Mom laughs. “Cleveland! What gave you that idea?”
“You baking cookies, dinner out, a movie—on a school night. What’s up?”
“Hey, can’t I spoil my daughter a little?”
“Ohhh. Well, if spoiling is what you have in mind, there’s this awesome denim jacket in the window at—”
“I said a little spoiling. There’ll be no completely ruining you.”
“As long as we’re on the subject of your unruined daughter, I have something to tell you.”
“You’re playing Friday night at Perkatory.”
“Whoa!” I shout. “Jeez, I might as well live in some dinky little town. Everyone here knows everything I do!”
Mom almost drops a tray of cookies because she’s laughing so hard. “It was Elizabeth Harriman. She called a little while ago to ask if she should bring something.”
I get up and hug her. “I swear I just found out for sure today.”
“It’s okay, Sophie. I am so proud of you. What are you going to play?”
I tell her about the Blazers’ tiny playlist. She can’t get over the fact that I wrote a song.
“Maybe we’ll have a look at this denim jacket after all.”
“Really?”
“We’ll have a look. By the way, did you ever call Michelle? If you’re going to join the swim team, I think you need to be at the pool on Sunday afternoon.”
“I’ll call her right now.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
I raise my hands over my head in the dive position. “Mom, I’m taking the plunge.”
Chapter 25
Not my best work, but it beats the heck out of a poke in the eye with a big stick, or so I would guess
“Some of you did very well on the test, maybe even surprisingly well in some cases,” Ms. Lonneman announces at the start of science class. Livvy and her crew turn to one another with smug smiles.
“However,” she continues, “some of you ladies have a little explaining to do. I’m not an expert in the field of probability or statistics, but I can’t help but wonder at the likelihood of a number of students—good students—receiving such similar scores.”
Livvy raises her hand. “Maybe they studied together.” She turns and smiles oh-so-sweetly at me.
“Miss Klack, perhaps you will understand my concern better after you see your test.” She passes the papers back without a word.
Margaret holds hers up for me to see. A perfect one hundred. Leigh Ann’s turn. Ninety-eight. Ms. Lonneman hands me my test. Ninety-six! Yes!
Livvy and friends, on the other hand, have gone silent. Livvy spins around, scowling when she sees my score. Then she sees Leigh Ann’s paper. Her jaw practically bounces off her desk; her eyes, they become mere slits; and her face, it gets redder and redder as she glares at Leigh Ann, who looks innocent as, well, a schoolgirl.
“The following students will stay for a little chat after school today: Miss Klack, Miss Aronson, Miss Peters, Miss Welles, and Miss McCutcheon.”
Yikes. I imagine how that conversation will go. (“But, Ms. Lonneman, the answer key that we stole out of a locker—the one that we thought was the real thing, stolen from your computer—turns out that it was a fake. So we’re victims, really.”)
Brrrinnnng! The three of us RUN down the stairs to the cafeteria. Rebecca holds up her own test—an eighty-six—and grins. “How did our dearest darling do?”
“Shame on you, Rebecca,” Margaret scolds. “And you, too, Leigh Ann. Those poor girls trusted you!” She holds the straight face for a half second longer, then cracks up. “Can you believe how gullible they are?”
“It was a beautiful plan,” says Becca, high-fiving Leigh Ann.
I put an index finger to my lips. “Shhh. Here they come.” Livvy leads the way, with her four stooges in tow.
Becca, she cannot resist. “Hey, Livvy! How’d ya do on the science test? Me? A little ol’ eighty-six.”
“Do not gloat,” Margaret warns. “That’s just what got Odysseus into all that trouble.”
Becca leans back in her chair. “What are you talking about?”
“The Odyssey? Remember? After Odysseus blinded Polyphemus—you know, the big Cyclops—by jabbing that big stick in his eye, he acted just like you. He couldn’t stop himself from bragging about how he did it and rubbing the guy’s face in it. The Greek-derived word for that kind of excessive pride is ‘hubris.’ And because of that, the gods turned on Odysseus, and it took him twenty years to get home.”
“Are you saying it’s gonna take me twenty years to get back to Chinatown? Because, you know, I can walk there in, like, an hour if I have to.”
I pat Rebecca on the shoulder. “Just know that you probably haven’t heard the last of Livvy Klack.”
We decide to celebrate our minor act of revenge in a let’s-not-tick-off-the-gods way, with ice cream and baked goods at my apartment after school. God knows we have cookies. When we get there, there’s a package wrapped in bright red paper on my bed with a card stuck in the ribbon.
“Look, your parents got me a present!” Rebecca says. She picks it up and shakes it.
Margaret takes it from her. “Easy, Becca. It might be fragile.”
“This is strange,” I say. “It’s not my birthday, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret says.
“Maybe it’s not for me.”
“See? I knew it was for me!” Becca exclaims.
I tear the card open and read:
Dear Sophie,
Just a little something for making us so proud.
Love,
Mom and Dad
I blink back a tear, stuff the card into my pocket, dig into the wrapping paper, and stop cold when I see the store’s name on the box. “No way.” I lift off the top and there it is: the coolest denim jacket ever. It is faded perfectly, with three different-colored bands sewn into the left sleeve, just above the elbow. We’re talking rock-star cool.
“That’s the one you were—” Leigh Ann says.
“I know. Mom and I were out last night, and I showed it to her, but she said it was too much. ‘Maybe for Christmas’ was all she said.” Suddenly I feel very self-conscious, and I put the lid back on the box.
“Try it on!”
“C’mon, I want to see it on you!”
“I feel kind of stupid now,” I say. “It just seems kind of rude, opening a present in front of everybody. It would be different if it were my birthday.”
They jump me and start pounding me with pillows, wrapping paper, my blazer, anything within reach.
“God, could you be a bigger loser?” Rebecca chides. “Rude? If you don’t try that jacket on in the next five seconds, I’m taking it.”
I put it on. “There. Happy?”
“Look in the mirror,” says Leigh Ann. “Raf is going to flip when he sees you in that thing.”
I can’t help smiling when I see my reflection. “Whatever you do, don’t say that in front of my dad. He’ll never let me out of the apartment.” I take the jacket off and lay it gently on my bed.
Parents! Go figure.
Rebecca is already on her way into the kitchen, shouting, “What about this ice cream you promised? Whoa! Are these cookies all for us?”
“No!” I shout back. “We’re only allowed to have the ones in the cookie jar.”
“Why, are these too good for us?” Becca says.
“Becca! You’re being a brat,” says Margaret. “Sophie, come in here so that I can tell you guys how I solved the puzzle with the picture and all the grids.”
“You mean … the … dun, dun, dun … final clue?” I ask.
Margaret takes the envelope with the clue out of her bag and spreads the papers on the table. “I went crazy looking at all these grids, trying to find words in every possible direction. I even went to the library and took out a few more books on deciphering codes, but nothing worked. And then …” She stops to take a big spoonful of ice cream, leaving us hanging.
“Margaret!” we shout.
“Okay, okay. When I saw Ms. Lonneman grading those tests with that tagboard answer key, it hit me. Windows. At first I thought this photograph of the apartment building had something to do with all the clues with addresses and apartment numbers, but I was wrong—again. The picture was telling me how to decipher the code, how to read the grids. It is the key to the whole thing.”
“Ohh,” we say together, not understanding even the tiniest bit.
“See, the picture is a kind of code machine called a grille, or a grid, all by itself. I learned about them in one of the library books. They were used by real spies back in World War I. Now look at the picture again.
“Do you notice anything special about the windows?” she asks. After a few seconds of silence from us, she adds, “Like how many there are or how they are arranged?”
We bend over the table, elbowing each other to get a better look and trying to be first to answer.
“Thirty-six windows. Six by six,” Rebecca says, sticking her tongue out at me.
“Precisely. What else about this clue is six by six?”
I win this round. “Ahhh. These grids with all the letters.”
“Now for the bonus round. How many of the windows have lights on?”
“Nine,” Leigh Ann answers.
“Yep. Nine out of thirty-six. Exactly one-fourth. Now the tricky part. I took a sheet of paper exactly the same size as the grids with the letters and divided it into thirty-six squares, again just like the grids. Then I cut out the squares that correspond to the locations of those windows, like this.” She holds up her own grid with nine square holes.
“And here are the first two grids.”
“Now watch what happens when I set my grid with the holes on top of the first one with the letters, like so.”
“Sophie, read the letters off from left to right and top to bottom. Leigh Ann, do me a favor and write them down as she reads them off. Ready?”
“T-H-E-S-T-R-E-E-T,” I read.
“The street,” Rebecca says. “Now what?”
“Now comes the beautiful part. Leave the grid with the letters alone, but turn the one with the holes a quarter turn clockwise, and you get the next nine letters.”
I read the next nine letters. “A-D-D-R-E-S-S-F-O.”
“And another quarter turn for the next nine,” Margaret says.
“R-A-P-T-T-H-R-E-E.”
“One more turn, and we’ll be done with this letter grid.”
“B-O-N-E-S-S-E-X-S. Got all those, Leigh Ann?”
She spins her paper to show Margaret the full message so far:
THESTREETADDRESSFORAFTTHREEB ONESSEXS
Margaret uses a pencil to divide the letters into words.
THE/STREET/ADDRESS/FOR/APT/
THREE/B/ON/ESSEX/S
“Everybody still with me? Good. Now, since the message is longer than thirty-six letters, it continues on the next grid, which has all new letters.”
Leigh Ann is checking out the grid with the holes. “Uh-oh. I forget which side is the top.”
“That’s easy. Just look at the windows in the picture. Turn the grid until it looks just like that. Pretty cool, huh? As long as you have the key, why don’t you take the rest of this one?”
Leigh Ann aligns the two grids and reads off the first set of letters, which Margaret writes down. “T-I-S-N-E-I-T-H-E. Is that right so far?”
Margaret nods and watches with a satisfied smile as Leigh Ann turns the top grid and reads off the next nine letters. “R-T-H-E-H-I-G-H-E. And the next nine are S-T-N-O-R-T-H-E-L. One more turn, and we get O-W-E-S-T-X-X-X-X.”
“Those X’s are just fillers at the end of the message,” Margaret says. She takes her pencil to the row of letters and divides them, leaving us with this clue:
THE/STREET/ADDRESS/FOR/APT /THREE/B/ ON/ESSEX/ST/IS/NEITHER/THE/HIGHEST/ NOR/THE/LOWEST/XXXX
“I already solved the other two, but here they are if you want to solve them for yourselves,” Margaret says.
I move the grids around myself to make sure I really understand how it works. “So it uses every letter on the grid exactly once? How is that possible?”
“Funny you should ask that, Sophie. You see, that’s the really amazing part, and the thing that makes this code so hard to crack. The holes have to be arranged in a very special way for the grid to rotate properly.” She opens a beat-up paperback about secret codes to show me a six-by-six grid that is numbered like this:
“See how there are four squares numbered one, four numbered two, all the way up to nine? Well, in order for the whole thing to work, you have to number your grid exactly like this and then cut out one of the ones, one of the twos, one of the threes, and so on.”
“Oh, I see why that works,” I say. “All the fives are in the corners, and the eight is always four spaces from the left in the top row, no matter how you spin the grid. Same with all the numbers.”
Margaret holds up the photo of the building. “All that makes this even more unbelievable. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to Photoshop this picture so the lights would be on in the right nine windows. It boggles the mind.”
“Oh, my mind is boggled, all right,” Becca says.
Margaret’s eyes sparkle mischievously. “Brace yourselves. There’s more.”
Chapter 26
One is good with pita bread; the other goes better with a big slice of humble pie
A few minutes later, I open a new document on my computer and start typing in the clues we have gathered from the four different challenges.
The piano player lives on Hester Street, but not in Apt. 4M and not at no. 127 or no. 301 (the orphan clue).
The bassoon player lives in 2J, but not on Grand or Essex (the first-letter clue).
The xylophone player lives on Bleecker Street, but not at no. 288 (the first pigpen clue).
The violinist does not live in the building located at 456 Grand or in Apt. 7A (the second pigpen clue).
The street address for Apt. 3B on Essex Street is neither the highest nor the lowest (the first grid clue).
And for those of you who didn’t figure out the other two grid clues on your own, here they are:
The man in Apt. 5C at no. 301 is not on Spring Street and doesn’t play the flute.
Neither 288 nor 770 is the address of the building on Spring Street.
When I finish, Margaret slides onto the chair next to me and makes this chart:
“Guys, Sophie’s going to print out three of these—the chart and the seven clues—one for each of you to take home and solve. Remember that there are five musicians, and for each one, there are five possible addresses, streets, and apartment numbers. Slice o’ strudel for three smarty-pantses like you!”
“‘Pantses’? Really?” Rebecca says. “And what about you?”
“I worked it all out last night,” Margaret says. “But I knew you’d want to be able to solve it on your own. Much more fun than having someone else just give you the answers. Just ask Ms. Klack.”
“I think my brain just got smaller,” Leigh Ann says.
“I’ve been feeling that way for the past five years,” I say.
Margaret ignores our self-pity party. “What you’re looking for is the address and apartment number of the violin player so that you know where to take the key. But see, you won’t know that until you have solved almost everything else. I have so much confidence in you all that I’m leaving a note saying we’ll all come to the apartment on Sunday afternoon.”
“Aren’t you supposed to leave the note on somebody’s watch?” I ask.
“Fred Lebow’s. You know that statue of the guy who is looking at his watch in the park at Ninetieth Street? That’s him. How does one o’clock Sunday sound?”
I quickly calculate the travel time needed to get to my other commitment for the day. “Can we make it noon? I need to be at Asphalt Green for swim team at three.”
“If I can’t solve the puzzle, can I still come?�
� Leigh Ann asks.
“You can solve it,” Margaret says confidently. “It really is simple compared with figuring out how someone was able to walk through the walls at Mr. Chernofsky’s.”
“Why, Margaret Wrobel,” I say. “I do believe you are bragging.”
Rebecca joins in. “Yeah, isn’t this that hummus thing you were talking about?”
“That’s hubris. Hummus is that spread made out of chickpeas—you know, tastes good with pita bread. But the answer is no. I’m simply confident of my abilities, that’s all. There is neither hummus nor hubris.”
“Still, I think I might bring some pita with me on Sunday,” I say.
Thursday is a blur of classes, band practice, homework (thanks, Mr. Eliot, for assigning an essay due on Friday—that’s a big help, really), constantly checking myself out in the mirror in my new jacket, and texting back and forth with Raf about a million times. As if he weren’t in enough trouble already, his mom got a call from his French teacher saying he was in danger of failing.
I call him immediately. “Raf, je parle français. I can help you. Why didn’t you tell me you were flunking? I’m never going to see you again.”
“I failed one stupid test. And I got a ninety on the next one.”
“So, what about tomorrow? Can you get ungrounded? The Blazers are playing at Perkatory.”
“Don’t worry. When I tell my mom I’m going to see you and Margaret, she’ll let me go. She thinks you’re a good influence on me. Wait until I tell her it was your idea to take the scooter across town. I’ll get a ridiculous curfew—probably, like, nine o’clock—but I’ll be there.”
Friday nights are usually quiet at Perkatory, but with word out that the Blazers are doing a free concert, tables start to fill early. (And if you pull this leg, it plays “Stairway to Heaven.”) Seriously, Aldo, the manager, seems pleased. He should be; he’s selling a lot of coffee, and he doesn’t have to pay us a dime. Now all we have to do is not chase everybody out the door by stinkin’ the place up.
The Vanishing Violin Page 18