Four Letter Word, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Gretchen McNeil
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.
First Edition, March 2024
Designed by Marci Senders
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McNeil, Gretchen, author.
Title: Four letter word / Gretchen McNeil.
Description: First edition. • Los Angeles ; New York : Hyperion, 2024. • Audience: Ages 14–18. • Audience: Grades 10–12. • Summary: Izzy and her family welcome foreign exchange student Alberto into their home, but after a series of mishaps and coincidences, and with a serial killer on the loose, Izzy begins to suspect Alberto is not who he seems.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023010967 • ISBN 9781368097437 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Serial murderer—Juvenile fiction. • Student exchange program—Juvenile fiction. • High school student—Juvenile fiction. • Mothers and daughter—Juvenile fiction. • Identity (Psychology)—Juvenile fiction. • Eureka (Calif.)—Juvenile fiction. • Detective and mystery stories. • CYAC: Mystery and detective stories. • Serial murderer—Fiction. • Student exchange program—Fiction. • Mothers and daughter—Fiction. • Identity—Fiction. • Eureka (Calif.)—Fiction. • LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. • Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.M4787952 Fo 2024 • DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23/eng/20230703
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010967
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-368-09743-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-368-10748-8
Visit www.HyperionTeens.com
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedicaton
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Ninteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Gretchen McNeil
To Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock for the inspiration
“It is fate. But call it Italy if it pleases you, Vicar.”
—George Emerson, A Room with a View
IZZY BALANCED HER LAPTOP ON CROSSED LEGS AS SHE LISTENED intently through her earbuds.
“Il libro di italiano è sul tavolo.”
Something about a table and a book, right? Maybe? You can do this.
“Eel leebro dee ee-ta-lee-a-no eh sool tavolo,” she repeated out loud, cringing at her atrocious pronunciation in comparison to the lilting female voice on the language app. “The Italian book is on the table.”
“The Italian book is on the table,” the instructor said.
Izzy exhaled in relief at getting the answer right. One down, ninety-nine to go.
“Mi presti la penna per favore.”
“Mee prestee lah penna pear favoreh?” She recognized the phrase for “please,” and “penna” might have been pen. Or pencil? Something else altogether?
Her fear of making the wrong choice overwhelmed her executive functioning while the Italian lesson barreled on without her.
“Lend me the pen, please.” The recorded instructor paused as if in judgment. “È una bella giornata per una passeggiata sulla spiaggia.”
Izzy’s shoulders sagged. She wasn’t even going to attempt that one. The vowels and consonants all bled together, making it difficult to know where one word ended and the next began. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make her mouth create those sounds, and parsing out the meaning? For-freaking-get it.
Her thumb hovered over the podcast app on her phone. A new episode of Murder Will Speak, her favorite true crime docuseries, had dropped that morning and she’d been itching to hear updates on the Casanova Killer, California’s newest and grossest serial killer. Maybe she’d just leave the Italian for later….
As if sensing her drifting attention, the instructor’s voice resumed her questions and answers.
“It’s a nice day for a walk on the beach.” Wow. That’s what it meant? “Il treno per Milano parte alle sette e mezzo.”
Before Izzy could officially bail on her failing Italian lesson, a nasally voice pierced the silence of her attic bedroom.
“Mangia, mangia!” Her brother Riley’s perfectly coiffed brown pompadour bobbed up the staircase, coming into view a full two seconds before the rest of his head. “Pappardelle in la luna. Mamma mia, ciao!”
Izzy paused the language app as Riley ascended the stairs just high enough to rest his elbows on either side of the opening in her floor. His honeyed smile and narrow amber eyes lent a smarmy quality to what was otherwise a handsome pale face, and his teasing struck even harder than usual because, though the words were nonsense, his accent was significantly better than Izzy’s.
“Your comedy would have slayed in 1933,” she said with a tight smile.
Riley ignored the barb. “Gonna be ready to converse with this exchange student in his native tongue when he arrives?”
“Fluently,” she lied.
“You can talk dirty to each other across the dinner table.” Riley pumped his eyebrows. “Mom and Dad’ll be clueless.”
“First of all, ew.” At nineteen, sex was basically all Riley thought about. She vaguely remembered her two other older brothers being this sex-focused, but Riley’s approach was particularly gross because, as an extrovert, he shared every porny thought that popped into his brain. “Second of all, Mom speaks Italian, dipshit.” Much better than I do.
“Wouldn’t stop me.”
“Once again, with feeling, ew!”
Riley rolled his head to the side and stared up at the ceiling as if in deep contemplation. “Can’t believe Mom is letting some hot Italian sausage in the house with her precious little girl, and she freaks out because I’m seeing Kylie again.”
“He’s coming here to study English for a semester, not date an American high school student.”
“Says you.” Riley smirked. “Besides, you can’t tell me you haven’t fantasized about some sexy Italian dude sweeping you off your feet. Like in that boring Brit movie Mom loves.”
Izzy jutted out her chin, feeling oddly protective of her mom’s favorite movie. “A Room with a View is not boring.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it’s also fiction, so no, I’m not expecting Alberto to show up here and suddenly make Eureka not suck balls.”
“Alberto? His name’s Alberto?” Riley laughed, sharp and barking. A harbor seal begging for fish. “Oh, Alberto, you’re so hot!” he cooed in falsetto.
She hated the smug look on his face. Especially because he was right. The moment Alberto Bianchi had been assigned to the Bell household as a foreign exchange student for his first semester of college, Izzy had looked him up. He didn’t have much of a social media presence so there weren’t many photos to go by, mostly group shots from before he graduated from secondary school, but he wasn’t bad looking. Plus he wore his sandy blond hair a bit long and floppy on top, which reminded Izzy of Julian Sands in A Room with a View.
And that was hot.
A Room with a View was her mom’s comfort movie, the one Izzy would put on whenever she sensed her mom was feeling depressed, or slipping into one of her “blue moods,” as she called them. Alone with her mom while her brothers were off at college and her dad was working late night after night, Izzy had watched that movie so many times, she knew every line by heart. At first, she’d pretended to care about the plot because it made her mom happy, but over time, George and Lucy’s romance had grown on her.
Their connection was fate, their love enduring. Izzy had nothing in her life but her family and her best friend, Peyton, so yeah, of course she’d imagined Alberto striding toward her through the golden haze of a Tuscan field at sunset, enveloping her in his arms while some operatic soprano belted out “Chi il bel sogno” in the background. How could she not?
But she wasn’t going to let anyone know that. Especially not Riley.
“What do you want?” she asked, her words clipped in irritation.
“Mom says you have dibs on the car this afternoon.”
“So?”
“So I need it.”
“Why?”
Riley ran a hand gingerly over his hair. “Hot date with Kylie.”
“On a Tuesday afternoon.”
“Five days before I leave, so I gotta squeeze it in when I can.” He pur sed his lips. “Literally and figuratively.”
How the youngest—and douchiest—of her three older brothers had become the heartthrob of Eureka, California, during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at San Diego State was a bigger unsolved mystery than the existence of Bigfoot. And his on-again, off-again relationship with Kylie Fernández, a bartender down at the marina, was an even bigger mystery. Kylie had been the cool, tattooed girl in her brother Parker’s class, the one who oozed confidence and didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought of her. Half the school had wanted to date her, the other half wanted to be her, and somehow, she’d gotten involved with Riley, who was three years younger and three million times less interesting. Baffling.
“I thought you broke up.”
“We did.” Riley shrugged. “But then I saw her reading an article about the serial killer in Los Angeles who has sex with his victims after he kills them. I told her I was focusing my thesis on the psychology of sexual deviancy and boom, back in.”
Riley only knew about the LA serial killer, dubbed the Casanova Killer, because of Izzy, and the idea that he was using her true crime podcast obsession to con a woman into having sex was almost as disturbing as the serial killer himself. “Aren’t theses for doctoral candidates?”
Riley waved her off. “Kylie doesn’t know that.”
“Yeah, you’re disgusting.”
“So how much for your car privileges?”
Izzy picked up her phone with a sigh of resignation and texted Peyton.
Riley needs the car. Can you drive?
The silence in the attic was stifling as she waited for a response. Riley drummed his fingers against the floorboards, slowly articulating each knuckle, eyebrows arched in annoyance as the seconds ticked by on the massive old grandfather clock beside the stairs. She should have just told him to fuck off, but she didn’t. She never did. Probably never would.
Anxiety was the great silencer.
Not that anyone in her family noticed Izzy’s reticence to speak up for herself. As the youngest child and only girl in the family, Izzy had spent her entire life overshadowed by the Bell Boys, as they were collectively known. Taylor, former high school baseball star and now an urban search-and-rescue specialist with Humboldt Bay Fire. Parker, the valedictorian who was heading back to Pasadena to start his PhD in aeronautics after graduating summa cum laude from CalTech. Riley, aspiring politician, who charmed everyone and everything in his path. Izzy was pretty sure most people in town didn’t even realize that Harry and Elizabeth Bell had a daughter.
Her phone vibrated as Peyton’s response popped up on her screen, all caps like whenever she was excited or agitated.
BE THERE IN 10 BUT TELL RI HE’S GROSS
“Twenty bucks,” Izzy said, tossing the phone onto her bedspread.
“Deal.” He pulled a crisp new bill from his wallet and tucked it into a seam between floorboards. “I’d have gone as high as sixty. Don’t be afraid to aim up, little sis.”
Fear. Her weak spot.
With a self-congratulating laugh, Riley turned and descended the stairs. The door at the bottom slammed shut, sending a gust of air up into the attic. The twenty-dollar bill shuddered like a palm tree in a hurricane, then flew out of its crevice and fluttered across the room, landing prosaically in Izzy’s trash bin.
“That’s about right.”
She contemplated returning to her Italian, but sadomasochism wasn’t one of her interests. She swung her legs over the side of her bed and strode across the room to scoop Riley’s twenty out of the garbage. The aged floorboards creaked in symphonic harmony with each step, and she realized with a cringe that Alberto, who would be sleeping in Riley’s room for the next three months, would be directly below her. If he heard her moving around at night, would he assume that she was going to the bathroom? Which would probably be true. Or think she was an insomniac? Which could also probably be true. Or some crazy old cat lady tucked away in the attic who puttered around aimlessly at all hours of the night and day due to a free-floating lifelong anxiety she couldn’t quite shake? Which was not true yet but probably would be someday if she didn’t get the hell out of Eureka.
She shoved the twenty into her messenger bag, then paused in front of her windows, three narrow dormers behind her bed that faced the harbor. The skies were gray, though it was August, technically the warmest month for the extreme northern end of California. But “warm” on the coast meant seventy degrees, and only if the sun was strong enough to burn off the ever-present layer of moist, heavy fog that blanketed them 365 mornings per year.
Blessedly, the fog had crept back out beyond Woodley Island, but the weather was anything but glorious. A thin marine layer blurred the sun and cast the whole area in a purplish-gray light, muting the colors of summer and hinting that Izzy would have to wear a jacket to the airport tonight when they picked up Alberto. She knew that Florence, Italy, was significantly hotter and sunnier than Eureka, and she hoped the relative lack of cheerful summer weather wouldn’t send Alberto running home early.
You’re being ridiculous. It didn’t really matter if Alberto stayed the full semester or not. He wasn’t the romantic lead in the rom-com of Izzy’s life. He was a stranger whose main purpose in her house was to help with her Italian so she could pass the second-year equivalency exam her first semester at college and immediately petition to study abroad. Basically her entire life plan.
Is that really what you want?
Izzy pushed the question aside. It didn’t matter what she wanted. The plan was to attend Middlebury College, like her parents had done; study art history in Florence, like her mom had planned to do her senior year of college; get an internship at the Uffizi, like her mom had always hoped for herself; and then maybe fall in love with a hot Italian guy and live in a villa in the country and literally never come home.
Izzy’s future, all mapped out by her mom, looked a lot like how Elizabeth Bell had always envisioned her own life. A vision that was interrupted when she got pregnant with Taylor.
Despite her dreams, Izzy’s mom had never been to Italy. She never studied art history in Florence, nor did she ever view Caravaggio’s Medusa in person at the Uffizi. And she certainly didn’t live in an Italian villa. It didn’t matter that this plan, this whole insane road map for the rest of Izzy’s life, wasn’t actually her dream at all. It mattered that planning for Izzy’s future made Elizabeth Bell happy again.
For that, Izzy would have endured anything. Even the sound of her own voice butchering the Italian language.
Besides, Italy offered her an option, an escape. There was literally nothing to tie her to this town.
She thought there had been something…someone. She’d made an unexpected connection earlier that year, a deep friendship that bordered on more, with a person who made life in Eureka seem not so horrible. But just a few weeks ago, he’d completely ghosted her, and once again, Izzy was left with nothing.
Her eyes trailed back to the window where she could see fishing boats beginning to return to the harbor, the same in-and-out flow she’d witnessed every day of her life from her attic room. If Italy was the solution to this, so be it.
“IZZY?”
Her mom’s voice drifted up two floors through the old vents in their 1907 home. It had been a fun feature when Izzy was little. Curled up on the floor in front of the wrought iron register like it was an analog radio circa World War II, she’d opened the damper all the way and eavesdrop on the goings-on of her brothers and parents from the anonymity of her attic bedroom. She’d listened to her parents huddled around the kitchen island discussing how to pay for Taylor’s shoulder surgery, heard the strain in Parker’s voice when he came out to his brothers, witnessed her mom crying alone in her bedroom when no one else was home. Every sound in the house drifted up to Izzy’s attic.
Then her dad had figured it out one day while repaning a window in her room. Now the family used the ventilation system as a low-tech intercom to summon Izzy when needed, and the vents had lost their charm.
“Izzy, can you come down?”
She sighed, looping her cross-body bag over one arm. Izzy wasn’t sure she could fake enthusiasm as her mom went over the day’s checklist one more time. She’d been single-mindedly planning for Alberto’s arrival since they’d gotten the email assigning him to their home, mapping out every mundane detail from how many face towels he might need to which of her nine thousand casserole recipes might make the best welcome dinner. Izzy was pretty sure her mom hadn’t spent this much time preparing for anything since Taylor’s birth.
