Deprivation House

by Franklin W. Dixon

  “There’s your sink,” Veronica told us. Do I have to say she was smiling?

  One of the production assistants began handing out goggles. I appreciated that. The sludge would probably sear off your corneas. And you definitely couldn’t see through it.

  “The dishes are at the bottom. You have to bring them up and wash them off over there.” She gestured toward the row of kiddie pools that had been arranged on a stretch of lawn. They were full of clean water and sponges. One of them had been assigned to each of us. “Your fifteen minutes starts now.”

  Bobby T bolted for the pool and dove in. James cannonballed after him, landing almost on his head. I shoved on my goggles and went after them. I tried to ignore the feel of the slime sliding into my ears and nose and trying to slip through my clenched lips.

  Strategy. I needed strategy. To get the most clean plates, you needed the most plates, period. I decided I’d focus on getting plates first. I’d just dump them into my kiddie pool and go get more. Then I’d wash them all at once. I didn’t want all the plates to get grabbed by my competitors.

  I kicked hard, my hands stretched out, groping for the bottom of the pool. Even now that I was down in the “water,” I couldn’t see the bottom. My fingers brushed against something smooth. A plate. I snatched it up and felt for more. I found a glass next.

  But plates should be easier to carry. With luck, I could get a stack of them before I had to surface for air. My lungs were already starting to burn a little. I did some more feeling around. Got another plate. Yeah!

  Just a couple more, then air, I told my lungs. I held my plates close to my body with one hand, and swept the other hand in a wide arc. I wanted to cover area fast. My forearm hit something. It wasn’t as hard as a plate or a glass, though.

  I moved my hand back and took another feel. Now I found a hard part. But small. Way too small. And surrounded by softness.

  My lungs were on fire. But I had to see if I was right. I didn’t want to be right.

  I pulled myself closer to the thing at the bottom of the pool.

  It was a body.

  No Siren

  As soon as I surfaced, I heard a girl scream. I let my plates go and scrambled out of the pool. I yanked off my goggles. They were so coated with gray sludge I couldn’t see anything.

  I had to blink a few times for my vision to clear. Then I started to run. Frank was hauling a body out of the water. I reached his side in seconds and helped him pull the man out onto the stone walkway.

  Frank grabbed a towel from the nearest deck chair and wiped off the man’s face. He used his fingers to clean the man’s mouth, getting ready to start CPR. I think we both knew it was too late, but that’s not a call you’re supposed to make. That’s for the professionals

  “Call 911,” I ordered, and I saw one of the PAs pull out a cell. I moved into place to start the chest compressions.

  “It’s that guy—Leo, the one who gave us the lists of deprivations this morning, right?” someone else—I wasn’t sure who—asked.

  I let the voices behind me fade out as I concentrated on the cycles of compressions. Frank and I kept at it until the EMTs arrived. They confirmed that Leo was dead.

  We all watched in silence as they loaded Leo onto a gurney, covered him from head to toe with a sheet, and rolled him all the way off the grounds, through the gate, and into the waiting ambulance. The ambulance rolled off without a sound. The siren was pointless now.

  “All right. That’s all for the day. Cameras off every-where,” Veronica finally said. She had her arms wrapped tightly around her body.

  “But Veronica, we had that technical problem yesterday, remember?” one of the production assistants said timidly. “We didn’t get any of the outdoor footage. Don’t we need to make up—”

  “I said cameras off everywhere.” Veronica shot the PA a how-dare-you-question-me look.

  “I thought . . . You said no matter what,” the PA stammered, then turned away.

  “What about the contest?” James asked. “Are we doing it tomorrow?”

  “No,” Veronica answered. “I want that pool drained again—now,” she snapped to another PA. “We’ll move on to a different competition.”

  “I think I had the most dishes. I’m the only one who got any in a kiddie pool,” Bobby T said.

  “There’s no way that—,” James began.

  “We’ll move on to a different competition tomorrow,” Veronica repeated firmly.

  “How would you describe the color of his face?” Bobby asked Frank. “You were the closest. You were right down in it. Would you say skim milk—you know how it has that bluish tone almost? Or cottage cheese? It doesn’t have to be a food. Just in your own words.”

  He held his hands poised over the keyboard of his laptop. He was trying to get his blog about Leo’s drowning perfect.

  We were all hanging out in the great room. We’d just all ended up in there. It didn’t seem like anybody wanted to be alone. I’d gotten a fire going in the walk-in-size fireplace. It gets kinda cold at night in L.A., but we didn’t really need one. But I’d wanted something to do, and I think people liked it.

  “Come on, Frank,” Bobby urged.

  “Not everybody finds death so exciting,” Kit snapped. Her face was still wet with tears. She’d been crying off and on for hours. And a lot of the time, she’d been angled toward the cameras. I think she must have forgotten they were off.

  “You’re the blogger. You describe it. You weren’t that far away,” Frank said. I could tell he was annoyed. And Frank doesn’t get annoyed that often.

  “I can’t believe he was there the whole time we were in the pool.” Mary shivered. “If we’d found him even a minute earlier . . .”

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference, I’m pretty sure,” I told her. “Frank and I did CPR just in case there was any chance to save him, but it seemed like he’d been gone a while.”

  “So has this made anyone think of taking the fifty thou and leaving?” Olivia asked, looking intently around the room.

  James just snorted without looking up from the video game he was playing over in the corner.

  “Because of the accident?” said Frank slowly.

  It was a pretty weird thing for her to ask.

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like Deprivation House is exactly the safest place,” Olivia answered.

  Kit snorted. “It wasn’t at all safe for Katrina Decter. Her husband killed her about ten feet away from where you’re sitting,” she told Olivia.

  “Oh, wait. This is that house?” Wilson burst out. “My mom’s a Trial TV fanatic. This is the one where the little girl had to testify that her mother tried to kill her father and that’s why he killed her. The jury decided it was self-defense, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kit agreed. “There wasn’t a ton of evidence proving Katrina attacked her husband. But Anna, their daughter, was a really convincing witness, even though she was so little. She said—”

  “Who cares about whatever happened ten years ago?” Olivia interrupted. “I’m worried about what happened today.”

  “If you’re really worried, why don’t you take the money and leave?” said Bobby T.

  Olivia didn’t seem to know how to respond to that.

  “Are you worried?” I asked Brynn quietly.

  She shook her head. She’d actually been one of the calmest people after Leo’s body was found. I guess Bobby T was the absolute calmest, so calm he was actually kind of happy, because it was such good blogging material. Frank and I were calm too, but we’ve had a ton of emergency training.

  “I think I’m going to go out on the balcony. Want to come?” she said.

  Obviously I did. Frank could keep an ear on the group discussion for motives and clues and all that.

  Brynn and I leaned on the railing and stared out into the grounds. Tiny white lights glowed in lots of the trees. “Pretty,” I said.

  “I guess,” Brynn answered. “So what’s the opposite of pufferfish?”
<
br />   “All I can say to that is—huh?” I answered.

  “I just want to talk about something completely random,” Brynn explained. “Don’t you ever want to do that?”

  On days that involved dead bodies—yeah.

  “Yeah,” I answered, leaving out the dead bodies part, since I figured that was the point. “So, puffer-fish. They live in water. They get bigger when they’re scared. I’m trying to think of something that lives on land and gets smaller when it’s scared. A snail, maybe? A turtle?”

  “Those can both live in water. Some of them,” Brynn said. “You have to be crazier. Like, I don’t know, an anorexic elephant.”

  I laughed. She laughed. It was a good part of a bad day.

  I started laughing when I stepped into the shower the next day. It was decorated with tiny silver fish. Which made me think of pufferfish—and Brynn. She had to be the coolest girl I’d ever met.

  Focus on the mission, a voice in my head said. The voice sounded like Frank.

  “Okay, okay,” I muttered. I turned on the water and closed my eyes. I did some good thinking that way. The mission. I couldn’t come up with any way to connect Leo’s death to the threat Ripley had gotten. Everybody in the contest had a motive for sending the threat. A few people were standing out as stronger possibilities. Kit, for one. James definitely seemed like he badly wanted to win. Bobby T’s blog would probably be even more popular if he won a reality TV show.

  I opened my eyes so I could find the soap. My heart gave a hard double beat.

  Blood ran down my body in streaks.

  That’s Repulsive

  A high, shrill shriek cut through the secondfloor. I raced toward the sound. Kit burst out of her room just as I got to the door. “Olivia’s bleeding!” she exclaimed. “She’s bleeding a ton!”

  “What happened? Did she cut herself?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. She was taking a shower, then she screamed. I went in there and she had blood all over, even in her hair,” Kit said in a rush.

  “Calm down. I think I know what the deal is. At least part of it,” Joe was saying as he strode down the hall toward us. His white terrycloth bathrobe was splotched with red.

  “Are you bleeding too?” I demanded.

  “No, but I thought I was for a second,” Joe answered. “I need to check out the bathroom in there.”

  Kit peeked into the room. “It’s okay.”

  Joe and I hurried inside. Ripley and Mary were huddled around Olivia.

  “I don’t see where the blood is coming from,” Ripley told us. “She doesn’t seem to be cut or anything.”

  “I don’t think it’s actually blood. I think it’s Jell-O,” Joe answered.

  Olivia’s eyes widened. She ran her finger over a splotch of red on her arm, then sniffed. “It does smell like Jell-O. I don’t . . .” She blinked, like she was having trouble processing the new information.

  Joe stepped into the bathroom and unscrewed the showerhead. He held it out to me. “See. There are still some clumps of semidry Jell-O in there.”

  “So when I turned on the water, it liquefied the Jell-O and then the Jell-O poured down on me,” Olivia said from the doorway.

  “Yeah. Same thing happened to me in our bathroom.” Joe gestured to the red stains on his robe. “There was something else, too.” He turned toward the mirror. “You have it too.”

  I followed his gaze. In the steamy surface of the mirror, five words had been written: YOU STAY, YOU DIE TOO.

  “The message was written in soap,” Joe explained. “It didn’t show up until the mirrors got steamed up.”

  “Somebody’s trying to psych us out. That’s what this is,” said Olivia. “This is just like the letter I got.”

  “What letter?” Ripley’s voice came out high and thin.

  “This stupid letter saying that if I won I’d die,” Olivia snapped. “Somebody started playing head games early. Well, Jell-O and dumb threats aren’t going to make me drop out.”

  “I got a letter too,” Mary said softly.

  “Me too,” said Joe. It was true. We’d both had letters being held for us at the L.A. airport.

  “I think we need to get the whole group together,” I said.

  “Not Veronica,” Ripley protested.

  “No, only the contestants. We’ll meet in the biggest bathroom. That way we don’t have to worry about the cameras,” I explained.

  Five minutes later, all fourteen of us were gathered in the bathroom off the other girls’ room. We didn’t even really have to squeeze. I gave a quick recap. “So who else got one of the letters?”

  Turned out everyone had. But I was pretty sure someone in the room was lying. One person didn’t get a letter. One person was the one who had sent the letters to the rest of the contestants.

  “It’s a psych-out. An attempt at a psych-out,” Olivia insisted.

  “Pathetic,” James said. “Anybody who’d launch an attack with strawberry Jell-O and spooky little elementary-school kind of notes isn’t anybody to worry about.”

  “Where did you go to elementary school?” Mikey joked.

  “So we just ignore it?” asked Kit. She took a swig of coffee.

  “Yeah,” Hal answered. He seemed to be ignoring the situation already. He was working away on a schematic of his planet’s core.

  “It gives me some cool blogging material,” Bobby T said. “Except maybe in the blog, I’ll say the showerhead was filled with, like, animal blood. That would be more exciting. I wish I’d gotten some photos of one of you all blood-smeared,” he added to Joe and Olivia. “I guess you wouldn’t want to re-create?”

  “Uh, no,” Joe said.

  “Forget it,” Olivia told him.

  “Maybe I can Photoshop a picture of me as an illustration.” Bobby T closed his eyes as he tried to picture it.

  The bathroom door opened. “Here you guys all are.” A guy with shaggy blond hair stepped inside. “I’m supposed to give you more towels. You’re not all planning to take a bath together or something, are you? Because that would really get the ratings.”

  “No cameras are allowed in the bathroom,” Brynn told him.

  “Ah. Didn’t know that,” he said. “I’m the new guy. Mitch. Just started this morning. I guess someone had to leave unexpectedly.”

  Had to be Leo. Guess they hadn’t wanted to tell the new guy the old guy died.

  “So you all get this whole place to yourselves. That’s pretty cool.” Mitch unloaded the towels into the cabinet.

  “Some of the rooms are sealed. The really good ones,” Mikey told him. “And Veronica’s quarters on the third floor are off-limits. Not that any of us wants to hang with her.”

  “She does seem a little scary,” Mitch agreed. “Oops. Don’t tell her I said that, okay?”

  He started for the door. “Hey, a tip. No sandals today. And wear long pants.” He waved as he headed out of the bathroom.

  “What was that about, you think?” Wilson asked.

  “I don’t know. But I don’t trust him,” said Olivia.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because he works for the show. People who work for the show can never be trusted,” she answered. “No one can be trusted, really. Someone right in this room could be a plant.”

  True. Joe and I were. But not in the way Olivia was thinking.

  “So you think we shouldn’t wear long pants and regular shoes?” Wilson said.

  “You’ll have to decide that for yourself.” She stood up and left the bathroom.

  “Seventy-four percent of her statements reflect paranoia,” Rosemary observed.

  “She’s a freak,” said James. He stood up. The Silent Girl stood up too.

  “So I guess this meeting’s over.” Kit got to her feet. “I guess I’ll go try to prepare for the competition. Which is impossible, since we don’t know what it is. I’m just hoping it doesn’t involve any dead bodies this time.”

  A groan went up from the group.

  “That�
�s why it’s called Deprivation House,” Veronica said with a smile. “All iPods in the bag, please. As I told you, luxuries will be taken away at least once a day.”

  Mitch smiled—a sympathetic smile—as he walked around the dining room, holding out a velvet bag for us to put our iPods in. Those of us who had them.

  Veronica clapped her hands. “Now, it’s time for our competition. As you know, the winner will select one of the luxuries to go. That means the winner will be able to pick something that he or she knows it’s possible to live without.”

  I checked out Veronica’s outfit, trying to get an idea what she had in store for us. She had on her apron again. That gave me pretty much nothing. “Today I’m going to put you to work in the kitchen,” she announced.

  “Unfair. I bet the Amish girl is great at cooking,” James burst out.

  “She’s not Amish. Mary has been home-schooled,” Veronica corrected. “And the competition has nothing to do with cooking. No one would want to cook a meal in our kitchen. Not in the state it’s in.”

  Uh-oh. Were we going to have to deal with more slime?

  She nodded to Mitch, and he began handing out large glass jars with lids. “The kitchen has been infested with pests. Specifically, cockroaches,” Veronica explained. “It’s your job to get each and every one of the insects out of there. Whoever collects the most roaches in their jar wins.”

  “That is so repulsive,” Ripley said.

  “There’s always the option of dropping out. Fifty thousand dollars if you decide to quit—and no touching repulsive bugs,” Veronica answered.

  Ripley shook her head.

  “What are we supposed to use to catch the roaches?” asked Mikey.

  “You may use whatever you find in the kitchen,” Veronica told him. “And you may start . . . now.”

  The door to the kitchen was wide. But not wide enough to let fourteen people through at once. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and elbowing as we all charged into the room.

  And stopped. Every surface was brown. Living, moving brown. There wasn’t an inch that wasn’t covered in roaches.