Deprivation House (10 page)

I was liking my theory—and then I remembered that everyone on the show had gotten death threats. Would Ripley have sent them? How would that fit in with a plan to be nice? Threatening people with death was pretty much anti-nice.

Although getting a death threat might get you some sympathy. It definitely worried her parents enough to go to the police, who went to ATAC. Maybe Ripley sent the threat to herself to soften her parents up. She could have sent everyone else threats to confuse things.

I was definitely confused.

“You're still trying to think of the opposite of a pufferfish, aren't you?” Brynn knocked her shoulder against mine.

I realized I'd been spacing. A bunch of people had already left the great room.

“Nah,” I told her. “I figured that out last night. It's a salad.”

She raised her eyebrows, making the pointy parts more pointy. Would she get mad if I told her she looked sort of like an elf? “A salad,” she repeated as we walked out to the balcony. It was starting to become our spot.

“In Japan cooks have to have a license to prepare pufferfish. One little mistake, and you can kill someone,” I started to explain. “With salad—”

“No matter how you make it, you're almost never going to kill anybody. Unless
maybe
you don't wash the spinach well enough.” Brynn smiled. “That's a very good opposite. You might have a real talent for this.”

“It's something I'm going to explore with my guidance counselor,” I answered.

Brynn laughed, then braced her hands on the balcony rail and looked down at the grounds. “The fountain is my favorite thing in the whole place,” she said.

“I don't think I've even seen the whole place yet,” I admitted.

“I'm sure I haven't either. I just make snap judgments,” she told me. “Do you think you'd be a different person if you had a completely different past?”

“You want to talk about something random again?” I asked.

“I like random,” she admitted. “I like conversations where you have no idea what the other person is going to say. Instead of ‘where do you go to school?' kind of things.”

“Okay.” I thought about her question for a moment. “I think I'd be somewhat different, but not completely different,” I said.

“So if you had been adopted by Frank's family and he'd been adopted by yours, you'd have the same personality?” Brynn turned to face me.

“Yeah. I definitely don't think I'd have Frank's personality, if that's what you mean,” I answered. “I don't think I'd eat pizza with a knife and fork. I wouldn't have a kitten if somebody put a CD back in the wrong case.”

“Frank eats pizza with a knife and fork?” Brynn asked.

Oops. I'd gotten so into talking to Brynn I'd
messed up on the cover story. She made me forget my ATAC training for a second.

“He definitely looks like the kind of guy who would, right? I mean, look at his jeans. I think he irons them. And they're jeans,” I said. “But back to your first question, I wouldn't be a guy who ironed, well, anything. But I guess every experience you have changes you somehow. Gives you knowledge. Or memories that are good or bad. Or skills. For example, because I met you, I'm now an opposites master.”

I figured I'd given a long enough answer to make her forget my slipup. “What do you think? Would you be totally different if you lived in a different place or had a different family or whatever?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Fine. You make me give a big, long essay-question answer and you get off with ‘who knows,'” I complained.

“You could have said ‘who knows,'” Brynn told me. “You could have . . .”

As she continued speaking, a flash of light from among the trees below caught my eye. I tried to pretend I was listening to Brynn as I watched for it to come again. It did. Frank was sending me a signal. A few flashes later and I had it.

Basically, the signal said, “Get to work.”

•   •   •

I wandered around the house, trying to figure out exactly how to get to work. Actually, as far as Frank knew, talking to Brynn could have been working. She could have been giving me insight into the motive of the killer. She wasn't, but he didn't know that.

I heard James's voice in the exercise room and decided to swing in there. He was a suspect who could use some further investigation.

“What's with the blue hair?” James lay on his back on a weight bench. He let out his breath slowly as he lowered a hundred-pound weight to his chest. He looked over at Bobby T, who was pedaling slowly on one of the exercise bikes.

Bobby gave a one-shoulder shrug. “It's a style.”

“It's weird.” James began lifting the weight again.

“How am I supposed to answer that?” Bobby asked me.

“You're not,” said James before I could open my mouth. “You're supposed to tell me to go eat a toad. I knew you were a wimp. I was just verifying.”

“A wimp who pretty much beat you in two competitions,” Bobby T said. He didn't sound too bothered.

James slammed the weight back on the bar over his head and sat up. “The first one was canceled before it was finished.”

“I'll be sure to make that clear in my blog when I write about it,” Bobby T answered. “Veronica isn't allowing me to post anything that's directly about the show. Nothing about the contests or that there are even deprivations or anything. I still wrote about Leo, just without the contest part.”

Bobby T started pedaling faster. “And I wrote about my near-death experience. Thanks for telling me my lips turned blue and everything, Joe. I put in that we've all gotten death threats, too.” He took a swallow from his water bottle.

“Don't you have to have our permission to write about us?” James asked.

“Nope. I'm writing about my life, and you happen to be in it.” Bobby T jumped off the bike. “I'm ready to try out the sauna. It should be nice and hot by now. Mitch got it going for me. Who's in?”

“I guess that's the only way you'll work up a sweat. You weren't exactly feeling the burn on that bike,” James said. “But my muscles could use some loosening in the sauna.”

“Why not?” I came into the gym because I wanted to gather info on potential suspects. I could do that anywhere.

Except what I ended up finding out was something I already knew—saunas are hot. That's pretty
much all we said to one another. Variations on “It's hot in here.”

“It smells kind of like pine,” I commented. Only to say something different.

“It's the wood, genius. It's white pine,” James told me.

Note to self: James is not very polite. I leaned my head back against the
white pine
wall and closed my eyes.

“I'm starting to feel sort of like I did last night,” Bobby T said.

My eyes snapped open. “You mean before you had the attack?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “My chest feels tight.”

Frank and I had thrown away the contaminated toothpaste. And anyway, I'd been with Bobby T for about the last half an hour. He hadn't eaten anything. He'd drunk some water—we all had—but his was from the same bottle he'd been using since I came into the gym. He would have had a reaction by now if it was contaminated.

I realized my own chest felt kind of tight. Hot and tight. “It's just from sucking down all this hot, dry air,” I said. “I think we should head out.”

I stood up, and my brain seemed to do a slow roll inside my head. “We should definitely head out. I'm more dehydrated than I thought.” I walked over to
the door and grabbed the handle. It didn't move.

I gave the handle a jerk. It still didn't move.

The door didn't have a lock, did it? I slid my hands over it, even though I was sure it didn't.

“What's wrong?” asked Bobby T.

“The door's jammed,” I answered.

“Let me do it.” James got up, elbowed me aside, and yanked on the door. It didn't open.

“Wait. Are we trapped in here?” Bobby T demanded. He crowded up to the door too.

“Let's discuss it with the heat down,” I said. I hurried over to the thermostat. At least this sauna had it inside. I slid my thumb across the wheel.

Jammed.

“No way,” said James, looking over at me.

Bobby T groaned. “I finished all my water a little while ago.”

“I'm out too,” James told us.

“I have about a quarter of a bottle left,” I said. I did a quick check of the room. There was no intercom in here.

“Here's my next question.” James picked up his empty water bottle and crushed it. “How long can we stay in here without passing out from heatstroke?”

N
ow where's Joe?
I thought.

I bet I knew who he was with, even if I didn't know where. The Brynn thing—it was starting to get a little annoying.

It's not completely under his control,
I told myself. Attraction and all that released a lot of chemicals into the brain. He was clearly operating while impaired.

But this mission was complicated. There were a ton of suspects. Chemical-soaked or not, I needed my brother.

So I began my search, starting with the top floor. I didn't find Joe up there. But I did find Brynn. Okay, I admit it. I was wrong.

She was standing alone in the library, running
her finger up and down one of the stripes on the wallpaper.

“Can't find anything good to read?” I asked.

“Too many good things. Practically everything. Even new stuff,” she said.

“Why wouldn't there be new stuff? This place has the newest everything,” I answered.

“I guess I expect libraries like this”—she gave the wheeled ladder a little push—“so-old fashioned looking, to have only old-fashioned books.”

I spotted a book I'd liked a lot and pulled it off the shelf. “Have you read
Life of Pi
? I'm usually more of a nonfiction guy, but it was really great.”

“I almost always read nonfiction too,” Brynn answered. “I just read this one.” She slid a book off the shelf—the book that was waiting for me in my living room back home.

“The part where it described the peeling away of the—,” I began.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

I realized I was having another conversation in the library with a girl. And I wasn't blushing. I guess it was because I started talking to Brynn without planning to talk to her. Now I really was beginning to understand why Joe kept wandering off with her.

“You haven't seen Joe around, have you?” I asked.

“Not for a while,” she said. And I was hit with how cute she was. I knew she was cute. I'd noticed it before. But it suddenly hit me—like a sucker punch. That's when I felt the Blush.

“I'll, uh, see you later.” I rushed out of the room and continued looking for Joe.

No Joe on the third floor.

No Joe on the second floor.

No Joe on the first floor.

I reached the basement and looked through the tiny window in the sauna door. My pulse started to race—

Joe.

He was sprawled out on the wooden planks. Motionless. Bobby and James lay beside him.

I grabbed the door—yanked it. Locked. No, jammed.

How long have they been in there?
I thought as I scanned the door, trying to figure out the problem.
Did they pass out, or are they—

“No!” I burst out. “It's not too late.” I wasn't going to let it be too late.

There was a workshop on the basement level. I'd seen it the night we checked out the bowling alley.

I jerked around and tore out of there. Through the locker room. Through the gym. Down the hall.
Right or left? Right or left?

This place was too huge!

I went left, praying that was the way to the workshop. Yes! I charged inside. I knew exactly what I needed. I ran my eyes over the tools hanging neatly on the wall. There it was.

A chainsaw.

I was back at the sauna door in seconds. I yanked on the safety goggles and the work gloves I'd found. I got the saw going with two quick pulls. Then I attacked the wall. Going at it as far away from where I'd seen the guys as I could.

There was probably a better way to do it. Maybe even a faster way. But this was the first way I thought of.

The chainsaw bucked under my grip as I struggled to carve out a hunk of wall large enough to get a body through.
A person
, I corrected myself.
Not a body. A person.

“What is going on here?” I heard someone yell from behind me. I thought it was Veronica.

“Three people are passed out in there and the door won't open. That's what's going on,” I shouted. I kept on sawing, sweat running down my back, the grip getting hot under my hands.

A jagged rectangle of wood finally fell to the sauna floor. I turned off the chainsaw.