Pieces and Players

by Blue Balliett

  “She stays in Chicago!” Petra shrieked, hugging Zoomy and knocking his glasses sideways.

  “And whoever rented that room is explaining the crime!” Early yodeled. The others had never heard her so loud. “It’s a double coded message, coded by the Farmer fight and the city itself!”

  “Now that’s good thinking,” Calder agreed happily.

  “This makes us rock stars!” Tommy whooped, hopping to his feet and pretending he was singing into a microphone. Calder elbowed him and he flopped back down on the floor.

  “We’re loud enough, that’s for sure.” Petra giggled.

  As if on cue, there was a light tapping on the attic door, followed by a scritch-scritch.

  “Scaz,” Petra muttered. “Sorry about the noise,” she said as she opened the door.

  Eagle stood outside while Ratty squeezed through, sniffing to be sure there weren’t any leftover sardines.

  “May I come in?” Eagle asked simply. “I just heard your latest Fine Arts deduction, and can’t pretend I didn’t!”

  Zoomy scratched Ratty behind the ears. “Were you listening through his collar all week?” he asked abruptly.

  Eagle sat down. “Come here, Rat-a-tat,” he ordered. As Ratty leaned happily against his master’s knee, Eagle unbuckled the collar and passed it around. “That thick part is a homing device that feeds the animal’s location to a cell phone, nothing more.” Eagle looked around at the group and shrugged. “Sorry if I scared you.”

  “So how did you know we made any discoveries at the Fine Arts?” Calder asked. “And how do we know we can trust you?”

  “How does anyone trust anyone else in this world?” Eagle asked pleasantly. “It’s always hard to tell a plain old gesture from what’s meaningful, hard to separate plain old errands from spy missions, and hard to separate overhearing from eavesdropping. Let’s face it: People are hard to decode. Nursery rhymes, too. But ghosts … now, things are different once you’ve died, don’t you think?”

  “We wouldn’t know,” Petra said, biting her lip. “How do you know?”

  “Well, some of it is dreams,” Eagle said, looking out the window.

  “We’ve had some crazy dreams, too,” Calder said. “All of us. About the art.”

  “I saw that,” Eagle said. “From the notes you left on the table here. That’s partly why I thought it’d be worthwhile to take all of you to the Farmer and risk an arrest.”

  “So you spied on us!” Petra said.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Eagle murmured. “I took advantage of an opportunity. As, I feel sure, all of you did while you were alone in the Fine Arts yesterday. My mother is a great one for providing opportunities. She loved what your grandma said to you yesterday, Zoomy. Louise Coffin Sharpe is truly a grape, even if she’s wrinkly enough to be a raisin. She’s believed all along that you kids could untangle what’s going on, and you have.”

  “Mostly,” Tommy blurted. “We still don’t have the loot.”

  “But you’ve communicated with the art, then with Mrs. Farmer, and now you’ve got me. I guess this is where I have to share an odd twist of fate. Perhaps twist is the wrong word — I think it may be more inevitable than that, like the bounce of sound that happens when you clap your hands in a tunnel.”

  All eyes were on Eagle. Zoomy propped his elbows on the table, rested his chin in his hands, and pushed his glasses tightly against his face with both pinkies. Petra mouthed, “Bounce of sound,” as if practicing it.

  As Eagle stroked Ratty’s head with each statement, the cat purred in agreement, blinking his green eyes as if to say, See? Simple!

  “I’ll start with my birth. Born on St. Patrick’s Day, March seventeenth, thirty-one years ago. My natural mother’s name was Rose Devlin, and she listed no father on my birth certificate. I’m told she died when I was a few weeks old. The rest of my childhood was spent in an orphanage.”

  “Did they read Mother Goose to you?” Early interrupted.

  “The ladies in there knew most of those songs by heart and sang them to us as bedtime lullabies. It seems like I’ve been comfortable with the book all my life. Plus, if you’re always wondering who you really are in the world, you pay attention to all clues, and I noticed that Mother Goose is full of people and animals with mysterious messages. I mean, the jingles kind of fit lots of situations in life.”

  “Yeah.” Petra nodded. “We see that. Blackbirds, cats, bees, Jack and Jill’s pails, maybe even donkeys …”

  Tommy frowned.

  “The rhymes have a way of following the truth,” Eagle went on. “Anyway, I always felt at home in the Farmer Museum, after being taken there for a school visit. As soon as I reached my teens and was allowed to go off on my own, that’s where I headed — and that’s where I met Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe. Long story short, we talked about our shared love for Vermeer. They adopted me at age eighteen and sent me right off to school, as you’ve probably heard. An amazing gift! And then, when I was nineteen, Leland Sharpe was killed. I went on to finish college, supported by Mrs. Sharpe, and launch my art handling and storage business in New York.

  “All was smooth until two years ago, when the trustees at the Farmer began to fight. Their struggle was front and center in the art world: What to do with a priceless collection that was hidden away in a decaying mansion in an out-of-the-way part of Chicago? Mrs. Farmer’s will stipulated that the art remain there forever, but her trust no longer covered all the expenses, and the place cried out for modernization. The museum itself was only open two days a week, and there were drafts and leaks. Security was inadequate. The situation was clearly an emergency.

  “And then, as you know, the National Gallery of Art stepped in with an amazing offer.

  “The seven trustees at the Farmer began tearing each other’s throats out over the possibility of a move to Washington, D.C., and that was when my mother and I had a terrible fight. She believed the art should go. I believed it must never leave its Chicago home, as did William Swift Chase. I didn’t know why, but it felt so wrong, like a betrayal. I believed with all my heart that anything possible should be done to prevent a move. My mother can be determined, as I’m sure you all know by now, and I can be stubborn, too. She ordered me not to communicate with her until I was ready to support the move, until I’d come to my senses. Shortly after that, she met Isabel Hussey, and they became close friends. That’s why Isabel hadn’t heard about me and vice versa before last week — hurtful but understandable, as my mother refused to discuss the Farmer situation with Isabel, and she and I weren’t speaking.

  “And then, when the theft happened on my birthday, she called me and apologized. She asked me to come and stay for a while, with Rat-a-tat, and see what could be done.

  “After William Chase died a few days ago, I’m sure you’ve heard that the trustees were surprised to discover that he left an unexpected amount of money for repairs but not enough to get the museum permanently out of trouble. He also left my adoptive mother a note.

  “In that note was an extraordinary request. He hoped that she could find his son. He confessed that he had had an unwanted child thirty-one years ago, on March seventeenth. The mother’s name was Rose Devlin McDonald — I know, this came as a complete shock — and he’d allowed her to leave him without offering support of any kind. He said he’d heard the mother had died shortly after the child was born, and he now deeply regretted having been so uncaring and not having tried harder to find his boy. Searching orphanages under the name McDonald, he never came up with a child whose age fit, and he assumed Rose McDonald had left me with family or friends. McDonald, of course, is a very common name, and Mr. Chase had no leads. Never having married, he’d lived alone for decades by the time he had that final stroke the other night. If found, this boy was, at the discretion of the trustees, to take the place of William Chase in running the Farmer Museum.”

  The kids gasped.

  “Scaz, you’re a Chase! And a big cheese in the art world now!” Zoomy offered a fist, which
Eagle bumped.

  “You’ll be famous!” Tommy added, forgetting to sulk about donkeys.

  “This is sad plus happy, all at the same time,” Early said. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet your dad.”

  “It’s so crazy that you always felt at home in the museum, and even connected to Mrs. Farmer …” Calder, unused to absorbing big news without his pentominoes, fished madly in his pocket.

  “You’re family, like the people in her art!” Petra looked genuinely happy. “That’s such a great match!”

  Eagle looked at Ratty and said nothing for a few seconds. “I’m not sure what I am or how I feel about the news, to tell you the truth. My mother, Ms. Hussey, and I are all reeling; there’s a lot to sort out. Is there any relevance to the theft happening on my birthday? And how odd is it that a piece of art in the Farmer Museum, the Vermeer, brought me together with friends of my birth father, who then brought me even closer to the art?

  “After sharing this life-changing letter with me last night, my mother insisted we go over to the Chase mansion and hunt for clues. I wandered around studying family faces and trying to absorb more strange echoes, among them the fact that I do look like William Chase, who did look quite a bit like that Rembrandt self-portrait as a young man. So if I’d known what to see, I would have recognized that portrait as a key that could have unlocked the mystery of who I am.”

  “Awesome,” Zoomy said.

  “While I looked through the pictures, my mother poked around in William Chase’s desk and found a handful of keys. Some were house keys, others car or file cabinet keys — and then there was one that had FA stamped on it, a heavy, brass one that was set apart in a new plastic bag.

  “ ‘F-A!’ my mother exclaimed, and the pieces began to fall into place. She described your excitement after exploring the Fine Arts on your own, earlier in the day. We realized that you five were already one step ahead of us.”

  “And the key?” Calder asked.

  “As if we know what to do with it,” Petra said quickly, not sure yet how much they should reveal.

  Eagle held up his hand. “Bear with me,” he said quietly. “I’m not quite done. My mother, after finding this oddly marked key, wondered if William Chase had somehow intercepted the thieves and been forced to take charge of the stolen art as well as hold on to the storage key. She wondered if he’d been framed or blackmailed just before his stroke happened, but that hardly made sense. Why would someone go to the trouble of stealing the art and then make it look as though Mrs. Farmer’s great-nephew had stolen it? And if so, why wouldn’t he call the police immediately?”

  The room was quiet for a moment, excepting the sound of Ratty cleaning his whiskers.

  “So what were you doing in the Fine Arts Building yesterday afternoon?” Early asked. “Before Mrs. Sharpe found the key?”

  “I’d been listening in on some of the kids with black jackets, the ones who’re all over Hyde Park, and heard them mentioning a meeting in the Fine Arts. Stupidly, I didn’t put it together with William Chase’s last F-A, but I did know those kids seemed to be following all of us around, and especially after our arrest of the night before, I was suspicious. I thought maybe one of them had seen us sneak into the Farmer, and called the police.”

  “Oh,” breathed Petra. “So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that you were at the Fine Arts yesterday, but more a getting-pulled-in-the-same-direction.”

  “Yeah, none of us knew we were going there, either, it just happened,” Tommy blurted. “Because of those olives at the Blackstone Hotel.”

  “I was surprised that you were all there,” Eagle said. “So here’s where the picture begins to sharpen. I don’t take credit for how this has fallen into forms we can read, far from it — there’s a definite force at work here, one that has affected us all. I must admit: I had my ear to your door just now — forgive me, please! — and heard ‘Sally Stayz 619,’ and was so excited I almost burst in. After a few seconds of what-should-I-do, I realized you’d just think I was on the wrong side if you didn’t have more background.

  “Now you’ve heard it, I can say what I’ve been thinking: You five are brilliant! How did you get the name Sally Stayz? Speaking of a pull, I pulled every string I could find yesterday afternoon but made no headway on recent rentals at that Fine Arts office. Nor did Mrs. Sharpe get anywhere.”

  The kids then told all, including Early’s sudden revelation about the name of the building, Tommy’s flash on the Ouija board message, Calder’s trick with dropped pentominoes, Petra’s fake fainting spell, the five-way exploration of all the floors, and Zoomy’s listening in at the door to 619.

  “My mother was right all along,” Eagle said. “You five are the key to this puzzle. At least, you’re the closest key to a possible fit!”

  “Huh?” Tommy said, just as Ms. Hussey knocked at the door. Smiling ear to ear and carrying a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches, she practically floated into the room. Everyone settled around the table and Ms. Hussey assured them that she’d also heard the story of “the most recent member of the Chase family.” They filled her in on Sally Stayz 619.

  “Real-ly!” she said, in her now-I’m-hooked voice, the one she used when someone in her class came up with a great concept. “Wouldn’t that be perfect if the key fit in the door and the art was inside? But … I agree that something’s very wrong with this picture. I mean, why would the key be in William Chase’s desk?”

  “If we could just get back there, to 619 … but you know we’re all grounded. And our parents already stretched the rules, both for the tea and then this last meeting.” Calder looked discouraged.

  “All the more reason,” Ms. Hussey said slowly. “Mrs. Sharpe has asked me to get your permission for another trip to the Fine Arts Building. She is calling herself the Carrier of the Key, and wants Eagle to drive the seven of you in his van. And you must be there, even if we invite the cops, which would reassure parents, no?”

  The kids were quiet as everyone pictured police bursting in the door of 619.

  “What if we were wrong and Sally Stayz is an artist? What if she’s in there when we open the door and we give her a heart attack?” Petra asked. “Besides, if Eagle goes, our parents might say no, after what happened in the Farmer. Even though it was really our fault,” she finished, glancing at Eagle. “We dragged you into that.”

  “I wanted to do it,” he said. “No regrets.”

  The kids glanced at one another. “What if you came with us, too?” Calder asked Ms. Hussey.

  “I’d love to, but couldn’t. Whether or not this is a red herring — the key may not even work, you know — I might lose my job. I can see it now: Teacher Lures Kids on Surprise Field Trip with Police.”

  “You think it’s a smart idea to go with the cops, Eagle, and Mrs. Sharpe?” Early asked her. “I don’t know, my parents might not be happy about that. Things can go wrong.”

  “You don’t have to, of course,” Ms. Hussey said. “But your choices are limited and you want to be there when that sixth floor door is opened. Plus, what parent can object to the police stopping by and whizzing you off on a special investigative trip?”

  “Mine,” Early said.

  “I think Mrs. Sharpe is our best protection,” Zoomy piped up. “Raisins seem more innocent than grapes, and Eagle is still on the grape side.”

  “Thank you,” Eagle said with a nod. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “What if you drive us down in your van, Eagle, and Mrs. Sharpe goes inside the building with us?” Petra asked. “The police might not listen to us, plus … that all sounds so noisy, we might scare away clues of all kinds as well as blackbirds.”

  Eagle looked thoughtful. “Could work.”

  “Hmm.” Ms. Hussey shook her bun loose and then recoiled it. “Perhaps I’ll call each of your homes and your grandma, Zoomy — take credit for the plan, and promise we’ll have you back immediately. I’ve had to explain more difficult field trips to parents before. Eagle, why don’
t you let your mother know that the children agree.”

  “Call it done,” he said, and headed downstairs.

  Ms. Hussey sat in a corner of the attic and called each household in turn, explaining this latest possibility. “This is an important development, and honors all of the kids’ incisive problem solving and ideas. No, perfectly straightforward, I assure you … Mrs. Sharpe will be with them at all times. Oh, yes … Back in no time.”

  While Ms. Hussey made the calls, Petra leaned toward her friends. “But who would steal the art and hide it in the Fine Arts Building? I mean, isn’t this insane as a possibility? It’s not exactly a secure place for such valuable things.”

  “And it isn’t Eagle’s fault, but everyone will think it’s a nutty idea to go on another expedition with him,” Tommy said.

  Eagle, now back in the doorway, said, “No nuttier than blackbirds popping out of a pie and singing after they’ve been baked.”

  Ms. Hussey finished her last call and looked around at the group. “As long as we keep in close touch, we’re good,” she said. “Don’t look so worried,” she added.

  As if to change the subject, she said brightly, “Eagle, why do you refer to Mother Goose so much?”

  He shrugged. “The kids asked me that, too. It fits. My life, your life … sometimes we all lose things, like Lucy Locket, or get rocked in a cradle on a branch that might break or sit on high wall and hope we won’t roll off. At times the dish has been known to run away with the spoon.” Ms. Hussey blinked.

  “Plus,” Eagle went on, “my birth mother left me her childhood copy of that book.”

  “Oh! Did she write in it?” Ms. Hussey asked, her head on one side.

  “She did. For some reason it always felt like a secret to be savored, which is why I didn’t mention it before. Silly to hide that, I know. She wrote, ‘For my son, Eagle: Fly, hunt, shine. I will always be with you.’ ”

  “That’s beautiful,” Ms. Hussey said warmly. “It’s wonderful. I hope it’s okay that we made you share it.”