Chasing Vermeer

by Blue Balliett

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chasing Vermeer Map Key

  About Pentominoes and About This Story

  About the Artwork: A Challenge to the Reader

  Chapter One: Three Deliveries

  Chapter Two: The Letter Is Dead

  Chapter Three: Lost in the Art

  Chapter Four: Picasso’s Lie

  Chapter Five: Worms, Snakes, and Periwinkles

  Chapter Six: The Geographer’s Box

  Chapter Seven: The Man on the Wall

  Chapter Eight: A Halloween Surprise

  Chapter Nine: The Blue Ones

  Chapter Ten: Inside the Puzzle

  Chapter Eleven: Nightmare

  Chapter Twelve: Tea at Four

  Chapter Thirteen: X the Experts

  Chapter Fourteen: Flashing Lights

  Chapter Fifteen: Murder and Hot Chocolate

  Chapter Sixteen: A Morning in the Dark

  Chapter Seventeen: What Happens Now?

  Chapter Eighteen: A Bad Fall

  Chapter Nineteen: The Shock on the Stairs

  Chapter Twenty: A Maniac

  Chapter Twenty-one: Looking and Seeing

  Chapter Twenty-two: Twelves

  Chapter Twenty-three: Help!

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Pieces

  Preview

  After Words

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  One can’t learn much and

  also be comfortable.

  One can’t learn much and

  let anybody else be comfortable.

  — CHARLES FORT, WILD TALENTS

  A set of pentominoes is a mathematical tool consisting of twelve pieces. Each piece is made up of five squares that share at least one side. Pentominoes are used by mathematicians around the world to explore ideas about geometry and numbers. The set looks like this:

  Pentominoes are named after letters in the alphabet, although they don’t all look exactly like their names. With a little practice, they can be used as puzzle pieces and put together into thousands of different rectangles of many sizes and shapes.

  This book begins, like a set of pentominoes, with separate pieces. Eventually they will all come together. Don’t be fooled by ideas that seem, at first, to fit easily. Don’t be fooled by ideas that don’t seem to fit at all. Pentominoes, like people, can surprise you.

  If you look carefully at Brett Helquist’s chapter illustrations, you will find a hidden message. It is related to the pentomino code in the book, but not presented in exactly the same form. A certain living creature plays a part in deciphering this code, and pieces of the message appear in the artwork at regular intervals that create a pattern within the book.

  Here is a hint: This pattern is even but odd. It has as many pieces as a set of pentominoes.

  To check your answers go to:

  www.scholastic.com/chasingvermeer

  On a warm October night in Chicago, three deliveries were made in the same neighborhood. A plump tangerine moon had just risen over Lake Michigan. The doorbell had been rung at each place, and an envelope left propped outside.

  Each front door was opened on to an empty street. Each of the three people who lived in those homes lived alone, and each had a hard time falling asleep that night.

  The same letter went out to all three:

  Dear Friend:

  I would like your help in identifying a crime that is now centuries old. This crime has wronged one of the world’s greatest painters. As those in positions of authority are not brave enough to correct this error, I have taken it upon myself to reveal the truth. I have chosen you because of your discriminating eye, your intelligence, and your ability to think outside of convention.

  If you wish to help me, you will be amply rewarded for any risks you take.

  You may not show this letter to anyone. Two other people in the world have received this document tonight. Although you may never meet, the three of you will work together in ways none of us can predict.

  If you show this to the authorities, you will most certainly be placing your life in danger.

  You will know how to respond. I congratulate you on your pursuit of justice.

  The letter was not signed, and it had no return address.

  The man had sat down to a late dinner. He liked to read when he ate, and he was on page four of a new novel. Book in hand, he answered the door.

  His spaghetti and meatballs were cold by the time he remembered them. He sat at the table for a long time, looking first at the letter and then out at the moon.

  Was this a joke? Who would go to the trouble of writing and sending such a letter? It was printed on expensive stationery, the kind you buy if you want to be impressive. Or pretentious.

  Should he feel flattered? Suspicious? What did this person want from him? What kind of reward were they talking about?

  And who was it who knew him well enough to know he’d say yes?

  A woman tossed and turned in bed, her long hair trapping moonlight against the pillow. She was going over lists of names in her mind.

  The more she thought, the more agitated she became. She was not amused. Could this be a coincidence, or was it a clever warning? What exactly did this person know about her past?

  She finally got up. A cup of hot milk would calm her nerves. She moved carefully in the dark, using the watery rectangles of light that fell across the floor. She wasn’t about to turn on the kitchen light.

  The names scrolled in tidy columns through her mind, each group belonging to a different chapter in her life. There was Milan, there was New York, there was Istanbul….

  But this was an invitation, not a threat. If things got strange or frightening, she could always change her mind.

  Or could she?

  Another woman lay awake under the moon, listening to the wind and the occasional whine of a police siren.

  This was one of the weirdest coincidences ever.

  Was this letter insane, or inspired? And was she just being gullible, thinking this person was really writing to her? Maybe hundreds of these letters had gone out. Had her name been picked out of a phone book?

  Fake or not, the letter was intriguing…. A centuries-old crime. What could this person be planning?

  And what about the spooky part? If you show this to the authorities, you will most certainly be placing your life in danger.

  Maybe this was a maniac, one of those serial killers. She pictured the police going through her apartment and finding the letter, standing over her body and saying, “Jeesh, she shoulda called us first thing. She coulda been alive today….”

  A lone cat yowled in the alley below her bedroom, and she jumped, her heart pounding. Sitting up in bed, she shut the window and locked it.

  How could she not say yes? This was a letter that could alter history.

  The letter is dead.

  It was a strange thing for a teacher to say.

  By the sixth week of sixth grade, Ms. Hussey still wasn’t a disappointment. She had announced on the first day of school that she had no idea what they were going to work on that year, or how. “It all depends on what we get interested in — or what gets interested in us,” she had added, as if this was obvious. Calder Pillay was all ears. He had never heard a teacher admit that she didn’t know what she was doing. Even better, she was excited about it.

  Ms. Hussey’s classroom was in the middle school building at the University School, in the neighborhood known as Hyde Park. The school sat on the edge of the University of Chicago campus. John Dewey, an unusual professor, had started it a century earlier as an experiment. Dewey believed in
doing, in working on relevant projects in order to learn how to think. Calder had always liked the man’s appropriate name. Not all teachers at the U., as it was called, still agreed with Dewey’s ideas, but Ms. Hussey obviously did.

  They began the year by arguing about whether writing was the most accurate way to communicate. Petra Andalee, who loved to write, said it was. Kids like Calder, who hated it, said it wasn’t. What about numbers? What about pictures? What about plain old talking?

  Ms. Hussey had told them to investigate. They took piles of books out of the library. They found out about cave art in France, about papyrus scrolls in Egypt, about Mayan petroglyphs in Mexico, and about stone tablets from the Middle East. They tried things. They made stamps out of raw potatoes and covered the walls with symbols. They invented a sign language for hands and feet. They communicated for one whole day using nothing but drawings. Now it was almost mid-October. Would they ever study regular subjects, like the other classes did? Calder didn’t care. What they were doing was real exploration, real thinking — not just finding out about what a bunch of dead, famous grown-ups believed. Ms. Hussey was cool.

  D-E-A-D. She had written it on the board.

  They were talking about letters that morning because Calder had groaned about having to write a thank-you note, and said that it was always a waste of time. No one cared what you put in a letter.

  Then Ms. Hussey asked if anyone in the class had ever received a truly extraordinary letter. No one had. Ms. Hussey looked very interested. They had ended up with a strange assignment.

  “Let’s see what we can find,” Ms. Hussey began. “Ask an adult to tell you about a letter they will never forget. I’m talking about a piece of mail that changed their life. How old were they when they got it? Where were they when they opened it? Do they still have it?”

  Petra, like Calder, was fascinated by their new teacher. She loved Ms. Hussey’s questions and her long ponytail and the three rings in each ear. One earring had a small pearl dangling from a moon, another a high-heeled shoe the size of a grain of rice, another a tiny key. Petra loved how Ms. Hussey listened carefully to the kids’ ideas and didn’t care about right and wrong answers. She was honest and unpredictable. She was close to perfect.

  Ms. Hussey suddenly clapped her hands, making Petra jump and setting the little pearl earring into orbit. “I know! Once you find a letter that changed a life, sit down and write me a letter. Write me a letter I won’t be able to forget.”

  Petra’s mind was already racing.

  Calder pulled a pentomino piece out of his pocket. It was an L. He grinned. L for letter — this letter was definitely not dead. L was one of the simplest pentomino shapes to use. Most letters, the kind you mailed, were rectangles, he realized, just like an accurately put-together pentomino solution. L was also the twelfth letter in the alphabet and one of the twelve pentominoes. Today was the twelfth day of October. Calder’s grandmother had once told him that he breathed patterns the way other people breathed air.

  Calder sighed. If only thoughts didn’t have to be broken down into words. Too much talk was hard to listen to, and writing, for him, was a brutal process. So much got left behind.

  Ms. Hussey ended the class by saying, “Got it? First find, then do. Who knows where this will take us?”

  Calder and Petra lived on Harper Avenue, a narrow street next to the train line. Their houses were three blocks away from the U. School, and three houses away from each other. They often passed on the street, but they had never been friends.

  Families came from all over to study or teach at the University of Chicago, and many of them lived in this part of Hyde Park. Since most parents worked, young kids traveled on their own around the campus and to and from school.

  On the afternoon of October 12, Petra walked home from school with Calder half a block ahead of her. She watched him fish around for his key and open his front door. She knew his pockets were full of puzzle pieces. He sometimes muttered things and always looked like he had just woken up. He was kind of weird.

  Scuffing through the first fall leaves, Petra drifted into the game she often played with herself: Ask a question that doesn’t have an answer. Why was yellow cheerful, she wondered, and why was it always a surprise — even when it came in an ordinary shape, like a lemon or an egg yolk? Picking up a yellow leaf, she held it in front of her face.

  Maybe she would write to Ms. Hussey about this. She’d ask her if she agreed that humans needed questions more than answers.

  Calder, at that moment, looked out his front window to see Petra walking by holding a leaf several inches from her nose. He knew he was kind of weird, but she was exceptionally weird. She was always by herself at school, and didn’t seem to care. She was quiet when other kids were loud. Plus, she had a fierce triangle of hair that made her look like one of those Egyptian queens.

  Calder wondered if he was becoming just as much of an oddball. No one had asked him what he was doing after class that day. No one had told him to wait. He’d taken his buddy Tommy’s presence for granted. Not now.

  Tommy Segovia had lived across the street from Calder until this past August. They had been great friends since second grade, when Tommy poured his chocolate milk on Calder’s bare legs and asked him how it felt. A teacher rushed over, and Calder had explained that it was an experiment and that it felt just perfect. That was the first of many collaborations.

  He and Tommy had decided back in July that they weren’t going to be mediocre kids. They swore that they were going to do something important with their lives — solve a great mystery, or rescue somebody, or be so smart in school that they’d skip grades. That was the same day Calder had received his first set of pentominoes. A cousin in London had sent them as a twelfth birthday present, even though Calder’s birthday wasn’t until the end of the year.

  The pentominoes were yellow plastic and clacked against the kitchen table in a satisfying, decisive way. Determined, Calder moved the shapes into one combination after another, flipping and turning them. The biggest rectangle he had put together so far was six pieces. A breeze was coming in the back door, and some mourning doves that had nested on the back porch were cooing, making that slippery, burbling sound that Calder always associated with summer in his neighborhood. Every detail of that morning with Tommy was strangely clear.

  At once Calder had known what to do — the Y had to slide into the U, which had to fit next to the P. He even remembered the sequence of letters: YUP. He had gotten his first twelve-piecer, and gotten it fast. When he looked up afterward, he saw the pentomino shapes echoed in the kitchen. The hinges on the cabinets were Ls, the water faucets were Xs, the burners on the stove stood up on neat N legs. Maybe the entire world could be communicated in some kind of pentomino code, kind of like a Morse code. He knew, at that moment, that he would be a great problem-solver. Or so he told Tommy, who punched him in the arm and told him he had a swelled head. “Yup,” he’d said with a grin.

  Calder’s head didn’t feel too swelled these days. He looked at the clock. He was already late. When Tommy moved away, Calder had taken over his job at Powell’s Used Books. Calder helped out one afternoon a week now, delivering books in the neighborhood or unloading boxes. With Tommy gone, it was something to do.

  Calder gulped a glass of chocolate milk, stuffed a cookie in each cheek, and set off at a run.

  Powell’s was one of Petra’s favorite places; it was peaceful, and you never knew what you might find. It looked more like a warehouse than a store — books were piled everywhere, and the rooms were jumbled together in a mismatched way. Although Petra had been inside many times, it always felt like a labyrinth: One dimly lit area led to the next, and suddenly you were back where you started without knowing how you got there. No one asked if you needed help. No one frowned if you read but didn’t buy.

  Petra’s mom had sent her to get milk and bread at the grocery store around the corner. Powell’s was on the way.

  Petra had just settled herself on a foo
tstool with a copy of Kidnapped when she saw a long ponytail whip by.

  Ms. Hussey?

  Petra stood up carefully. She peeked around the corner, ready to pretend to look surprised. There was no one in sight. Petra looked across rows of cookbooks. She tiptoed carefully through the next room, past English, History, Psychology, and Pets. She only wanted to see what Ms. Hussey was reading.

  Darn — the next person she saw was Calder. He was bending over a box of books, a piece of paper in his hand. Don’t turn around, don’t you dare turn around, Petra thought. She didn’t want anyone from the class to see her spying.

  She tiptoed around the next corner. Ms. Hussey was crouched by the art books. Petra couldn’t see what she was looking at, but she noticed several paperbacks next to her on the floor. Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler — Ms. Hussey moved suddenly, and Petra jumped backward.

  To her surprise, Calder was right behind her. He had obviously seen what she was doing. Petra cupped her hand quickly as if to cover his mouth, but stopped before she touched him. They looked equally shocked. Calder, recovering first, peered around the corner. He ducked back in a flash.

  “She’s coming!”

  It felt too late to do anything but hide, so they hurried out of History and into Fiction. Ms. Hussey was at the front desk now. She plopped down her books and began talking to Mr. Watch, the man with red suspenders who was usually at the cash register. They were laughing. Did they know each other?