe said. “And heart runs alone—that’s like fast heartbeat, right?”

  “Yeah. I can feel mine going right now.”

  I thought it was possible, at least a little possible, that Mitch might be feeling some of those symptoms right now. Not because he was somehow getting jimsonweed poisoning through the air. That wasn’t possible.

  But dry mouth, red face, accelerated heartbeat—those were all also symptoms of anxiety. And Mitch had a couple of things to be anxious about. He might be thinking he could have maybe brought a little jimsonweed into the house accidentally. That might be making him nervous. Or he might be remembering how he primed the Newfie to attack Joe. That would do it too. Maybe he was thinking about what he did to Leo—if Joe and I were right about that. Yeah, he had a few reasons to be a little twitchy.

  Besides, if you talk about symptoms, some people start to feel them. “I can’t see if my face is red,” Joe said. “Mitch, dude, just mop the floor or something. Seriously, I don
’t want to be sucking jimson into my body.”

  “Veronica isn’t going to be happy if we’re dead when she comes out here,” I added.

  I heard Mitch take a step toward us. Or maybe toward the mirror. Yeah, Mitch, you want to look in the mirror. You want to see if your face is red. You don’t want to end up poisoned, do you? I thought.

  More footsteps. Joe gave me a jab. Mitch had to be getting close to the mirror. It was almost time to roll.

  Joe tapped me on the side. One. Two. Three. The next one was it—

  And go.

  I rolled as hard as I could. I didn’t worry about smashing Joe. All I wanted was for the Joe-Frank combo to hit Mitch as hard as it could.

  Over and over and crunch.

  Mitch and the mirror collided. I don’t know how hard the impact was, but it had happened. A shard of the glass had fallen near enough that my fingers could just reach it. I used it to start sawing on whatever Mitch had used to tie us. I could feel warm blood dripping down my hand. Didn’t matter.

  The ties loosened a little. I thought Joe managed to wriggle an arm free. Must have, because I heard Mitch give a grunt of pain.

  Now that Joe’s arm was out, the ties were even looser. I got an arm free. Getting the next one loose was easy. Joe and I both attacked the ties now. I shot a glance at Mitch. In the broken mirror, I could see that blood was running down his forehead. And he was crouched low. Like maybe Joe had managed to get a shot in behind his knee.

  He definitely wasn’t down for the count. He turned to face us as we made it to our feet.

  I caught a glimpse of motion out the window. A figure bouncing up and down on a trampoline in the distance. The others had started running the obstacle course.

  Mitch saw where I was looking. “Too late,” he said.

  “Not hardly.” Joe arched back and slammed his fist into Mitch’s jaw. KO. “You go,” he told me. “I’ll clean up the mess in here.” He reached for the restraints.

  That’s all I needed to hear. I took off, pain ricocheting through my numb legs. I ignored it.

  I had one thing to focus on right now—getting to the garden tractor before anyone turned the ignition key and set off the bomb.

  JOE

  I finished tying Mitch up, my brain clicking away. I couldn’t figure out a motive for Mitch killing Leo and trying to kill the contestants.

  He murdered Leo to get his job—okay. Seemed like a weak motive, but okay. But why keep killing after he got the job?

  What possible motive could he have for wanting us contestants dead? It’s not like if he killed everybody off, he’d get the million dollars. So it wasn’t about money.

  Or wait. Was it? I flashed on the money in Veronica’s ceiling beam. Had Mitch hidden it upstairs—before everyone from the show moved in, maybe? Then he couldn’t get it back, because Veronica wouldn’t let anyone onto her floor and there were cameras all over.

  It kind of made sense. Mitch killed Leo to get the job. But having the job wasn’t enough. It didn’t get him the access he needed.

  What he needed was everybody out of the house. The threats and dangerous stuff—that had been Mitch trying to get the show shut down. He’d planned to step it up to murder of a show participant today. He probably figured that would put the end to everything.

  I stared down at Mitch. His eyelids began to flutter. He was coming to.

  “You said to make myself at home before. So I’m going to ransack the place looking for evidence,” I told him.

  Mitch glared up at me. He was really hating me right now.

  I was fine with that.

  I headed for the computer first. You can get a lot of evidence off a computer. It took me about three seconds to find out that my buddy Mitch had been researching poisonous plants—including jimsonweed.

  He’d also been reading articles about a bank robbery that had taken place about a year ago. About twenty-five thousand dollars had been stolen.

  That got me wondering what Mitch’s record might be like. I spotted a felt-tip pen near the mouse pad. I grabbed it and hurried back over to Mitch.

  I inked up his fingers, then transferred his prints onto a piece of white paper.

  “Those aren’t going to tell you anything,” he said. “I’m too smart to leave prints.”

  I used Mitch’s computer to scan the prints and send them to Vijay. I got his response in less than a minute. “You weren’t too smart to go to prison for assault.”

  Mitch laughed. “That was nothing.”

  I thought again of the money hidden in the hollowed-out beam in Veronica’s quarters. “Yeah, it didn’t earn you twenty-five thou like your bank job, did it?” I asked.

  Mitch’s eyes widened.

  “Not that you got to spend much of it. Since you got locked up for that little nothing assault thing,” I added.

  FRANK

  I hauled myself up an enormous spiderweb of rope strung between two trees. I hadn’t been taking the obstacles. I wasn’t a contestant. But I had to scale the web. It was the shortest way to get past it.

  The web jerked and I saw James coming up behind me. Fast. “What are you doing here, snot-rag?” he shouted.

  I wasn’t going to try to explain. It would waste time. James was not in a listening kind of mood.

  I had to get to the garden tractor first. That was my only goal. I started down the other side of the web.

  “Answer me!” James yelled. He flung his weight against the ropes and I almost lost my grip. I looked down. I was way too high up to think about jumping. Then I remembered the zip line.

  “Later!” I grabbed the metal handle and rode the wire all the way to the ground. As soon as my toes hit the grass of the field, I started running again. I figured no one could have taken the course faster than James. But I was wrong.

  Brynn was ahead of me. Tearing toward the best mower—the tractor with the bomb in it.

  I focused my eyes on her back and put on speed. Lungs, legs, heart. All on fire. But I was gaining on her. I could almost grab her by the hood of her shirt. Faster!

  She was veering to the side. She’d already reached the row of mowers. All I’d been seeing was her.

  “Brynn, no!” I shouted as she climbed onto the seat of the tractor. “Stop!”

  She didn’t hesitate. She reached out and turned the ignition key.

  I aimed myself at her and hurled myself into the air. The breath slammed out my body as I—as we—landed.

  Brynn shoved at my shoulders. “What is wrong with you?”

  I braced my body to take as much of the blast as possible.

  A second later, it felt like the sun exploded.

  Loose Threads

  “I feel like I’ve been called to the principal’s,” Frank said. We’d made a bathroom stop on our way to meet with Veronica in the library.

  “You mean that time you got the perfect attendance award?” I joked.

  “I know it doesn’t matter if we get booted. We solved the case. But I feel like I actually did get caught cheating,” Frank admitted.

  “Yeah. I don’t like Brynn thinking I would do that,” I said. “Just part of being ATAC sometimes . . . People think you’re slime.”

  “Let’s go get this over with,” Frank told me.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking what to do with you boys,” Veronica told us when we walked into the library. “I think I could make a case against you in court. You basically committed fraud by looking at the obstacle course in advance.”

  Oh, man. She was being even more hardcore than I thought.

  “We had reason to believe that Mitch had sabotaged the mower—,” I stopped myself, but it was too late.

  “You shouldn’t have known there were mowers, period,” Veronica said. “You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t already begun cheating.”

  Oh, man. How would we get out of this without exposing ATAC to Veronica, a civilian?

  “However, you did save Brynn’s life,” Veronica told Frank. “And for that
reason, I’m willing to give you both a second chance.”

  We exchanged looks. So that meant we weren’t off the show—we’d have to find a way to accomplish that part still, without raising too much suspicion. I guess we’d stick around a few days longer, then make our exit strategy. I had to admit, I didn’t mind a little more time with Brynn.

  Veronica held up one finger. “I will be watching you both extremely carefully, though. The slightest misstep will not be tolerated.”

  “You two are total heroes!” Olivia exclaimed at dinner that night.

  “I can’t believe what you found out about Mitch. He seemed so nice,” said Mary.

  James rolled his eyes and took the last ham sandwich from the plate in the middle of the dining room table. “Mitch was an idiot. He did what he did for twenty thousand—including robbing the bank?”

  “Twenty grand is a lot of money,” Olivia protested.

  “It was twenty-five, actually,” Joe corrected. “He spent five before he had to stash the rest.”

  “To go to jail,” added Mikey.

  “It would take a lot more to get me to kill,” James insisted. “He should have, like, made some threats. Then told us he could take care of the problem for, let’s say, twenty thou—collectable from the winner at the end of the show. Then he’d stop making the threats and get the cash.”

  “But Mitch had to kill somebody to get the job,” I reminded James.

  “Not a problem. See these guns?” He flexed his arms. “Veronica would have seen them and given me a job.”

  “I’m about to swoon myself,” Brynn muttered. She absentmindedly ran her fingers over the bandage on the side of her neck. She’d taken a shard of flying metal from the tractor there, but it hadn’t gone deep.

  And Frank, he’d gotten some minor burns on his back and a few cuts and scrapes. It was pretty amazing, really.

  “How long do you think Mitch will go to jail for?” Mikey asked.

  “So long,” said Frank. “With everything he did here, plus the bank robbery.”

  “I can’t believe the cops had him in jail—and it wasn’t even for the robbery.” Bobby T shook his head. “I might have to blog about it.”