DEC HAD written about half his essay on Frank Lloyd Wright.
“Architecture as frozen music. I like that,” said Ezra. “Is it about that place called Falling Water?”
“The Edgar j. Kaufman η house,” said Dec. “How do you know?”
“It’s in Pennsylvania, right?” said Ezra. “I love it. All the angles and the way it sort of hangs out over the stream like that and…” He stopped. They had been making slow passage through the knot at the entrance to the cafeteria, but Ezra, who was taller than Dec, had his eyes on their table. “What’s going on?” he said.
In truth, nothing was going on. Not the usual kind of thing, anyway. Melody and Martin weren’t at the blackboard solving the mysteries of the physical universe. Langston’s chessboard was all set up but no one was playing. Arianna wasn’t doing her crossword and Vivien, back to regular clothing — if overalls and a fluorescent blue wig could be considered normal — was not composing in her journal. She looked anything but composed. She was tugging absent-mindedly at her eyebrow ring.
They were all crowded around something, their heads pressed together.
Vivien was the first to see the boys arrive. “Have you seen this?” she said to Dec.
The others cleared a path. What Dec saw was Steeple Hall. The image filled the top of half of a page in some newspaper. The story filled the rest of the page. Under the picture in large black letters was the headline, “A Thief in the House of Memory.”
“Shit.”
“It’s the Ottawa Citizen” said Langston, hitching up his pants. “I went out to get a copy because I wrote this letter to the editor protesting the education cuts and it was supposed to be in today.”
Speechless, Dec started to read the article.
In the countryside not far from the pretty town of Ladybank, a man died three weeks ago. He was a small-town crook crushed in his last act of larceny. He had tried to rob the House of Memory.
Dec tried to go on but the words began to swim before his eyes.
“You didn’t know about this?” asked Vivien. He shook his head. “Bummer,” she said.
The house was shot from a distance but it still looked grotesquely tall, a lurid house of horrors. The image was grainy and distorted and they had used some kind of eerie effect to lend an artificial twilight to the scene.
“Ghost Central,” said Richard.
Dec groaned. “Oh, perfect. This is just perfect.”
“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Arianna. She was sitting with the article in front of her and a yellow highlighter in her hand. “I’ve counted three typos so far.” Dec stared at her vacantly. “Well, who is going to believe such shoddy journal-ism?”
“It’s mostly about your grandfather,” said Martin. “I didn’t know he was a senator.”
“That was his great-grandfather,” said Melody.
“Oh, right. Your grandfather was the business guy.”
“Steeple Industries,” said Richard grandly, stretching out his arm as if pointing to a huge neon sign.
“Steeple Enterprises” corrected Langston. He turned to Dec. “Your family used to own half of Ladybank.”
Dec had a sour taste in his mouth. “What’s your point?” he snapped.
Langston shrugged. “I don’t have a point.”
“I read the article this morning,” said Vivien hurriedly. “It’s actually kind of inspiring.”
Dec looked at her skeptically. “Really?”
“Really. It talks about how your dad has kind of appointed himself as the family historian, how committed he is, and how much work he puts into upkeep — that kind of thing.”
Dec looked at the article and then back at Vivien hopefully.
“It’s true,” she said. “I even started writing a poem.” She plunked her journal down on the table and started leafing through the pages. “It made me think of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ It’s got this kind of Poe feel to it,” she said. “So I call it a Poe-em.”
As the journal pages flipped by, something caught Dec’s eye, and he stopped her hand. A sketch — a good one — and it looked remarkably like him.
“Oh, that,” she said. “Just a doodle.” She snatched up the journal and held it to her chest. She pushed a strand of neon blue hair from her face and cleared her throat.
“The Poe-em is written in trochaic octameter,” she said.
“Is that some kind of dinosaur?” said Richard. But before Vivien could reply, Arianna made another mark with her yellow highlighter.
“Four!” she said triumphantly. “Can you believe they left out the “h” in psycho.”
“Psycho?” said Dec, looking at her in shock. “Psycho?”
“It’s okay,” said Vivien, seeing the look of panic on Dec’s face. “The journalist was just sort of saying something about the contrast between the… Here it is.” She pointed to the passage and Dec read it for himself.
A lonely stretch of highway, a modest roadside dwelling at the foot of a steep hill leading, by a ragged pathway to an imposing Victorian mansion. One might almost be describing the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psyco.
Dec smacked his forehead. “The setting for Psycho!”
“Keep reading,” said Vivien.
But Dec’s face was buried in his hands. “My father is going to freak.”
“He must have known about it,” said Martin.
“But he didn’t,” said Melody. “The journalist says that every attempt to contact Steeple was turned down.”
“Then the guy was trespassing,” said Martin. “You can sue!
“Yeah, right,” said Dec.
“It’s defamation of character,” said Richard. “Slander!”
“You mean libel,” said Arianna. “When you actually publish a false statement, it’s libel.”
“Stop!” said Vivien with such passion that, remarkably, everybody did. “You have to read the whole thing, Dec. In the very next sentence he says… where is it… yeah, listen, ‘Nothing could be further from the truth.’ Then he goes on to say that your dad’s this real family-minded guy who likes to live the quiet life and nice stuff like that.”
Richard looked disappointed. “So your dad’s not a psychotic killer?”
Dec looked at Richard wearily. “Richard, sometimes…”
“Hold on,” said Ezra, interrupting. He stared at Dec, a glint in his eye. “He asked you a question, Dec. Answer the guy.”
Dec gaped at Ezra. And Ezra smiled back at him, but would not withdraw the challenge.
Dec swallowed hard. They were all looking at him now and waiting, as if the question hadn’t been a joke.
“Is my dad a psychotic killer?” He fixed his eyes on Ezra.
“The jury is still out.”