We got off the train in Genoa and walked across to the local that would take us to Santa Margherita. I looked at Rachael to see if she knew we were supposed to help save our family, but she didn’t seem to understand the look.

I looked at Dad and he was still fuming and had glass in his hair, and I looked at Mom and she had her sweetest expression on her face to show how she was not the family lunatic. We all knew who was. I got to thinking about how this was going to be an interesting vacation even though I’d have to walk to Paraggi every day.

Chapter 19

THE HOTEL NAZIONALE IN PORTOFINO sits in the middle of the town facing across the main square to the yacht harbor. The view from the window of Room Thirty-six is spectacular. Mom had booked this front room specially for herself and Dad. The view from the window was romantic. When I looked out I thought to myself that this ought to do the job since standing there you felt like a king or a millionaire or something what with the yachts and all right there in front of you.

Mom told me to run along to my room and wait. She’d come help me unpack in a minute, she said. Since I wasn’t having a second honeymoon, my room, Number Thirty-seven, was across the narrow hall. My window was up near the ceiling, and when I stood on the bed to see out, I found I was looking into a gray air shaft that only a little daylight came down from high up someplace. People’s toilet windows were vented into it. The first and last thing I heard every day were sounds of toilets flushing and the creak of the wooden toilet paper holders as people in the hotel used them. I could hear voices too. One night I heard a woman scream and then slapping sounds followed by a man shouting. Mom and Dad were not the only people in our hotel who needed a special view or a second honeymoon, by the sounds of it.

Mom came into my room and looked around and said, “Bet you’re glad to get your own room for once.”

I said, “Yes.”

But really I kind of missed Rachael because she’d read to me sometimes at night when we shared the room in the Pensione Biea.

“You’re older now,” said Mom. “Do you have any questions you’d like to ask?”

I knew what she meant, and it made me a little nervous. Mom had started doing something in the last year or so that I knew was really strange.

I had asked Andy Keegan if his mom did it, and he said, “Are you kidding? No one’s mom ever talks about stuff like that! Your mom’s really weird.”