The Mystery of the Third Lucretia

by Susan Runholt

  Lucas had liked this guy named Eric all semester, and finally, at the end of the year, he took her to the spring dance at her school and actually kissed her. More than once. Then, exactly eleven days later, he moved with his family to Austin, Texas. So much for Lucas.

  Then there was Mom. She tried Internet dating. She went out with fourteen guys in six weeks. She said almost all of them were nice, but she didn’t want a second date with any of them. After that she gave up looking because it took up too much time.

  As for me, a guy in my geography class that I’d been joking around with asked me to a dance, and I turned him down and got flak from absolutely everybody. See, I like him a lot, but only as a friend, and I thought if I went out with him he’d get the wrong idea. Well, Lucas thought he’d tell all the other guys that I didn’t accept dates, so nobody would ever ask me out. Mom and some of my school friends thought I should have given the relationship a chance. But all their talking didn’t change my mind. I still think I did the right thing.

  One good thing about our love lives. Bringing you up to date doesn’t take long.

  And now we move right from one depressing subject to another: the mystery.

  The best thing was that after we found out the Art Institute guard had probably been killed by Gallery Guy, I stopped feeling so guilty about Bert being murdered, even though I still felt bad about him dying. The problem was what to do about the things we were figuring out.

  Thanks to the fact that Mom’s a journalist, she managed to get the people at the Art Institute to tell her that the man who copied the Lucretias was registered as Reinhold Roemer of Essen, Germany, and the man who painted in the National Gallery was registered as Hans Velder of Antwerp, Belgium. Both men had used a passport for ID. Mom told Lucas and me that getting a false passport is easy, especially in big European cities, and they were probably forged.

  Next Mom wrote to Scotland Yard, which is like the headquarters of the Police Department in London, enclosed a copy of one of Lucas’s drawings of Gallery Guy, and told the whole story about Gallery Guy and the two guards. Scotland Yard wrote back to say, in a very polite way, that the death of Albert Robinson (that was Bert’s name) had been ruled an accident, the case was closed, and our letter didn’t give them enough of a reason to open it again.

  It was all incredibly frustrating. So much for trying to do the right thing.

  23

  Paris, and What We Saw in the Herald Tribune

  Lucas and I were eating dinner together one night in June when Mom told us she was going to take a trip to France and Italy later in the month, she’d already checked it out with Lucas’s parents, and Lucas and I would be going along.

  So by the last week in June we were in Paris, staying at a small hotel. Mom was busy with some fashion stories she had to do, and Lucas and I were hanging out. So far we’d been in Paris five days. It was Thursday. Tomorrow and Saturday Mom was doing a “Paris Looks,” and on Sunday we were leaving for Italy.

  Ah, Paris. My favorite city. The Luxembourg Gardens with its mothers pushing baby strollers and its patches of flowers. The Champs-Elysées with its busy traffic, sidewalk cafés, and beautiful trash cans. The Eiffel Tower in the evening, seen from a boat on the River Seine. The miniature Lady Liberty, reminding us where New York Harbor got its statue in the first place. French bread. Etcetera, etcetera.

  We’d walked around the part of town where all the really expensive stores are. We’d been to the Louvre, the world’s biggest museum, where we made a special trip to look at the Rembrandt paintings, and to the Musée D’Orsay, a museum where they have thousands of works by Impressionist painters like Renoir and Monet. We’d climbed to the very, very top of Notre-Dame Cathedral. One night I ordered shrimp and it came with the all the heads still on, the little dead eyes looking straight at me.

  Thursday morning we were taking it easy, lingering over our breakfasts, as they say. For breakfast in a Paris hotel you usually get your choice of the very best café au lait in the entire world—I like it even without whipped cream and sprinkles—tea, or hot chocolate, plus croissants and little loaves of French bread still warm from the bakery, and butter and jam. You can’t imagine how good it is until you taste it.

  So there I was, drinking the last of my café au lait and eating my bread and writing in my journal. This was a whole new journal book for me because I’d completely filled up my other one when we took our trip to London.

  Lucas was eating her croissants and drinking her hot chocolate. She’d finished what she was writing. She always writes so little that she was still using the same blank book Mom gave her before our first trip. Now she was reading the International Herald Tribune, which is like the main newspaper for Americans living and traveling abroad. It has news from all over Europe and the world, and lots of news from the United States.

  Suddenly she said, “Hey, here’s something about Grandma Stickney.”

  Lucas turned the newspaper my way, and on the front page I saw a picture of a huge crowd of women standing in front of a big building. Most of the women were waving banners in a lot of different languages. The caption under the picture said, “More than 80,000 women gather in Geneva to call attention to women’s rights in the developing world.”

  After I’d seen the picture, Lucas read, “‘Women from more than ninety nations are gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, this week to draft a resolution urging greater international attention to the issue of women’s rights in developing nations.’

  “Blah blah blah, it goes on about Africa and the Middle East,” Lucas continued, “then it gets to the part about Grandma Stickney.

  “‘Margaret O’Hara Stickney,’” she read, “‘of Saint Paul, Minnesota, spokesperson for the group International Women United, said, “The size and energy of this gathering is intended to bring attention to the continuing problem of inequality between the sexes, especially in developing countries.” ’ Blah blah blah. ‘O’Hara is among a dozen women selected to present the completed resolution to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.’”

  “Cool,” I said. “The United Nations! That’s awesome.”

  “It’s not the first time she’s spoken at the United Nations,” Lucas said quite casually, not even looking up, as if it was something everybody did once a month or so. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about this United Nations thing before, and I figured I’d ask her about it as soon as she finished the article. Her family is really something.

  “Let’s see,” she continued, “it goes on talking about the resolution they’re writing, and the story is continued on page five. . . .” She leafed through the newspaper. “Okay, here’s—”

  She broke off and just stared at the newspaper for a minute, and I swear, her face actually turned white right in front of my very eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I thought it was something awful about Grandma Stickney.

  “Ho . . . ly . . . shmack,” she said, very quietly and very slowly, and she folded the page and handed it to me.

  There, at the top of page three, was a headline that said, PAINTING BY REMBRANDT DISCOVERED IN AMSTERDAM CANAL HOUSE, and underneath, in a smaller headline, Rijksmuseum Officials Verify Art Discovery of the Century.

  Beneath that was a big photo of the new Rembrandt painting that had been found. It was a picture of a woman I recognized as the Lucretia I’d seen in the other paintings, lying on a bed, dead, with three men and a woman around her. At the foot of the bed was a little black and white dog. There were lots of pillows and messy sheets. The woman was wearing a loose blouse trimmed with gold lace covered up by a gold velvet vestlike thing partly fastened up the front.

  And here was the most interesting thing. The woman’s hands lay on her stomach, the fingers intertwined.

  We’d seen those hands before. We’d painted those hands.

  The caption beneath the picture said, “Rembrandt’s Third Lucretia.”

  24

  What the Story Said, and Manipulating
Mother

  The story and picture took up most of the page. Here was the deal.

  There was this guy named Willem Mannefeldt who’d died six months before, when he was sixty-seven years old. The Mannefeldt family had made a lot of money back in the seventeenth century selling tulips, and the Mannefeldt company was still selling tulips all over the world. Willem was the head of the company, so he was very rich. He had two children by a previous marriage who inherited his part of the business and most of his money. His third wife, Marianne, who was thirty-two, inherited his house and everything in it.

  The paper called the house “one of Amsterdam’s finest residences.” It was on the “exclusive” Herengracht, which is Dutch for Gentlemen’s Canal. (By the way, you already know that Amsterdam is in the country called the Netherlands. Well, the Netherlands is also called Holland, and their language is Dutch. Confusing, I know, but that’s the way it is.)

  Earlier in the summer, Marianne had decided to sell the house and move to the south of France, so she started having people come in and look over everything in the house to tell her how much it was worth.

  They found a bunch of old paintings, which they sent out to an art expert. He took them all out of their frames to look at them, and on the back of this one big, ugly painting that had been in the attic, he found something he thought was a painting by Rembrandt.

  When this guy told Marianne what he’d discovered, she took it to the Rijksmuseum to have them examine it. (I found out later that Rijksmuseum means “National Museum” in Dutch, and that Rijks rhymes with yikes.) A guy there, whose name was Jacob Hannekroot, was a world-famous expert on paintings by Rembrandt. He examined it with all sorts of tests of how old the paint and the canvas were and other things, and finally he said it was the real thing.

  Marianne said the painting should stay in the Netherlands, so she sold it to the Rijksmuseum for what they called an “undisclosed sum.” Experts thought the museum probably paid more than twenty million dollars for it.

  According to the paper, the newly discovered painting finished off the story of Lucretia. The article told about the Lucretia legend, and about the other two paintings of her. They even mentioned the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Third Lucretia showed her husband, her father, a female servant, and an unidentified man standing around Lucretia after she died and her body was put on her bed.

  The article said that this painting was quite different from the first two, because instead of being “portrait” shaped, which means longer up and down than wide, this one was “landscape” shaped, or horizontal. It also said that this one had what they called “conventional symbolic elements,” including the little dog, a mirror, and a candle in the background. Mostly Rembrandt didn’t include a lot of symbols in his paintings, so this was unusual for him.

  At the end, the story said the painting would be on special display at the Rijksmuseum through October, shown as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

  “We have got to get to Amsterdam,” I said to Lucas.

  “Right away.”

  “Without going to Italy.”

  “Absolutely,” Lucas answered. Then we both were quiet while we broke off little pieces of bread and croissants and stared at the walls of the hotel breakfast room, thinking.

  By lunchtime we had a plan. We were meeting Mom at a little park in a neighborhood called the Latin Quarter. That whole part of town is covered with tourists in early July, and there are all kinds of food stands where you can buy a good-tasting lunch that doesn’t cost a billion bucks. Food in Paris restaurants is unbelievably expensive, and paying for me to go along on her trips meant Mom was always traveling on a tight budget.

  Anyway, I saw Mom coming, and when she got up to us, before we even had a chance to say hello, I said, “Mom, did you see the Herald Tribune today?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Should I have?”

  Lucas and I smiled at each other. “You will not believe what we have to show you.”

  “Okay, show me,” she said.

  “Not until we have our food and sit down,” Lucas said. The paper was in her backpack.

  “Hmmm,” Mom said. “Am I going to like it?”

  I looked at Lucas. “I’m not sure like is the right word. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.”

  We walked through the narrow, crooked streets to our favorite Greek food stand, and came back to the park with huge gyro sandwiches and fries and bottles of mineral water.

  When we sat down, Lucas, who had the newspaper in her hand already opened up to the right page, handed it to Mom. Mom put it in her lap and, holding her sandwich in both hands, turned aside to take a bite so she wouldn’t drip yogurt sauce on the story. When she turned back and started reading, it took about three seconds before her mouth stopped chewing. Still with her eyes on the page, she reached for her bottle of water, took a drink, and swallowed.

  At last she looked up at us and opened her mouth as if to say something. While she was still trying to figure out what to say, Lucas put her travel journal on top of the newspaper, right next to the picture of the Third Lucretia. The journal was open to the page where Lucas had drawn the hands we’d seen in the middle of Gallery Guy’s canvas.

  Lucas pointed at the drawing in the journal. “You saw the painting we did of the hands. Well, here’s a drawing I made of them while Kari was busy doing the painting.”

  You didn’t have to be an art expert to see that the hands were exactly the same as the hands of the dead woman in the Third Lucretia.

  Mom looked back and forth at the two of us again, still couldn’t think of anything to say, and turned back to finish reading the article.

  Finally, when she’d finished, she put down the paper and said, “Good Lord. So what he did was go to Minneapolis to get Lucretia’s face right. . . .”

  “Mm-hmm,” Lucas said, and I nodded.

  “And then he went to London to work on the hands.”

  “Exactly,” Lucas said.

  “And who knows what other museums he went to for the other parts,” I added.

  “This is very, very big stuff you two have gotten yourselves into.”

  I said, “Mom, we’ve got to go to Amsterdam.”

  She looked at me for a minute. “I know you’d love to see that painting—so would I, for that matter—but I have an assignment in Italy to complete. Besides, exactly what would we do in Amsterdam?”

  “Lucas and I talked about this, and here’s what we’re thinking. There’s got to be something more going on than just what’s in the newspaper. I mean, how did Gallery Guy’s forged painting get into that house on the Heren . . . Heren . . .”

  “Herengracht?” Mom said.

  “Yeah. Whatever. And if Gallery Guy was doing this for the money, which it makes sense is why he was doing it, then what good does it do him if the Rijksmuseum gives all those millions of dollars to Marianne what’s-her-name?”

  “Yeah,” Lucas piped up. “And if the Rijksmuseum has these experts, how come they couldn’t tell the difference between a real Rembrandt and a fake? Face it, there’s no way we’re going to convince anybody that Gallery Guy forged that painting if we don’t know any more about all this stuff than we can figure out from sitting here reading the newspaper.”

  “At least we could go to the museum and see the painting,” I said. “And we think they’ll have lots of information in the museum about finding the painting. Museums always do that kind of thing.”

  “I suppose you have a point,” Mom said, “but The Scene is expecting me to cover the fashion collections in Milan. I can’t just up and change my plans.”

  “I’m sure you could come up with stories in Amsterdam that are as good as the ones you’re planning to do in Italy,” I said.

  “Besides,” Lucas added, “if we have to, we could maybe extend the trip for a few days. Go to Amsterdam first, and go to Milan after that.”

  It was time for our big ending. I started. “Mom, ever since I can remember, you’ve want
ed to write for one of those intellectual magazines you think are so cool. The ones we always have around the house. Think of it. You said yourself, this Lucretia business is big stuff. This is your chance, Mom.”

  “They’d love this story!” Lucas chimed in. “Imagine the headline.” She looked up and gestured into the air, as if she were seeing the headline written there. “They’d call it, like, ‘How I Helped Two Teenage Girls Uncover the Art Rip-Off of the Century.’”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I concluded. “All we have to do is go to Amsterdam, where we can follow all this up and prove the Third Lucretia is a fake. Then you’ll be able to write all about it and sell the story for really big money to The Atlantic, or Harper’s, or Vanity Fair.”

  Mom had put her gyro sandwich down on the bench next to her after that first bite. Now she picked it back up, took another bite, chewed and swallowed, all the time staring off into space like she was thinking. Then she took a third bite, and a fourth, still staring and thinking. First I figured she was thinking of travel schedules. Then, because it was taking so long, I thought she was trying to figure out how Gallery Guy had pulled off the forgery, or what to tell The Scene about not going to Italy.

  But finally, when she spoke, what she said was, “Not to mention The New Yorker.”

  25

  A Train Ride, Amsterdam, and My First Big Mistake

  I overheard the conversation Mom had with her boss at The Scene. She told them she’d had an e-mail from a friend who was covering the fashion shows in Italy, and that this year’s designs were either boring or so far-out no teenager would go near them. Mom told the editors she thought Scene readers would be more interested in a story about this hot young Dutch designer who had a new line of clothes for teenagers that was going to be in the department stores beginning in the fall.