13 Hangmen

Corriveau Art

Description

Some people wont believe any of this story. You might be one of them. But every single word is true. Tony DiMarco does catch a murderer, solve a mystery, and find a treasureall in the first few days he moves, unexpectedly, to 13 Hangmans Court in Boston. The fact that he also turns thirteen at the same time is not a coincidence. So begins the story of Tony and his friendsfive thirteen-year-old boys, all living in the same house in the same attic bedroom, but at different times in history! None are ghosts, all are flesh and blood, and somehow all have come together in the attic room, visible only to one another. And all are somehow linked to a murder, a mystery, and a treasure.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 08 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781613123591
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

PUBLISHER S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-1-4197-0159-7
Text copyright 2012 Art Corriveau Book design by Maria T. Middleton
Published in 2012 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [e-mail] or the address below.

115 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011 www.abramsbooks.com

Prologue
Special Delivery
PART ONE: THE MURDER
1 Lucky No. 13
2 Surprises
Angelo
* How Angelo Saved Ted Williams s Red Sox Career
3 Under Investigation
PART TWO: THE MYSTERY
4 The Anomaly
5 Something Fishy
Solly
* How Solly Saved 13 Hangmen Court with a Ring
6 Unnatural Causes
7 A Big Misunderstanding
8 Tweaking History
Finn
* How Finn Helped Honey Fitzgerald Get Reelected as Mayor
9 Condemned by a Hangman
PART THREE: THE TREASURE
10 An Unexpected Ally
Jack
* How Jack Saved William Lloyd Garrison s Life
11 A Riddle
Tobias
* How Tobias Rescued Paul Revere s Treasure from the Clutches of a Traitor
12 Stars and Stripes Forever
13 Condemning a Hangman
Epilogue
The End?
What s Story, What s History
ony DiMarco kicked his sneakers off at the backdoor mat, as usual. He flung his book bag onto the kitchen table, as usual. But he didn t raid the fridge for a slice of leftover cake as usual. It wasn t an as-usual kind of day. It was Tony s last day of seventh grade at Ann Arbor Middle School-thank God-which also made it the first day of summer vacation and, therefore, the first official day of his diet. Tony s thirteenth birthday was now only three weeks away. He had totally promised himself he would begin life as a teenager twenty-five pounds lighter. The plan was to grab an orange from the fruit bowl on the counter instead.
So why was he laying his forehead against the fridge door and picturing that leftover cake-devil s food smothered in chocolate frosting-tucked behind a Tupperware of spaghetti on the second shelf, left-hand side?
Because he had just suffered through a grueling two-hour final assembly at school, one that had turned out to be a love-fest for his graduating twin brothers. Not only had Mikey and Angey cocaptained the baseball team to first place-Mikey as starting pitcher, Angey as catcher-but Mikey had also been voted Class Clown, while Angey had gotten the School Spirit award. And that hadn t even been the worst. The worst had been when the principal had stood up and named the evil twins co-valedictorians of their eighth-grade class. Tony would never hear the end of it at dinner tonight. Who could blame him for wanting a little chocolate pick-me-up now?
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