The Mystery of the Third Lucretia

by Susan Runholt

  “Right.” The guy hesitated. “Well, I’ll be off then.”

  He gave Lucas a last, uncertain look.

  “Right,” he said again. “Cheers.” Then away he went.

  “You want to sit down?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I guess so,” Lucas muttered. I pointed behind her, toward a bench a few steps from the corner. I grabbed her leaking backpack and helped her over.

  She sucked in her breath and let out a little moan as she sat down. “I’m going to have some heavy-duty black and blue marks. Kari—”

  “Yes?”

  “Kari, thank you for screaming at me like that. If you hadn’t, I’d probably have been run over.”

  “No big deal. Anybody would have done it.”

  “It is a big deal, Kari. You saved my life. That guy we just talked to was right. The driver must have been nuts.”

  “Um, Lucas—”

  I was just about to say something about the driver of the Jaguar, when I saw Mom coming down the sidewalk. When she got to us she said, “I looked over and saw you limping. What’s up?”

  “Lucas had an almost-but-not-quite accident,” I said.

  “No! Are you hurt?” Mom dropped to her knees in front of Lucas, her expression suddenly serious.

  “Not really. My butt’s going to be black and blue, is all.”

  “What happened?” Mom asked. She looked alarmed, and her eyebrows were pulled almost completely together.

  “It was my fault,” Lucas said. “It was the first time since we got here that I forgot about the driving-on-the-left thing. I didn’t look behind me to see if anybody was coming up in the left lane wanting to turn in front of me.”

  “That’s not how it happened!” I said. “You didn’t see the whole thing. I did. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d have looked, Lucas. The guy didn’t have his blinker on or anything, and at the last minute he just squealed around the corner without any warning.”

  “When Kari saw the car turn she screamed, or I would have been hit.”

  “Crazy driver! He should go to jail!” Mom was almost shouting, she was so upset. “Did you fall? What happened?”

  “I ended up sitting down smack on my backpack on the sidewalk.”

  I held up the dripping backpack to show Mom.

  “You’re sure you didn’t injure anything?”

  “Like I told you, my butt hurts. That’s all. And I skinned my hand.” She held up her scratched palm.

  “You’re white as a sheet, and you’re shaking.” Mom was up close now, looking into Lucas’s face.

  “Yeah, I guess I am a little.” I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen her get shaky about anything. Nobody asked me how I was feeling, and I didn’t want to say anything since I wasn’t the one who was hurt, but to be honest, I was shaky, too.

  Mom got to her feet and helped Lucas up just like the guy had done. “Kari, why don’t you run up and tell the photographer to be back in an hour? Let’s find a restaurant and have a nice, relaxing lunch. And you need some strong tea with lots of sugar, young lady,” she said to Lucas. “It’s what the English would prescribe, and it’s probably as good for you as anything.”

  After she ate, Lucas seemed better and her face was a lot less pale. I had some tea, too, and I was feeling more normal. Lucas said she didn’t want to go back to Robert’s, so we stopped at a store and got a couple cushions for her to sit on, then went back to our park bench.

  And that was the first chance I had to talk to Lucas about what I was thinking. I let her get all comfortable and waited until Mom and the photographer were busy, then I said, “Uh, Lucas. About that car that almost hit you.”

  “What about it?”

  “Remember that day when we saw Gallery Guy in his car outside Charing Cross station?”

  “Of course. In his Jaguar.” Then she looked at me, and it was obvious she knew what I was going to say. “Don’t even go there, Kari. It was not Gallery Guy driving that car.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense. He couldn’t have known where we’d be today. Even your mom didn’t know until she and the photographer decided.”

  “I don’t think Gallery Guy was stalking us,” I said. “I think he just happened to be driving along King’s Road, saw you, and decided in a split second to try to take you out.”

  “Take me out! You’re always talking like a TV cop.”

  “Kill you. Whatever.” I was beginning to lose my temper. A couple hours before, I’d saved her life. Now she was mocking me. I counted to ten, like Mom always tells me to do when I get mad, then said, “I think Gallery Guy will kill anybody who sees what he’s doing.”

  “You think he just happened to be driving on King’s Road, and happened to see me, as I happened to be crossing a street? You’d have to be stupid to believe in that many coincidences.”

  When Lucas starts talking to me like that, I want to hit her. Since I’m not into violence, the next best thing is to say as little to her as possible until we’ve had some time apart. Thank goodness this was our last day in London.

  20

  An Orphan at 30,000 Feet

  Flying across the ocean takes a long time, and the day we flew back from London it seemed like I had 283 hours to think. What I was thinking was that I was partly responsible for Bert’s murder. And even though I was sitting for nine hours in an airplane between my mother and my so-called best friend, I couldn’t talk to anybody about it.

  I sure wasn’t going to talk to Lucas. I was still so mad at her I probably had steam coming out of my ears. Even if she was right about Gallery Guy not being the driver of the Jaguar, she didn’t have to be so snotty about it. Especially right after I’d saved her life. Yeah, it did seem like a lot of coincidences that Lucas would be crossing a street just when Gallery Guy came driving along and could run her down, but coincidences do happen.

  If she was miserable sitting on her butt all those hours, it about served her right. Getting back to Minnesota and dropping her off at her house was the one thought that made me happy.

  So that took care of Lucas. Trouble was, I couldn’t talk to my mom about the Bert thing and how guilty I felt about it either. And I sure couldn’t tell her what I suspected about the Jaguar. I don’t want to sound like I’m still a little kid or anything, but when I have a really big problem, Mom’s always been the person I wanted to talk to. Well, remember what I said about knowing I was going to have to pay big-time for telling all those lies? I thought eventually I’d be grounded or lose my allowance or not be able to use the phone or the Internet or something.

  But instead, at least so far, it looked like my punishment was going to be not being able to talk to my mom when I really needed to. What could I tell her? That everything we’d said to her in London had been lies, all lies? To say we did it for a good cause—well, that might mean something to me, but when it came to my mom I didn’t think it would cut it.

  The only answer was to keep my mouth shut. So there I sat with one part of me feeling like a terrible, no-good murderer, one part still wondering if Gallery Guy had almost killed Lucas, and still another part feeling like an orphan. As punishment went, believe me, this was way worse than losing telephone and IM privileges.

  I was so tired because of everything that had happened and the after-excitement letdown that about halfway over the Atlantic Ocean I got all teary-eyed feeling guilty and alone. Just then the flight attendant came by and I got some orange juice and drank it, and I felt a little better.

  When I was done I pulled out my journal and did a little summary of the Gallery Guy mystery. I knew Mom wouldn’t look at what I was writing because she doesn’t believe in reading other people’s journals. I wrote:WHERE WE ARE WITH THE GALLERY GUY MYSTERY

  Things we’re almost absolutely sure about:1. The guy painting in the National Gallery is the same one who was painting in the Minneapolis Art Institute.

  2. He’s planning an art crime of some sort. Theory: It has to do with
forging a painting by Rembrandt.

  3. He’s practicing some hands he’s going to have in his own picture.

  4. He’s using disguises so that people like Lucas and me who see him in both places won’t recognize him.

  5. If there is a crime, and if we hear about it, our canvas and Lucas’s drawings of Gallery Guy in the Rembrandt gallery will be a big clue.

  Questions: 1. Who is Gallery Guy, and what exactly is he up to?

  2. Has he visited other museums and copied from paintings there?

  3. What do the painting of Lucretia in the Art Institute, Belshazzar’s Feast, and Gallery Guy’s painting of hands all have to do with each other?

  4. What if some big art crime happens and we don’t ever hear about it?

  5. What if the crime goes so smoothly for Gallery Guy and his accomplices, if there are any, that nobody ever catches on?

  6. If something actually happens and we do hear about it, who will we give our clues to?

  7. Why exactly was Bert killed?

  8. Is it possible Gallery Guy didn’t have anything to do with Bert’s death?

  9. Did Gallery Guy try to run Lucas down on King’s Road?

  Possible reasons why Gallery Guy might have murdered Bert: 1. Gallery Guy thought Bert saw the canvas when we let out the snake.

  2. Gallery Guy thought Bert saw the canvas some other time.

  3. Gallery Guy killed him because Bert said something to him about us spying on him.

  4. Gallery Guy didn’t kill Bert because of anything having to do with us. He killed him because Bert could put two and two together and maybe identify him if any big crime happened involving a painting by Rembrandt.

  And then, after writing that much, I added in big letters, AND IF THAT’S TRUE, AND GALLERY GUY HASCOPIED PAINTINGS IN OTHER MUSEUMS, THEN BERT MIGHT NOT BE THE ONLY MUSEUM GUARD GALLERY GUY HAS KILLED!

  I was still thinking about what I’d written when Mom, who was in the window seat, asked us to move so she could go to the loo. The idea that Gallery Guy had killed other guards seemed so important that when Mom left, I turned to Lucas and said, “I’ve thought of something.”

  “Are we talking animal, vegetable, or mineral here?” she said sarcastically.

  “Forget it,” I said in my best freeze-out voice. “Just forget it.”

  These were almost the first two things I’d said to her since she’d called me stupid. I made up my mind they were going to be the last for a very long time.

  Uncle Geoff picked us up from the airport. Exactly twenty-three minutes after getting in his car, we dropped Lucas at her house, and two minutes after that we were home.

  Geoff had bought some groceries so we wouldn’t be coming home to an empty refrigerator. When we got into the house, I played with Guido, the cat we share with Uncle Geoff, and Mom made us some café au lait—with whipped cream and sprinkles for me—brought it out on a tray with some Mint Milano cookies, and put it on the coffee table.

  When we’d both had our first bite of cookie, she said, “Okay, what exactly is going on?”

  21

  The Mother Myth

  Mothers have a way of finding things out, even when you don’t want them to. They seem to have a special intuition about their kids. This means you can’t get away with much. The good side is that if you’re far away from your mom and something bad happens, chances are the phone will ring and it will be her. Out of the blue.

  Uncle Geoff calls it the Mother Myth, the “myth” being that mothers know everything. They don’t, but they know plenty.

  I should have known we couldn’t get away with what we were doing in London.

  So when Mom asked me what was going on, I said, of course, “What do you mean?”

  And she said, “What do you mean, what do I mean? You know what I mean. In London. What were you and Lucas up to?”

  I took a sip of my coffee. “Isn’t a mother supposed to say, ‘Honey, Sweetie, Daughter That I Love, do you have something you want to tell me about?’”

  “Don’t push it.”

  I put my cup down. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but my body still thinks we’re in London, where it’s, like, two in the morning, and I have jet lag. Couldn’t we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I want you weak and tired and helpless so you can’t come up with any tall stories.”

  Here I was, sort of glad to have a chance to talk with my mother about everything, plus trying to figure out what I was better off covering up, and because of jet lag I felt like every movement my brain was making was in super slow motion.

  So I told her—very, very carefully. I started out with the man who’d been copying the painting of Lucretia at the Art Institute, and the “Go a-way” thing. And then I told her how we’d seen the same man in London, only disguised, probably doing something that had to do with art forgery.

  “How do you know it was the same guy?” she asked.

  “It was the way he said ‘Go a-way.’ I’ll never forget the way he sounded. That was about the meanest thing anybody ever said to me in my whole life up until then.”

  “You’ve lived a very sheltered life,” she said dryly.

  “Besides, Lucas recognized his face from Minneapolis, even though he was wearing a disguise.”

  “That photographic memory thing of hers,” she muttered.

  I told her that we visited the National Gallery every day for the next three days. I didn’t tell her that we spent all day every day doing it. I told her about the hands. I told her about a few of the disguises. I told her about our painting and drawing, and I pulled the painting of the hands out of the poster tube and showed it to her. I let her believe we made our copy of the big middle set of hands from what I saw when Gallery Guy reached over to get his paint that time.

  “Then,” I said, sitting back down and getting to the end of my story, “when we went back to the National Gallery with you, Gallery Guy was gone, which didn’t surprise us, but the guard in the Rembrandt room was also gone.” I hadn’t expected it, but saying this made me want to cry. “And we found out from the other guard that he’d been pushed out in front of a bus.”

  Now remember, I hadn’t had any sleep for something like nineteen hours, and it hadn’t exactly been a wonderful day, and all that. I think that was why I started to get tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop my lip from trembling.

  “Oh, honey!” Mom said, and put her arms around me in that embarrassing way parents have. I hadn’t planned on breaking into tears, but it happened at just the right time. With Mom fussing over me, I had that many more seconds to figure out what I was going to say next. I was getting to the trickiest part.

  “Well, I think it might have been our fault he got killed. I think,” I gulped, “I think we might have been partly responsible.” No way was I going to tell her about the snake.

  I straightened up. I finally had my story ready. “See, when I saw what was in the middle of Gallery Guy’s canvas, the guard, his name was Bert, saw me looking, and he might have told Gallery Guy, and if he did, then Gallery Guy might have thought Bert knew too much and . . . and bumped him off.”

  Mom thought about that for a minute, as if trying to figure out what I’d said. Remember, she had jet lag, too. “No wonder you were looking so miserable on the plane,” she said finally. “Kari, I don’t want to discount everything you’ve told me, but you don’t know for sure that Gallery Guy was doing anything wrong. Face it: it’s not likely that you and Lucas would have stumbled onto something like that. So it follows that Bert’s death probably has nothing at all to do with Gallery Guy.”

  Parents should learn that it’s exactly this kind of thing that keeps their kids from talking to them in the first place.

  I suppose the expression on my face must have shown my feelings, because she said quickly, “Besides, even if it’s all true, and even if Gallery Guy did push Bert under the bus, you don’t know that you had anything to do with it.”

  “No,” I said, blowing
my nose. “And I’m not sure that was how it happened. Mom, I’m sure that Gallery Guy is up to something illegal. But I’ve been thinking about how it was a museum guard that died, and it seems like there’s a chance that every time Gallery Guy spends a long time in one museum, he kills off anybody who sees him there who might recognize him later.” I couldn’t help thinking about Lucas on King’s Road.

  “So what you’re saying is, assuming he’s doing something fishy, he might have killed a guard at the Art Institute.”

  I nodded.

  I could tell that Mom hadn’t quite believed that Gallery Guy was doing anything illegal, and as for the business about him maybe having killed Bert—well, she didn’t buy that at all. You know how parents are when you try to tell them something.

  But the next day, to keep me from bugging her, she called somebody she knew who’d worked at the Art Institute for a long time. Yes, Mom’s friend said, she remembered that a little over a year ago one of the museum guards had died suddenly. It might have been around the time of the Lucretia exhibit. How did he die? Oh, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

  At the end of the call Mom just stood there for a second looking at the phone, then she turned to me and said, “Maybe you’re on to something.”

  It was all I could do not to tell her about the Jaguar.

  As for my punishment, it was pretty bad. I was grounded and lost phone and Internet privileges for three whole weeks (which, as it turned out, was almost exactly long enough to stop being mad at Lucas). I also didn’t get to buy one single new piece of clothing for the rest of the school year and the entire summer. I got to know the Salvation Army Thrift Store really well. It would have been way worse if I’d told Mom the whole truth, but I never did.

  22

  Love Lives of the Gleesome Threesome, and Trying to Do the Right Thing

  Lucas and I were back to being friends way before school was even out. Except for my joining the Y swim class, Lucas taking tennis lessons, and both of us playing soccer on the same team—oh, and a week with my dad—I don’t remember much about the nonmystery part of our lives over the rest of the school year and the first part of summer except what somebody with an incredibly twisted sense of humor might call our love lives.