Deprivation House by Franklin W. Dixon Page B

genius,” I corrected myself.
    â€œLet’s test the theory,” Frank suggested. He tooka small plastic bottle out of his jacket pocket and shook a short, narrow test strip into his palm. He touched the strip to one of the tubes of toothpaste, and we watched as it turned a murky green with a lavender center.
    I pulled out my cell, took a picture of the strip, and zapped it off to Vijay with a text that said, GOT PEANUT OIL?
    Vijay’s fast. He interpreted the colors of the strip in less than a minute. CONFIRMATIVE, he texted back.
    I looked at Frank. “So it’s confirmative we had an attempted murder tonight.”

Way Too Many Suspects
    I stared up at the ceiling. It felt like I was looking at the sky. The scale of the rooms in the villa was massive.
    It wasn’t the sound of Hal’s snores that was keeping me awake. Or even the occasional stink bomb Bobby T emitted, now that he was back home from the hospital safe and sound.
    No. The problem was that my mind had gone all hamster on a wheel. Joe and I had confirmed that someone had put peanut oil in Bobby T’s toothpaste tonight. Everybody knew about Bobby T’s peanut allergy. He’d told all us contestants that eating anything with peanuts could kill him. And Veronica said all the crew and staff knew about the allergy too.
    That meant everyone in the house was a suspect. But who had a motive to want Bobby dead?
    All the contestants—except me and Joe—had reason to want him out of the way. Like Mikey said, so far Bobby was the front-runner. He’d won the first competition. And he’d been on the way to winning the one that had been . . . interrupted. That made him a threat.
    I ran through the contestants. Ripley. Kit. Mikey. Brynn. Mary. James. Olivia. Wilson. Rosemary. Hal. And Silent Girl.
    The one who leaped out at me was James. He was so crazy competitive. But any of the others could be as competitive as he was—and want to win as badly. James might just be the only one who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it.
    Kit’s name popped too. She had a big reason for wanting the money. It would change her life. A million bucks would change anyone’s life, but for a lot of people it would mean a lot of cool stuff. For Kit it meant being able to stay in L.A. and keep trying to be an actress—which seemed like the only thing she cared about.
    Joe said Wilson came on the show to get a girlfriend. Sending Bobby T into anaphylactic shock wouldn’t help with that. But could a girlfriend really be the real reason he was here? There had tobe easier ways. Not that I know from experience or anything.
    I really didn’t get how Ripley would be willing to kill for a million dollars. It seemed like she could buy anything she wanted to right now. She’d definitely shown up with more suitcases than anyone else.
    Hal was clearly deeply obsessed with his planet project. Once he got past the planning stages, it would take some serious money to produce the game he wanted to create around L-62. After spending so much time working on the project, the money to make it happen had to be really important to him.
    I realized I had no idea what Olivia, Mary, Mikey, Brynn, Rosemary, and Silent Girl wanted to do with the money. Which meant I didn’t understand what possible motive any of them might have for trying to kill Bobby T. Man, I didn’t even know Silent Girl’s name. Joe and I had—
    A hand wrapped around my ankle.
    I jerked upright—and saw Olivia standing over me. “Frank, I need to talk to you,” she whispered. “Meet me in the library.” She scurried out of the room.
    I got out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. I was already wearing a T-shirt. I left the bedroom as quietly as possible.
    What could Olivia want with me? I wondered as Iheaded to the library. I didn’t think I’d even had a real one-on-one conversation with her.
    â€œUh, hi,” I said as I