The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two)

by Baum, Spencer

  Nicky looked at the lace bandage on her little finger as she spoke. A needle was hidden inside that bandage, meant to prick Art’s neck once they had what they needed from him. The needle was coated in Addonox, a knockout drug that Ventigen invented to subdue anyone the immortals wanted taken away, including jackals kidnapped off the streets.

  Nicky still remembered the horrible nightmares she had when a dose of Addonox knocked her out, and was glad for Art that she didn’t have to use it yet.

  “You mean the drink just put him to sleep?” Jill said. “Please tell me you were able to get his password.”

  “Screw you dad,” said Nicky.

  Jill looked at her, confused.

  “That’s the password, I think” said Nicky.

  “Screw you dad is his password?” said Jill.

  Nicky nodded. “Either that, or he had to get something off his chest before he went under.”

  “Geez,” Jill muttered. She turned to Art’s sleeping body. “Daddy issues much?” she said. “And how do I spell that password? Are there any spaces or hyphens? Do I capitalize the first letter of each word? Do I use any weird spellings? If I were making that my password I would end it with an exclamation point to add an extra character for security and to really drive home the sentiment.”

  “He didn’t elaborate,” said Nicky. “He barely got the words out before he was unconscious.”

  “Well, they’re likely using security software that my mom wrote, meaning we have three chances to get it right before we’re permanently locked out,” said Jill, the tone in her voice suggesting that she was excited at this new obstacle in her path. “Point me at a computer so I can get to work.”

  “What about Art? Shouldn’t we move him to his bed?”

  “I have no idea what to do about Art,” said Jill. “If he hasn’t had any Addonox, for all we know he might wake up. I think we should leave him there for now and you should keep an eye on him. If he wakes up, use your needle to knock him out.”

  “Got it,” said Nicky, happy that Jill had was taking charge. This version of Jill, the brilliant, confident computer hacker, was the one Nicky liked best.

  Nicky put her phone and her keys down on the mantle near the entryway, then led Jill back to the study, where a razor thin silver laptop sat on a glass table in the corner. Jill turned it on and sat down at the keyboard.

  “We’ll try all lower case with no spaces first,” she said.

  She typed in the password. A window with a red X appeared on the screen.

  “Okay, I guess I’ll try capitalizing the first letter of each word,” she said.

  Again, her password was met with the red X of rejection.

  “This is it,” she said. “Last try. If I type in the wrong password one more time, it’s over. Art’s login will be locked until another partner at the firm reinstates it with a new password. What do you think we should try? Hyphens? Does Art seem like a guy who would use hyphens?”

  “No,” said Nicky. “He’s too lazy for that. Try replacing the word ‘you’ with just the letter, like you’re texting.”

  “Okay. Are you sure? I mean…this is our last chance.”

  Nicky shrugged. She wasn’t sure of anything.

  “Maybe we should try to wake him up,” Jill said.

  “No, we’re messing with him enough already,” said Nicky. “He gets to sleep now. I’m worried we might kill him if we put his body through anything more right now.”

  “Well this is it. Whatever I type in now is our final answer. What do you think? Should I go with all lower case, no hyphens, and the letter u?”

  Nicky looked at the keyboard, imagining Art sitting at a computer and entering his password for the first time. Clearly he was in a rebellious mood when he created it. He would have typed it quickly, without much thought. He would have blurted it out through his fingers before he had a chance to take it back.

  She raised her hands and put them on imaginary keys in the air, pretending to be Art, angry at his father and blowing off steam with words he’d always wanted to say. She followed the movements of her fingers, each hand taking its turn. Left-right-left-right-left…

  “Not the letter u,” she said, seeing her left index finger reaching for the y key. y-o-u…pinkie hits the shift key…

  “Capital D,” Nicky said.

  Jill raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Yes, even in his little moment of rebellion, Art would fear his father enough to capitalize Dad.”

  Jill typed the password as instructed.

  “We’re in!” she said. “Nicky Bloom I could kiss you!”

  “No thanks. I’m all kissed out tonight. I’ll leave you to your work. How long do you need?”

  Jill didn’t answer. Her fingers were clapping across the keyboard; her eyes were glued to the screen. Nicky had seen this before. Once Jill got going on a hacking job, she was like a machine.

  Nicky stepped out of the study and quietly closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 4

  While Jill hacked away at the database, Nicky explored the Tremblay mansion. She started with the bedroom next to the study.

  If the main entry was Merv’s walk-in trophy case, this bedroom was a museum in his honor. Photos of Merv standing with every power player in Washington lined the walls. Framed thank you notes and letters of appreciation from dignitaries and business titans hung near the window. And sitting alone on the far wall, where it could catch the perfect lighting, was a huge oil portrait of Merv the hunter in all his glory. The portrait showed him standing in the tall grass of the African plain, a comically large rifle propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger. He wore a beige flak suit and hard hat, like some Colonial British adventurer, and he stared down the barrel of his gun, begging the viewer to imagine what awesome prey was about to get shot.

  The next room over was a strange, almost sad, bit of space. Clearly meant to honor the children the way the previous room honored Merv, it was an untended, incomplete project. Childhood photos of Art and his older brother Reggie gave way to photos of Reggie by himself to photos of Reggie out hunting with his dad. There were photos of Reggie and Merv in a pine forest in winter, in a tropical jungle, and on the side of a mountain. Art was in none of these shots. He had the opposite wall, and all he got were his school pictures, one after another in sequential order. In the middle school photos he wore colorful polo shirts. In the high school photos he wore suits. A few inches of wall space separated Art from the rest of his family, but it might as well have been an ocean for what it implied.

  Art’s mother, who had lived in this home only a few months ago, was nowhere to be found in any of these pictures. It was that kind of divorce. The fighting parties didn’t just want to separate; they wanted to stamp each other out of existence.

  The more Nicky looked, the more the Tremblay mansion left her depressed. Fifty rooms, most of them untouched by the two bachelors who still lived here. Art’s older brother was off at college. His mother lived across town. Two men and a team of servants—that was the Tremblay home. Sure, there were still great parties at this mansion—an invite to one of Merv’s cocktail hours meant you were a power player in DC—but what about the rest of the time?

  Nicky went back through the foyer with all its animals. She stopped to check on Art, who was still sleeping soundly. She went to the sitting area beyond the giant moose and grabbed a pillow from one of the couches. She brought it back for Art and laid it gently under his head. He let out a soft whimper as she did so. He had a smirk on his face. Hopefully he was someplace nice at the moment, someplace better than here.

  The west wing of the mansion had a giant indoor pool with a cascading waterfall, a game room with two pool tables and a pinball machine, a small movie theater with a full-size screen, and a dining room with a long mahogany table and twenty chairs. Past the dining room, Nicky found an intersection between three hallways. One hall led to the garage, where Merv’s collection of sports cars f
rom around the world was stored. Another hall led to the kitchen, and was meant for servants. But the third hall, the one to the right….

  That hall dead-ended at a small door. Unlike any of the other doors in the house, which had beautiful engraving and filigree on the handles, this one was plain wood with a plain brass doorknob. And it was locked.

  Nicky ran back to the foyer where Art was still sleeping peacefully. Remembering something lumpy pushing up against her earlier, she reached into his front pocket and pulled out his keychain. She took it back down the hall and to the locked door. She tried every key on the keychain. Not a one of them worked.

  She placed Art’s keys on the floor, pulled off her right earring, and straightened out the earwire. She slid the earwire into the center of the lock and began to jiggle it up and down. With each upward pull, the steel pins in the lock pressed their shape into the soft silver wire. She could feel herself getting closer, the wire stretching to the back of the lock. She was seconds away from getting the door open when she heard the Jada Razor jingle that was her ringtone. She had left her phone on the mantle in the foyer. She thought about letting it ring, but then decided it might be a distraction to Jill. Leaving her earwire in the lock, she ran back to the foyer.

  She found her phone in time to see that the incoming call was from Ryan Jenson.

  Her first thought was to shut the phone off, that now was a terrible time to take a call from anyone, much less from him, that she needed to think about the mission and Ryan wasn’t a part of the mission anymore.

  It rang again. She had to act now. She felt an urgency to make it stop ringing. She reached for the button to shut it off, but at the last second, she pressed answer instead.

  “Hello?”

  Chapter 5

  “Hey Nicky. It’s Ryan.”

  Silence. Nicky ran on the balls of her feet, scurrying as quietly as she could to get out of the foyer where Jill might hear her talking on the phone.

  “Hello?” Ryan said.

  “Just a minute,” Nicky whispered.

  She ran back to the hallway, back to the earwire she’d left in the locked door.

  “Okay, sorry about that,” she said. “I had to get someplace quiet.”

  “That’s okay,” Ryan said. “I understand. I had to do the same thing…step away, that is.”

  “Oh yeah?” Nicky said. She knelt down on the floor and got back to work jiggling her earwire. “Step away from what?”

  “We’re having a little get-together at my house. Kind of an after-after-party, if you know what I mean.”

  Nicky stopped jiggling.

  “Are you telling me that Kim Renwick’s at your house?”

  “Yep. Pretty stupid of me to call since you and Kim are mortal enemies now. I’ll have to come up with something to say when I get back to the party. What do you suppose I should tell everyone?”

  “I don’t know. Who might you normally call at this time of night?”

  “Good question. Unfortunately, they all know the answer. No one. I don’t really talk on the phone much. I think I’ll need a different cover story. I’ll probably just say I had to go to the bathroom.”

  “That’s always a good way to go,” Nicky said. “Be sure to flush a toilet somewhere in the house before you come back.”

  “Good idea. I’ll do that.”

  It was good to hear his voice, even if they didn’t have anything to say to each other. The last time Nicky spoke to Ryan was at Homecoming, when Ryan asked her to run away with him before it was too late. She had rejected him—she had to—but that last conversation with him was one of many things that had been floating in her head all day long.

  She started jiggling the earwire again. She was getting close. She could feel it.

  “So…is there any particular reason we’re speaking on the phone this evening?” Nicky asked.

  “No. Just felt like it. I kind of wanted to tell you about Kim’s party, but maybe that conversation will have to wait.”

  With a hard click, the earwire found its way to the back of the lock. Nicky turned the knob and let the door swing open.

  There was nothing but a dusty water heater on the other side. It was a closet with a water heater, an unusually deep closet for such a small water heater. The unit was set so far back in the closet the light from the hallway barely touched it.

  “Bummer,” Nicky said.

  “Totally a bummer,” said Ryan.

  “What? Oh…no, I was just…something else was a bummer…it doesn’t have to wait, Ryan.”

  Ryan was laughing now. “What are you talking about Nicky Bloom?”

  She started to laugh too. He did that to her. The sound of his laugh was so genuine. So clean. It forced her to smile.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t being very clear,” she said. “What I was trying to say is, I’m dying to hear about what happened last night.”

  She started closing the door to the water heater when something made her stop. Why was this water heater set so far back in the closet? It was strange. She took a step back to get a different view.

  “Nicky, I can tell you everything you need to know about Kim’s party in two words.”

  “So tell me then.”

  “It sucked.”

  Nicky laughed harder now. “Did it really suck, or are you just saying that to make me feel good?”

  “It royally sucked. It was the suckiest piece of sucktitude I’ve ever had the sucky luck to attend. Seriously, Nicky. If things weren’t…the way they were…I would have bolted on that party ten minutes into it. Hell, I almost bolted anyway. I was playing that game you play when you’re sneaking out on the party early. You know, the one where you make sure everyone’s seen you and then you wait until they’re just drunk enough that they don’t really know what’s going on and then you’re out of there. But I was afraid Kim might have done something to keep track of who stayed and who didn’t, like hidden cameras at the exit or something.”

  “She probably paid her door security to keep notes on anyone who left,” Nicky said.

  “There you go. That sounds like her. So anyway, I was stuck there, like everyone else, and had to grin and bear it.”

  Nicky was looking at the hallway as a whole now, thinking about where she stood in the house. The kitchen was behind her. The garage was off to her left. The dining room was next to that….

  During her time as a thief for the Network she had learned how to figure out houses quickly from the inside. The layout of pipes and wires behind the walls gave clues to where the valuable things might be hidden.

  Looking at this water heater, she tried to imagine the layout of pipes behind the wall, and it didn’t make any sense.

  “I’m sure the party was fine for the other attendees,” she said. “You didn’t really want to be there, but a lot of people had been looking forward to it for a long time.”

  “But that’s just it, they didn’t want to be there either. I could tell. It was the craziest thing. For the first hour of the party everyone was frantic trying to figure out who wasn’t there, because they knew anyone who wasn’t there had dissed Kim and was on your team now.”

  The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that a water heater didn’t belong here, that putting it at the end of this hall kept the hot water so far away from the kitchen and the bathrooms that on cold days, the water would lose half its heat before it ever came out of the spigot.

  “Now I get it,” she said, quietly.

  “What’s that?” Ryan said.

  This water heater was a trick. It was hiding here at the end of a hall, behind a boring old door, a door that was locked for no good reason. Someone had put this water heater here to fool thieves like Nicky. This water heater wasn’t connected to anything and wasn’t functional. It was just here to hide something. Something good.

  Nicky stepped into the too-large closet and again thought about the layout of the house. Garage to her left. Outside wall to her right. Kitchen behind her.

&nbs
p; She turned left and ran her fingers along the wall. She found the crevice in the corner, hidden in shadow. Cradling the phone to her shoulder, she put both hands on the wall in front of her and gave it a hard push.

  With a slight pop, a hidden door in the wall swung open, revealing a stairwell descending into darkness behind it.

  “Nicky? Hello? Are you there?”

  “Hello, I’m here. Can you hear me?” she said.

  “I can hear you now,” Ryan said. “We must have lost each other there for a bit. What were you saying?”

  Nicky stepped down onto the stairs and felt along the wall with her hand. She found a light switch to her right and flipped it. A single fluorescent bulb came on, showing her the entire space. She was on a staircase that led down to a short corridor. At the end of the corridor was a solid steel door.

  “Oh..I was just saying…now I get it. People were more curious about who wasn’t at the party than who was there. They were thinking about my party even when they were at Kim’s.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly it,” Ryan said. “Your party was the big topic of conversation at Kim’s, and let me tell you, that made her furious. She hated it that everyone was trying to figure out who had ditched her party. The first person we all noticed was absent was Jill.”

  “Right. Who else?” Nicky said.

  “Then everyone noticed Art wasn’t around, of course. That thing you did with Art at the dance, with the wine glass and the dinner jacket…that had everyone all atwitter. What was that about anyway?”

  “I was improvising,” Nicky said. “Once you told me you had to go to Kim’s party, I had to get to work on someone else with money.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Ryan said. “It was never Art’s idea to crash into Rosalyn, was it?”

  Nicky went down the stairs and to the end of the corridor. She rubbed her hands on the steel door. Shiny and cold, she got the sense that it was really thick. There was a numeric keypad on the wall to her right. Nicky leaned in close to inspect it, thinking of how wild things had become. She and Jill wouldn’t be here if last night had gone according to plan, if Ryan had been their big money player rather than Art. Now Ryan was schmoozing with Kim and Nicky was burgling Art’s house.