13 Hangmen Read Online Free

parlor.
    Why had it suddenly gone so quiet?
    Everyone was staring at the tarnished brass bed in the middleof 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.
    â€œWait,” 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. Hedarted 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 peelingdoor. The twins and Julia brought up the rear, discussing what colors they planned to paint their rooms.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWhere’s the bed?” Mikey said over Tony’s shoulder.
    â€œDown in the parlor,” Angey laughed.
    Michael didn’t deny it.
    â€œNo way,” Tony said.
    Michael nudged Tony into the room, reassuring him that top of the list was buying him a