The Maze of Bones (The 39 Clues #1)(2)

Dan hoped her outfit was as uncomfortable as his stupid suit and tie. Aunt Beatrice had thrown a fit when he tried to go to the funeral in his ninja clothes. It wasn't as if Grace would care if he was comfortable and deadly, the way he felt when he pretended to be a ninja, but of course Aunt Beatrice didn't understand. Sometimes it was hard for him to believe she and Grace were sisters.

"Remind me to fire your au pair as soon as we return to Boston," Beatrice grumbled.

"You two have been entirely too spoiled."

"Nellie's nice!" Dan protested.

"Hmph! This Nellie almost let you burn down the neighbor's apartment building!"

"Exactly!"

Every couple of weeks, Beatrice fired their au pair and hired a new one. The only good thing was that Aunt Beatrice didn't live with them personally. She lived across town in a building that didn't allow kids, so sometimes it took her a few days to hear about Dan's latest exploits.

Nellie had lasted longer than most. Dan liked her because she made amazing waffles and she usually cranked her iPod up to brain-damage level. She didn't even hear when Dan's bottle rocket collection went off and strafed the building across the alley. Dan would miss Nellie when she got fired.

Aunt Beatrice kept driving and muttering about spoiled children. Amy secretly went back to her huge book. The last two days, since they got the news about Grace's death, Amy had been reading even more than usual. Dan knew it was her way of hiding, but he kind of resented it because it shut him out, too.

"What are you reading this time?" he asked.

"Medieval European Doorknobs?

Bath Towels Through the Ages?"

Amy gave him an ugly face -- or an uglier-than-usual face. "None of your business, dweeb."

"You can't call a ninja lord dweeb.

You have disgraced the family. You must commit seppuku."

Amy rolled her eyes.

After a few more miles, the city melted into farmland. It started to look like Grace country, and even though Dan had promised himself he wouldn't get sappy, he began to feel sad. Grace had been the coolest ever. She'd treated him and Amy like real people, not kids. That's why she'd insisted they simply call her Grace, not Grandmother or Gran or Nana or any silly name like that. She'd been one of the only people who'd ever cared about them. Now she was dead, and they had to go to the funeral and see a bunch of relatives who had never been nice to them....

The family cemetery sat at the bottom of the hill from the mansion. Dan thought it was kind of stupid they'd hired a hearse to carry Grace a hundred yards down the driveway. They could've put wheels on the coffin like they have on suitcases and that would've worked just as well.

Summer storm clouds rumbled overhead. The family mansion looked dark and gloomy on its hill, like a lord's castle. Dan loved the place, with its billion rooms and chimneys and stained glass windows.

He loved the family graveyard even more. A dozen crumbling tombstones spread out across a green meadow ringed in trees, right next to a little creek. Some of the stones were so old the writing had faded away. Grace used to take Amy and him down to the meadow on their weekend visits. Grace and Amy would spend the afternoon on a picnic blanket, reading and talking, while Dan explored the graves and the woods and the creek.

Stop that, Dan told himself.

You're getting sentimental.

"So many people," Amy murmured, as they walked down the driveway.

"You're not going to freak out, are you?"

Amy fiddled with the collar of her dress. "I'm -- I'm not freaking out. I just -- "

"You hate crowds," he finished. "But you knew there'd be a crowd. They come every year."

Each winter, as long as Dan could remember, Grace had invited relatives from all over the world for a weeklong holiday. The mansion filled up with Chinese Cahills and British Cahills and South African Cahills and Venezuelan Cahills. Most of them didn't even go by the name Cahill, but Grace assured him they were all related. She'd explain about cousins and second cousins and cousins three times removed until Dan's brain started to hurt. Amy would usually go hide in the library with the cat.

"I know," she said. "But ... I mean, look at them all."

She had a point. About four hundred people were gathering at the grave site.

"They just want her fortune," Dan decided. "Dan!"

"Well? It's true."

They had just joined the procession when Dan suddenly got flipped upside down.

"Hey!" he yelled.

"Look, guys," a girl said. "We caught a rat!"

Dan wasn't in a good position to see, but he could make out the Holt sisters -- Madison and Reagan -- standing on either side of him, holding him by his ankles. The twins had matching purple running suits, blond pigtails, and crooked smiles. They were only eleven, same as Dan, but they had no trouble holding him. Dan saw more purple running suits behind them -- the rest of the Holt family. Their pit bull, 14

Arnold, raced around their legs and barked.

"Let's fling him into the creek," Madison said.

"I wanna fling him into the bushes!" Reagan said. "We never do my ideas!"

Their older brother, Hamilton, laughed like an idiot. Next to him, their dad, Eisenhower Holt, and their mom, Mary-Todd, grinned like this was all good fun.