Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3 Amy pounded on the cell door. "Hello? Help?" she yelled. Dan appeared and looked inside the bars. "Whatever you did, I'll always stand by you," he said. "Don't be a dweeb. Get the guard and open this door!" Amy yelled. Dan pushed on the door, and it slowly swung open. Amy blinked. Why had she thought the door was locked? Come to think of it, Isabel had never said that it was. She felt her legs trembling. She was more shaken up than she wanted to admit. "C'mon," Dan said. "I found this awesome collection of knives. One of them still has bloodstains on it!" "Dan, Isabel Kabra was here," Amy said.

"Isabel Kabra? Multiplying Cobras. Which one is that?" "Ian and Natalie's mother!" "Oh, man. Those kids have a mother?" "She was almost… nice," Amy said. "She actually apologized for Ian." "Too late. Her kids are the hounds of suck." "She said the Lucians should win—" "Duh." "—and that I should trust her. She was about to tell me something." Dan made a face. "Let me guess. Go home, little children, this game is too dangerous for you, you're going to lose. Blahbaddy blah. We've heard it a million times since we started. So which branch got the originality gene? They all sound the same." Amy decided to leave out the part about Ian really liking her. She wasn't buying it, of course. But Dan definitely wouldn't buy it. "She said she met me when I was little, but I don't remember her at all," Amy said.

Dan was barely listening. "We'd better get outside or Nellie is going to have a freak attack." As they walked toward the exit, Amy stopped in front of the wall of mug shots. "Why was she here?" she wondered. "It wasn't just a coincidence. She stopped here, at the mug shots. She was leaning in, right—" Amy stopped. "Dan! One of the mug shots is missing!" Neatly cut out from behind the Plexiglas, one small photograph was gone. "Now we'll never know who it was," Amy said. Dan closed his eyes. Amy knew he was going over the photographs in his mind. Even though there were about a hundred on the wall, she knew he'd remember the one that was missing. "Follow me," he said. Amy hurried after him to the gift shop. There was a framed poster on the wall showing the same criminal faces. Dan put his finger on one, a youngish man with dirty hair and a blank expression. One side of his face showed white scars from his forehead to his chin. "Him." "Bob Troppo," the clerk behind the register said. "Is that some sort of Aussie greeting?" Dan

murmured to Amy. He waved. "Bob Troppo!" he called. The clerk came from around the counter. "The bloke you're looking at. He was called Bob Troppo. Nobody knew his real name because he never spoke. 'Gone troppo' is an Australian expression for someone who's lived in the tropics so long he's gone a bit weird. He lived in Sydney in the 1890s." "What did he do?" Dan asked. "Feed someone to a croc? Tie him to the railroad tracks?" "He tried to assassinate Mark Twain." Amy and Dan exchanged a glance. Mark Twain was a Cahill descendant. He was a Janus, the clever, artistic branch. The clerk, a burly young man in khaki shorts, leaned against the counter. "Twain was on a lecture tour, you see, back in 1896. Troppo was seen talking to him in an alley outside the hall where he spoke. Apparently, they had words, and Troppo smashed him on the shoulder with a cane!" "That doesn't sound like an attempted

assassination," Amy said. "The cane had a knife concealed in it. That was enough to convict him, especially since he never spoke a word in his defense. Anyway, he escaped in a totally ingenious way." The clerk leaned forward as if he was about to impart a secret. "He was in jail, but he had the job of cleaning the floors at night, you see. So every night he scraped the wax off the wood and kept it in his cell. Then he made a wax impression of a key! Is that clever or what?" Dan and Amy exchanged another glance. They knew each other so well and had depended on each other for everything for so long that they could communicate without speaking. Ekaterina? The Ekat branch was ingenious and inventive. "What happened to him?" Amy asked. "Nobody knows. Rumor has it that he took off into the bush. Would you like to buy some handcuffs? A book?" "Handcuffs?" Dan asked. Amy pulled on his shirt. "No, thank you. We have to be going. Thanks for the story!"

Amy and Dan walked out of the shop and headed for the door. "Bob Troppo sounds crazy," Amy said. Dan nodded. "Gotta be a Cahill." "But what does Isabel want with him?" Amy wondered. "Is he the reason the Kabras are in Sydney? Or…" "…is it us?" Dan asked. Amy, Dan, and Nellie stood in front of a metal door. There was no nameplate, just a grimy button that could be a doorbell. The building was made of corrugated steel and brick, with long shuttered windows. It looked like a warehouse. "Maybe this isn't it," Amy said, suddenly nervous. "It's the address," Nellie said. She pressed the bell. They waited. Amy shifted from one foot to the other. She felt heat rise in her cheeks. How crazy was it to travel halfway around the world and show up at someone's door? Someone who hardly managed to stay in touch with his own cousin and