by Susan Vaught
“I think it’ll be fine,” Lavender said.
“Oh, the Council mess?” Bot shook his head. “I can’t believe they’re taking it so far. Chief Brennan has a lot of people on his side.”
“They can’t blame my grandfather for some evil-brained hacker,” I said. “They just can’t.”
“You’d be surprised.” Ellis frowned. “Has he thought about taking time off?”
“Toppy never takes time off,” I said. “And he’s not about to let some online bully run him out of his police station.”
“But if Chief Brennan took a leave of absence, at least acted like he might resign,” Ellis said, “the hacker might stop. Maybe the guy just wants a win. Give him one and see what happens.”
Bot gave this some thought. “Ellis has a point. No matter what hackers say or how flashy they get with their crimes, their real motives can be pretty straightforward—like, to get a bunch of cash, or prove they’re better and smarter, or win some battle or other, even if the fight’s only in their own mind.” He coughed. “Not that I’d know much about what hackers want.”
His eyes twinkled.
“I don’t think this hacker will quit if the chief blinks in this stare-off,” Lavender said. “I think this guy would just move on to the next target—probably Mayor Chandler.”
“Maybe,” Bot agreed. “Or maybe she’s just a way to get at the chief. He might do better protecting the people he wants to protect if he gives this guy a little bit of respect, you know? Let him tell the world about whatever made him mad, and the justice he seems to want so badly.”
“Or that might make everything way worse,” I said. “Make him think he has real power.”
The twinkle left Bot’s eyes, and even in his Santa suit, he seemed very serious all of a sudden. “Well, if the Council’s meeting about the chief’s job, seems like he does have power, right?”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and neither did Lavender. Thankfully, a small flood of shoppers saved us, drawing Bot away from the desktop station and back toward Mom, who handed him as much chocolate as she gave the shoppers.
“So,” Ellis said a little too lightly, like he wanted to keep Lavender and me from getting in bad moods. “Why are you suddenly interested in Vivienne Thornwood?”
“An untried angle,” I said, having trouble putting my instincts into words. “Different perspective.”
Honestly, I had no idea why I wanted to research her, save for a deep feeling that I should, that I was missing something major, and that it somehow related to her. Out loud, I added, “I think Mayor Chandler will veto anything unfair that the Council does. We’ll be okay.”
Ellis stared at something over my right shoulder—oh. Bot, doing a little dance and ringing a bunch of jingle bells.
“I think he goes further overboard every year,” Lavender said.
“You think?” Ellis’s laugh sounded strange. “He starts posting about Christmas in May, counting days. But I won’t say anything against him. He gave me a job when my aunt died and I lost my home, and nobody else would let me work. Without Bot, who knows where I’d be.”
He went silent for a minute or so, typing and clicking, moving around whatever paths he had found to hunt down Thornwood’s floorplans. Then he clicked on a site I had seen before, but barely remembered, and popped up a picture with what looked like an app-generated architectural drawing, kind of like the ones people use to sell houses online. He clicked a set of arrows, and the picture expanded to fill his screen.
“That’s it.” Lavender leaned in. “There’s the main floor. Scroll?”
Ellis complied, showing us all the floors, tower included, and then the underground room we thought might be a big priest hole or vault. On this diagram, it was marked “basement.”
Lavender frowned. “This isn’t the original plan. Just a copy, put up after the hidden room got discovered.”
“So?” Ellis sounded confused. “It’s just a basement, right?”
“I think it’s something Thornwood built because he was such a paranoid jerk,” Lavender said. “I wonder if it used to go somewhere, you know, like a bolt-hole, or a safe room with a passage out of the house—but without doors, probably not.”
“That would make so much sense,” I said. “Especially since people really were trying to kill him.”
“Except there’s no other passages.” Ellis gave a quick laugh. “Unless Thornwood’s ghost sealed them all up or something.”
He clicked off the picture. “So, did you guys figure out anything about Junior Thornwood?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “When we nailed him about his motorcycle business being auctioned, he didn’t deny it.”
I gestured to Lavender. She gave me a sullen frown, but said, “He hasn’t asked for money or made any moves to rip Mom off, not that I can tell.”
“He just seemed all torn down because Thornwood’s in such crappy shape,” I added.
“He needs to go back where he came from,” Lavender said.
“Yeah,” Ellis agreed. “I don’t like the coincidence of him showing up when Chief Brennan’s trouble started.”
My eyes strayed to the shop door, where Mom waved at a guy coming in and offered him candy. “Some people are good at showing up when there’s trouble.”
Ellis followed my gaze, then reached over and patted my hand. “Your mom probably came to Blue Creek to check on you, with all this mess going on. She just wants to take care of you.”
“Something like that,” I said, moving my hand away from his. I felt irritable and tired all of a sudden. My watch beeped, and I moved in the chair without thinking about it.
As if to make me stop being unhappy, Ellis said, “Listen, I’ll try to get into the state architectural archives and see what I can find out about the original floorplans for Thornwood. I’ll e-mail you if I get anything.”
“Thanks,” Lavender said. “I don’t know if that will clear stuff up, or just confuse us more, but we’ll try anything at this point.”
At that, Ellis gave her a little salute, then got up to go help with the next wave of holiday buyers.
17
Lavender sat with me in the thankfully Mom-less kitchen as I got everything ready for Toppy’s nighttime tea. It was getting later, and still no sign of him or Mayor Chandler. The fact that the big summit to prepare for the City Council meeting tomorrow night was running so long—that really worried me.
“What if they actually fire him?” I murmured to Lavender, who was trying again to discover the secrets of Toppy’s crime board using yet another unblurring app.
“They won’t,” she said automatically. And then, “Pictures and writing, but I still can’t make out any details.” She put down the phone with a frustrated sigh. “We have to get back in that office—when we aren’t upset this time, so I can focus.”
I left Toppy’s cup with honey and tea bags sitting by the electric kettle, rolled back to the table, and fished a silver paint pen out of my arm pouch. “If they fire him, he won’t have the money to keep me,” I said, writing Fight on top of some of the Breathe’s I hadn’t already worn away, because I would fight not to leave my grandfather.
“Oh, again with the Toppy-wants-rid-of-me stuff?” Lavender made a gag-face. “You need to get off that.”
“Maybe.” I tried to act like she hadn’t hurt my feelings.
Fight. Fight. One day I might get a tattoo with that word. I had to be eighteen for that, though. Fight. Definitely. Maybe right on my shoulder. Because I wasn’t losing Toppy and my home and my friends without a major throw-down. I couldn’t imagine trying to go to some new school in California, and trying to find new friends, and having to prove to everybody all over again that I had a brain and could really do stuff for myself.
Lavender went right on trying to unblur our crime board photos from Toppy’s office at the station. I went right on Fight-ing and thinking about Toppy getting canned, and telling me that really, it was time, that he couldn’t afford for me
to stay and I needed to go back to California with Mom. Maybe all things really did obey money, after all.
“So,” I said, my voice shakier than I wanted, “about the key you hid in my arm pouch.”
“You should keep it,” Lavender said. “Mom would only make me give it back.”
“Your acting skills are getting pretty scary.”
“Too bad my photo editing skills still stink.” She grinned at me, and my hurt feelings eased a fraction.
I put up my silver paint pen as voices outside the kitchen got our attention, and a few seconds later, Ms. Springfield came to collect Lavender. I managed to keep a smile on my face, and while Mom was seeing Lavender and Ms. Springfield to the door, I got to my room and closed my door.
For a long bunch of minutes, I studied my photos from the trip to Thornwood. The entry hall with the too-clean grate, the too-clean fireplace, too. Really, that was the only thing unusual at all, that the hacker or intruder or whoever had polished up those spots, and nowhere else we could see.
I reached up and traced the swirly design of the entry hall grate and the bits of wire poking through it. No matter how many times I looked at the pictures, I didn’t see anything new, but I just kept feeling like I should.
When I closed my eyes and rolled away from that dead end, I came face to face with our pitiful little corkboard, and its red cards seem to stare back at me, reminding me of all the different ways Thornwood’s Revenge might descend upon us all.
Fire. $$$. Killing Spree.
I felt sick as I remembered Fire had already sort of happened, at my school. And $$$—well, the website hacks had covered that category, A lot of businesses in Blue Creek had lost money over that, especially since it was the holidays, when people usually sold the most. That left Killing Spree.
My shivers came back. The only three yellow SUSPECT cards we had left, Toppy, Junior Thornwood, and ???, didn’t feel impressive. And underneath those, the purple MOTIVE cards—Max Is Pathetic for Toppy, Publicity and Hype and $ for Junior, and Punish Toppy for Arresting and Get Revenge on Toppy and Get Rid of Toppy for ???—also didn’t help me figure anything out. We didn’t have much for the MEANS and OPPORTUNITY cards.
“Police business,” I muttered to myself. Mostly because Lavender and I didn’t have enough information to even consider other suspects or motives, or who might have means and opportunity to be carrying out the attacks against my grandfather, the mayor, and really, the whole city.
Don’t forget the fire, my mind whispered. That one might have been an attack against you.
An attack Toppy had saved me from, of course.
Deep in my heart, I knew my grandfather didn’t want to get rid of me. Lavender was right. That whole line of thinking, it was just pathetic. I pulled down his cards, turned my chair away from the corkboard, and rolled over to the table near my window. I couldn’t help gazing out at Thornwood Manor and noticing that Junior had left some lights on. For all I knew, he was still up there. Or maybe it wasn’t him at all. Maybe the hacker had broken in again.
“The bad guy isn’t Junior.” I felt the let-down inside as I said it, but I knew it was true. So, iPad in hand, I rolled back to the corkboard and pulled off his card.
For a time, I stared at the red cards and the single suspect, the card that read only ???. My eyes moved down to the purple MOTIVE card beneath it, and I felt completely frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to help my grandfather or myself. I couldn’t stand that feeling, not even a little bit.
I opened the iPad. For a while I just stared at the empty search bar. On impulse, I plugged Thornwood into the search engine. Dozens of headlines popped up immediately, but I had seen most of them. They were just variations on stories run by the local news stations.
Except—
Hmm . . .
Thornwood hits on eBay were new. Was that a picture of a table?
It was!
I clicked to the offering, which was posted today.
The table . . .
I rolled back over to my pictures, held up the iPad for comparison—and sure enough, the photo on eBay looked just like one of the hall tables in the picture I took, right down to its cobwebbed legs.
“Who would pay thousands for a dusty old table?” I shook my head and clicked around. Thornwood chairs, for thousands. A clock, for more thousands. There was the dining room table! All in all, I counted a hundred listings, all posted this morning, and I found a bunch of the offered stuff in the pictures I had taken. If people bought the items, the seller would make hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Did Junior put this stuff up for sale? I clicked to look at the seller’s name. John Smith, and it listed a PO Box address in Arizona. Probably not Junior then, unless he wanted to hide making money from the people he owed up North.
Mom.
Mom could have taken lots of shots, and—no. Wait. She didn’t have time to clean off the tops of the furniture pieces and stage them for good shots before Junior interrupted us, and she didn’t have a key to go back and do it on her own.
This felt shady. I pulled open my Notes and copy-pasted several of the entries. Something else to show Ellis, and to give to Toppy. Maybe this big-time try at stealing the stuff right out of the mansion would get my grandfather some federal help.
For my next search, I typed in Vivienne Thornwood. Her image came up immediately, the one in the painting at Thornwood Manor—lots of different angles, a few other paintings and some articles.
I rolled to my bed, lifted myself onto the mattress, stretched out facing my wall, and scrolled through the articles. Mostly, they were just different retellings of the Thornwood legend with a mention of the daughter she managed to sneak out of the house—but no specifics. A few pieces talked about how old she was, or where she grew up, and how smart and kind she had seemed. Overall, though, there wasn’t much about her.
I frowned.
Vivienne Thornwood had lived and died at Thornwood Manor—but she seemed like a footnote. She wasn’t allowed to be her own story. Was it because she was a woman? I scrolled past another shot of her oil-painted curls and came to rest on that seriously spooky picture of Thornwood himself.
“She couldn’t have her own story because he wouldn’t let her,” I decided, staring into Thornwood’s empty eyes. “I bet nobody in his life got their own story. He acted so greedy and awful, everyone else turned invisible.”
I knew what invisible felt like, because sometimes my wheelchair turned me invisible. People stepped on me or got totally in my way in the school hallway, or didn’t seem to see me when I was crossing the street.
Of course, I wasn’t really invisible, and being treated like that made me more determined to be seen, to be heard. That made me think of something Bot said about my grandfather earlier, at the computer store.
No matter what hackers say or how flashy they get with their crimes, their real motives can be pretty straightforward. . . .
I sat up trying to figure out why that bothered me so much, and just then, my door creaked.
Mom walked into my room, closed the door behind her, and started to speak to me, but her attention got pulled to the corkboard and the few colored cards left hanging for all to see. A bunch of emotions played bumper cars in my chest, and I couldn’t name any of them.
“We had a lot of suspects to start with,” I said, irritation winning out—but not irritation with Mom, for once. “Just . . . no good ones, I guess.”
Mom studied the board. “Well, the stuff on the red cards is a little scary.”
“Lavender and I tried to guess what the hacker would try to do, based on all the legends about Thornwood’s Revenge.” I waved a hand at the potential disasters we hadn’t discarded. “Those are the ideas we didn’t toss.”
When Mom turned to look at me, she said, “You’ve been working this case pretty hard.”
“Yeah. But we haven’t gotten anywhere.”
She came closer to me, her expression serious. “You work on everything pr
etty hard.”
“I try.” I also tried not to move away from her. That was my instinct, but it seemed mean.
Mom watched me, and then she sat down on the edge of my bed. “I think I realized how hard you work on a whole new level today. What you did with your chair’s speed—that was amazing.”
“And reckless.”
“Lots of brilliant things have a little bit of reckless in them. Innovation is risky and it doesn’t always go smoothly.”
I couldn’t help the laugh, honest. Or the, “What, did you take a philosophy class since I saw you the last time?”
“Maybe I took a Max class.” She grinned, and didn’t seem offended at all. “I realized I don’t work as hard as you do. I give up too easily.”
The bumper car emotion explosion started back, this time in my belly. Dread bashed into Worry, and both of those plowed into Pissed Off, but Nervous squirted out ahead. “Wait. Is this about me? About us?”
“Yes.” Mom fiddled with the bed covers, but she held my gaze like she did when she was telling the truth. “When I drove here, I had one thought: that I needed to get you, to take you back to California where you’d be safe.”
Nervous blasted away from all the other feelings, and my jaw locked in place. Mom must have seen the NO WAY in my eyes, because she nodded. “I know. And today, I think I got a piece of why I don’t need to take you home with me.”
She stopped talking for a second, and her throat worked like she might be swallowing a lump. I waited, dealing with my own throat-lump. Her eyes wandered to my chair, to my armrests and the new silvery Fight marks.
“Even if I had a workshop like Toppy’s,” Mom said, “I never would have let you try to modify your chair. I probably wouldn’t even have let you get used to painting and etching and welding stuff all over it. I’d have been too afraid you’d get hurt, or that people might get the wrong idea about who you are as a person.”
Fight. I ran my finger over the word. “Toppy says the chair is part of my body, so what I do with it is my decision.”