The Mystery of the Third Lucretia

by Susan Runholt

  “I feel like a coconspirator,” Celia said, smiling and rubbing her hands together. “I have a black wig. I used to use it for auditions when I was trying out for Latin parts. And how about some dark makeup?”

  After she and Celia finished discussing the disguise, Lucas said, “Oh, and Gillian, do you remember when you said I could use the leather jacket whenever I wanted to and you could borrow Celia’s raincoat?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Mom answered. “Want to use it tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Well I should think you could, since it’s actually yours.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s yours now,” Lucas said, “but I think tomorrow’s a good day to take that picture with me wearing it.”

  The next day we took the leather jacket, one sari, the wig, and the makeup to the city center, stopped at the drugstore again, found a pet shop, and entered the museum, ready to go to war with a snake.

  About one thirty in the afternoon, Lucas walked into the Rembrandt room. She was wearing the turquoise sari draped over her head and she carried the end of the fabric over one arm. She was all done up in Celia’s wig, she had a red dot on her forehead, kohl pencil around her eyes, and wherever you could see her skin we’d put dark makeup on it. Except for her blue eyes, she looked just like the girls from India and Pakistan who are always wandering around Trafalgar Square.

  If you looked closely, you could see that under where the sari hung over her arm she was carrying a little box.

  Coming into the room about thirty seconds after her, wearing torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, a leather jacket, a ring through her eyebrow (fake), a row of pierced earrings in her left ear (fake), one big metal stud in her right ear (real), and spiked-out hair, was yours truly, feeling excited, terrified, and stupid, all at the same time.

  We were following a bunch of French tourists on a guided tour.

  Lucas turned in the opposite direction from Gallery Guy and Belshazzar’s Feast as soon as she came in the door. I went over to hang around the edge of the French tour group. They were all standing on one side of Gallery Guy, looking at Rembrandt’s self-portrait. I stood just on the other side.

  Lucas sauntered around as if looking at the paintings, moving closer and closer to where Gallery Guy was sitting and I was standing. She seemed to drop something on the floor, and leaned over as if to pick it up. Then she casually stepped over in my direction.

  Suddenly somebody yelled something in French, and all meep broke loose. People were running and pushing, women were screaming and men were shouting.

  And the word all the French people were using was something that sounded like “Sair-pah, sair-pah!”

  It was French for serpent. Because there was an eighteen-inch snake crawling across the middle of the floor.

  The place was totally panicked. Bert must have pulled a switch, because the museum alarms went off. Guards poured in from both entrances.

  The doors were blocked with French people trying to get out, and other people trying to get in to see what the fuss was about. People kept screaming. One of the guards yelled, “Stay calm, stay calm.” The French guide was yelling something that sounded like “Calm-may voo! Calm-may voo!” A couple of the guards were walking around the room, making sure all the paintings were safe and talking into little walkie-talkies.

  Bert was running around after the snake. Another guard said, “Pick up the bleedin’ thing!”

  “I hate ruddy snakes!” Bert yelled back.

  Obviously Gallery Guy didn’t like snakes either. Lucas had let the creature out of its box right behind him, then she’d given it a poke with her toe so it would go right toward the easel. Seeing it curve across the floor almost at his feet, Gallery Guy jumped from his stool. I was standing so close that when he popped up he almost knocked me over.

  That’s what was supposed to happen. Now it was time for my big part. “Watchit, Dad,” I said in my best East Ender accent, just like Robert had taught me, and I gave Gallery Guy a shove with my elbow, which made him stumble and knock over his easel.

  While he was trying to get his balance and watching so he didn’t step on the snake, Gallery Guy was too distracted to notice Lucas, who was busy memorizing the lines and colors of the big set of hands in the middle of his canvas, now lying on the floor in plain sight.

  It wasn’t until Bert marched from the room, grasping the wriggling snake by what you might call the neck if snakes had necks and holding it way out in front of him, that Gallery Guy remembered his canvas, and by that time Lucas had seen what she needed to see and was flouncing out of the room, where I was waiting for her.

  I tell you, that girl has nerves of steel.

  18

  What Happened to Bert

  All the way back to Robert’s we were totally pumped. We’d planned it so we’d get back earlier than anyone else that afternoon. We ended up with almost an hour and a half to work on drawing the hands. Lucas was close to finished when somebody came in, and we slid our painting and drawing things under a bed upstairs in the loft that was our bedroom.

  On Saturday we helped Mom do “London Looks,” this time at Covent Garden, where Lucas and I spent most of our time watching the buskers, or street entertainers. That night Robert had to work, and Mom and Celia went out to have a fancy dinner and hear some jazz. The minute everyone was gone, we pulled our canvas out again and spent six whole hours painting the hands as well as Lucas could remember them, with me trying to make the brushstrokes and color mixtures look like Rembrandt’s. Lucas thought I did a great job. I’d spent enough time studying Rembrandt’s paintings to know that it wasn’t great, but it was the best I could do in a hurry.

  When the canvas was dry, we rolled it up with the drawings Lucas had made of Gallery Guy on her sketch pad and the print we’d bought of Belshazzar’s Feast, and stuck the whole roll in the cardboard poster tube the print came in. We figured we could take it back home that way and Mom would just think it was the print.

  Then we put our paints and dirty brushes in a plastic shopping bag and dropped the whole thing into the garbage can (what Robert calls the dustbin) out by his garden shed and opened Robert’s windows to make sure we got rid of the paint smell.

  And that was that. It made me depressed. It was like we were saying good-bye to our whole adventure in London, and absolutely nothing had come of it. I wished we could just go home and I could forget about the whole thing. Instead, we were stuck there for three more days.

  What I didn’t know was that some of the most important parts of our London adventure were still to come.

  On Sunday we took a drive in the English countryside. But on Monday it was pouring down rain and the forecast said it would probably rain all day. The last thing Mom had to do before we left on Wednesday was another “London Looks,” which she wanted to do outdoors if possible, so she decided to take the day off.

  It was Mom’s choice about what to do, because she hadn’t had any time to sightsee. Guess where she wanted to go.

  The National Gallery.

  “Great,” Lucas said when she and I went back up to our loft. “We get to go back and see all those paintings we’ve seen a billion times.”

  “We could give her our own guided tour,” I said.

  “I could even give her a guided tour in French,” Lucas responded, with a dry look.

  “Maybe we can go back to the women’s loo in the education section, just for old time’s sake.”

  “Spray a little air freshener.” That one got me giggling.

  “You know, this won’t be the first time we’ve gone through the National Gallery with a grown-up. But it will be the first time we’ve gone with a grown-up who’s ever laid eyes on us before,” I said, and now Lucas was giggling, too.

  “I might have to fight an uncontrollable urge to run into the restroom and change my clothes,” she added.

  By this time we were laughing hysterically. After we’d gotten control of ourselves, I said, “I bet Gallery
Guy’s gone. He was almost finished with what he was doing, and I bet he’s left town.”

  “We’ll have to at least sneak a peek.”

  For a second I thought about telling Lucas I didn’t want to even go back and peek into the Rembrandt room. But then I realized that even if Gallery Guy was still there and saw us and recognized Lucas, there was nothing he could really do to us in the middle of a museum, especially with Mom there. I have to admit, having her around made me feel safer.

  Mom is way more serious about looking at art than we are, and besides, she knew we’d already visited the museum. So we told her we wanted to go around on our own, and we’d meet her later in the cafeteria. As soon as we made sure she’d started on a whole other part of the museum, we wandered away to the Rembrandt room.

  We took the roundabout way and ended up in Gallery 24, where we’d waited out of Bert’s sight on our first day spying on Gallery Guy. Standing back and looking through the doorway, we weren’t surprised to see Gallery Guy’s usual spot empty. That was a relief.

  “Well, we don’t have to hide anymore,” Lucas said, and walked through the Rembrandt room toward the door to Gallery 22. And surprise surprise, somebody besides Bert was standing guard.

  “Wonder what’s up with Bert today,” Lucas muttered.

  “Maybe he has a cold or something.”

  “Or maybe they moved him to another gallery. Let’s ask,” she said, and before I could comment, she’d walked straight up to the new guard.

  “How can I help you?” the guard said. He was short and wiry, with red cheeks and bright blue eyes, and he had a really big accent.

  “We were wondering about Bert, the guard who’s usually here. Is he absent today?” Lucas asked.

  The guard suddenly looked very serious. “How did you know old Bert? He wasn’t your uncle or nothing, was he?”

  “No, we don’t know him,” Lucas said. “We just saw him in here sometimes, that’s all.”

  “I have bad news for you, missies,” the guard said slowly. “Bert died Saturday, on his way home from his half-day shift. Got run over by a bus, he did.”

  “Saturday!” I said. “But we just saw him on Friday.” I felt like somebody had punched me. And from the look on Lucas’s face, I think she felt the same.

  “That’s how these things go, my dears. Terrible shock, it was. He lived alone, did old Bert, so at least he didn’t leave behind no missus or little kiddies needin’ a dad.”

  “But how did it happen?” Lucas asked. “Did he just fall, or what?”

  “We-e-e-ll,” the guard began, and the way he said it, you knew he was winding up to tell us something interesting, “there’s a woman was behind him in the queue, says he was pushed.”

  Then, seeing our horrified expressions, he continued, “Oh yes, she says she saw a man push him under the oncoming bus. But others say it was an accident, and that’s what I think, too. I don’t know why anybody would want to push old Bert. He was harmless enough.

  “It’s been quite a week around here, with Bert’s accident coming right after the snake incident and all.”

  “What snake incident?” I said. I knew perfectly well what snake incident.

  “We-e-e-ll,” he wound himself up again, “it was last Friday, it was. About the middle of the afternoon. Suddenly this here snake starts roamin’ the galleries. Old Henry, he was the first one as seen it, over in the Impressionist section. Ted says he thought he seen somethin’ out of the corner of his eye. That’s in Eye-talian Ren-AY-zance.” He meant Italian Renaissance.

  Lucas and I looked at each other. We knew that snake had only been on the floor for approximately ninety seconds, and only in the Rembrandt room.

  “Then it crawled in here. Caused quite a stir, it did. Old Bert, he picked it up and carried it out, brave as you please, though he said afterward it near gave him heart failure. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Everyone bein’ so afraid of snakes and all.”

  We didn’t tell him that we weren’t the slightest bit afraid of snakes.

  “The incident even made it into the Mirror.”

  “What?” Lucas was almost shouting. The Daily Mirror is a newspaper.

  “Not as you’d say a big article. Still, Bert got his name in it. Hope it made his last day a little happier, poor bloke.

  “I says to my missus, I says, ‘It’s eerie, him dying like that after just handling a snake. It’s as if that snake was a omen, like.’”

  I don’t know when I’ve felt quite as miserable as I did after hearing about Bert dying. For one thing, just to know that someone you’d seen alive almost the day before was now dead was weird, and it made me sad, even though I didn’t much like Bert when he was alive.

  But there was something else, something totally huge that made me feel like I’d been socked in the stomach. With everything that was going on with Gallery Guy, I didn’t think Bert’s death was just an accident. Somebody had pushed him under that bus. And I kept thinking about those last words of the guard, the ones about the snake being an omen. Was there any connection between the snake incident and what happened to Bert? Because if there was, then in some way Lucas and I were responsible for his death.

  19

  The Jaguar

  Tuesday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not the kind of day when you expect something terrible to happen.

  We were helping Mom with “London Looks” in a little park called Sloane Square in a busy part of town where there are lots of clothes shops and fashionable people. When we weren’t doing something for Mom, we sat in the sunshine, writing in our travel journals. I hadn’t written much since the whole thing with Gallery Guy had started the week before, so getting it all down, including my feelings about Bert dying, was going to take hours.

  Lucas never seems to write as much as I do, and after about the first half hour I noticed that she was drawing on the journal pages. She did more sketches of Gallery Guy, and a big drawing of the hands with the intertwined fingers in the middle of Gallery Guy’s canvas.

  A little after noon, Mom gave us some money and asked us to walk a few blocks down a big street called King’s Road to this little sandwich-and-salad takeout place called Pret a Manger to get us all some lunch.

  The last thing Mom said before we left was, “It’s busy around here, so be extra careful of the traffic.”

  Lucas and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. We’d been walking around London for days in places a lot busier than Sloane Square and nothing had happened yet. We’d gotten good at it.

  We found the place, no problem, and got our food.

  “I’m hungry,” I said when we were back outside and I was stuffing the drinks on top of the hoodie in Lucas’s backpack.

  “Me, too. Let’s get going.”

  We took off at a trot. There was traffic up and down King’s Road, but not anywhere near as bad as around Trafalgar Square.

  Halfway down the first block a little kid got loose from his mom and ran straight into my legs. By the time his mother got hold of him again, Lucas was way ahead of me, just about to cross a quiet side street with no traffic lights.

  She was running the last few steps to the corner when I noticed the car coming up beside me on King’s Road—driving on the left-hand side of the road, of course, like they do in London. It was black and long and low and shiny. It wasn’t slowing down and didn’t have its blinker on. It was just another car in London traffic.

  Then, at the very last minute, it speeded up and was suddenly turning left into the street Lucas was just going to cross.

  I saw her, still trotting, turn her head the other way, to make sure no one was coming on the side street, then step off the curb and onto the pavement.

  The car revved its engine as it roared around the corner, tires squealing. One more second—maybe half a second, maybe less—and the little silver jaguar on the hood of the car would be aimed directly at Lucas.

  “LUUUCAAAS!” I screamed from way down in my throat, the loudest I’ve ever screamed in m
y life. I was sure I was too late. I was sure she’d be smashed, thrown to the pavement, run over.

  She heard me just in time. Her head snapped to the right. She saw the car. I know this can’t be true—she must have touched ground somewhere in there—but it seemed like she actually stopped and reversed in midair. I watched as she flew backward, saw the heel of her shoe hit the curb as she went down, falling, falling—but onto the sidewalk, not into the street.

  She landed hard smack on her butt. Beyond her the black car sped away, tires still squealing.

  Then it was quiet, and Lucas was sitting there. Somehow her backpack had slipped off her shoulders, the straps now around her elbows, and she was sitting on it.

  I dropped to my knees next to her. “Are you okay?”

  She grunted.

  A youngish guy with supershort hair ran toward us from across the little street.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No,” Lucas said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “Any painful bits?” he asked.

  “Just . . . the part I sit on.”

  He held out his hand and helped Lucas struggle to her feet. She took a few wobbly steps.

  “Would have been worse without the rucksack,” the guy said. I figured that must be the British word for backpack.

  I looked down. Lucas had landed on the hoodie, but she must have gotten a couple of the plastic bottles, too. I could see orange juice oozing out from one side onto the sidewalk.

  “Driver must have been a nutter,” the guy said, “speeding around the corner like that. Miracle he didn’t hit you.”

  “Did you see what he looked like?” I asked.

  “Nah, can’t say I noticed. Just some toff in a Jaguar.” He pronounced it like jag-you-are.

  He turned to Lucas. “So you’re all right then? Nothing broken? You’re sure now?”

  Lucas held up a hand, which was badly skinned at the bottom of the palm, then flexed her wrist. “Yeah, I’m sure. Thank you.”