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

Thief in the House of Memory.”
    â€œShit.”
    â€œIt’s the
Ottawa Citizen”
said Langston, hitching up his pants. “I went out to get a copy because I wrote this letter to the editor protesting the education cuts and it was supposed to be in today.”
    Speechless, Dec started to read the article.
    In the countryside not far from the pretty town of Ladybank, a man died three weeks ago. He was a small-town crook crushed in his last act of larceny. He had tried to rob the House of Memory.
    Dec tried to go on but the words began to swim before his eyes.
    â€œYou didn’t know about this?” asked Vivien. He shook his head. “Bummer,” she said.
    The house was shot from a distance but it still looked grotesquely tall, a lurid house of horrors. The image was grainy and distorted and they had used some kind of eerie effect to lend an artificial twilight to the scene.
    â€œGhost Central,” said Richard.
    Dec groaned. “Oh, perfect. This is just perfect.”
    â€œI wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” said Arianna. She was sitting with the article in front of her and a yellow highlighter in her hand. “I’ve counted three typos so far.” Dec stared at her vacantly. “Well, who is going to believe such shoddy journal-ism?”
    â€œIt’s mostly about your grandfather,” said Martin. “I didn’t know he was a senator.”
    â€œThat was his great-grandfather,” said Melody.
    â€œOh, right. Your grandfather was the business guy.”
    â€œSteeple Industries,” said Richard grandly, stretching out his arm as if pointing to a huge neon sign.
    â€œSteeple
Enterprises”
corrected Langston. He turned to Dec. “Your family used to own half of Ladybank.”
    Dec had a sour taste in his mouth. “What’s your point?” he snapped.
    Langston shrugged. “I don’t have a point.”
    â€œI read the article this morning,” said Vivien hurriedly. “It’s actually kind of inspiring.”
    Dec looked at her skeptically. “Really?”
    â€œReally. It talks about how your dad has kind of appointed himself as the family historian, how committedhe is, and how much work he puts into upkeep — that kind of thing.”
    Dec looked at the article and then back at Vivien hopefully.
    â€œIt’s true,” she said. “I even started writing a poem.” She plunked her journal down on the table and started leafing through the pages. “It made me think of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ It’s got this kind of Poe feel to it,” she said. “So I call it a Poe-em.”
    As the journal pages flipped by, something caught Dec’s eye, and he stopped her hand. A sketch — a good one — and it looked remarkably like him.
    â€œOh, that,” she said. “Just a doodle.” She snatched up the journal and held it to her chest. She pushed a strand of neon blue hair from her face and cleared her throat.
    â€œThe Poe-em is written in trochaic octameter,” she said.
    â€œIs that some kind of dinosaur?” said Richard. But before Vivien could reply, Arianna made another mark with her yellow highlighter.
    â€œFour!” she said triumphantly. “Can you believe they left out the “h” in psycho.”
    â€œPsycho?” said Dec, looking at her in shock.
“Psycho?”
    â€œIt’s okay,” said Vivien, seeing the look of panic on Dec’s face. “The journalist was just sort of saying something about the contrast between the… Here it is.” She pointed to the passage and Dec read it for himself.
    A lonely stretch of highway, a modest roadside dwelling at the foot of a steep hill leading, by a ragged pathway to an imposing Victorian mansion. One might almost be describing the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psyco.
    Dec smacked his forehead. “The setting for Psycho!”
    â€œKeep