13 Hangmen (9 page)

ony headed straight next door to No. 15.

Well, not
straight
next door. First he pretended to eat breakfast with Julia and the twins. He could force down only about a pancake and a half, though, before he shoved his plate aside and declared himself late for his rendezvous with Michael over at the Revere House. He reassured Julia he would be on his new cell—just in case—and told the twins to have fun moving all that furniture.
Then
he ducked out the door beneath the stoop, climbed the steps of No. 15, and rang the bell.

A moment later, Hagmann answered.

“What's your problem?” Tony said.

“It's your father who appears to have the problem,” Hagmann said.

“Yeah, because you called the cops!” Tony said.

“It was my duty as a law-abiding citizen,” he said.

“To accuse him of murder?” Tony said.

“I made no such accusation,” Hagmann said. “I simply alerted the authorities to what I had seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.”

“Which was?”

“That I found Angelo stone-cold dead in his bed mere minutes after your father's so-called visit to him last month.”

Tony couldn't even pretend to hide his shock.

“And that, as a result, you—a DiMarco—were suddenly named inheritor of Angelo's house, despite his solemn vow never to allow such a thing to happen.”

“Why would Zio Angelo vow
that
?” Tony managed to stammer.

“Because the whole DiMarco clan had been shunning Angelo ever since his mother, Isabella, left Number Thirteen to
him,
and not her second husband, Antonio DiMarco.”

Yikes!
That pretty much explained, Tony had to admit, why Nonno Guido and Zio Angelo never saw eye to eye. He didn't say so to Old Man Hagmann, though. Instead he said, “But Dad made a point of visiting Zio Angelo whenever he was in Boston.”

“Are you sure about that?” Hagmann said. “Or did he just
say
he did? Frankly, I'd never met the man until the morning
of Angelo's death. Meanwhile, Angelo was pretty insistent that no DiMarco should get even a single chipped teacup of his property after he was gone. In fact, he recently asked me to type out a correction to his will changing the inheritor of Number Thirteen from your father—whom he had reluctantly chosen as the best of a bad lot when the will was first drawn up—to
me
. I strongly objected, of course. I already
had
a house and didn't need another one. But Angelo was adamant that he sign the deed of Number Thirteen over to me. I was the only one who ever visited him, who bothered to look after him now that he was ill, who actually cared whether he lived or died.”

“If he felt that way about it, why did he suddenly fly to Ann Arbor to spend Thanksgiving with us?” Tony said.

Hagmann frowned. “To inform your father in person of his intention to cut all of you DiMarcos out of his will, once and for all. Angelo was convinced, on his return, that it was the stress of your father's violent reaction that brought on his stroke.”

Tony had no recollection of any conflict between Michael and Zio Angelo at Thanksgiving. They seemed to get along just fine. And when was his dad
ever
violent? “If they were fighting, why would Dad bother to drop in on Zio Angelo three weeks ago?” Tony said, grasping at straws.

“Break in, more like,” Hagmann said. “I began looking after Angelo full-time once he became bedridden. So you can imagine
my alarm when I heard footsteps overhead in the parlor while I was making his breakfast down in the kitchen. I knew it couldn't be poor Angelo. And I raced upstairs to discover your father—a total stranger—looming over Angelo's bed in a frankly menacing way while Angelo scribbled
Trying to kill me
on the notepad he used for communicating his needs.”

Tony was speechless.
That
didn't sound like his dad at all. Then again, what had he joked with the twins over pizza? That it was always the mild-mannered ones who went postal?

“I was just about to call 911 when your father introduced himself as Angelo's nephew from Michigan,” Hagmann continued. “He explained away the note by reminding me that Angelo's heart medicine made him a little paranoid—which I knew to be true. He asked me if I would kindly make him a cup of tea. What could I do? Against my better judgment, I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. When I was on my way back up with the tray, though, your father came barreling out of the parlor. He stuffed an envelope addressed to Birnbaum & Birnbaum into his coat pocket and, claiming he was late for an appointment across town, dashed out the door.”

Tony's heart sank. This more or less corroborated what Michael had said: that he had dropped in on Zio Angelo just before heading over to Harvard to deliver his speech on Paul Revere at the history conference.

“To my horror, I found Angelo dead when I returned to his side,” Hagmann concluded. “Which is when I called 911. And then I remembered—having recently typed out that change to Angelo's will—that Birnbaum was Angelo's lawyer. Immediately suspicious, I checked Angelo's rolltop desk, only to discover both the will and the deed to Number Thirteen were missing.”

Uh-oh.
Tony tried not to panic. Old Man Hagmann's allegations did sound pretty convincing. “But none of this makes any sense,” he said, even though it sort of did. “Why would Dad risk the rest of his life in prison for such a falling-down heap of old bricks?”

“That's for those detectives to deduce,” Hagmann sniffed. “All I know is this: that the DiMarcos have been trying to get their hands on Number Thirteen ever since Antonio tricked poor Isabella into marrying him. Why do you think he insisted on adopting Angelo as a teenager? I'll tell you! So there would be no question of the house going to him after her death. But Angelo's dear old mother confounded them all by leaving Number Thirteen to Angelo anyway.”

“You have no real proof to support any of that,” Tony said.

“Perhaps not,” Hagmann said. “But I wouldn't get too comfortable over there if I were you. It's only a matter of time
before the authorities declare your father's trumped-up version of Angelo's will to be shamelessly falsified.”

“Or realize he's totally innocent,” Tony said. Not knowing what to say next, he turned and strode out of Hangmen Court. As soon as he rounded the corner of Charter Street, though, he stopped at the entrance to an Irish bar to collect his wits. What were the odds those two detectives would ever buy that Michael was innocent? There was no denying how strange it was that Zio Angelo had changed his will the day he'd died, leaving No. 13 to Tony. Even stranger that Zio Angelo had tried to warn Old Man Hagmann, just beforehand, that Michael was trying to kill him. Stranger still that all this had taken place the day after Michael was notified that the DiMarcos were being booted out of university housing in Ann Arbor.

Basta!
Michael couldn't possibly have killed Zio Angelo. It just wasn't in his nature. There must be some other explanation. Wait, what had Hagmann just said? That the DiMarco family had been trying to get their hands on No. 13 for generations. Could that possibly be true? Unfortunately, there was now no way for Tony to ask Michael, at least not at the moment. Nor could he call Nonno Guido without spilling the beans about the allegations against his dad. If only he could figure out a way to conjure the ghost of Angelo back and ask
him
about Antonio DiMarco. But how?

Colonial Maid Goth Chick was still reading that astrophysics book at the slate counter when he jangled through the front door. Except now she wasn't wearing that long purple dress or her gathered cotton cap. She was sporting a cutoff jean miniskirt and Bob Marley tank top. Her punked-out black hair was tied back in a ratty ponytail with a purple ribbon.

“Video shop is next to the hardware,” she mumbled, turning the page.

“Can I ask you a question?” Tony said.

“Oh, it's you,” she said, looking up and squinting.

“Tony,” he said, wandering over. “I just moved into the neighborhood.”

She stared at him.

“So what's
your
name?” he said.

“Sarah,” she said. “Are you, like, stalking me?”

“I've got one of these in my room,” Tony said, tapping the countertop where the spiral was carved. “Only mine's a shelf.”

“It's called a pawcorance,” Sarah said. “They're wicked old. Ancient Native Americans carved them centuries before the Algonquian Nation formed its tribes or the Pilgrims even thought of boarding the
Mayflower
.”

“What were they for?” Tony asked. “Originally, I mean.”

“Anthropologists
theorize
they marked spots where ancient
natives encountered ancestral spirits,” Sarah said. “The Algonquians continued to consider them sacred, especially the more elaborate ones in the form of altars.
Pawcorance
is actually the Algonquian word for ‘mockingbird.' Tradition held that the mockingbird was itself possessed by spirits, since it only ever appeared at dusk or dawn—often at pawcorances—and could sing in the voice of any animal. Dude, are you OK? You look like you're about to pass out.”

Tony nodded, though he wasn't so sure.

“Unfortunately, the Pilgrims turned most of the pawcorances around New England into horse mounts, boot scrapers, door lintels, fireplace mantels—you name it,” she said. “They weren't very respectful. Are you sure you're OK?”

Tony hesitated. Was he really going to go there? Sarah was, after all, a total stranger. Emphasis on strange.

Dad's in jail. OK,
at
the jail, for questioning. But still.

“I think my pawcorance might have conjured my dead great-uncle Angelo from 1939,” he blurted. “When he was a kid. But then he disappeared again before I could figure out what was going on. I sort of need to conjure him back.”

Sarah squinted at him again. “Better follow me,” she said. She ducked through the purple velvet curtain behind her.

Tony checked his pants pocket for his new cell phone—just in case she skinned rats back there—but did as he was told. He was
a little disappointed to find himself in an ordinary storage room crammed with more junk. Sarah busied herself filling a dented copper kettle at a small, rust-stained sink. She set the kettle on a gas camp stove and fired up the burner with a wand-like fireplace match. She reached for a teapot on a shelf above the stove cluttered with canisters and tins. “Cup of mint tea?” she said.

“Um, sure,” Tony said. He'd never actually had one in his life. “So do you think my pawcorance still works?”

“How should I know?” Sarah said. She plucked two faded teacups off hooks beneath the shelf and dusted them with the black-and-skulls hanky she pulled from her pocket.

“You never conjured anyone with yours?” Tony said.

“It's not mine,” she said.

“With Mildred's?” Tony said.