فصل بیست و هفتم

chapter-27

Akimi and Angus were in the lead as the four bikes raced across town.

“I know a shortcut!” Kyle hollered to Abia.

“Of course you do!” Abia shouted back.

He swung down Birch Street to cross the train tracks. Abia followed him.

They made it to Poplar before Akimi and Angus. The street was lined with simple brownstone apartment buildings, five stories tall.

“There’s Twenty-One,” said Abia. “How do we know if that was Mr. Lemoncello’s childhood home?” “Maybe there’s a plaque or something….”

They propped their bikes on their kickstands and hurried up the stoop to the front door to see if they could find some sort of sign labeling it as the childhood home of the most famous son of Alexandriaville, Ohio.

“Hey, look!” someone shouted. “Here’s a plaque! ‘Boyhood home of master game maker Luigi L. Lemoncello’!” It was Angus, up the block on the other side of the street at 12 Poplar Lane.

He and Akimi were on the stoop with a sweet-looking old lady in a black housecoat who’d come out to greet them.

“Buongiorno! Welcome to my nephew little Luigi’s childhood home. Come in, come in. I have almond biscotti upstairs.” “Thank you, ma’am,” Kyle heard Angus say, “but we’re kind of in a hurry. May not have time for a snack.” “But you are so skinny….”

“They’re going in,” said Abia.

“Um, ma’am?” shouted Kyle. “We’d like to see the house, too.” “You’re gonna have to wait,” said the lady. “I can only do one tour at a time. My feet are killing me.” Angus waved a twiddle-fingered “buh-bye” to Kyle. He and Akimi hurried into Mr. Lemoncello’s childhood home with their tour guide.

“Come on,” Kyle said to Abia. “We’ll search the outside of the building while we wait.” They biked down the block.

The brownstone behind the rusting wrought-iron fence looked so cramped, Kyle couldn’t imagine Mr. Lemoncello living there with his nine brothers and sisters.

“Hmm,” said Abia, “look at this. Someone has scratched a strange and nonsensical message into this fence post.” Kyle bent down and examined the etching:

!KNIHT FLESYM RAEH OT DEEN I

“It could be some kind of code,” said Kyle. “Mr. Lemoncello loves secret codes. Always has. Even when he was a little kid. The first game he ever tried to make was called First Letters, where…” Kyle stopped.

“It’s like ‘Lemoncello’ from the word jumble and ‘open sesame’ on his front door. It’s backward. ‘I need to hear myself think!’ ” “What does it mean?”

“That we need to race back to the library!”

“Why?”

Kyle was so glad he’d just done that school report on Mr. Lemoncello.

“His childhood home was so crowded and noisy, the public library was the only place where the twelve-year-old Luigi could ‘hear himself think’ and work on his game ideas!” “Excellent research analysis, Kyle Keeley!”

They hopped onto their bikes and, pumping hard, made it back to the library in record time. When they bounded up the front steps and into the lobby, Mr. Lemoncello wasn’t there.

But his hologram generated by the Nonfictionator was.

“Do you like the semitransparent me?” asked the Lemoncello illusion. “The real me used the three-D camera hidden inside the beak of a ceramic raven in his office to pose for me. I think I look a lot like me, don’t you? The ear, the eye, and the arm. I sound like me, too, because that was a book title I just cleverly dropped into my speech.” “Um, this is all great, Mr., uh, Fake Lemoncello,” said Kyle. “But we found a clue at your childhood home that sent us back here….” “As it should’ve!” replied the hologram. “There is one fascinating fact missing from my database, because, well, I’m embarrassed to say, the real Mr. Lemoncello forgot to tell the equally real Mr. Raymo the inspiration for my very first board game.” “Your family!” said Kyle, surprised at how easy the answer was.

“Can you give me names? Because as a data-driven interactive device, I need details, specifics, and, most important, data!” “Come on,” Kyle said to Abia. “We’ll look upstairs. The Lemoncello-abilia Room. There’s probably a family scrapbook or Bible with all the names listed inside it.” Kyle and Abia hurried up the grand staircase to the second floor and made their way around the balcony to a spiral staircase they could take to the third floor.

They burst into the Lemoncello-abilia Room, which was cluttered with a mishmash of knickknacks and souvenirs from Mr. Lemoncello’s past.

“Dig in!” said Kyle as he started pawing his way through the piles of unorganized junk. It was more cluttered than his grandmother’s attic (which was more cluttered than his grandfather’s workbench). Kyle found a stack of antique comic books. A bag full of brightly colored tiddledywinks. A snow globe from the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

“Is this the game referred to in Mr. Lemoncello’s question?” asked Abia as she pulled out a long, slender box that had been jammed between two big cardboard crates.

“No,” said Kyle. “Mr. Lemoncello’s game is called Family Frenzy, not Family Frolic. There’s no Imagination Factory logo in the corner, either. That’s not even a Lemoncello game.” “So what is it doing in the Lemoncello-abilia Room?” “Good question.”

Curious, Kyle studied the box top. There was a photo-graph of a young woman with a bright smile, heavy black eye makeup, and blond hair that curled in to brush her apple cheeks. The words “Family Frolic” bounced across the box in letters that reminded Kyle of the titles from that 1960s TV show Gilligan’s Island, which he’d checked out on YouTube after hearing Emily Dickinson sing her poem.

“Have fun frolicking with my groovy family!” was written in a cartoon balloon coming out of the blond lady’s smile.

Kyle lifted off the lid and unfolded the game board.

“Wow. It looks almost exactly like Family Frenzy. See, there’s the apartment building, the church, and the dog pound. Here’s Millionaire’s Mansion. Huh. One of the playing pieces is a red boot. Another is a pouncing cat.” “Those are both in Family Frenzy, are they not?” asked Abia.

“Yeah,” said Kyle as he riffled through the deck of game cards.

While he did that, Abia examined the inside of the box top.

“You are assessed fifty dollars for sewer repairs,” said Kyle, reading the top card. “There’s one just like that in Family Frenzy. Somebody stole Mr. Lemoncello’s idea!” “When did Family Frenzy first come out?” asked Abia.

“I don’t know, exactly.” Kyle looked around the room and saw a dusty heap of antique Lemoncello board games, including a classic edition of Family Frenzy.

He opened the game and read the information printed inside the box lid. “Copyright Luigi L. Lemoncello, 1974.” Abia had a sad look on her face.

“What?” asked Kyle. “What’s wrong?”

Abia read what was printed inside the lid of the Family Frolic box: “Family Frolic. Copyright Irma Hirschman, 1969.” “Impossible,” said Kyle. “That was five years before Mr. Lemoncello invented it.” “Exactly,” said Abia. “Perhaps, given his devotion to the truth, this is the answer Mr. Lemoncello wanted us to find—the one he was too ‘embarrassed’ to tell Mr. Raymo. The inspiration for his first game may very well have been a game created five years earlier by Irma Hirschman.” “What? You think he stole the idea from her? That Mr. Lemoncello made his first millions with someone else’s game?” “I think we need to do more research to learn the truth. Or we could race back downstairs and give our first answer: It seems the inspiration for Family Frenzy was Family Frolic, a game created by a woman named Irma Hirschman in 1969.” “But that can’t be true,” said Kyle. “Can it?”