Free A Thief in the House of Memory by Tim Wynne-Jones

young and daring. When he showed it to me, I thought, Hey, girl, he may
seem
like a pussycat, driving his beige Le Sabre with the cruise control set right on the speed limit, but there’s a
Wildcat
in there somewhere.” Then she exploded with laughter. “Crazy mama,” she said.
    She grew quiet again and he watched, not sure what she would do next. Then the grin was back and she gave Dec a hurry-up wave.
    â€œHop in, Big Stuff,” she said. “Come on, quick now.” He crawled in behind the steering wheel. She clambered over him and lounged in the passenger’s seat. “Take me somewhere,” she said.
    â€œWhere?” asked Dec, both hands on the wheel, only wishing that his foot could reach the pedal.
    â€œCalifornia,” said Lindy. “I need a little sun in my life. How ‘bout you?”
    He drove a bit. She made loud driving noises. She joked about him running over a cow. “Careful you don’t put us in the river!” she said. “Hey, is that Las Vegas up ahead? I think it just might be. Viva Las Vegas.”
    Then they sat quietly with only the sparkling green lawns of Steeple Hall before them. “You don’t think your daddy was a crook?” she said, her voice tetchy now. “Well, I used to have a life. Where’d that go, huh?”
    Dec sat staring at her, her bare feet up on the seat, her knees supporting her chin, her sad face, her puffy eyes. Hedidn’t like it when she got sad. He crawled up on his knees, leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around him.
    â€œGet me out of here, Declan,” she whispered between smooches. “Get me out of here. Before it’s too late.”
    Thunder rumbled a long way off.
    Dec opened his eyes. How old had he been? The memories came back to him willy-nilly. He had no control over them. Sometimes he was eight or nine, sometimes he was little more than a baby. But he never seemed to get too close in age to the time she left. That time was a blank. She had left in the fall, just a few months after Sunny was born. He had been ten.
    He looked back towards the house. His ten-year-old self was walking around in there somewhere, lost to him.
    Lightning crackled across the southern sky. He shuddered. He should go inside. He closed the door on the empty bay. The rain would be back; the Wildcat wouldn’t. One night she drove it away, all by herself.

Psycho
    D EC HAD written about half his essay on Frank Lloyd Wright.
    â€œArchitecture as frozen music. I like that,” said Ezra. “Is it about that place called Falling Water?”
    â€œThe Edgar j. Kaufman η house,” said Dec. “How do you know?”
    â€œIt’s in Pennsylvania, right?” said Ezra. “I love it. All the angles and the way it sort of hangs out over the stream like that and…” He stopped. They had been making slow passage through the knot at the entrance to the cafeteria, but Ezra, who was taller than Dec, had his eyes on their table. “What’s going on?” he said.
    In truth, nothing was going on. Not the usual kind of thing, anyway. Melody and Martin weren’t at the blackboard solving the mysteries of the physical universe. Langston’s chessboard was all set up but no one was playing. Arianna wasn’t doing her crossword and Vivien, back to regular clothing — if overalls and a fluorescent blue wig could be considerednormal — was not composing in her journal. She looked anything but composed. She was tugging absent-mindedly at her eyebrow ring.
    They were all crowded around something, their heads pressed together.
    Vivien was the first to see the boys arrive. “Have you seen this?” she said to Dec.
    The others cleared a path. What Dec saw was Steeple Hall. The image filled the top of half of a page in some newspaper. The story filled the rest of the page. Under the picture in large black letters was the headline, “A