Free Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy by Wendelin Van Draanen

they pack up her stuff. Go!”
    A “few minutes,” it seemed, were up. Marissa and I scooted out of there and snuck back upstairs to LeBrandi's room. And we were so busy looking over our shoulders aswe slipped through the door that we practically had a heart attack when we faced forward and saw Hali standing next to the bed we'd slept in.
    She scowls at us, then starts tearing apart the bed.
    I catch my breath and say, “What are you
doing
?”
    She pulls up hard on the fitted sheet, lifting the whole mattress a few inches before it flops free. “What I've been doing since I can remember—following orders.” She peels off the sheet, covers and all. Then she throws the ball of bedding on the ground, walks right across the mattress, and starts tearing apart the bed my mother had slept in. “Inga seems to think Dominique will be traumatized for life if she has to sleep in LeBrandi's sheets again, so I've been told to launder these and the ones next door.” She strips the bed and drags the bundles out the door, muttering, “They all get to hang around and gossip about LeBrandi, but can this wait? No. It's got to be done
now
.”
    When she's gone, Marissa shakes her head and says, “I wouldn't want her working for me.”
    I check down the hall, then close the door and push in the lock button. “What do you mean?”
    “That is one major chip she's got on her shoulder.”
    “Yeah, but you know what? She wasn't like that last night. I mean, she had attitude and everything, but she wasn't
mad
.”
    Marissa shrugs. “Yeah, but still—she shouldn't take it out on us.”
    I took out the brooch and started buffing away finger-prints with the bottom of my sweatshirt, thinking that even though Hali had seemed mad—especially at mymother—I got the feeling that it really wasn't any of us she was mad at. It was something much deeper. Like overnight she'd become angry at the whole world.
    Marissa says, “That's good enough, Sammy. Put it away!”
    The pair of socks the brooch had come out of was sitting unrolled on top of the other balls of socks in the drawer. I picked one up, then gathered it down to the toe, thinking that I could pick the brooch up with the sock and not have to touch it again.
    Then my thumbs felt something that does not belong in the toe of a sock.
    Paper.
    So I stopped, looked at Marissa, then pushed the toe end inside out. And onto the dresser fluttered a small scrap of folded paper.
    Now, I don't know about fingerprints and paper. And maybe I was being paranoid, but something about the whole situation told me to pull the sleeves of my sweatshirt over my hands and
then
unfold the scrap. So that's what I did.
    77CURIO was all that was written on it.
    Marissa whispers, “What's that mean?”
    “I don't know. It looks like a license plate number.”
    I could hear Hali thumping the mattress around next door, and when she banged against the wall, it reminded me of what I'd heard the night before. I had
not
imagined it! No way. And wondering what that thumping had been about gave me the shivers. Clear up and down my spine.
    I scooted the scrap next to the brooch on the dressertop, then gathered the sock again and pinched them both inside the toe. Marissa whispered, “You sure you want to do this?”
    “No, but I'm doing it anyway.” I tucked the socks inside each other, popped them into the dresser, and closed the drawer. “You-know-who told me to, and besides, I just want to get rid of the thing. It's giving me the creeps.”
    “So what are we supposed to do now? Go back down there?”
    “I guess. I sure don't want to stay in here.”
    “Can we maybe go find something to eat?”
    “Sure. Let's ask Hali.”
    Marissa grabs my arm. “Let's not.”
    Now, it's probably not very polite to go up to someone who's busy being mad at the world and ask her for food. It doesn't rank as high as fainting, but it's definitely somewhere in the top twenty. Especially when the person who's mad at the world is