The Crims #2 Read online

  Imogen didn’t really have much of a choice. She walked around the edge of the room and started to climb the ladder. Please don’t let the Kruks see my hands shaking. . . . She climbed into the opening at the top of the cage, and Uncle Knuckles, who looked quite relaxed about the whole imminent-death situation, reached up a hand to help her down. She clung on to the side of the cage, right above Big Nana and between Nick and Nate, which was her least favorite place to be, apart from in a pool full of piranhas, which was where she was about to be.

  The butler climbed back up the ladder and shut the cage’s door. Imogen had no idea how they were going to get out of this one. . . .

  She looked down and saw that Uncle Knuckles was now sitting on the floor, poking his feet down into the pool.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  “IT FEELS GREAT,” he “whispered” back. “THE PIRANHAS ARE NIBBLING OFF MY BUNIONS!”

  “You fools! You thought you could mess with me?” shrieked Elsa, reaching for the lever. “Haven’t you heard what they say about me? ‘Don’t mess with Elsa.’ I even have a line of bumper stickers!”

  And she started pulling the lever down, to lower the cage into the pool.

  Imogen saw Ava squeeze her eyes shut. Won’t you try to stop her? she thought hopefully. But it was clear that Ava was too afraid of her mother to do that.

  And then . . .

  “WAIT!” shouted Imogen. She let go of the edge of the cage with one hand, reached into her pocket, and pulled out the copy of Ten Little Mice in the Woods.

  Elsa let go of the lever. She looked as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, which, when you consider she was looking at a girl holding a children’s picture book, in the middle of a cage full of eccentric criminals, moments away from plunging into a pool full of piranhas, maybe wasn’t all that surprising.

  Elsa turned to Big Nana. “Are you saying you’ve had the book all this time?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Big Nana, “but now that you mention it, yes, I have.”

  Imogen was confused. “I thought you knew she had it,” she said to Elsa. “I told Barney—the robot dog—”

  Elsa turned to the butler, who looked as though he’d been hoping to sneak out of the room, and shouted, “WHY DOES NO ONE AROUND HERE TELL ME ANYTHING?”

  “Because most of the people who tell you things end up dead, ma’am,” said the butler, with a stiffer bow than usual.

  Elsa chose to ignore this remark—luckily for the butler. She turned back to Big Nana and said, “If you still have the book, well, that changes everything.”

  “I always felt terrible that I didn’t get to finish reading it to you,” said Big Nana. “That’s why I kept it. That, and the fact that it’s a real collectible. It turns out there was a little misprint at the end. . . .”

  “Why don’t you finish reading the story now, Big Nana?” said Imogen, looking down at her grandmother. “Wouldn’t that fix everything?”

  There was a long, tense silence—as long and as tense as a tightrope between two very tall buildings, and just as dangerous—and then, at last, Elsa nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll hear the end of the story. And then I’ll decide whether I still feel like killing you.” She turned to the butler, snapped her fingers, and said, “Bring me the story-time chair!”

  The butler walked out of the room backward, and slipped over on the solid-gold floor. And then he picked himself up and went off in search of the chair.

  “I’m not promising anything,” Elsa said when the butler came back in, carrying the story-time chair (a very old child’s chair with an “E is for ‘Execution’” cushion on it). “I might still kill you all. I’m in a very murderous sort of mood today.”

  Imogen managed to catch Ava’s eye at last. She looked at her as if to say, Help us!

  Ava gave her the tiniest nod—a nod so small it might not have been a nod at all—and then she stepped forward. “Mom,” she said. “Isn’t this whole thing kind of weird and mean? Like, how much did this whole piranha tank room even cost? Shouldn’t you be saving for my college education?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” said one of the Kruk boys. “I’ve been wearing the same tuxedo for, like, three years now. I can barely do my bow tie up, it’s so tight! And it’s hard playing football in a cummerbund. You say there’s no money to buy me a pair of sneakers, but you have plenty of money for piranha tanks—”

  “BE QUIET!” shouted Elsa.

  They were quiet.

  Ava rolled her eyes at Imogen and mouthed, “Parents.”

  Imogen held the book up in the air again. “I’m going to give this to Big Nana now. Okay?” she said.

  “Okay,” said Elsa, and settled herself in the story-time chair. “I am sitting comfortably. Big Nana, you may begin.”

  Big Nana held her hand up, and Imogen passed her the book.

  “Right,” said Big Nana, opening the book to the first page.

  “Once upon a moonlit night,

  Ten little mice got an awful fright—”

  “I can’t hear you properly!” Elsa shouted again. “Big Nana, you may leave the cage. Stefan! Point your gun at her! And if she tries anything funny, shoot your gun at her!” The butler, looking a little put out by all the rushing backward and forward, lowered the ladder back onto the cage, ran up to open the hatch at the top, and climbed back to the ground again. Big Nana, surprisingly nimble, made her way down and waited close to the water’s edge while the butler relocked the cage and pulled the ladder away before any of the other Crims could get any ideas. To be honest, they were all too scared to have ideas.

  “Stand here!” demanded Elsa, pointing to a spot directly in front of the story-time chair.

  Moving slowly, which is how you move when a mass murderer is pointing a gun at you, Big Nana took up her position. She opened the book again. “Ready?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Elsa, folding her hands in her lap.

  Big Nana started to read again.

  “They were walking through the woods one day,

  When one little mouse was taken away.

  He was adding up numbers, ‘One, two, three,’

  When a nasty owl swooped down from a tree—”

  “NO!” shrieked Elsa, waving her hands madly. “STOP! I want THE VOICES!”

  Big Nana sighed. “All right, Elsa, my terrible case of halitosis. I’ll start again.”

  So Big Nana started all over again, this time with THE VOICES.

  Imogen listened, rapt, to the story of the ten little mice who lived in the wood, who were just minding their own business, doing things that mice like to do—eating cheese, squeaking, reciting poetry about cats—when for no apparent reason, they started disappearing. The first mouse was captured by the nasty owl while it was doing math problems; the second was taken while it played in the forest amusement park (a glade full of particularly exciting twigs); the third was lured in by the owl’s impressive skateboarding tricks. . . . The whole thing was strangely familiar. And Big Nana’s performance was masterful. Each mouse had a different, distinctive voice—one had an Irish accent, another an Australian one, a third sounded French—and the owl sounded uncannily like Elsa Kruk herself. Not that Elsa seemed to notice. It was so brilliant that Imogen could understand why Elsa was so angry that Big Nana never finished reading the story. Although nothing could excuse the piranha tank.

  Big Nana continued reading:

  “The mouse looked up from its cheese, but then

  The mouse became victim number ten.”

  Elsa was on the edge of her seat, her eyes shining with delight (and a little bit of craziness, but mostly delight)—she looked happy. This is working, thought Imogen. We might just get out of this alive. . . .

  Big Nana turned the page to read the very end of the story.

  Everyone held their breaths.

  But just as she was about to start reading, Ava stomped over to her and grabbed the book out of her hands.
/>   CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AVA WALKED OVER to the piranha pool and dangled the book over the water. The fish writhed and snapped their tiny jaws.

  What was Ava doing?

  Imogen groaned. This was their one chance of getting out with all their limbs intact. Big Nana had to finish reading the story. Imogen had thought Ava was on her side. Had she been wrong?

  Elsa fell to her knees. “Don’t do it!” she cried. “Please! Don’t be cruel to your poor, defenseless mother!”

  “Poor? Defenseless? HA!” laughed Ava. “You have a hand grenade in your pocket right now! And it’s made of solid diamond!”

  “I have standards,” Elsa muttered sulkily.

  Ava flicked through the book. “This book is terrible!” she said.

  “Please!” Elsa said again. “Don’t rip the pages!”

  Ava shook her head and held the book above the piranha-infested pool again. “This is what’s so important to you? Important enough for you to uproot your daughter from a wonderful private school in London and drag her to THE MOST BORING TOWN ON EARTH?!”

  “Actually,” said Freddie, from the back of the cage, “it’s not the most boring town on Earth. That particular honor belongs to a town in Iceland where everyone is called Jon and most people die in their thirties of acute interest deficiency.”

  Ava ignored him. She was focused on her mother, who was cowering at her feet, which means pretending to be a cow out of sheer desperation. “Moo!” said Elsa. “Please! Have mercy!”

  “I told you moving here was a stupid idea,” said Ava, who did not have mercy. “I told you the piranha tank was ridiculous. But you said that everything you were doing was necessary—that our family was in danger. And now it turns out you just wanted to find out the end of a picture book that involves TALKING MICE and is illustrated in COLORED PENCIL??”

  Uncle Clyde and Henry and the twins all cheered.

  “I’m tired of doing whatever you tell me to do, Mum!” cried Ava. “Don’t I deserve to be happy too? I wanted to go to the anime convention in Japan with Uncle Dedrik, BUT NOOOOO! Now I’ll never get to meet a grown woman dressed up as a massive rabbit, or sit on a talking toilet.”

  “You could visit Jack Wooster,” said Uncle Clyde. “He has some talking toilets.”

  “I WANT THE TOILETS TO TALK IN JAPANESE!” screamed Ava.

  “It’s not too late!” said Elsa, weeping openly now. “I have loads of air miles! I can book you a flight to Tokyo! Business class, if they still have seats available!”

  But it was too late.

  Because Ava tossed the book into the pool.

  Imogen watched as it spun through the air, pages fanning out, as if in slow motion, and plunged into the water—where it was instantly eaten by the piranhas, that obviously hadn’t had a decent meal for days.

  “NOOOOOO! WHYYYYYYY?” screamed Elsa, prostrating herself on the ground and banging her fists into the solid unicorn-bone tiles.

  “Because you’re THE WORST LEADER EVER! Worse than Great-Great-Aunt Sibylle, and she sank the Titanic while she was trying to steal it!”

  “HOW DARE YOU COMPARE ME TO SIBYLLE?” screamed Elsa. “We do not talk about her! Your great-great-grandmother TOLD her not to disguise herself as an iceberg!”

  “Whatever, Mum,” said Ava. “I’m not scared of you. You’re pathetic.”

  “Yeah!” shouted Henry. “Down with the system! Down with parents!”

  “Good for you, Ava!” called Uncle Clyde.

  “Clyde, you fool,” said Josephine, weeping. “This is not good for us. We’re about to be killed!”

  “Good point,” said Aunt Bets, whipping out a sharpened colostomy bag, which did indeed have a good point on it. She held it up to Imogen. “Kill that Ava girl for me, will you, before she gets us murdered? If you lean out really far, you might be able to reach.”

  Elsa, by this point, was rolling around on the floor, sobbing. “Now I’ll never know the end of the story!” she wailed.

  “ALL THE MICE DIE!” yelled all of the Crims at once.

  “Actually,” said Big Nana, “interesting fact: That ending was the misprint. The owl wasn’t supposed to eat the mice—he was supposed to rock them gently to sleep. The copy editor obviously had a macabre sense of humor!”

  Elsa stood up, shaking with rage, her hands in fists, and her face a purple ball of fury. “I HATE SPOILERS!” shouted Elsa. “EVEN MORE THAN I HATE CRIMS! AND YOU ARE CRIMS! AND YOU JUST SPOILED TWO ENDINGS OF MY FAVORITE BOOK! YOU WILL WATCH YOUR FAMILY DIE! AND THEN YOU WILL DIE!”

  And, before anyone could stop her, she reached over and pulled the lever.

  “NO!” screamed Big Nana, rushing over to Elsa and wrestling her for control of the lever.

  “YES!” yelled Elsa, pushing Big Nana so that she staggered backward, almost slipping into the piranha pool.

  Stefan Kruk marched up to her and put his gun into her back. “You are lucky I was reloading just then,” he said. “Next time you try anything like that, you die.”

  There was a whirring and a clicking, and the cage began to shake. Elsa had obviously blown her budget on the unicorn-bone floor and the solid-gold entrance hall and gone for the budget cage option, Imogen reflected, as the rickety structure began rattling and slowly dropping toward the pool.

  “OOH, LOVELY. I HAVEN’T HAD A BATH FOR DAYS,” chuckled Knuckles.

  “Stop it!” Ava ran over to the lever and tried to wrestle control from her mother so she could push it back up. “You can’t do this to people!”

  Imogen looked over at Stefan, who seemed to be having an internal crisis about whether to threaten Ava with his gun or keep it on Big Nana.

  Elsa was too strong for Ava, too. Imogen had read in Art, Murder, Money, and Mythical Creatures: At Home with the Kruks that Elsa practiced weightlifting with particularly heavy blackbirds. It was evidently paying off.

  Imogen stared at the cage, willing it back up with her eyes. Which didn’t work, because she wasn’t magical. It’s really happening, she realized. Big Nana was preparing me for this exact scenario in my first crime homework essay. Well, plus some claustrophobia and minus the acid.

  And yet she just sat there, too rattled to do anything (literally—the cage was making quite a racket as it descended toward the water).

  Come on, she told herself. What was the plan I came up with in that essay? Big Nana gave me 90 percent, so it must have been a good one. I just need to remember the steps. . . .

  Imogen tried to clear her mind. But all she could think of was the piranhas and how hungry they were. . . .

  Concentrate, she thought. But she was finding it hard, because the Crims had started pushing and shoving one another in an attempt to get away from the bottom of the cage.

  “Oi, Aunt Josephine!” Henry shouted as Josephine climbed over him. “You just trod on my head!”

  “Have some respect for your elders! Especially when about to die!” shrieked Aunt Bets, planting a punch on Henry’s nose.

  Think, Imogen. Imogen closed her eyes—and at last her plan began to come back to her.

  First, distract the master criminal.

  Well, she thought as Elsa laughed at the fighting Crims, that seems to be taken care of.

  Then work out a cunning plan to free your family.

  A plan. A cunning one . . . What did Big Nana always say about plans? Start with what’s right under your nose.

  The thing that was right under Imogen’s nose at that moment was her father’s head, which was cowering from Aunt Bets’s sharpened colostomy bag, which she was jabbing blindly in every direction. But right in front of her were the bars of the cage. And now that she looked at them, the spaces between the bars were fairly wide. If she could just find a way to cut through one or two of them, they’d be able to climb out. . . .

  She patted her pockets, on the off chance that she was carrying something useful like a crowbar or a stick of dynamite—but there was nothing apart from Barney’s ridiculous dog bone.

>   That’s it! she thought. She reached into her pocket and held the bone out to Barney, who was still standing by the door, panting electronically. “Here, boy!” she called, holding out the bone, feeling a bit ridiculous, because she was, after all, talking to a robot. “Come and get it!” And she threw it onto the floor of the cage.

  True to form, Barney ran up to the edge of the tiles and leaped across the water to reach the cage—and then, in his determination to get to the bone, he started to gnaw through the bars with his robot teeth.

  Yes! It worked! Imogen gave a quick victorious fist pump.

  Now they just had to get to dry land. . . .

  Big Nana came to the rescue. While the Kruks were screaming and shouting—mostly rude things about Barney in German—she raised the lever to stop the cage from descending, then ran over to the ladder and lowered it toward the hole in the cage.

  Imogen climbed out of the hole Barney had gnawed in the bars and made her away across the ladder as quickly as she could, followed by the twins, followed by Delia, and Freddie, and her aunts and uncles, her mother, and lastly, her father.

  “Get back in there!” screamed Elsa, suddenly looking up from her bickering family to realize what was going on.

  But the Crims were sick of doing what she told them to.

  Imogen glanced over to Stefan, who had raised his gun toward the Crims—and then she saw Ava give him a very slight shake of the head, and he lowered it again. She really was powerful. And she was on their side. Sort of.

  Big Nana beamed at Imogen. “You did it!” she said, giving her a slightly sweaty hug. “Thank you!”

  “Thank you,” said Imogen. “The ladder’s what saved us, really. And I just did what I learned in my crime homework—”

  But their mutual appreciation–fest was cut short. The Kruks had started to fight again, rather violently, among themselves.

  “See?” Ava shouted at Elsa. “I told you this was a stupid idea!”

  “How dare you talk to me like that, you glossy-haired pony, except less useful than a pony, because at least ponies take you on scenic countryside rides and DON’T ANSWER BACK!”