Super Max and the Mystery of Thornwood's Revenge

by Susan Vaught

  “I thought it was puppies.”

  “Puppies, kittens, ponies, goldfish. It’s all the same after a while.”

  Lavender stayed quiet for a while, then squirmed in her seat. “Is your mom still thinking about coming for a visit?”

  “I hope not.”

  That earned me the extra-special Lavender-does-not-approve look. “I thought you weren’t mad at her anymore.”

  “It comes and goes. I mean, I get why I live with Toppy.” When I flopped against the back of my chair, it groaned in the bus’s wheelchair locks. “The work she does, it only pays in spurts, and sometimes she really struggles. Plus, here, I’m a lot closer to Vanderbilt Hospital, and Toppy’s insurance covers my wheelchairs and everything I could ever need.”

  “But . . .”

  “But, I don’t know. She can’t handle me, I guess.” I gestured to the wheelchair. “Or she doesn’t want to. Or maybe she never wanted to be a mom in the first place. The hacker has that bit about her irresponsibility right, at least.”

  “I don’t know if the hacker has anything right,” Lavender said. “But that’s part of why I keep thinking it has to be somebody who knows you at least a little bit, to dig at you and Toppy about your mom.”

  My stomach tensed. Somebody who knew us. Maybe knew us well enough to know how much that would bother Toppy—or me? “The computer corkboard app is cool, but I feel like we need to do a real corkboard, you know? To see it, to be able to touch it and move things around and stare at it live and in-person. Maybe it’ll help us think.”

  “I’ll grab supplies from Mom’s store and bring the stuff over—oh, wait. I’ll bring it next year, when we’re ungrounded over the detentions.”

  I started to let the dread settle in, but my mind lurched to a new possibility. “Does the school call our parents over detentions?”

  “I don’t think so. Not unless we don’t show up for them. I really don’t know, since I don’t get in trouble.” Lavender leaned her head against the back of the bus seat. “And you don’t either, not anymore.”

  “So . . . if we don’t say anything about having to stay after school on Friday until Thursday . . .” I wiggled my eyebrows at Lavender.

  Her head came up. She pointed a finger at my face. “You’re trying to get us killed. Or grounded until we’re both fifty. You’re absolutely a bad influence and totally evil.” Then she grinned. “I like that in a person.”

  10

  DECEMBER 6

  Iron Man,” Riley Soza proposed, leaning back against the far counter in Bot’s Electronics. He had his hair pulled back today, and he was wearing jeans and a holiday sweater, all green and red with ornaments dangling in bad places, but he was still trying to look cool for Lavender’s sake.

  Bot was out picking up some packages at the post office. The shop smelled like cookies, and Bot had decorated the place with bowls of brightly colored candy on every flat surface. Classic holiday music piped from the ceiling, Christmas stockings hung from rafters, and Bot had sprayed snowflakes on all the windows. Early evening frost kept me from getting a clear view of the police station when I tried to look back over my shoulder to be sure Toppy hadn’t gotten impatient and walked outside to hunt for me.

  Lavender stood next to me in the corner, swapping between dance poses and stretches, and goggling at the rad desktop computer Ellis had just finished building for the store’s business operations. With the superfast Internet Bot had hooked up at the store, the thing worked like lightning. Pages loaded faster than blinks and flickers. I was so jealous.

  Today, at least, Lavender seemed more impressed with Ellis’s mad computing skillz than Riley’s gorgeous hair. She lifted her hands high over her head, stood on her toes, and arched her back. “Black Widow could take Iron Man with her energy weapons if she really wanted to,” she murmured in Riley’s general direction, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in the fight right now. We had gone a whole thirty hours with nothing new from the hacker, and even though that was great, it made us both nervous. Plus, she was really hating on Junior Thornwood, who had called her mom no less than ten times since he got to town, I swear it, Max!

  Was the hacker done messing with us, or just resting up, or getting ready for something way, way worse? Was it all connected to Junior’s arrival in town somehow?

  “No luck tracking the Facebook page or any of the other fake social media accounts, I’m assuming,” I said to Ellis.

  “None.” He kept his eyes on the screen, which was mostly black, reflecting the twinkly Christmas colors everywhere and the yellow outline of the top of his blond head. He worked with a grim expression, following pathways and pings, trying to run down the IP address of the person who had used my mother’s contact page with the spoof Thornwoodsrevenge e-mail address; we had tried actually sending an e-mail to that handle, but it bounced.

  Ellis had on a black That Which Doesn’t Kill Me . . . Better Run sweatshirt, complete with a scary looking, very nonholiday bloody eyeball in the center. It fit my mood a whole lot better than Riley’s entry into this year’s Worst Christmas Sweaters Ever contest. Instead of trying to keep up the superhero fight, Riley came over to us and stood next to Lavender. She ignored him and did a spin-in-place, then picked at a loose red curl, obviously not caring if Riley thought she was cute or not—at least for today.

  The sound of Ellis’s keyboard tapping blended with the old, worn-out holiday songs. The program he was using to chase the IP signal wasn’t store-bought. I could tell. No fancy prompts, no glossy anything. He powered through command after command. Each time a ping came in telling him that he’d found a computer where the message might have come from, he’d copy-paste a cyberaddress and start again.

  Another ping returned. And another.

  “Why is this message pinging back to so many different computers?” Lavender asked Ellis. “The hacker can’t possibly have that many—and how could all of them have sent the message?”

  Ellis clicked a few more times, then leaned back in his chair, letting his arms go slack. “They’re zombies,” he said.

  Lavender looked at me, clueless. “Zombies? As in brrraaaaiiinnnns zombies?”

  “The hacker’s using other people’s modems and networks to route his signal,” Riley explained. “Zombie networks are robot or ‘bot’ networks. Bot got his nickname from his last name, yeah, but also ’cause he used to do stuff like that back in the day, until he got in trouble for it.”

  “So, is that expensive?” Lavender asked, and I knew immediately she was thinking about Junior Thornwood and his money. “I mean, it would take a lot of cash to do something like that, right?”

  “Nah,” Riley said. “It’s code. Viruses and Trojan horses—stuff people click on, and it launches programs that open doors to their computers. Most people never even know their machines are being used.”

  “More about skill than finances,” I said. “Sorry, Lav. Can’t nail Junior Thornwood that easily.”

  Lavender lifted her leg straight up in front of her face, then looked around her knee and offered me a rude hand gesture.

  “Junior Thornwood, yeah,” Ellis said. “He came by here to get some help with his phone battery. Weird that he’s in town just when the net’s lighting up about Thornwood’s Revenge.”

  “Past weird,” Lavender said. “I think he’s a creeper. Or up to something. He’s in this somehow.”

  “Who is a creeper?” Bot asked as he elbowed through the shop door carrying two stacks of teetering packages.

  I rolled over to help, and Lavender came over, too. We helped him load the stacks onto the shop counters.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Lot of trouble for nothing. I didn’t get the supply contract for the middle school and the high school, so I’ve just gotta send most of this stuff back. The restocking fees will hurt.”

  Bot sounded sad. I reached out and patted his hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Stinks,” Riley commented from over at the computer. “Got outbid by some big bo
x store in Nashville.”

  “Blue Creek should keep its business at home,” Ellis said. “That’s how loyalty works.”

  Bot put on a big grin that deepened the lines in his face and made his white curly beard poof out around his lips. “I still want to know who the creeper is.”

  Lavender gave one of her better theatrical groans. “Junior Thornwood. I think.”

  “Well, it’s easy enough to check his history,” Riley said. “Right, Ellis?”

  “Well, yeah, since there’s not much else I can do to help,” Ellis admitted. “Sorry about the e-mail dead end, Max. This hacker’s probably booting from a public WiFi, maybe even taking over computers at the hotspot. If we want to catch him using his cyberfootprints, you’ll have to have help from the Feds.”

  “Feds are bad news,” Bot said, shuffling the packages behind the counter a few at a time and stacking them onto a storage shelf. “I’d leave them out of it. Take it from a high school malcontent, the FBI has zero sense of humor.”

  I frowned. “The State Police and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation are already helping, but they aren’t finding much.”

  “Probably not a priority, since nobody’s really getting hurt.” Ellis glanced from me to his computer screen again.

  “Sooner or later, he’ll make a mistake,” I said.

  Ellis laughed. “Dunno about that, Max. He’s pretty good.”

  Lavender’s frown was almost as big as mine. “Toppy says criminals always screw something up somewhere. We just have to find where Junior or his goons left openings.”

  “You’re pretty positive it’s that guy from up North,” Riley said.

  Lavender assumed something that looked like a yoga pose, feet back, arms out. “He’s disgusting.”

  “He likes her mom,” I explained to both confused guys.

  “Oh.” Riley focused on Ellis and the computer screen for a few seconds. Then Riley said, “So, does Toppy have any suspects other than Junior Thornwood?”

  “Not that he’s told us,” I admitted. “Lavender and I, we’re keeping notes ourselves, but we’ll be grounded as of Thursday night, so it’ll be a while before we can do much.”

  That made Riley narrow his eyes. He studied first me, then Lavender. “You know in advance you’ll be grounded? What, are you planning another fuse box meltdown or something?”

  “That was an accident.” I banged my head on the chair’s headrest once. “I keep telling everybody, but noooobody believes me.”

  “We got a detention for Friday,” Lavender said glumly. “Two whole hours.”

  “I could come keep you company,” Riley offered. “Blue Creek High’s not much on detention, so I don’t get pegged often, like Ellis used to.”

  “Shut up, degenerate,” Ellis mumbled, still typing. “It’s only because I wasn’t rich. The kids with money—nothing ever happened to them, no matter what they did.”

  “Yep, we’re in the poverty club,” Riley agreed. “And it sucks. But at least we have places to live and jobs we love, right?”

  Ellis grumbled something under his breath, and Riley went back to offering to keep us company in detention.

  Lavender hit Riley in the shoulder. “You show up at our school acting silly, and we’ll be stuck staying after school for a whole month, dork.”

  “You think Black Widow could take out Iron Man, and I’m the dork?” Riley tried to look all mean and sarcastic, but failed.

  I sighed and glanced out the window, just in time to see Toppy stalking across Town Square, heading for Something Wicked, where he assumed I’d be.

  “We have to go, Ellis.”

  He gave me a sort-of smile. “Sorry I couldn’t find out anything. I’ll call you if I dig up anything on Junior.”

  “E-mail,” I reminded him. “No cell phone, remember? But thanks for the other stuff. At least we know it’s a real hacker and not some wannabe. Maybe that’ll help narrow possibilities. I mean, not everybody has serious computer skills.”

  Ellis pondered this a second, then gave me a single nod. “Just, you be careful. Don’t accidentally get yourself caught up in this. I don’t think it’s about you. And your new footplate etchings are seriously cool. I like the red glitter paint.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up before honking my clown-nose joystick and heading for the door that Lavender was already holding open. But I couldn’t help thinking about how wrong he was. Attacking my grandfather, the only family member I could count on—that totally was about me. All the stuff the hacker said, implying how much of a burden I was to everyone, I’d mark that in the “about me” category, too, never mind getting questioned by Captain Coker about being abused. Plus, that hacker had e-smacked Mayor Chandler, and I really, really liked Mayor Chandler.

  When the people you cared about got attacked, it definitely felt personal. It was personal. Way down deep inside, I wished I really could turn into Super Max with her flying, sailing, tank of a chair and outstanding superpowers, because I was personally going to stop this mess any way I could.

  • • •

  Toppy had errands to run, so Lavender’s mom offered to swap cars and drive us home. We lingered at Something Wicked for a while, helping with holiday decorations, and by the time we got to my house, Toppy was already at the kitchen table arguing with somebody on the phone. I figured it was somebody in Blue Creek, mad about something the hacker had done, but as we eased by trying to get to my room without bothering him, I heard the words, “bill,” “repair,” and “ridiculous.”

  I quit rolling, and Lavender stopped beside me, her hands gripping the bag with the corkboard and other supplies she had taken from Something Wicked.

  “Yes, I understand that you only buy one battery per wheelchair,” Toppy said. “But the batteries stop working every year or so and need to be replaced.” Pause. “No, she can’t just use a manual chair. Her arms aren’t strong enough.” Pause. “It makes no sense that you would refuse to purchase parts needed to keep her wheelchair running because they’re too expensive. What’s she supposed to do? Pray for the miracle of walking when her spine is broken? What kind of chicken-fool logic is that?”

  I jammed my joystick forward and my chair shot toward my bedroom. Face burning, I wheeled inside and almost slammed it hard before I even remembered Lavender was with me.

  “Sorry,” I got out as she stood there, petrified, staring at my death-grip on the door.

  I let the door go.

  She shut it after she came inside, and started unpacking the bag. I rubbed my face and recited superheroes and tried not to feel guilty for scaring her. When that didn’t work, I studied the row of ten Thornwood Creepiness photos I had hung on my wall. There was the shot of the entry hall, and some of the daguerreotypes, and then the fireplace, and Vivienne Thornwood’s portrait.

  I had looked them over before I hung them up, and I had stared at them afterward, too. I had even expanded them on the iPad a few times, trying an inch-by-inch search, but really, they didn’t show much. Just old stuff in an old house. Still, I kept coming back to them, bothered because I felt like I should be seeing something. What, I had no idea. But something.

  The clean spots were weird, sure. And those old photos—ugh. And really, I could find better shots of Vivienne Thornwood’s portrait online, because my lighting was off, and—

  “What’s that?” Lavender asked from beside me, making me jump.

  I realized my hands were still pressed against my cheeks from when I got mad, and I lowered them. “What?”

  “That.” Lavender pointed at a shiny spot on the fireplace, right at the edge of the hearth.

  “A reflection of the light we turned on,” I said.

  She walked up to the picture and squinted. “Well, the shadow beside it looks spooky.”

  “That’s Mayor Chandler.”

  She giggled. “Oh.” The giggling stopped. She turned toward me, and I went stiff all over, waiting for her to tell me how mean it was that I almost slammed the door on her, and how she hat
ed it when I got mad.

  Instead, she said, “That’s pretty stupid, how the insurance company won’t buy you a battery if yours dies.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

  Lavender stood still for a few really miserable-feeling seconds, then stretched and did a dance step back to my desk and picked up a piece of corkboard and scissors. “What do you think? Taller than wide, or wider than tall?”

  “I want to put it on my door, top to bottom.”

  “Strips then,” she said. “Got it.”

  It took us a while to get the corkboard hung, but we got most of the door space covered, then made our SUSPECT cards.

  “Really,” Lavender said, “I think we can take out Mayor Chandler. She has motive, maybe, given that she stayed mad at Toppy after they broke up—like, for decades—but she doesn’t really have means, and no opportunity.”

  “Agreed,” I said, and took her card from Lavender.

  Next, she held up Toppy’s card. Both of us stared at it. Really, he had no means or opportunity, but motive—

  I glanced down at my expensive chair and thought about the phone call. When I looked at the corkboard on the back of my door again, Lavender was still standing there with his card in her hand. She seemed like she was about to argue that we should junk it, but then she pinned it up without saying a word.

  “Now, about your Mom.” Lavender waved the next card at me, but I cut her off.

  “Leave Mom.”

  I could tell she wanted to argue, but she didn’t. I rolled over to my desk, where she had stacked the blank cards, and dropped off the eliminated suspect. When I got back, Lavender had finished organizing everything under Toppy’s name, Mom’s name, and Junior Thornwood, and ???.

  “I guess we won’t know what to put next until the hacker does something else.”

  “Don’t want to think about that,” I said.

  She crossed the room and plopped down on my bed. “What would somebody plan if they wanted everybody to think Thornwood’s Revenge was happening?”

  “No idea. When I’ve read theories, they’re always stuff like a giant town-eating fire, or financial ruin, or something else messy.”