Excerpt from The Wright 3
Spring semester at the Lab School in Hyde Park finds Petra and Calder drawn into another mystery when unexplainable accidents and ghostly happenings throw a spotlight on Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, and it's up to the two junior sleuths to piece together the clues. Stir in the return of Calder's friend Tommy (which creates a tense triangle), H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man, 3-D pentominoes, and the hunt for a coded message left behind by Wright, and the kids become tangled in a dangerous web in which life and art intermingle with death, deception, and surprise.
Can you unravel the web in The Wright 3 by Blue Balliet? Get started with the first chapter of the book.
Chapter One: Invisible
On the morning of June 3, the mason climbed carefully to the highest level of the roof. He was alone and looked around happily: spring in Chicago, a day with no wind, and a world that was all new leaves. Smells of black earth and lilac mingled with children's voices from the school down the street, and he felt suddenly lucky.
I'm young and alive and almost invisible up here in the trees, he found himself thinking, and then shook his head at such a strange idea. Turning his attention back to the famous terra-cotta roof, he ran his hand along the chimney. A chunk of brick broke loose, rattling downward and landing with a distant ping on the terrace below.
At that moment he lost his footing. Startled, he flung his arms out for balance. Had he been standing on a loose tile? Was this an earthquake? He listened for car alarms, but the street below him was quiet. There was a second, longer shudder, and he thought he saw the roof itself rippling toward him in quick, irregular lines. The building seemed to have come alive, twitching in the irritable way an animal does when it wants to get rid of a fly. The mason staggered to the left. Muttering "what the —," he stumbled back to the right and sank to his knees.
His fall was sudden, a whirl of blue and branches and panic. He knew he would hit concrete. Copper gutters flashed by, and he landed heavily on the balcony outside the dining room. From where he lay, triangles in the art-glass panels above his head flashed like sharp teeth. He struggled to breathe but felt as if a huge weight had landed on his chest; he was suffocating.
Invisible, his frightened mind whispered, you're invisible now. The house was empty, and he knew he was hidden from the street — he wondered if he would die before he was found. In the seconds before his vision melted into blackness, he thought he heard a high voice, the shrill command of a child, but he couldn't quite make out the words. Was it "Stay away!" or "Stay and play!"?
