Finding the Forger

by Libby Sternberg

  “Have they ever been missing? Do you know if she’s ever complained about losing them?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said, her voice getting high and excited. “But I can find out. I can ask her this week.”

  “Okay, that’s a good start. If we find out her keys went missing at some point, we know Neville had a chance to grab them when he was there with his dad.”

  With that settled, we headed for the library to make other plans.

  “Oh, darn,” Sarah said before we went in. “Forgot my notebook—it’s got all the ideas I wrote down for the party. And my notes for my project. It’s in the car.”

  I waited for her at the door, but when she got to her car, she didn’t grab the notebook. Instead, she waved me over.

  “What?” I asked, rubbing my arms. It was getting colder and I was wearing only a sweater. No way would I wear that fashion mistake parka again—even if I was on the North Pole.

  “Neville! I just saw him go by.”

  Uh-oh. First Hector, now Neville. I didn’t even need to ask. I hopped into the car as Sarah slid behind the wheel and turned on the engine.

  “Get in!” She was already putting the car into gear as I closed my door and started buckling my seat belt.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Following him!” She pointed straight ahead. Neville was driving his father’s big silver Mercedes.

  “He’ll see us,” I said, remembering Connie’s previous instructions about needing two cars to do a good surveillance on wheels.

  “Nuh-uh. Wait and see.” Sarah let Neville take off down the road. When he was turning onto Mulberry, she took off, not at racing speed, but at a good clip all the same. But it didn’t take long before Neville turned—a wide left onto Charles that almost put him into the left lane facing oncoming traffic. Boy, he still hadn’t gotten used to this driving on the right thing.

  Sarah didn’t follow right behind him. Instead, she ducked onto a small street, Hamilton, then wove back onto Charles, then back again. I was getting seasick from all the turns. But darn if she wasn’t good at this—far better than Connie, who was supposed to be the professional. After several loops and turnbacks, it was clear where Neville was headed— toward the museum!

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I blurted out.

  “Yup.” She pressed down on the accelerator and zipped up and over to St. Martin’s Drive, looping behind the Hopkins campus. We couldn’t see Neville’s car any longer, but since we were both sure we knew where he was headed, it didn’t matter.

  And sure enough, when we did get to the museum, his car was parked in the lot with no Neville to be seen. Sarah made sure we were out of sight, parking her distinctive blue Olds two blocks from the museum.

  “Let me go see what’s happening,” I volunteered.

  “Not without me!” She undid her seatbelt at the same time I did, and we exited the car together. First, we walked casually up to the broad steps to the front of the museum. There we stopped. To go farther meant traversing an open sidewalk. If Neville returned, he would see us. There were a few Saturday museum-goers around, but not enough to constitute a crowd in which we could get lost.

  “Come on. Let’s make a run for it.” Sarah rushed out into the open, sprinting past the steps. I followed, huffing and puffing when we reached the other side.

  “Have you considered going out for track and field?” I said between gulps of breath.

  “Shh … There he is.” From our hiding place behind some shrubs, she pointed. Neville was coming out of the museum. And in his hand was a flat, dark parcel—just the kind of thing you’d put a painting in. To make matters even more conclusive, he was hurrying, looking both right and left as if afraid of being spotted. The museum parking lot was crowded. Perfect—snatch something when lots of people are around, when guards are keeping an eye on shady-looking folks. Not folks like Neville, a son of a board member, well-dressed, polite …

  Okay, I admit it—I was excited. We had him red-handed. Hector was off scot-free now. All we needed to do was get the police involved.

  “He’s leaving,” Sarah whispered.

  “We should call the police,” I said. “Or at least Connie.”

  “Don’t have a phone, do you?” asked Sarah.

  “Nope.” We’re a one-cell family, not counting Connie’s business cell phone. And Mom had the Balducci mobile.

  “Besides,” Sarah said, “we don’t know what he has. Come on. We’ve to get back to the car.” As soon as we were sure Neville was in his vehicle and not looking, we did the sprint routine again, retracing our steps back to Sarah’s car. In a few seconds, we were on the road again, this time headed toward Charles going north, several blocks behind Neville’s car. It was starting to rain, a soft cold drizzle that blurred the windshield. Sarah’s wipers didn’t do too great a job, either, and they made such a horrible racket I was afraid Neville would look back to see what all the noise was about.

  At 39th Street, Neville turned right, heading into the confines of Guilford. He was headed home.

  “Maybe we should just pull over and call the police now,” Sarah said, biting her lower lip.

  “No, you were right before,” I said, my brain cells kicking into gear. “We don’t know for sure what he has. We have to unmask him ourselves. Come on. Just a little while longer.”

  Sarah followed at a discreet distance until we turned into a dark, shaded drive. Uh-oh. A private drive. Neville’s drive. Up ahead, Neville’s car disappeared behind lush evergreens. Sarah slowed to a snail’s pace. As we rounded a curve, we saw his house, big and mansion-like, its black-shuttered windows looking like closed eyes.

  “No farther.” Sarah stopped and put the car into reverse. “We’ll go back to the street and do the rest of this on foot.” Looking over her shoulder, she backed the car up the drive.

  And backed it. And backed it. Until she came to the wrought iron gate.

  Yup. A wrought iron gate. It had been open—obviously—when we followed Neville in. Now it was closed. Must have been one of those automatic gates, and Neville had pushed the button to close it once he was home. We both stared at it in panic.

  “What do we do now?” I whispered, as if Neville could hear us.

  Speaking of Neville …

  “Hullo, ladies, nice of you to visit!” He stood, umbrella in hand, right outside my window.

  I shrieked. Sarah jumped off her seat.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you. Come in, come in. Just having a spot of tea. Join me, why don’t you?” Neville gestured to the house and I looked at Sarah. She shrugged and we both got out.

  To stay under the umbrella, we leaned into either side of Neville, and we walked to the huge house like the three stooges.

  “Perfect timing, too,” he said with good cheer. “I just bought my father the sweetest gift and I want to show it to you—a signed print! Just picked it up at the museum gift shop! You can tell me what you think.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  DESPITE THE FACT that tailing Neville turned up diddly, I wasn’t ready to scratch him off the suspect list. If anything, our little visit with him made me even more convinced he was the one. During tea-time with him, I asked him more about his mother. He opened up a lot about her and talked virtually nonstop about how talented she was, what kinds of art she handled—abstract expressionism!—and how awfully hard she worked. He told us her birthday was coming up and he was going to go shopping the next day for something really “grand.” Not only that, he revealed that he was lonely for home and was thinking of talking to his father about letting him go back to London! Sarah and I exchanged a couple of wide-eyed looks that clearly communicated the following:

  Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

  Oh yeah. This guy would go to any lengths to help his mother.

  And vamoose out of town after the misdeed is done.

  After Sarah and I managed to escape the Witherspoon estate, she dropped me home just in time for din
ner. Mom cooks on the weekend, and I don’t like to miss her terrific meals. I managed to come in the door just as she was putting chicken and dumplings on the table—real dumplings she made herself.

  I pretty much snarfed down my meal in silence. It was just Mom, Connie, and me because Tony was working. And since Connie was always quiet on Saturday nights—probably because that’s when she felt the need to have her own place the most—dinner conversation once again consisted solely of sentences that began with “Pass the …”

  That was until the end, when Mom pushed back her chair and looked at us both with the “Tasking Eye,” which is the look she gets when she’s about to tell us to do something.

  “You’re up,” she said looking at each of us. “And the dishwasher hasn’t been unloaded yet.” With that, she left the room.

  I looked at Connie. “I’ll load if you do pots and pans.”

  “Then you’re unloading, too.”

  “That goes with pots and pans.”

  “Nope. Dishwasher duty is dishwasher duty.”

  She got up to leave. “Call me when you’re done.”

  “Connie! Wait a minute!” I stood and started scraping plates. “I want to tell you a few things I found out about Neville today.”

  That did the trick. She lingered by the door.

  “Probably nothing I don’t already know,” she said.

  “Oh, really? Like the fact that Neville’s father has a Bargenstahler in his home here?” I went to the dishwasher and opened the door. “Oh dear. This will take me so long to do.” I looked up at her, all sweetness and light. “But if I had help, then I could tell you more quickly what I know.”

  Connie snorted. “You can tell me while you work.”

  “Nuh-uh. Want to focus on the dishes first.”

  Connie looked at her watch. She probably had a date. With a groan, she trudged to the dishwasher and began unloading it.

  “Okay, give. And it better be good.”

  So I told her about the night at Neville’s party, about the paintings, about Neville’s “Mummy” and her failed art career, and about following Neville earlier that day. I timed the whole story perfectly, too, so that the last syllable was tumbling from my mouth just when Connie was placing the last tumbler in the cabinets.

  “That’s odd.” She twisted her mouth to one side. “Bertrand never mentioned anything to me about his wife. Or, for that matter, about owning a Bargenstahler.”

  “When were you talking to him?” Now that the dishwasher was empty, I began to do the loading routine.

  “Just yesterday. I had a meeting to go over what the firm expects of contractors, etc.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And we talked about the museum case. I specifically mentioned the Bargenstahler.”

  “Not the stuff about one possibly being in Sarah’s car!”

  “No, not that. I was just talking about how that kind of art was difficult to appreciate. And he agreed with me.”

  “Maybe he was being polite.”

  “No. He was pretty fired up about it. He even quoted Tom Stoppard to me. Said ‘modern art is imagination without skill.’ It was like a little art lecture.”

  “Yeah, but still … he could just be showing off how much he knows and all.”

  “I guess. But he sits on the museum’s board, for crying out loud. I thought it was a little odd at the time, but now …” She glanced at the clock above the sink. “Look, I gotta run. Thanks!”

  And before I’d even had a chance to tell her how Sarah was going to snoop around Fawn Dexter to find out if her keys had ever been missing at work, Connie was off to DateLand.

  I didn’t realize what a juicy tidbit I’d provided my sister until the next day, when she offered to go Christmas shopping with me after church.

  You have to understand—Connie wouldn’t offer to do something like that unless she was feeling really grateful or sympathetic. So she must have really appreciated my scoop on the Witherspoon household and hoped to get a little more. We headed for the mall around noon.

  And you know what? We actually had a good time. Sometimes it works out that way with siblings—they’re fun to be around. We picked out a gift for Mom—a gift certificate at Hecht’s. Yeah, it sounds pretty boring, but when I look back at all the gifts I’ve given Mom over the years, I cringe with embarrassment—a huge artificial orchid pin (that she actually wore to church one Sunday), an exercise video, a fuzzy key chain, bright orange gloves, and a silk scarf that looked like it had been an awning in a previous life. Nope, she’d get a lot of use out of a gift certificate, especially if Connie and I pooled our money. (Tony was on his own.)

  And with Connie’s help, I also managed to find a gift for Doug that I think struck the right tone. Since Doug will be doing the college-search routine before long, I bought him a “College Survival Guide” and a pair of really cool leather driving gloves. Even if he isn’t a cool driver, he can at least look like one, right?

  So I was feeling pretty happy and organized when we decided to head to the Food Court for a snack.

  When we sat down, Connie started asking me more about the case, and even asked me for my opinion! I was in heaven. That summer job was looking more and more like a real possibility. So, I again went over everything I had learned, thinking of even more details from my afternoon with Neville.

  “The only problem is, we can’t figure out how Neville would have gotten the keys to the room holding the security tapes,” I said. “Sarah’s going to ask Fawn if her keys were missing recently.”

  “They were,” Connie said. “I already asked a bunch of administrators. Fawn misplaced her keys a couple weeks ago and had to have duplicates made.”

  A shiver went through me. It suddenly hit me—I could actually be right. It happened so rarely that it felt, well, cosmic.

  “Did the keys ever turn up?”

  Connie nodded over her straw, sipping at her double mocha chocolate espresso cappuccino ice. “Yes. They were in her desk drawer, right where she left them.”

  “Except they weren’t there when she was looking for them,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “Right.”

  “But how could Neville—I mean, was he at the museum a lot?”

  “From what I can tell, he and his dad are together a lot. He could easily have pocketed the keys when he was there with Bertrand.” Connie smiled at me. “You know, you might have solved this case, Bianca.”

  Wow. Did I hear that right? Had my sister just told me I had solved one of her cases? I gulped and spluttered.

  Well, not really. But I did get a goofy grin on my face.

  “What do you do now?” I asked.

  “I’ll check out the keys stuff and see when Neville was around. I’ll look into his mother’s background a little more. Into Neville’s—”

  All of a sudden, I remembered something Neville had said. “He might be leaving town,” I blurted. “He said he’s lonely.”

  Connie’s smiled faded. “Crap. That means we have to hurry this up.”

  “Aren’t the police involved?”

  “They’re moving a bit slowly—playing catch-up.”

  “This pretty much clears Hector, though, don’t you think?”

  “It could.”

  We lapsed into happy silence, and I was about to ask Connie if she could call Fawn that afternoon to find out about Neville’s presence at the museum, when I looked over and saw—Neville himself!

  He was sitting alone at a table, with a big brown shopping bag—the kind with rope handles. He had said he was going to go shopping for a birthday gift for his mother, and this mall was the best place to do that.

  But he looked kind of … funny. Funny as in weird. He wasn’t eating or drinking anything. He was just kind of staring at his hands and frowning, with this pasty look on his face like he was going to be sick. In fact, my first thought was that he had a hangover.

  “Look, there’s Neville,” I said to Connie.

  She turned and looked to where I�
��d gestured.

  “Maybe you should go say hi.”

  “What!?” Now that Neville was the suspect, I was suddenly afraid to talk to him.

  “Well, if you want to do this Private Eye thing, you have to gather information. You could talk to him about visiting the museum with his father.”

  Okay, that was enough for me. After all, my goal was to get a job with Connie during the summer. As far as I was concerned, this was an “assignment,” or at the very least a test of my skills. I looked longingly at my drink, took a quick sip for courage, and headed Neville’s way.

  He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice me until I was right on top of him. And instead of his usual sloppy come-on grin, he looked startled, even unhappy that I’d stopped by.

  “What are you shopping for?” I asked, pointing to his bag.

  He grabbed at it and closed it tightly. “Nothing! Nothing! I mean, I’m returning something. Didn’t fit. A shirt. That’s all.” Then, as if he realized just how lame that sounded—after all, that was an awfully big bag for a single shirt, and he’d told me already he was going to search out a gift for his mother—he switched on his charming light and smiled from ear to ear. “How about you?”

  “Christmas shopping with my sister.” I gestured toward Connie, who waggled her hands in the air when she saw us look her way.

  “Oh, I see.”

  I hadn’t known Neville all that long, but I did know that the normal thing for him to say at that point was “why don’t you join me?” Or at least a “want to do something together?” After all, we already knew the guy was lonely and desperately trying to make friends.

  Instead of those offers, however, he remained nervously silent, even biting his bottom lip and tapping his fingers on the table. “You know, I really must be off. Forgot I was supposed to meet my father. Awfully nice to run into you.” He stood, grabbed his bag, and left.

  When I went back to Connie and explained the conversation to her, she didn’t say anything at first.

  “A shirt, huh?” she eventually asked. “I don’t think so.”