When you get a mysterious note in invisible ink from a girl who was murdered, telling you that the explanation of another murder is in a safety deposit box, you probably would expect to discover maybe a gun or a bloody knife or at the very least a long document detailing everything that you could take to the police to close the case.
Or, you could find what I did.
Chapter Eighteen
“Okay, let’s go over this again, just to be sure,” Polly said, reading off the monogrammed notepad she’d been writing on. “One white vinyl little girl’s jewelry box with a ballerina on top that plays a hideous song when you wind it up, containing one pink pencil eraser, one package of light blue silk embroidery thread and needle, one black plastic pen with a gold symbol of some kind on it, one small screwdriver, a magnet from Ho Ho’s Pancake Shack, five old newspaper articles in Italian, and two scraps of blank white paper with”—she glanced down the table at me to where I was holding the second piece over a lit match; I shook my head—“no hidden messages on them.”
I blew out the match. “That’s it.”
We were settled around a big wood table at Ae Oche, my favorite pizza restaurant in Venice due to its having so many kinds of pizza and every one of them delicious. Despite the fact that the decor—something they called Old Country Club style, by which I think they meant Crazy Granny’s Attic because I’ve never been to a country club with dusty license plates, oil cans, broken lacrosse sticks, and stuffed squirrels hanging on the walls—offered plenty to talk about, no one spoke. It’s a cruel world when Hopeful Anticipation leads only to promotional magnets for Ho Ho’s Pancake Shack (Route 1, Mayfair, Virginia. Turn left at the Clown!).
Finally Polly pulled a stack of computer printouts from her bag. “Here’s what we know about Ned Neal’s death. It’s not much, because for the past few years he’d been a bit of a recluse and jealously guarded his privacy. Apparently he was found on the floor of his office in front of his desk early in the morning. When he didn’t show up for breakfast as usual, the housekeeper alerted his secretary, who alerted the handyman. They all lived in the house. The office door had to be broken down to get in because it was locked from the inside. He’d died between eight P.M. and nine P.M. the night before, which was the staff’s night off, so he was home alone. Security cameras on both the street entrance and the water entrance of his house showed no one arriving or departing during that time. So if we assume he was poisoned, whatever did it had to have been in the office with him.”
“What about a pen?” Tom asked. “That makes sense with the whole ‘poisoned through hand’ thing, right?”
Roxy, whose superpower is to be able to make a weapons system out of benign household objects, started to reach for the pen from the box to examine it but I stopped her, and said to Polly, “Eye shadow, blush brush, Scotch tape, pink index card.”
“What color shadow?”
“The white. It’ll show up best.”
She pulled each item out of her bag, and I got to work. Balancing the pen on its tip, I started dusting at the end, but Absence of Friendly Prints was the only thing waiting for me there.
I turned to Alyson and held out my hand. “Gum.”
“Calamity, I’m not a set of dominos,” she announced.
I stared at her for a second. “Did you think you were?”
“Duh, you were treating me like dominos. You know, ordering me around? God, have you been sipping Fool-Aid?”
“I totally would have been, but the guy at the store told me you bought it all out,” I said brightly. “Anyway, I’d love to chitchat like this with you more another time, but right now may I please have a piece of your gum?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Because if you don’t give me one I’ll tell your dad you snuck out last night to meet a guy.” I said it entirely because it was the kind of thing she always said to me, but the effect was magico.
Alyson blanched. She blanched! Like a, um, blanching thing.22
If I hadn’t been wearing floaties (THANK YOU POLLY), I totally would have patted myself on the back.
“We didn’t meet a guy,” Veronique said, ruining the mood. “Reggie didn’t show up.”
Before I could enjoy the double whammy wonder of Almondyson being scared AND a guy standing her up—not that I would have! Because I am not a cold snake with icy pops where my heart should be! And also my rib cage!—Alyson hastened to add, “He didn’t just not show up, he totally called. He had some family thing.”
Sigh. It had been so sweet while it lasted. But now was not the time for Le Basking in Others’ Misery (not that there ever is a time for that, of course). Now was the time for Le Busting a Moveo. So I said, “Look, I just need a tiny piece of gum. It can even be one you’ve chewed, okay?”
“When she finishes dusting for prints, we could try the pen for vibrations,” Veronique pointed out.
Alyson pulled a mini-wad about the size of my pinkie off the mega-wad in her mouth and dropped it on my bread plate. I smiled winningly at her—
“Stop making faces at me, Jas.”
—and used the gum to stand the pen up so I could dust the main part of it for prints.
I started near the tip and worked my way down. There were none at the tip, where people usually hold pens, but there were three partial prints near the end. I used the Scotch tape to lift them and pasted them onto the cards.
“Based on the locations, with one underneath and two on top, I’d say it looks like a thumb, index, and pointer finger.”
“What does that tell us?” Tom asked excitedly.
“That someone used their thumb, index, and pointer fingers to hold the end of the pen,” I said.
“So, in other words, N-O to the T-H-I-N-G,” Alyson clarified politely. “For a change. Whereas everything Tiger’s *Eye and I have tried has worked.”
Luckily I was wearing my Ignoring Ears so I couldn’t hear this.
The rest of the conversation had pretty much the same result, though. I would hand Roxy something and say: “What about [insert object from box]? Could it be used to kill someone?”
And she’d say: “I could make a [nonlethal device], [other nonlethal device], [musical instrument], [bud vase], but nothing that would kill anyone through their hand.”
And I’d say: “Okay, so we still have [insert word for nothing].”
And then Alyson and Veronique would take the object and start chanting over it. And I would [insert word for wanting to cry].
“If you could figure out how to get someone into the room with him, I’d have a lot more ideas,” Roxy said.
“Like what?”
“You could poke someone in the brain through the eye with the screwdriver and cause a heart attack. I could come up with tons more,” Roxy added. “But they’d all only work if there was someone with him.”
“So we need to figure out how someone could have broken into his office,” I said.
“I’ve got it,” Veronique said from Planet Hench. She dropped the silk thread she’d been “ommmmmmmmmm”ing over.
“What?”
“Behind the Music,” she said proudly.
“The killer got in through music?”
“No. We have to find out what Arabella’s Behind the Music moment was.”
“Her what?” I asked.
“Duh, the moment in her life that changed everything,” Alyson explained. “It’s usually a horrible-slash-heartrending tragedy. Everyone has one. It defines them. God, Jas, you are so gignorant.”
“What’s that? I’m gignoring you.”
We put the conversation on pause at this interesting point for a moment of awed silence as the waiter delivered our pizzas to the table.23 I swear Roxy had tears of bliss in her eyes as she looked at her artichoke heart and prosciutto pizza, and even Polly looked a bit starstruck contemplating her pizza with arugula and walnuts on it. Tom had gone with the MangiaFuoco—fire eater—so his was covered with spicy sausages, peppers, and hot sauce, and I’d stuc
k with my favorite, pesto with pepperoni. Together they were glorious to behold and even the salads the Evil Henches had ordered instead of pizza (yes! They forewent pizza! If that is a word!) did not take away from the beauty of the table. Speechless with wonder is how I suppose you could describe us.
It’s hard to be depressed in the face of such Wonder but I felt a little sad, anyway. Despite the new clues, I was still clueless about what had happened and why. Not to mention who did it. Or what Arabella’s Behind the Music moment was. And I couldn’t get away from the nagging feeling that I was missing something.
As we ate, I pulled the newspaper articles toward me and skimmed them. They were more than twenty years old, and the Italian was kind of old-fashioned and hard for me to understand. They were all written by the same reporter, Carlotta Longhi, and the more I got into them, I realized that they were all connected.
“These are all about Arabella’s dad’s house. Ca’Dario, better known as La Casa che Uccide. It’s a five-part history of the place.”
“What does La Casa che Uccide mean?” Tom asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I said.
“Jas, what does it mean?” Polly repeated in the voice she will use in later life to frighten her children.
I said, “It means The House that Kills.”
Chapter Nineteen
Okay, I might have mumbled it. And whispered. From behind a napkin.
Polly frowned. “What was that? I could have sworn you said ‘The House that Kills.’”
“I could have,” I mumble-whisper-napkined now with added coughing action.
“That would be a good song title,” Roxy pointed out.
“It would also make a good place to avoid,” Polly said. “But I suppose that’s too much to hope for. Anyway, the articles are all old. Mr. Neal didn’t own it back then.”
“No, but maybe Arabella found something in them that gave her a clue about how her dad was murdered.”
“What do they say?” Roxy asked. “Is it morbid?”
I started reading out parts to my pals and the Henches, translating as I went.
“One palace on the Grand Canal always makes ooh and aah spurt out of tourists for its very beautiful face,’” I translated. “‘And always they are electrocuted when they learn the truth of it.’”
“Wow, Jas, your Italian is really good,” Polly said. “I am electrocuted listening to you.”
“When an ancient Venetian decided to make the most beautiful house as a wedding gift, never once does he think that instead of a glad house, he has made the house of tears, the house of stopped-breathing, the house of tortures. In different words: the house that kills.”
“Now I am electrocuted,” Roxy said.
“I am stopped-breathing,” Polly said.
“We didn’t order the director’s-cut box set, Calamity. Can you just skip to the good parts?” Alyson said.
“Fine. The next article talks about how the girl it was built for became dead, and then the two after that are about the house’s other victims.” I flipped through them, then stopped. “Hang on, Arabella underlined this part.”
“What does it say?”
“‘The power endures—as recently as last month the house tries to claim another victim, a boy artist making the restoration. He is working alone in the studio when a beam falls on him from above, but he succeeds to escape with only a broken shrimp.’”
Tom looked at me skeptically. “Are you sure the word is shrimp?”
“Not really. Anyway, a broken something. Then blah blah blah. Okay, here’s a good part: ‘When you pass the big door of the house you will sense that special feeling. As though digits are creeping up your spine and your hair is dancing up-ended.’”
“Your hair does that all the time, anyway,” Alyson chimed in.
“Thank you for enriching the conversation. Then it says that the palace is being restored from the foundation and wonders if the new owner will also become dead. The end.” I looked up at my pals. “We have to get in there.”
“Yeah, I can’t wait to get that special feeling,” Polly said.
Roxy seconded that emotion. “I love it when digits crawl on me.”
“Your support warms le cockles of my heart,” I told them. “Come on, aren’t you even a little curious? How else are we going to figure out a way that someone could have gotten into Ned Neal’s office?”
Tom said, “I’m curious about who would buy a house like that.”
“Many of the owners didn’t die there, they just died while they owned it. And it’s really beautiful. And one of the articles said that guests hardly ever met a bad end. So see, it will be perfectly safe.”
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Veronique said. “Sapphyre and I will be able to pick up a lot of helpful vibrations there.”
There was a pause then as I saved Polly and Roxy from choking to death. When they were better, Tom asked, “Are you planning to just walk up and ring the doorbell and ask to see where Ned Neal died?”
“No, we’ll have to be clever about it.”
“I hope you are using ‘be clever’ as code for ‘eat some gelato and then go to the hotel for a nap,’” Roxy said. “Menudo was fighting all the time so I didn’t get much sleep on our flight.”
Since I couldn’t immediately come up with any clever ideas, and since at least if we went back to the hotel, Alyson and Veronique might change their outfits, and since I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before either, and really since wearing water wings is sort of uncomfortable and Polly had promised to let me take them off in my hotel room, I agreed.
We paid our bill, gathered up the crazy puzzle of Arabella’s clues, and headed down a narrow calle back to the Grissini Palace. We passed by sixteen glass stores on our way, where by “passed” I mean “lingered endlessly at” as the Evil Henches stood inside sensing for a sign that Arabella had bought the cat there. The fact that every store had at least a dozen cats with goldfishes in their stomachs (as well as clowns plus fish, roosters plus fish, clear globs plus fish and [insert horrifying-to-think-of object here] plus fish), which made finding Arabella’s store very unlikely, did not daunt them. It did suggest a Little Life Lesson to me:
Little Life Lesson 35: Many people lose their minds on vacation.
As we waited for the Evil Ones outside a particularly jam-packed-with-hideousness shop, Roxy said, “Why do they make glass candies? They are taunting me.”
I groaned. “I told you not to use that word.”
“According to St. Willy Wonka, candy is mixed with love and makes the world taste good,” Roxy said. “What’s your problem with it?”
“Nothing.”
Polly looked me over with her special Best-Friend-O-Vision. “Does this have something to do with Jack?”
“No,” I lied.
“Ah, well, since we’re speaking opposite-intention language, then I will say that does not surprise me at all since he has not been spending a lot of time with them,” she said.
“Them?”
“Yes them. Candy. As in, the band.”
“Candy is a band?”
The Evil Henches had rejoined us then. “Ooh, I love Candy,” Veronique said. “All those girls are so hot. They’re opening for the NASCAR Dads on tour, aren’t they?”
Candy was a band. CANDY WAS A BAND!!!! A totally hot girl band, but still. I was so excited I wrote a haiku on the spot:
What does not melt in
Your mouth or your hands? A band!
I love you, Candy!
“Who did you think Candy was, precious?” Polly asked.
“A sooty-lashed, fair-haired, tantric sex goddess who could stop a rhino from charging with a look,” I explained.
“Oh, well, that makes sense. I could see how you would leap immediately like an antelope to that conclusion.”
“It fit all the evidence,” I said.
“Which was?”
“He was meeting someone named Candy.”
Polly got all
matter-of-facty. “On that logic we can assume that Ned Neal was killed by a phantom who doesn’t really exist. That fits all the evidence, right?”
“You’re right,” I agreed. And as we would find out in less than forty-eight hours, it was true.
Chapter Twenty
At the time, though, all I knew was that my friends Happy and Go-Lucky had rejoined me then. Life was all sunny-side up, don’t hold the bacon.
I turned to Polly as we continued our walk back to the hotel. “Can I borrow your phone? I want to call Jack.”
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Jas,” Tom said.
My heart rate picked up. “Why? Is he with someone besides Candy? Tell me.”
“It’s nothing like that, just that it’s only four thirty A.M. in LA. You might want to wait like, five hours. You know, if you want him to be awake.”
Tom was right, of course. But a love like mine chafes at restraint. I would have to find something to do for five hours, something—
I don’t know if it was because DJs Happy and G-Luck were again in da house or what, but at right that second I had a dazzling flash of brilliance.
“I’ve just had a dazzling flash of brilliance,” I announced.
“I’ve just felt my hair dance up-ended,” Polly said.
“I am spurting Oh Nos,” Roxy added.
“My silly pals, there’s no need for concern. I figured out a way to learn more about what Arabella was thinking.”
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