13 Hangmen (4 page)

Or freshly skinned mothers-in-law
.

Michael led them down a short passageway, pointing out the antique water closet on the left. That was when Tony remembered how badly he had to go. Michael warned him the toilet was pretty old-school; to flush, you needed to pull the chain dangling from a porcelain tank overhead. “I think I can handle it,” Tony said. Michael laughed—very funny—and told him to rejoin the tour in the back parlor. When Tony yanked down on the chain, though, the toilet didn't flush. The chain just broke off in his hand. Tony set it on the wooden seat to wash his hands at the tiny sink. Rusty water gushed out of the tap and drenched the front of his white T-shirt with bright-orange blotches. No towels. No toilet paper, even. He had no choice but to wipe his hands on the seat of his jeans and head for the back parlor.

Why had it suddenly gone so quiet?

Everyone was staring at the tarnished brass bed in the middle
of the room. Tony joined the semicircle of speechless DiMarcos. “OK, so that's weird,” he said.

Michael stammered an apology. He had meant to get the bed dismantled and donated to Goodwill before they arrived. Zio Angelo had slept there after he fell ill, when it became too hard for him to make it up to his real bedroom.

“Wait,” Tony said. “That isn't where the neighbor, you know, found him?”

Michael answered by
not
answering. “Check out that desk!” he said, pointing to a gigantic rolltop in an alcove over by the fireplace. “That's going straight to my new office on the second floor, which was originally the library, so it already has shelves for all my research books. In fact, let's head up there now.”

Everyone trooped up to the second floor—except Tony. He couldn't take his eyes off the bed. What was that glinting under it? He stooped and tugged a small metal key—the kind Benjamin Franklin might have used to fly on his kite in a lightning storm—out of a crack between the floorboards. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and slipped the key into an empty credit-card slot. He decided not to let anyone know he'd found it—especially not the twins—until he figured out what it opened.

Everyone was stopped at a recess in the first hairpin turn of the staircase. “Coffin corner,” Michael was explaining. He
darted a quick glance at Tony, then hesitated before continuing. “This little niche in the wall prevents, um, furniture from getting stuck when you're moving it up and down.” No one commented. After seeing that bed in the parlor, it couldn't have been clearer what
kind
of furniture he meant.

The so-called library did indeed boast a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, though Tony worried that setting any books on the shelves might cause the whole thing to tip over on top of Michael and crush him like a bug. In the rear there was a spacious master suite that came with a gigantic four-poster bed plus its own fireplace
and
bathroom. Julia gave Michael another excited hug.

Oh, great. No chance of a mutiny now
.

Tony even lost the twins as unlikely allies when they saw their two bedrooms on the next floor. Mikey immediately called dibs on the front one, because it had a wooden sleigh bed and bay window. Angey accepted, as usual, the smaller rear one containing a modest brass bed. But both rooms were connected by a full-size bathroom with a normal toilet and shower. Which caused them to high-five.

Michael turned to Tony. “Ready to check out the penthouse suite Zio Angelo saved for you?”

Tony nodded, not so sure.

He followed his dad up the final flight of stairs to a peeling
door. The twins and Julia brought up the rear, discussing what colors they planned to paint their rooms.

“You go first,” Michael told Tony, stepping aside. “I haven't even been up here yet myself.”

Tony nodded again. Bracing himself for the worst, he turned the knob and swung the door open to discover—

The worst.

It was just an attic. Bare floors, bare walls, bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling; no bay window, no fireplace—no bathroom! From dim wedges of daylight cast by small dormer windows at the front and back, Tony could make out—barely—an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair against one sloping wall, a beat-up dresser against the other, and a bookcase parked in front of some tacky laminated paneling beneath a weird slab of slate. It was a shelf, sort of, that jutted out of the wall.

“Where's the bed?” Mikey said over Tony's shoulder.

“Down in the parlor,” Angey laughed.

Michael didn't deny it.

“No way,” Tony said.

Michael nudged Tony into the room, reassuring him that top of the list was buying him a brand-new bed. Meantime—just for a night or two—they might need to move Zio Angelo's up from the parlor. But they would definitely toss the old bedding
straight into the trash. Tony could use his own sheets and comforter from Ann Arbor.

“No way,” Tony said. “I'll sleep on the floor first.”

Mikey and Angey declared they wouldn't sleep in this room,
period
.

Michael suggested the twins head downstairs to the kitchen for some lunch. The fridge was stocked with hummus and tabouleh salad and pita pockets from a health-food store around the corner. He and Julia needed a private word with Tony.

“No cold cuts?” Mikey said.

“Not even any tuna fish?” Angey sighed.

“Sorry, meat wasn't the first thing that leaped to my mind,” Michael said.

(Michael had, in fact, been a vegetarian since high school. He didn't mind if the rest of the family was carnivorous, but he himself wouldn't even wear leather shoes or belts. He was also a devout Buddhist, which meant that he didn't believe in killing any living creature—not even a house fly—since its soul might reincarnate into a human being one day. Though admirable, this didn't help Michael's geek factor
at all
.)

“Tabouleh tastes like kitty litter,” Mikey grumbled. He clomped down the attic steps with Angey at his heels.

Michael reached over and gave Tony a side hug. “I admit it needs work,” he said. “Let's face it, the whole house is a little
rough around the edges. Poor Zio Angelo. He just wasn't able to look after it properly toward the end. Nothing a little DiMarco family TLC can't fix.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Tony cried. “This whole place should be bulldozed to the ground!”

“It's not that bad,” Michael said.

At that point, Tony melted down. It had been a very long couple of days—it was his
birthday
—and he couldn't keep it bottled up: Doors squealed open, ceiling paint drifted down on your head like snow, toilet chains came off in your hand, and water gushed orange out of the rusty tap. Hadn't anyone else noticed the amount of wallpaper stripping and floor sanding it would take to make this house even remotely livable?

Michael patted Tony's shoulder. He was positive that once Tony had run the vacuum cleaner, hung a few posters, and laid his own comforter on the bed, he would feel completely different about his new bedroom.

“Hello?” Tony said. “It's not a bedroom. It's the
attic
. Plus it feels all spooky and haunted and weird. I'm not sleeping here. Ever. That's final.”

“Tony's afraid of ghosts,” Mikey singsonged up the stairwell. Angey burst into a fit of giggles. They had both been eavesdropping, of course, from the third-floor landing.

Julia told them to beat it—this was a private conversation.
They clambered down the rest of the staircase to the kitchen, wailing like banshees. She rolled her eyes and advised Tony to ignore them. Which, in his opinion, wasn't at all the same as sticking up for him. Meanwhile, Michael reassured him an old house like this one had its own quirky language—creaks and groans he'd eventually get used to and stop hearing. Anyway, ninety-nine percent of all ghosts turned out to be mice in the walls.

“Not helping!” Tony said. Michael opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Seriously, Dad, what did Zio Angelo have against
me
? I was actually nice to him at Thanksgiving. Angey and Mikey were the ones who rolled their eyes at his stories. He should have made
them
sleep up here.”

Michael laughed. “As weird as it might seem, Zio Angelo actually believed he was doing you a
favor
by saving you the top floor. He loved this room. He slept up here himself—ever since he was your age—and only decided to move to the parlor when he could no longer manage the stairs.”

Plainly, Tony was not gaining any headway. He made one last-ditch effort. “Why don't you guys sell this place and buy a
real
house in the suburbs, someplace normal that isn't falling down around our ears?”

Julia and Michael darted each other one of their parent-to-parent glances. “Sorry,” Michael said. “That's not an option.”

“Why not?”

“Zio Angelo's will was actually a little complicated, but the bottom line is we're sort of stuck here for a while.”

“What could be so complicated about hanging a for-sale sign?” Tony said.

Michael ruffled Tony's hair. “What do you say we grab a sandwich? Then maybe you and the twins can go out and explore the new neighborhood while your mom and I deal with the bed.”

“The exercise'll do you good,” Julia said.

(That was the other thing, besides portion control, she was now obsessed with. She'd been harping at Tony since school got out: stop chatting online with God-knows-who and start tagging along to the twins' pickup Wiffle ball games in the park. As if! Angey laughed at the way the thighs of his jeans scratched when he ran, and Mikey said he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn whenever he threw a ball.)

“But they
hate
me,” Tony said.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Julia said. “They're your brothers.”

“They are totally ashamed to be seen with me, and you know it,” Tony said.

Michael laughed. “They're ashamed to be seen with
me,
” he said. “It's sort of normal. They're in puberty. Now how about that sandwich?”

Tony saw no choice but to follow his parents out of the room.
That's when he noticed the door didn't even have a lock. Oh, great. There was no actual way to keep the twins from bursting in. Seriously, could his birthday get any worse?

Tony stooped to tie his sneaker in front of the Paul Revere House. At Michael's insistence, he and the twins had grudgingly agreed to explore the Freedom Trail—a redbrick line embedded in the sidewalk connecting one historic site to the next. So far they had seen the Copp's Hill Burying Ground and the Old North Church. Mikey and Angey wanted to skip the house tour. They were in a hurry to get to the next stop down the line—Quincy Market—where some kid back in Ann Arbor had told them they could watch street performers outside a giant food court. Tony was secretly enjoying himself. As upset as he was about 13 Hangmen Court, he had to admit the North End itself
was
kind of great. Famous landmarks of the Revolutionary War were jumbled up with
caffès
, pizzerias, and cannoli shops. Plus there were all these other layers of history. He would never have known, for example, that hundreds of African Americans were buried in unmarked graves at Copp's Hill—back when this neighborhood was known as New Guinea because of the runaway slaves who lived here—unless he had stopped to read the plaque at the gate.

He stood back up, determined to make the twins take the tour.

They had vanished.

Tony peered around the cobbled street; they were usually pretty easy to spot. Nope, they were definitely gone. Had they gotten swallowed up in the hordes of afternoon tourists? Or had they just ditched him—as he had pretty much predicted they would—because they hated his guts? He saw no choice but to set off along the Freedom Trail, hoping to catch up. A little ways down North Street, though, the redbrick line took a sharp right onto Richmond Street. He stumbled along the uneven sidewalk for a block, until it suddenly disappeared at Hanover Street—obviously the North End's main drag. Tony swore he could be in Italy. Skinned rabbits hung in the front window of a nearby butcher shop. Grannies dressed all in black dipped their fingertips in holy water and crossed themselves as they exited a church. Old men argued in Italian over dominoes at tables set up on the sidewalk. In the middle of it all, a blind man played “That's Amore” on an accordion.

Tony decided he'd better ask somebody where the Freedom Trail went. He turned to the shop directly behind him. In the display window was a dusty jumble of furniture, vases, antique clothes, and framed maps. He glanced up at the purple-striped awning overhead: Y
E
O
LDE
C
URIOSITY
S
HOPPE
, M
ILDRED
P
ICKLES
, P
ROPESS
.

A tiny bell jangled as he passed through the front door. He
gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the gloom. The store was crammed full of old machines and mysterious mechanical devices; Buddhas and Madonnas and Shiva-the-Destroyers; rickshaws and telescopes and red-lacquered chests with dozens of puzzlelike drawers; a gilded glass case full of crystals and geodes; carved elephant tusks and a stuffed mongoose entwined with a snake. On the right, there was an entire wall of dusty leather-bound books. On the left—

Tony did a double take. Standing behind a counter of rough-hewn slate was a girl a couple of years older than him. She wore a long purple dress, a white apron, and a gathered cotton cap, though she also had punked-out black hair and a nose ring. Tony made his way over. Carved into the top of the counter was an odd spiral. Hanging overhead was a very old American flag.

As for the Colonial Maid Goth Chick, she didn't bother to look up from the book she was reading—
Astrophysics for Dummies
—until Tony cleared his throat. That was when he noticed her eyes. Not blue, and not brown. Violet. He'd never seen anyone with purple irises before. She curtly informed him the video shop was a few doors down, just past the hardware store.