by Brat
“The problem is, he can,” said Conrad. “Technically he’s our next of kin.” For the first time, he seemed really, truly scared. They both fell silent for a moment, imagining possibly wicked foster parents forcing the twins to do all sorts of grueling chores. Rhyme doubted that two sixteen-year-olds were in high demand. In the corner, Conrad found a corduroy teddy bear with one eye missing and held it up to the light. “Who would want us?” he asked, echoing Rhyme’s thoughts.
“So now what?” Rhyme hated to be insensitive, but she still couldn’t really piece it all together.
“In twenty-seven days, the estate will be settled,” Conrad said grimly.
“And then?”
“Then, that’s it.”
“What do you mean, ‘That’s it’?”
“That’s it for our lives. Asheville. Betty’s house. Our bedrooms, friends at school. Our everything. Who knows if we’d even get to live in the same home?” Conrad looked at the floor, as if seeking out his sister. “Don’t get me wrong. Meg drives me nuts, but it’d be …” His voice dropped off.
“I’m going to help you,” said Rhyme resolutely, blushing as she imagined the two of them on a treasure hunt together. But then she thought of T. K. “Why don’t we split up and switch floors? You stay down here, and I’ll go upstairs.”
CHAPTER 12
While Conrad searched the first floor, Rhyme made her way through the upstairs bedrooms. There were four, each with a particular (and slightly peculiar) theme. The first was all green. From the bedclothes to the walls and trim, every inch was forest, lime, chartreuse, and so on. Down the hall—where Rhyme was staying—was a second bedroom, covered in seashells: sand dollars, clamshells, and desiccated starfish, all stuck to the walls. The nightstand lamps were filled with black and pink sand, and the bedspread was embroidered with starfish. Sleeping there, Rhyme sometimes felt like a little mermaid.
But there was nothing to look at in these rooms aside from the spectacle. Mrs. Simpson had clearly decorated them herself—nothing from Betty Cassidy’s era, decades earlier. And most of the closets were empty. Mrs. Simpson was an empty nester, and these were guest rooms. After a quick once-over, Rhyme moved on.
Mrs. Simpson’s room itself was the most traditional, though that wasn’t saying much. She had three life-size portraits of what appeared to be Reggie. Though, on closer inspection, Rhyme saw there were subtle differences in the white spots among the three, and as she read the inscriptions beneath, confirmed that the first two paintings depicted Reginald Fairfax I and II. Rhyme shuddered, severely hoping she wasn’t going to open the closet and find two stuffed Boston terriers. Luckily, she didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t a closet at all—not anymore, at least. At some point Mrs. Simpson had converted the master walk-in closet to a miniature bedroom, complete with a memory foam twin bed to the side, under a gauzy canopy. The thick duvet was covered in cushions and dog toys. This was Reggie’s room, Rhyme realized with a grin. Or maybe it was the reverse. Mrs. Simpson did love that dog.
Down the hall, Rhyme looked in on what must have been Mrs. Simpson’s daughter’s bedroom, because this one had a winter motif. Mrs. Simpson’s daughter, Leslie, was an avid skier who now lived in Colorado. Snowflakes dotted the wallpaper, and the light fixtures looked like snow globes. A card sat on the white desk: “To Leslie—Congrats, grad!” In the desk’s pull-out drawer, Rhyme found a graduation cap and tassel—gold, of course, Leslie being an honors student—and below that, Attaway High yearbooks from 1986 and 1987. Leslie was a junior and senior in them, with no sign of the freshman or sophomore books. Rhyme remembered hearing the Simpsons had moved to Attaway as Leslie was nearing the end of high school.
Rhyme sat down on the bed and leafed through the pages. It was uncanny how much everything was still the same: Most Likely to Succeed senior superlative, Ski Week ’87, World Culture Club photos, Phoenix Fest. Rhyme turned to the class pictures, gasping when she saw Ellie’s mom, aged sixteen, with the biggest teased hair Rhyme had ever seen. She giggled and snapped a photo on her phone. She had to show this to Ellie. A few pages down, Rhyme found Ms. Sharpe—ten years before she became Kayla’s mom. She even found Roberta Roach, also known as Robin Robbins. Ick!
Rhyme looked up when she saw an unusual shadow on the wall. The streetlights had turned on, casting their glow through the wrought iron window. That window. With the “delicate latticework.” Rhyme hadn’t noticed it until now. This must have been Betty’s room, too. Rhyme went to the glass and saw her own empty room across the way. She tried to imagine it, being Betty, with a suitor below writing poetry. It was tough to imagine T. K. as the stand-outside-your-window kind of guy. She wished he was downstairs now, tossing rocks to get her attention.
Rhyme walked over to the opposite wall and, without thinking, ran her finger along the shadow’s curls. If it were the Sistine Chapel, it would not inspire any greater depth of feeling. She sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall, falling into the spindly shadows. Knowing that Conrad was right downstairs made her feel both safe and terrified. It was like something incredible or something terrible was about to happen, and she couldn’t decide which. She sighed, then gasped. Ever so slightly, the wall had given way beneath her. Her stomach dropped. Rhyme righted herself and pressed her fingertips against the wall. Click. A rectangular panel sprang back, sunk into the wall and opened. It was a tiny hidden door, leading into a tiny hidden room. That explains the pitched roof, Rhyme thought.
Before she could second-guess herself, she crouched down and crawled inside.
Undoubtedly this was Betty’s hideaway, Rhyme thought, as she passed through the narrow entrance. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the narrow attic, barely tall enough for Rhyme to stand. Dust swirled in the air and fell at Rhyme’s feet. In the middle of the room, a ratty old sheet covered something big and rectangular. Please tell me it’s not a coffin, Rhyme thought to herself. The last thing she needed to show Meg and Conrad was a skeleton. As she neared the mysterious object, Rhyme’s head started filling up with questions: If his love for Betty was so strong, why hadn’t Vinny ended up with her? Was there something in their way? Doesn’t true love conquer all? Rhyme wanted to believe that, but she feared that whatever was beneath the sheet might say otherwise.
With one quick tug, Rhyme peeled off the sheet. She shut her eyes and counted to five before opening them. “A trousseau,” she mumbled, surprising herself. Her mom had one at the foot of her bed, and Rhyme always made fun of her for referring to it as her “trousseau.” It was meant to hold “the dowry,” her mom had explained with a dreamy smile, which meant a box of gifts from a bride to a groom. Rhyme was pretty sure this was a trousseau. Anyway, it was more than a box—and it certainly wasn’t a coffin.
Opening it, in fact, she found the opposite: it was full of life. Strewn about the top were photos of a young Betty in a cheerleading costume; she was always in the back, not quite fitting in. Which made sense, given the next photo Rhyme uncovered, of Betty beaming beneath a banner that read “LORD OF THE RINGS FAN CLUB.” The caption beneath identified her as the club’s founder and president. And from the looks of it, also the club’s only member. Another picture showed her with two friends: “Me, Jo & Cathy—1963.” Digging around the box, Rhyme found some mismatched earrings, a stack of silver dollars, and an old piece of paper in a red sleeve.
“What is this?” Rhyme heard behind her. She jumped and clasped her chest. But it was just Conrad. “I came to see how you were doing. Nothing downstairs but old remote controls and receipts from the drugstore.” He trailed off as he laid eyes on the treasure trove. “Is that …” he said, unable to finish. Rhyme nodded and backed up, as if to give him space with his family.
“Should I get Meg?” she asked. Conrad was silent for a moment.
“No. Don’t,” he said, still eyeing the trousseau. “Let’s just us two look for a minute. We haven’t even found anything useful. Meg will just want to get straight to business, rip this thing apart.” Rhyme’s heart
skipped a beat. In the dark she couldn’t see the expression on his face, or the tattoos on his arms, but she could feel his presence. He had a kind soul. He must have gotten that from his grandmother. That and his bad sight, Rhyme thought, as he cleaned his glasses on his shirt.
“Shall we?” said Conrad, as he turned on the flashlight on his cell phone. “There’s gotta be years of memories in here.” He held up the picture of Betty under the banner and smiled proudly. “You go here, too?” he asked Rhyme.
“Attaway High? Oh, yeah. I’ll be a freshman in September,” she said, immediately regretting reminding him of her age.
“I’m guessing you’re a cheerleader, too,” he said.
“No way! Dance team forever!” Conrad raised his eyebrows, and Rhyme laughed. “Seriously, they’re way different.”
“You just strike me as the all-American girl,” he said. Rhyme gritted her teeth, as that was just one degree from “girl next door.” But he stopped there. “You know what I mean, cheerleader with the quarterback boyfriend, probably class president.”
Rhyme laughed. “I could never. The president has to give lots of speeches. Talking in front of all those people? No way.” She shook her head with fearful eyes.
“I doubt that,” Conrad said. “You’re brave. I have the bruise to show for it.” He pointed to his shin.
“Sorry about that …” Rhyme bit her lip.
Conrad looked through a few more items—straight-A report cards, dried-up pens, a broken protractor, a muddy copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a recipe for “Pineapple Upside Down Cake” among them—before he turned back to Rhyme. “So where are your parents, anyhow?” he said.
Rhyme hesitated. Then, she told him about her summer. Harmony’s show. Her parents abandoning her. Her friends ditching her. Everything … with one notable exception. She never mentioned T. K. Does it not matter, or am I hiding him on purpose? Whatever the reason, she avoided the subject altogether. “I don’t know, I just feel really alone,” she said.
Conrad nodded. “I know how you feel.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t even think about …” Rhyme wanted to bang her head against the wall. Conrad had lost both his parents and his grandmother and was on the brink of losing everything else. “My problems are nothing compared to yours,” she said.
But Conrad waved her concern away. Then, after a moment, he turned to her. “You know, my parents didn’t die at a concert.” Aha! Rhyme couldn’t help but smile to herself. “Meg is always making up those stories,” Conrad continued. “I think it’s still too painful for her to talk about, it’s easier for her to lie. She’s strong, and hard, but only because she has to protect so much softness inside.”
Rhyme didn’t say anything.
“My mom died in childbirth,” he said. “So I never really knew her. We learned a lot about her from Betty, though.” He pulled out his phone and showed Rhyme a picture of a framed photograph. Conrad and Meg’s mother had indeed been beautiful, her skin a shade darker, and eyes even greener than theirs. To think she was even loosely connected to boring old Attaway was a credit to the town.
“She looks a lot like Meg,” Rhyme said. “And you, too, obviously, being twins and all.” Shut up, Rhyme. In awkward situations, Rhyme often became a chatterbox. Trying to change the subject, she asked, “What was your dad like?”
Conrad let out a long breath. “That one’s harder, because I can remember him. It’s more difficult to describe people you know. You know?” Rhyme nodded, thinking of T. K. again.
Conrad thought for a second. “My dad was half Filipino and half Japanese. Both his parents were immigrants,” he began. “So, we’re really a melting pot of nationalities and ethnicities.” Conrad wiped some dust from the wooden rosebuds that lined the trousseau. “Especially now that we don’t even know who our real grandfather is. I dunno,” he said, trying to lighten the mood with a hollow laugh. “Sometimes I just feel like I’m having a bit of an identity crisis, you know? Meg, too, I think. It’s the reason she’s so determined to find our real grandfather.”
Rhyme nodded. “I—I just want to,” she stuttered, unsure of what to say. Their faces were less than a foot apart. Is he about to? Or am I—
“What’s that?” said Conrad, nodding at the red envelope Rhyme was still holding.
“Not sure,” said Rhyme, as she held it up in the wan light. But before they could investigate further, an interruption came from downstairs.
“Guys!” Meg called, her voice drawing closer. “Where are you?”
Conrad stooped back out through the door. Rhyme following behind. As she shut the panel, Conrad put a finger to his lips. They had a secret now. On the way down, Rhyme slipped the red envelope into her backpack, before hurrying to the first floor. Downstairs, Conrad was in the process of telling Meg that their search hadn’t turned up anything.
“Well that makes one of us,” she said, with a slight air of superiority. “I found something in the basement—”
“What?”
“—behind the boiler,” she finished, outstretching her arm and opening her palm.
“A pin?” Conrad asked, picking up the small black object. But it wasn’t just a pin, and as he held it up to the light, Rhyme saw it wasn’t black, either.
“It’s a Purple Heart.”
CHAPTER 13
Early the next morning, Rhyme arrived at the library with a lot on her mind. And a lot in my backpack, too, she thought, rolling her eyes. Making sure nobody was looking, she took out a list of instructions from Meg about the Purple Heart she’d found in the boiler room. Tempting as it was, Rhyme still had two math problem sets left to complete—casualties of spending all night with the twins. If she fell behind on homework, Rhyme knew that Ms. Sharpe would keep her late. As the librarian paced in and out of her storage closet, the air conditioner puttered on, the computers started humming, and ax2+bz+c danced in front of Rhyme’s eyes …
But try as she might to concentrate on the quadratic formula, her attention kept drifting back to the night before. Meg and Conrad had hid at Rhyme’s house while Mrs. Simpson came home from the Sunset Club, all dolled up, and bragging about beating Mr. Fitzroy in canasta. It was nearly eleven before Mrs. Simpson went to bed and Rhyme could sneak out. The twins were hard at work in the kitchen, scribbling on a pad of paper. Conrad’s sleeves were rolled up to show off the inky, cryptic patterns that adorned his arms. Meg, looking puzzled, kept blowing a lock of hair from her forehead. Her phone displayed the search results for “Purple Heart”: A military decoration awarded in the name of the president to those wounded or killed while serving with the US military.
Their working theory was that Vinny had served in the war (“Vietnam probably,” Rhyme had piped up, using her recently acquired knowledge of 1960s Attaway to good use. Conrad and Meg had been impressed.) “Wounded, obviously,” Meg had chimed in, since Vinny’s last letter to Betty was from only five years ago. According to the twins, that meant there should be some record of enlistment, or maybe even an article about Vinny’s wartime service. “You have to do this,” Meg had said to Rhyme, grabbing her shoulder—almost like a friend. “We don’t have access to the library.”
Which was how Rhyme found herself once again hunched over the ancient computer console. It took almost ten minutes to “boot up,” and still used something called a “dial-up connection,” Ms. Sharpe had explained. Apparently, that meant old and slow. Finally, the screen snap-and-crackled to life.
Rhyme called up the search engine, and hit the clackety keys….
…“Vinny” + “P” + “Purple Heart” …
…“Vincent” + “Purple Heart” …
…“VP” + “Purple Heart” + “injury” …
…and so on, and on, and on …
After an hour of scouring different names, nicknames, and permutations, Rhyme had turned up zilch. Nothing about a Purple Heart for a Vincent, Vinny, or anyone similar. Maybe it was never reported, or worse, never uploaded. Ms. Sharpe had said the librar
y still rented several storage units filled with papers waiting to be scanned.
“Just look up ‘Purple Heart recipients,’” Meg texted when Rhyme said she couldn’t find anything. “How many could there possibly be?”
“Like, in the entire world?”
Meg hadn’t responded. The answer was almost two million soldiers who had been wounded or killed. And that was just a rough estimate. There was no way to search beyond name, and there were over 364,000 names that included a V. Nine hundred eighty-four thousand if you included last names.
They weren’t going to find Vinny this way. At least not today. So Rhyme moved on to mission two, which was more like a joint mission, she decided. She and Conrad had come up with it together. She and Conrad … It was an obvious idea, actually. But there was a saying about the things right in front of your nose. Like Conrad, Rhyme thought, and it had taken until the night before to make her think of it.
“We need to check Betty’s yearbook,” Rhyme had said. “Vinny must have gone to school with her.” Conrad had said he didn’t remember ever seeing his grandmother’s yearbooks, even though they had to be somewhere in her labyrinth of an attic. Luckily, the Attaway Public Library kept copies of the high school yearbooks.
Betty was class of ’67, and Rhyme flipped immediately to the back of that yearbook, following a hunch. “Best Couple.” Rhyme would certainly have voted for them. But it wasn’t them—it was “Allen Powell and Cathy Fitzroy.” Whoever they were. If Meg and Conrad found their real grandfather, Rhyme suddenly wondered, would they stay here? Would they go to Attaway High? She couldn’t imagine them fitting in. Or picture Conrad tossing a football with T. K., Flash, and Ace. For a split second, Rhyme had a crazy thought: Best Couple: Rhyme and Conrad.
She put the thought out of her mind. They weren’t even in the same grade. Not to mention, T. K. She felt it again, that deep pit of guilt in her stomach. But she had done nothing wrong! Right? Was it cheating to think about someone else? Was her relationship with T. K. even serious enough that it could be considered cheating?