Amanda Lester, Detective Box Set

by Paula Berinstein

  In addition, Headmaster Thrillkill had engaged Mr. Onion to defend him and the school against the charge of child endangerment brought by some of the parents, specifically Celerie Wiffle, David’s mother, and Editta’s mother, Andalusia Sweetgum. Mr. Onion was known as an excellent barrister and was a pretty nice guy to boot. Perhaps he would help uncover the truth about Salty. And while Amanda was thinking about him . . . no. She would not refer him to Nick. She would not get mixed up with Nick’s problems.

  But even if Mr. Onion were to help her find out what really happened with Salty, that wouldn’t prevent the EMT from searching for Fern. Amanda was fresh out of ideas. Perhaps Simon had something in mind. She’d discuss the issue with him later.

  5

  A Mysterious Painting

  After spending hours at the Penrith Hospital, Darius emerged with a cast, crutches, and a bandaged nose. The crutches made it more difficult for him to get around the dig site, so he asked Amanda if she would help out. He’d run the handheld camera and she’d monitor the one on the tripod he’d use for longer shots. Amanda was just sure, though, that he would not be able to manage the handheld all the time and she was looking forward to his asking her to maneuver it.

  The next day she was just about to get into the whole page thing with Simon, Ivy, and Clive, when the local police announced that they had found a clue in the tunnels where Thrillkill and the rest had disappeared.

  Apparently various local constables had followed as many branches as they could for miles and miles and had seen signs that the wretches (they called themselves “the wretch society”) had been there. They had encountered numerous blockages, such as the cave-in Hugh had caused, and had determined that several were of recent vintage. This made them wonder whether the zombies—or perhaps Blixus—had purposely caused them so they couldn’t be followed. Even though the zombie sightings had ceased, however, the police were becoming more optimistic because they had just found some freshly scrawled artwork on the tunnel walls, together with a number of footprints, some of which unmistakably belonged to Thrillkill.

  When Salty heard about the artwork, he made his way to the spot and scoured the place. He also took numerous pictures and forwarded them to Amanda and Ivy. Apparently the teachers had already seen the drawings because the police had informed them immediately, but Amanda thought Salty’s pictures were better.

  The drawings were downright weird. Crudely done, they were fashioned from sharp lines, bold blotches, and nauseating colors, and made Amanda think of death. But she was no art expert and had no idea if you could take them at face value. She needed to consult someone who would be able to understand them: the sketching teacher, Professor Julia Browning.

  When Amanda and Ivy arrived at Professor Browning’s office, she was poring over the pictures. She started when she saw Ivy. Amanda was glad Ivy couldn’t see that and doubted that even with her ESP-like perception she would have picked up on it. The teacher quickly recovered and said, “Come in, girls.”

  “Hello, Professor Browning,” said Ivy. “I was wondering—well, we were wondering—have you any thoughts on the artwork the police found in the Penrith tunnels?

  “I’ve just been looking at the pictures, Miss Halpin,” said Professor Browning, “and I have to be honest with you. A detective cannot be otherwise, you understand.”

  “Of course,” said Ivy. “I don’t want you to protect me.”

  “Very well, then,” said the teacher. “These images are extremely disturbing. I will describe my observations for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Ivy.

  “These figures,” the teacher pointed to what looked like two people writhing in pain, “are contorted into poses that are most unnatural. I’m not sure anyone but a yogi could get their body to do that.”

  Amanda could see what Professor Browning meant. While the figures were barely recognizable as living beings, the lines that sort of made up their skeletons formed sharp angles and looked painful, if a line can look painful.

  “Whoever created this picture was either in a lot of pain themselves or wanted to depict suffering so as to make a point,” said Professor Browning. “If you look at Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ for example, you will see something that works the same way.” The teacher flipped to another image on her tablet. This was Pablo Picasso’s famous painting showing victims of a bombing in the village of Guernica, in northern Spain, in the 1930s. Picasso meant it as an anti-war message. Amanda winced.

  “Here is another one,” said Professor Browning, flipping to an orange and brown painting. “This is ‘Gorky’s Agony’ by Arshile Gorky, painted in 1947. The image depicts the artist’s anguish as he battled cancer and depression. See how the body parts are just stuck onto each other. And note the murky colors. This man was in a horrific state.”

  Amanda could feel her stomach go queasy. She reached into her bag as surreptitiously as possible and fingered a gingersnap. Would it be rude to eat it in front of the teacher? She wasn’t sure.

  “Now look at this tunnel sketch, Miss Lester,” said Professor Browning. “Do you see the similarities? I’m sorry you can’t see these, Miss Halpin,” she said to Ivy, “but suffice to say that the artist who made these drawings is very conversant with suffering. Whether the pictures are meant as self-expression or some kind of political or religious message I can’t say. Not yet, at any rate.”

  Wow. It hadn’t occurred to Amanda that the wretches might be some sort of religious group. Was it possible that Thrillkill and the others had been abducted by a cult? Maybe one that performed human sacrifice? The thought was horrifying but she didn’t dare voice it in front of Ivy. Of course they might be political. They did use the word “society” in their name. That sort of implied something political. But what could they want? They weren’t slaveholders, were they? The idea of Fern, Gordon, Despina, and the rest being enslaved was just too much. Amanda pulled out the gingersnap and took a bite. “Sorry, Professor,” she said. “I have to.”

  “Understood, Miss Lester,” said Professor Browning. “Here. Have some more.”

  The teacher opened a desk drawer and Amanda just about fell over. Inside were about ten boxes of gingersnaps.

  “You’re not the only one with a sensitive stomach,” she said.

  Suddenly Amanda couldn’t help it. She started laughing so hard that she ended up spitting bits of the cookie onto the teacher’s desk. This faux pas embarrassed her so much that she choked and Professor Browning had to give her the Heimlich maneuver. Could her gaffes get any worse? She already had the worst reputation at the school. Vomiting, tripping, consorting with criminals, and now this. Thank goodness they didn’t know about her collision with the peacock. It was a wonder they hadn’t expelled her.

  Professor Browning opened another drawer, took out a roll of paper towels, and handed it to her. Then she did something completely unexpected. She winked! Amanda felt so relieved that she smiled and even more crumbs fell out of her mouth.

  “I wish I could see you,” said Ivy, cracking up. “You must be quite a sight.” Amanda was so glad to see her friend laugh she easily would have broken her own legs if it made Ivy forget about Fern for just ten seconds. There was something she could do to help, though. She grabbed Ivy’s hand and brought it up to her mouth.

  “Eeeeew, gunk,” said Ivy.

  “You can’t take me anywhere,” said Amanda.

  Professor Browning laughed and then got serious again. “In summary,” she said, “I would say that whoever drew these pictures is possibly unstable, but considering that many artists are, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  Amanda thought about this. It almost went without saying that the zombies were cracked. You had to be to abduct people. So the fact that their art reflected their craziness wasn’t terribly significant. What was interesting, however, was that they’d drawn at all. At least one of them must have an artistic bent, even if he or she was a complete lunatic. How Amanda could use that information she had no idea, but at
least they had something now.

  Then she got an idea. Perhaps there were other clues in the pictures, such as who the wretches were or where they were going or what they believed. But Ivy was obviously thinking along the same lines because she asked first.

  “I honestly don’t know,” said Professor Browning, shaking her head. Wisps of hair were streaming out of her French roll and it looked like it might come loose. Amanda wondered how long the teacher’s hair really was. “You might ask Professor Kindseth, though. He knows more about the case than I do.”

  Professor Kindseth. Amanda had been hesitant to bug the forensic photography teacher about the remark he’d made a few days before. When a streaming video of Thrillkill and the zombies had come through on his phone, she’d said, “If I didn’t know better I’d say those people were zombies.” Then he’d got very quiet and said, “Yes. She is.”

  Amanda had got an odd feeling after that. She just knew that Professor Kindseth knew more about the zombies than he was letting on, so she’d asked him what he meant. He claimed he’d made a slip of the tongue, that he’d meant, “Yes, they look like zombies, but of course there’s no such thing. They’re obviously just hobos or something.” He had no idea why they looked the way they did, and that had been that.

  But she hadn’t been convinced. First of all, there were the love letters from Ken to Charlotte that Amphora had found in a closet. They couldn’t be sure that Ken was Ken Kindseth, but they didn’t know of any other Ken at Legatum.

  Second, his explanation wasn’t convincing. You wouldn’t get that thoughtful over a bunch of hobos and then use the word “she” to describe them unless there was some connection between zombies or hobos and some woman or girl he knew. Whether that had anything to do with the wretches, though, Amanda couldn’t know, and she didn’t like the idea of invading the man’s privacy by asking more questions. So she decided to let the whole thing slide for the moment. Except that one thing kept eating away at her: if Professor Kindseth knew who the zombies were, why wasn’t he saying anything? Did he want Thrillkill and the others to die?

  Boy, things were a mess. Everyone was missing: Thrillkill and friends, Hugh and Blixus Moriarty, Taffeta Tasmania, David’s roommates, and of course David and Editta. The only people they did know the whereabouts of were the Punitori. They had gone to set up their new school on the Isle of Skye.

  But it made sense to consult Professor Kindseth at this juncture, so Amanda made her way to his office. He wasn’t there, but he’d left a note saying he’d be in his classroom, so she went there and found him fooling around with some lenses.

  When he saw her the teacher did a double-take. Guilt? Perhaps, but she had approached rather quietly. He may simply not have seen her until she was practically standing next to him. Still, she made a mental note.

  “I heard,” said the teacher without preamble. How did he know what she’d come to discuss.

  “About the drawings?” she said.

  “Yes. Dashed weird.” He lifted a lens and looked right into it, then took a soft-looking cloth and started polishing it.

  “Professor Browning says they’re the work of a disturbed mind,” said Amanda. “Which lens is that?”

  “Medium telephoto.” He polished harder. Amanda wondered if it was possible to polish so hard that the lens changed shape. “I’m afraid I’d have to agree with her. Terrible colors.”

  “Professor,” said Amanda, “do you think there are any clues in those pictures? I mean to the whereabouts of the zombies or their intentions?”

  “You mean symbolism?” he said, blowing on the lens.

  “Maybe. Or something like we found in Wink Wiffle’s painting.”

  She was referring to a painting the murdered man had made that showed an actual scene from a nearby town. That had led them to the flat of Crocodile Pleth and helped them solve Wink’s murder. It had also led them to the King Arthur coin.

  Professor Kindseth was silent for a moment and continued to polish his lens. How much polishing did it take to clean a piece of glass anyway? Then he sighed and said, “Very well, then. Let’s give them a look.”

  He knew something, and he knew she knew he knew something. Still, it wasn’t a good idea to call him on it so Amanda kept quiet. She just could not imagine that Professor Kindseth, who was her favorite teacher at the school, would lie. He might be putting everyone in danger! Surely he knew that.

  The teacher called up the images on his tablet. They were so ugly. Amanda grabbed a piece of gingersnap and quietly stuck it in her mouth.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “It’s just the figures—no background other than the tunnel wall itself. Perhaps we can make something of the shapes, colors, and the emotions we can read. Or, hm, wait a minute. Let’s look for political and religious symbolism.”

  “Which politics and which religions?” said Amanda.

  “I suppose we could start with the ones we know the most about,” said the teacher, tracing shapes with his finger. He was still holding the cloth with the same hand and it dragged across the screen while he moved. “Any crosses? Stars? Hammer and sickle shapes? Swastikas?”

  Swastikas! Now that was a scary thought. There had better not be. Amanda looked closely. It was so hard to tell. Everything was so skewed that she couldn’t tell what the shapes signified, if anything. She didn’t see any of the things Professor Kindseth had mentioned.

  “None of those,” she said. “I see figures—sort of. Well, what might be body parts, but might just as easily be weapons or some kind of map. How does anyone tell what’s in this modern art stuff anyway?”

  “It takes training,” he said. “And experience. You have to look at lots and lots of it and read the various critics.”

  “Have you ever done that?” she said.

  “A little. Not as much as I should have.”

  “But if that’s what’s required, how come Professor Browning couldn’t figure these out?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” said Professor Kindseth.

  “Then I have an idea,” said Amanda, who’d suddenly hit on a plan. “We’ll crowdsource these pictures. Maybe someone will see something.”

  Professor Kindseth looked appalled, then caught himself and smiled. “Great idea! With two hundred students on the project we’ll have a much better chance.” He looked positively green. Amanda got the feeling he didn’t want them to figure anything out. The thought made her ill.

  She dug into her bag again and pulled out another gingersnap. “Cookie?” she said as she held it out to him.

  After she had sent a text to everyone in the school, Amanda met up with Ivy and Simon in the common room. Professor Sidebotham had already hired a new décor gremlin to replace Alexei Dropoff, and the room had been redecorated at last. Instead of Downton Abbey, it was almost the thematic opposite.

  The room looked like a spaceship, or, to be more precise, the bridge of a starship. This, of course, filled the kids with great glee, as so many of them were science fiction fans. But instead of being a gleaming, modern version of a starship, it resembled a submarine, with pipes and gray metal machines and dials and rusty surfaces and narrow aisles all over the place. It felt military. When you thought about it, the Enterprise from Star Trek looked more like a luxury yacht. There was no way a posh vehicle like that was a battleship.

  The coolest part of the room was, as always, however, the windows, which normally looked out on the beautiful rear portion of the campus. Somehow, though, the gremlins had turned the view into deep space, and you could see nebulae and distant galaxies and stars and planets, all in 3D, without using special glasses. Of course this meant that you couldn’t see the trees, but since the décor was due to be changed soon, the loss of the view wasn’t a huge sacrifice.

  Amanda sat down on a metal gizmo she thought was supposed to be a chair and said, “Simon, have you ever seen anything like these pictures before?”

  Simon, who was sitting in what was probably the captain’s chair, said, “There’s
something oddly familiar about them, but I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve been thinking about them all morning.”

  “Obviously I can’t see them,” said Ivy, “but maybe I can help if you describe them to me.”

  “Good idea!” said Amanda. “Let’s see, there’s a shape that looks like a chicken leg, and another that looks like Simon’s nose, and a bigger one that looks sort of like a test tube.”

  “It does not look like my nose,” said Simon.

  “Yeah, it kinda does,” said Amanda. “If I hold up my tablet and look at it and you at the same time . . . yeah, it definitely does.”

  “Does not,” said Simon. “There are no noses in there at all. You mean that shape?” He pointed to the one in question. Amanda nodded. “Hogwash. That’s a wishbone.”

  “Are you kidding me?” said Amanda. “It doesn’t look anything like a wishbone.”

  “It certainly does,” said Simon. “And that thing there,” he pointed to a blob, “looks like that slime mold that ate the pink sugar last winter.”

  Amanda peered at the picture. He was right about that. Why hadn’t she noticed the resemblance before?

  “You don’t think—”

  “Well, if they’re working for Moriarty, it absolutely could be.”

  “But did he ever know about the slime mold?” said Ivy, reaching down to pet Nigel. The dog looked up at her with his big brown eyes. He was the cutest animal on the planet. “He never came onto campus.”