The Curse of the Dead Man's Diamond

Chapter 1

My cheek was smashed so firmly against the cool car window that it peeled off like a Fruit Roll-Up when I lifted my head. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 was still blaring in my earbuds, as it had been ever since we’d stopped for gas two hours ago. As I cracked my eyes open, Dad came into focus, his body twisted around awkwardly in the driver’s seat. He smiled at me, but it wasn’t his usual smile. It was his pretending-everything-is-great-when-everything-clearly-isn’t-great smile. Which I’d come to know well.

Our car was no longer moving. We had arrived.

“Welcome home, Charlie!” said Dad, too cheerfully.

I gazed past him at the bizarre color of the sky--a heavy grayish-blue--then rubbed my eyes, wondering how I could’ve slept so long. It took my foggy brain a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t actually nighttime. Those were storm clouds overhead, blocking out the sun. They churned like a wild animal trying to claw its way out of a sack. How appropriate.

But even worse than the angry sky was the house outlined against it, stark black against the ashy gray. Winklevoss Manor--that’s right, our new home had a name--was a towering Victorian mansion, crisscrossed with so many thick vines it looked like clutching fingers were trying to drag the place back into the earth. The paint was faded and chipped and speckled with mold. A row of sharp iron spikes jutted up from the edges of the roof for no reason whatsoever. On the left side of the house, a narrow third story extended into the sky, ringed by a spindly iron balcony. According to my Google research, this charming feature was called a “widow’s walk.”

In other words, everything about the place was creepy, like something out of a ghost story. The classical music in my ears swelled dramatically as I blinked up at it.

“Whaddaya think?” asked Dad as I yanked out my earbuds. “Welcome to Winklevoss Manor! Do you think we should change the name? How about Hess Manor? No--Hess House!”

“It’s . . . it’s . . .” I couldn’t find the words for the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d expected the move to Florida to be horrible, but this? I dug into the backpack at my feet and removed the crumpled page Dad had printed from the Internet. I smoothed it against my knees and held it in front of my father’s beaming face, confronting him with the breezy blue beach cottage I’d been promised, with its broad front porch and elegant, winding balconies. A real-life dollhouse, only bigger. There was nothing breezy or dollhouse-y about the place in front of me.

“That photograph was taken decades ago,” said Dad, with a literal wave of his hand. “I told you this place was a fixer-upper. That’s why we got such a great deal on it.”

“More like a tearer-downer,” I mumbled.

“C’mon, give it a chance,” he said. “The realtor says it’s got great bones.”

“So did the dinosaurs,” I reminded him, pushing open the car door and unfolding my numb legs. “And look what happened to them.”

As soon as I stepped outside, salt air flooded my nostrils, so tangy it made me cough. The wind whipped my long hair around my head in bright pink swirls.

“Can you believe it?” Dad nudged me with his elbow. “That’s our backyard!” He pointed past the house, where the ocean crashed and gurgled. It sounded like the white noise machine Gran used to use at night, to block out the sounds of the city. But there was no danger of city noise here. Instead, seagulls swooped overhead, their screeches like nails on a chalkboard. Over a ridge of tall, whipping seagrass, I caught flashes of the glinting surf and the grayish, claylike sand. And beyond that, the endless water--foaming and seething. Somehow, it was even angrier than the sky.

“No,” I said sullenly. “I can’t believe it.” It was way too much nature for my taste. I missed New York’s kind of sea--the kind made of glass and steel and concrete. Solid things. Not like the wild, surging force out there. But apparently, I didn’t get a say in the matter.

I trudged behind Dad up the rickety porch steps. The front door of Winklevoss Manor had once displayed a large panel of colorful stained glass, but now it was boarded up from the inside with plywood. Broken shards of the original door gaped like an open mouth with sharp, glistening teeth.

“I guess we know what our first project will be,” said Dad. When he opened the door, it creaked like someone moaning in pain, which seemed about right. The air inside was thick and musty. Years of grime coated the windows, dyeing the light that trickled in a sickly brown color. The wallpaper had yellowed and curled at the edges, and a thick blanket of dust covered every surface. I sucked in a lungful of it and coughed a little more dramatically than was necessary.

The living room was crammed full of stuff, most of it toppled and broken, like someone had trashed the place on the way out. The furniture and knickknacks cluttering the place looked a million years old--everything floral, fringed, and faded. I half expected to see someone’s granny on the lumpy sofa, hunched over her knitting (but not my granny, of course--Gran had no tolerance for typical grandma things, like cats or hard candy or needlework). “Who does all this junk belong to?” I asked.

“Us,” said Dad. “We bought the house fully furnished.” A brief look of concern passed over his face. Finally. “I didn’t realize quite how furnished it would be.”

Something thumped upstairs, deep in the recesses of the cavernous house. Dad and I both froze and slowly raised our eyes. “What was that?” I asked, trying to sound more annoyed than nervous. In fact, I was an equal mix of both.

“Just the normal moans and groans of an old house like this,” said Dad, plastering a smile back onto his face.

“It’s probably a rat,” I grumbled. “Or a raccoon.” Then I brightened suddenly, struck by a promising thought. “Maybe there’s an infestation!”

“Why do you sound excited by that idea?” asked Dad.

“Isn’t that fraud or something, if they sell us a house with an infestation?” I asked. Dad was an attorney, so I knew the best way to get his attention was to speak his language--legalese. “Maybe we can get our money back!”

Dad shook his head. “Florida has all sorts of critters. We’ve accepted that risk, I’m afraid.”

“We?” I said, lifting an eyebrow. “And when you say ‘all sorts of critters,’ could you be a little more specific?”

Right on cue, a cockroach the size of a hamster scuttled out from under a coffee table and ambled across the floor, heading nonchalantly toward me. I’m not afraid of many things, but any animal with more than four legs makes my skin crawl. So even though I was wearing my favorite thick-soled boots, which could squash any bug into submission, I shrieked and darted away from it, toward the front door.

But flailing around and wailing like a banshee didn’t have the effect I was hoping for. Just the opposite, in fact.

The bug responded by fluttering its wings--yes, wings!--and whipping around the room, smacking haphazardly into furniture and walls and windows. The more it spun out of control, the more I did the same. And on and on it went until Dad calmly opened the front door and waved the pest outside (the roach--not me).

“What. Was. That?” I demanded as soon as my thumping heart had calmed to a lively allegro. “They have flying roaches here?”

“I think they’re called palmetto bugs,” said Dad. “I’ll get an exterminator to come by as soon as I can. Until then we’ll put out some traps.”

“Traps for what, exactly?”

“For . . . everything.”

“Ugh, I hate it here.”

“Don’t be so negative, Charlie. Look!” Dad picked his way through the living room, into an adjacent room at the back of the house, where a giant window was covered by heavy velvet curtains. Dad parted them with a dramatic sweep that sent a storm of dust swirling around his head. Through the grimy windowpanes, I could make out the ocean again. The white-tipped surf looked like the snarling jaw of a rabid animal to me, but Dad, once again, was oblivious. “We’ll put Gran’s piano right here when it arrives,” he said, choking on his words as puffs of dust fluttered off his lips. “Imagine looking at that view while you’re playing!”

I hmphed and crossed my arms over my chest. Speaking of oblivious, Dad still didn’t realize I hadn’t played a note in months, and this didn’t seem like the best time to tell him. I didn’t want to let him off the hook by changing the subject, which currently was the huge mistake he’d made by dragging us here.

“Check out this space!” he went on, flinging his arms wide. “We could fit our whole New York apartment in here twice, with room to spare. After we’ve tidied up, of course.”

I topped off my crossed arms with a dramatic roll of my eyes, which I think made my point quite nicely. I happened to like our apartment in the city, even though it was roughly the size of a shoebox. I’d lived there for all of my twelve years, and I’d never once complained about not having enough space. I didn’t need space. What I needed were crowds and traffic and skyscrapers. And roaches that stayed on the ground where you could squish them with your boots, if necessary. What I really needed was Gran, who’d talk sense into Dad the way she always did.

But that wasn’t going to happen now.

Gran had died in the spring, leaving a big Gran-shaped hole in our world. Not only was she not around to make Dad see reason, but she wasn’t there to look after me, either. Dad’s job didn’t give him any spare time to walk me home from school or double-check my homework or fix meals that didn’t come in plastic trays--all the things that Gran used to do.

Not that I minded taking care of myself. But Dad sure did.

So he did some online searching--and some soul-searching, too –and found a charming cottage in Florida, right on the beach and available for a steal. He decided he’d start his own law practice down there, rustle up some local clients and be his own boss. Working for a big firm, he said, was wearing him out, and he wanted to spend more quality time with me. He said he’d been longing to escape from the cold and congestion of the city for years. All of this came as a surprise to me, but a few months later, here we were. In sweaty, sticky, roach-infested Florida.

“You know, if we get back on the road right now, we can stay in the same hotel as last night,” I said hopefully. “You loved their continental breakfast, remember? With the crispy bacon?”

“We’re staying,” said Dad. “New York isn’t feasible for us anymore. You know that. Besides, this place is paradise.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If you’re a bug.”

“Look, Charlie, I know we didn’t plan this little speed bump, but now that we’re here, we might as well make the best of it. This place may look like a lump of coal, but I swear it’s a diamond that just needs a little polishing.”

That time, he really deserved the eye roll I gave him.

“C’mon . . .” He grinned playfully. A real one this time. “Are you with me?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “I’ll get the rest of the stuff out of the car. Why don’t you go upstairs and check out the bedrooms? I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

On the contrary, I had a very bad feeling about it. And it was getting worse by the second.

I waded through the living room and started up the staircase just as my phone chimed. It was a text from my best friend, Becca--a picture of our whole group of friends, minus me. It had been Becca’s idea for all of us to dye our hair different colors so that in pictures we’d make a rainbow of colorful heads all pressed together and smiling. Only now there was no pink. I quickly swiped the photo away and stomped to the second floor.

Nothing could’ve prepared me for what I found in “my” room at the top of the stairs. If the living room had been trashed, this one had been properly destroyed. A thick coating of sawdust crunched underfoot, and what had presumably once been furniture had been reduced to hunks of wood--splintered and hacked to pieces. A few stray items were still recognizable in the chaos, and the very sight of them made me shudder: the disembodied head of a baby doll, the spines of children’s books stripped of their pages, the severed limbs of a rocking horse. The grisly ruins of a child’s bedroom.

As I gazed at the chilling scene, an unsettling feeling passed over me. But it wasn’t a shudder this time. It felt like hands brushing against my skin--so real I could make out each individual fingertip pressing into my flesh. Like someone playing scales on a piano.

But it wasn’t real, of course. It couldn’t be real. Because Dad was the only other person in the house, and he was downstairs. I backed out of the room, onto the landing overlooking the floor below. Dad was shuffling inside with a tower of boxes in his arms. He looked up, startled. Then, when he saw the look on my face, concerned.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

I rubbed my arms to prove there was nothing there and shook off whatever had come over me. I reminded myself that, first and foremost, I was supposed to be angry at Dad. “Do you really want me to answer that?” I snapped.

“Probably not,” he said.

At that moment, a peal of thunder crashed, rattling the house’s “good bones” like someone shaking the bars of a jail cell. Then the sky split open, and heavy sheets of rain came pouring down at last.