13 Hangmen (2 page)

The front doorbell rang.

Tony leaped away from the fridge like he had just tripped the alarm to a safe. He peered around—heart pounding—though he knew nobody else was home to catch him in his moment of weakness. His mom, Julia, had met the twins after school and driven them to the mall to buy them new dress shirts for graduation. And his dad, Michael, had been in Boston all week at a history conference. Julia and the twins were probably speeding to the airport that very minute to get him. Tony grabbed an
orange, then crossed the living room to the front door to see who was there.

The postman needed somebody to sign for a package. Special delivery for Anthony DiMarco.

Tony told the postman he wasn't expecting anything. Maybe he should double-check the address. It was probably a mix-up with some other Anthony DiMarco in Ann Arbor who had bought a toaster oven on eBay. The postman told Tony he
knew
his job, thank you very much; he had been doing it for twenty-two years. Tony shrugged an if-you-say-so. He balanced his orange on the arm of the sofa and signed for the box. The postman shoved it into his hands and huffed off. Tony closed the door, then double-checked the address anyway. It was right. He looked for a return address. There wasn't one. He checked the postmark.
Boston, Mass.

It must be from Zio Angelo.

(That's what Tony called his only uncle in Boston—
zio
meant uncle in Italian—though Zio Angelo was, technically speaking, Michael's uncle and Tony's
great
-uncle. Which was why he was eighty if he was a day, and smelled like mothballs combined with cough drops.)

“That's weird,” Tony said. And it was. Zio Angelo had never sent him a gift before. He always got a birthday card with a
twenty-dollar bill tucked inside. (More than the twins ever got, it had to be said. Zio Angelo never sent them
anything,
even though Angey was the actual nephew named after him.) Weirder still: Tony had only ever met Zio Angelo once in his life—last Thanksgiving—when the old guy had unexpectedly turned up in Ann Arbor to spend the holiday weekend. Usually Michael just visited him in Boston, whenever his research or a conference took him there. But Zio Angelo had declared to everyone on his arrival—even more weirdly—that he had really wanted to meet Tony in person before he turned thirteen. Which led to the weirdest thing of all: Zio Angelo had insisted on sitting next to Tony at the big turkey dinner—like they were best buddies or something—so they could talk about the Boston Red Sox. The twins had immediately rolled their eyes and excused themselves from the table, abandoning Tony to suffer through a long and rambling and totally random account of how Zio Angelo had met baseball legend Ted Williams. It had happened when Angelo was a water boy at Fenway Park, back in the day.

Tony decided to open the box, even though his birthday was still ages away.

In the kitchen he grabbed a steak knife out of the drying rack. He sawed through the taped-up lid. Sure enough, there was a corny For My Nephew birthday card resting on top of something lumpy and bubble-wrapped. He opened the card.
Bummer—no cash
. On the right-hand side there was a singsongy printed poem he didn't bother to read. On the left, a handwritten note in Zio Angelo's spidery old script:

What new room?
Zio Angelo knew perfectly well from his visit that the DiMarcos were renting a tiny two-bedroom house from the University of Michigan while Michael finished his PhD in history. Tony shared the larger bedroom with the evil twins; Michael and Julia slept in the smaller one (though they had given it to Zio Angelo for the weekend and moved onto the fold-out sofa). In actual fact, every room in the DiMarco house did double duty: The living room was where Michael kept putting off writing his dissertation, so if anyone wanted to watch TV, they had to squint through a tunnel of books. The dining-room table—which was actually in the living room because there was no dining room—was where Julia designed books freelance for the university press, which meant her computer, not Michael, sat at the head of the tablewhen the family ate dinner.

Tony pulled the bubble-wrapped lump out of the box and plucked at the tape. If
only
he did have his own room! About all he could really call his own was the shelf above his bed. And he
still couldn't prevent the twins from messing with the private stuff on it: his Junior Sleuths of America trophies, his collection of murder mysteries, his Boston Red Sox memorabilia.

Speaking of the Red Sox—

Out of several layers of bubble wrap emerged a faded ball cap. The shape of the bill was old-fashioned, and the big red embroidered
B
looked a little funky. Yet for some reason Tony felt like he should recognize it. Zio Angelo's water-boy cap? Unlikely. This one was too big for a kid. He took it over to Julia's PC on the dining table. He fired up an Internet browser. He typed “vintage red sox caps” in the search box. Dozens of images came up. He scanned through them.

Time simultaneously stood still and flew by, like it always did when Tony surfed the Net.

The cap was definitely an antique, most likely from the 1930s. And judging by a similar one on eBay, it was worth a fair chunk of change. In fact, it blew away everything else on his memorabilia shelf.

Angey and Mikey burst through the kitchen door.

“Tony's on your computer again!” Mikey shouted.

Crap!
Tony was not supposed to use his mom's work PC without her permission, and the twins had caught him red-handed. “Only for a second,” he said to Julia as she stepped through the door carrying two department-store bags.

“I bet he's in that sketchy chat room of his,” Angey said.

“Am not,” Tony said. He was
for sure
not allowed to log on to his favorite website, mysterykids.com, unless Julia was present, since she was nervous about who all his online friends might actually be. (Which was kind of a drag, because that was what Tony
liked
about them: that he didn't know whether they were fat or skinny, blond or brown-haired, American or Italian or Zulu. They all just liked solving mysteries together. Plus the site wasn't sketchy—it was educational. And monitored.)

“I thought we had a deal?” Julia sighed, setting the bags down.

“He's been trying to win a trip to Chicago,” Mikey said.

“Just check the browser history,” Angey advised. “Like we did.”

With that, they made a beeline for the fridge.

Tony went beet red. It was true—he was only a couple of clues away from winning himself a totally excellent birthday present in the site's annual competition: a trip to Chicago to play real live Clue games with kids from all over America, solving who got murdered in which room with what weapon in a gigantic mansion. It was Tony's last-ditch attempt to head off what was shaping up to be the most boring summer vacation of all time: plowing through a two-page reading list for eighth-grade English, taking more swimming lessons at the Y, and—oh
yeah—
dieting
. Tony hadn't planned on mentioning the competition until he'd actually won, thereby making it harder for his parents to say no. Especially since the trip was all expenses paid, so they couldn't complain it wasn't in the family budget. (Money was always tight at the DiMarcos'. All of Julia's earnings as a freelance designer went to paying the monthly bills. Michael didn't earn a living yet as a history professor; in fact, his PhD program actually
cost
money.) Tony thought it best to change the subject: “I was only trying to find out how valuable this is,” he said, holding up the cap. “Zio Angelo sent it for my birthday.”

Suddenly Julia looked more startled than mad.

“What's this about Zio Angelo?” Michael said, wheeling his suitcase into the kitchen. He set his laptop on the floor and spread his arms, Vegas-style: Who-loves-you-baby?

Tony gave his dad a hug.

“Show him,” Julia said.

Tony handed Michael the cap.

Michael examined every inch of it in silence. Another unexpected reaction: his eyes welled with tears. He tapped his index finger on a small
9
embroidered on the inside brim and said, “I wonder if this is, you know,
it
.”

That was when it dawned on Tony: Ted Williams was number 9. Theodore Samuel Williams, a.k.a. The Kid, Teddy Ballgame. A
Red Sox legend and, arguably, one of the greatest left fielders of all time. Zio Angelo's rambling water-boy story at Thanksgiving—the one he had told after the twins had excused themselves from the table—was about how Williams had given Zio Angelo his very first number 9 ball cap as a thirteenth-birthday present during his rookie season with the Sox.

“But that would make this supervaluable,” Tony gasped. “Why would Zio Angelo just up and send it to
me
?”

Michael and Julia exchanged one of those parent-to-parent glances.

“Let's not jump to conclusions,” Michael said. “We need to get it professionally appraised first.”

“You better tell him,” Julia said.

“What are you guys whispering about?” Angey called from the open fridge.

“A piece of cake is missing,” Mikey reported.

“Don't look at me,” Tony said.

Everybody looked at him.

“You promised you'd have some fruit instead,” Julia said.

Figures,
Tony thought. Julia was slender and athletic and blond, like the twins. The three of them jogged five miles together every morning. Which was why, in Tony's opinion, she constantly sided with them. Why she was always on him about his weight. Why she was so gung ho about him losing
twenty-five pounds this summer, even though the diet was actually his idea, not hers.

“But I did take a piece of fruit!” Tony said, pointing to the orange still balanced on the arm of the sofa.

“Who cares who ate what?” Michael said. Also typical. Michael was dark and round and clumsy, like Tony. In the morning, they preferred to eat a bowl of cereal and watch reruns of
History's Mysteries
. Which was why Michael was always saying he loved Tony just the way he was. Unfortunately, Michael was a total vegetarian Buddhist history professor megageek, and Tony didn't actually want to turn out like
him
.

“Actually, I ate the cake,” Angey admitted. “As a midnight snack.”

“Basta!”
Michael shouted. “Enough! Enough about food, already. Everyone into the living room for a family meeting. I've got something important to tell you. Some good news and some bad news.
Andiamo!
”

Uh-oh
. Michael only ever used Italian when he was seriously upset. Tony slumped back into the chair in front of Julia's PC and logged off eBay. The twins closed the fridge and headed for the living room. They helped Julia shift stacks of photocopies to the floor so they could all perch at the edges of the sofa seat cushions. Meanwhile, Michael leaned against the back of
a recliner full of books. He waited for Mikey to peel Tony's orange and hand half to Angey.

“First the bad news,” he finally said. “Zio Angelo is dead.”

Tony stared, horrified, at the cap in his hands.

“His heart was always a little iffy,” Michael reminded them. “He had that stroke—remember?—right after his Thanksgiving visit. He lost the ability to speak as a result. And he could no longer make it up and down the stairs of his house in Boston. In fact, he was completely bedridden last week, when I dropped by for a visit on the way to my conference.”

Tony couldn't help but shudder. Zio Angelo had made a big point of flying out to Ann Arbor just to meet Tony. Had he known Thanksgiving might be his last chance? Tony pictured Zio Angelo scratching out that creepy For My Nephew card just before keeling over:
Finally, your 13th birthday!

“Unfortunately, Zio Angelo took a sudden turn for the worse while I was giving my paper on Paul Revere over at Harvard,” Michael continued. “It was actually the next-door neighbor who found his body and dialed 911. I immediately called your mom, of course. But we decided not to trouble you boys with the sad news—since it was your last week of school—until I could tell you in person.”

Yikes!
One of Zio Angelo's last acts alive
must
have been
to box up Ted Williams's cap and send it off to Tony, special delivery.

“So what's for dinner?” Mikey said. “Better not be any of those lo-carb, fat-free frozen dinners—just because Tony needs to be sent to the fat farm.”

“Yeah, we want regular food,” Angey said. (They said
we,
not
I,
whenever they were together. One of those annoying twin things, like finishing each other's sentences.)

“We're
all
having regular food,” Julia said. “I read online that those frozen things are just an expensive scam. The only diets that really work are about portion control and exercise.”

“So that's it?” Michael said. “Another argument about food?”