by Linda Johns
“Okay, Lily. Do you want to go to my house or your house?” I said loudly as I clambered off the bus.
“Can we go to mine first?” Lily said, just as loudly. Geesh, can you see why I love this girl? She’s a true best friend. She should get an Academy Award for Best Actress Supporting Hannah West’s Game of Deception.
If Jamie the bus driver was paying any attention to us, I thought we’d given pretty good cover.
We headed to Lily’s house. First on the agenda: Stress Dancing. We turned up the stereo in her family room superloud and jumped around. After three songs, Lily turned down the stereo, and we headed for homework and cookies.
At five o’clock, Lily’s dad and little brother, Zach, got home. I started getting my stuff together to leave.
“Can you stay for dinner, Hannah?” Lily’s dad asked. “I’m experimenting with a new dish tonight. It’s rich with antioxidants and fiber.”
“Thanks, Dan, but I can’t,” I said hurriedly. I’d forgotten that Lily’s dad was creating new recipes and writing a cookbook for his organic food co-op. His working title for the book was Life Gets Better with Kale. No matter how much I like the Shannons, I didn’t feel like learning what kale was. “I’m going to head downtown and meet my mom. It’s easy this time. We’re staying at the Belltown Towers.”
“Wow. Pretty fancy. Do you have a view?” Dan asked.
“Yep. Eleventh floor corner unit, full view. And it’s all ours—at least for six weeks.”
“It seems like I just read something about the Belltown Towers in the Times this morning,” Dan said.
“News at the Belltown Towers? Let’s see … robbery, art heist, and all kinds of high-end intrigue. We’re in the thick of it,” I said.
“The paper said the robber pulled a fast one, switching a blank canvas for an authentic Hansen painting that was about to be delivered to some wealthy art patron. That sounds like a smart villain. I love Hansen’s work,” Dan said.
“Really? You do? Why?” I really wanted to know. What was it about this artist that had everyone’s eyes lighting up?
“Well, I guess I don’t love all her stuff,” Dan said. “Then again, that’s what’s so great about her. You can’t peg her style. Almost every piece is different. She’s got tremendous range.”
“Range?”
“Some landscapes, some abstract, some soft and subdued,” Dan said. “I could go on and on about it—”
“But you won’t,” Lily cut him off. “Because Hannah has to go. Right, Hannah?”
“Right.” Thank you again, Lily Shannon. I’d decided that I’d had enough talk of Mimi Hansen for a while.
CHAPTER 10
I SPRINTED DOWN to Eightieth Street. Timing is everything.
And my timing is perfect—at least when it comes to Metro buses. It’s like I have this weird mechanism inside that’s perfectly tuned in to Seattle city buses. Sometimes I’ll be sitting in class and I’ll look at my watch and think, Hmm … 1:32 P.M. The number 6 will be at Third and Pine right about now. I have the schedules and routes memorized for sixteen different buses. Best yet, I always get to a bus stop right on time.
Like now. I got to the stop on Northeast Eightieth Street just as the 66 came into view. I hopped on and found a window seat for the ride downtown. Here’s another little tip I’ve learned in my Metro riding experience: Always wear headphones. No one bothers you if you look like a kid listening to loud music. My mini-player was out of batteries. In fact, I didn’t even have my mini with me. But with my earbuds in place, I pulled out my sketch pad and looked around for a victim … Er, I mean, I looked for a fellow passenger to draw.
I’ll give him a try, I thought to myself. The guy sitting two rows ahead and across the aisle from me looked kind of familiar, in that brown-haired kind of cute older guy (midtwenties) kind of way. Too old for me and too young for my mom, but I had my eye on him for another reason. He had that five o’clock shadow thing going on. Drawing people is hard no matter what, but perfecting the shadowing needed for facial hair is an extra challenge. One of the characters in my graphic novel has two days’ growth of beard. I needed to work on stubble. I decided to manga-ize this guy, drawing him Japanese comic style.
I got so engrossed in my drawing that the bus was all the way south of the Pike Place Market and the Seattle Art Museum before I noticed I’d missed my Stewart Street stop. Darn it. I pulled the cord to signal the bus driver someone wanted off at the next stop. I stuffed my sketch pad in my backpack and headed to the front of the bus.
The guy I’d been drawing hopped off ahead of me and took a bike off the bike rack in front. He started walking his bike down the street.
Click, click, click.
This time I recognized the sound. Bike cleats. The same sound I’d heard outside Belltown Towers yesterday. It made perfect sense that he’d make that noise. He had a bike, after all, not to mention black cycling shorts, a purple hooded sweatshirt, and one of those bike messenger bags slung across his chest.
Come to think of it, both the thief at Belltown Towers and Bike Guy had messenger bags like that. So, maybe the thief was a bike messenger? Okay, wait. I needed to remember that old phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The bike messenger was just delivering a package. Someone had probably switched the bags before the messenger even started pedaling off on the delivery. Right?
Or was my imagination getting a little overactive?
Maybe not. The bike guy from the bus took off his sweatshirt. He was wearing a purple-and-black Swifty’s bike-messenger jersey.
Maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all.
I did what any normal twelve-year-old sleuth would do.
I pulled out my cell phone.
“Lily! Where are you?” I said to her answering machine. “Hannah here. I’m hot on the trail of a bike messenger. Could be the same one I saw outside Belltown Towers …”
Beep.
Lily picked up the phone.
“Do you have any idea how many bike messengers there are in Seattle?” she asked.
“No, but this one is wearing a Swifty’s shirt. And so was the one at Belltown Towers. Are you going to tell me that’s just a coincidence?”
“Do you have any idea how many bike messengers work at Swifty’s and wear those jerseys?” Lily asked.
“Well, how many of them ride the bus instead of a bike?”
“Maybe the ones who are riding the bus downtown to get to work,” Lily offered in a patronizing voice, like she was explaining the absolute obvious to me. “Some of those Metro buses have bike racks in front. My dad and I put our bikes there when we took the bus to the Arboretum last summer.”
“Stop with the logic and the family stories,” I whined. “What if this guy is the art thief? Maybe he’s working with the guy who knocked me over yesterday? Like his accomplice, or a lookout or something.”
“Well, then, my paranoid little friend,” Lily said slowly, “you might as well indulge yourself in your art-thief theory and follow the guy. Go ahead. Follow him!”
Of course, I was already following him while I talked on the phone. He was conveniently heading north, walking alongside his bike, heading in the same direction I needed to go to get home to Belltown Towers. When he leaped on his bike and started pedaling, I had to hold myself back. Just because there was a slim, slight, minuscule, teensy-tiny chance that the thief was a cyclist didn’t mean that this cyclist was a thief. Lily was right. Downtown Seattle was teeming with cyclists. Bike messengers wove in and out of traffic on weekdays, not to mention all the people who commuted to their jobs on bikes.
Before I knew it, I had lost him.
I looked around for the nearest bus stop and realized that I was at Second and Pine, close to Nina’s studio space. I might as well see if Nina was around. Nina, my mom’s best friend, let me keep an easel and some supplies in a corner of the studio. She shared the studio space with a bunch of other artists, but she said I was welcome to work on my own stuff as long as she was there. I w
as so close, I decided not to call first. I’d stop by, like people are always doing in books and on TV shows.
When I got to First Avenue, I looked up at the fourth floor of the Stimson Building. Lights were on in Studio 4, Nina’s studio space. I was about to buzz the studio when …
Click, click, click.
Man, was my mind destined to endless echoes of that clicking sound? It was getting to be like an annoying song that gets stuck in your head, like those high-pitched girls singing “Tell me more, tell me more” in that song from Grease. Only this time the cleats were thundering—and they were real—and they were coming down the stairs inside the building. The door swung open.
“Thanks, I was about to buzz,” I said, catching the door, as the same bike guy from my bus came out. No time to exchange pleasantries, apparently. My hunch about him being a thief evaporated. He was just an ordinary Swifty’s bike messenger, picking up an ordinary oversize package at the Stimson Building.
He jumped on his bike and took off remarkably fast. It was remarkable because he was also carrying a large flat object wrapped in brown paper. Sort of like what I’d seen yesterday when I was on the eleventh-floor balcony at Belltown Towers.
CHAPTER 11
I GRABBED THE door to the Stimson before it closed so I could run up to the studio without buzzing. If Nina wasn’t there, I could at least leave her a note. I sprinted two steps at a time to the fourth floor. The dimly lit hallway had five doors leading into what realtors advertised as “loft space for artists.” Nina shared a space with a bunch of artists I’d never even met.
The door to Studio 4 was open a crack.
“Nina?” I called as I walked in.
Music came from a boom box in the corner, and I thought I heard water running in the back. Maybe Nina was there washing out brushes.
“Nina? It’s me, Hannah,” I called again.
A tall man with dreadlocks came out of the washroom.
“Yes? Nina is not here,” he said. He had that kind of Jamaican/Rasta-sounding voice.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said. “The door was open, so I thought I’d see if she was in here working. I’m a friend of hers.”
The man didn’t say anything.
“Nina lets me hang out here sometimes and do some work. That’s my easel over there,” I said, pointing to a corner.
He moved over in front of some paintings lined up against the wall. “Nina is not here,” he said again.
I guess that should have been my cue to leave. But noooo… . Something caught my eye. My artist’s eye, as Mom would say.
“Are these yours? These are fabulous,” I said, walking toward the three small canvases behind this guy. Maybe I should have been on guard about being in a building with a total stranger. But he wasn’t really a stranger if he worked with Nina. She and her studio mates were always supercareful about who they shared their space with. Besides, as I stared at the three paintings, I was getting pulled into a world of swirling blues. I couldn’t look away. I stepped closer, and scenes of alleys and streets unfolded in the myriad of blues. Each painting was only about a foot wide, but it was full of details, giving it the impression of being much larger. “The play of light in this one is so intriguing,” I said. Eww! I sounded like a hoity-toity art person. But the words play of light were jumping around in my mind. Where had I heard that phrase recently?
The man shuffled from foot to foot.
“Um, my name is Hannah West,” I said. I held out my hand. “Like I said, I’m a friend of Nina Krimmel’s. Actually, she and my mom, Maggie, are friends. She just tolerates me.”
He shook my hand quickly and let go. “I am James,” he said.
“I love your work. I feel like I’ve seen it before… .”
“It is not ready to be seen yet,” he said.
“I guess that’s why you haven’t signed these three,” I said.
“I do not mean to be rude to one of Nina’s friends, but perhaps it is now time for you to leave,” he said. Was it my imagination, or was James a little nervous? I know a lot of artists are perfectionists (a trait that hadn’t appeared in me yet) and didn’t want anyone to see their work until it was absolutely perfect. James’s paintings looked pretty darn perfect to me.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you while you were working,” I said. “Is it okay if I leave Nina a note?”
“Yes, yes. Leave her a note. And then I think you should go,” he said.
I turned to a fresh sheet of paper in my sketch pad and did a rough sketch of one of James’s blue street paintings. I hoped it looked like I was writing. James went back to the sink area. Then he came back and draped a paint-splattered sheet over the three paintings.
“These are not ready to be seen,” James said yet again. “Come back some other time, when Nina is here.” He went back to cleaning brushes.
I drew a superquick sketch of James. I left a note folded for Nina.
Nina,
I stopped by. Can I come paint some night this week?
—H.W.
“Has your work been in a gallery?” I called out to James. “I feel like I’ve seen it before.”
I heard a woman’s voice in the hallway.
“… I’m at the Stimson Building to see what James has ready to go. I need at least one more from him, plus whatever we get at The Factory on Friday night… .”
It was one of those annoying cell yellers—the kind of person who walks around with a cell phone constantly glued to her head, talking loud. What’s really annoying is that you get only half the conversation—the cell yeller’s half—when you eavesdrop. It’s terribly unsatisfying.
“The messenger is on his way… .” the cell yeller said, but then her voice dropped and I couldn’t hear. Something about “making a witch” or “making a switch.” Whatever.
The cell yeller was getting louder and the door to Studio 4 opened wider.
Mimi Hansen walked in.
CHAPTER 12
“WE’LL TALK LATER,” Mimi said into her phone. She flipped it shut with a snap.
“James, I thought you’d be alone. I thought we had an understanding that your work was highly secretive,” Mimi said. She glared at me, even though she was talking to James, with absolutely no sign of recognizing me from yesterday.
“This is a friend of my studio mate,” James said hurriedly. “She stopped by to leave a note for Nina. She was just about to leave.” He grabbed the note from me.
“I will give this to Nina,” he said. He looked at Mimi and said quietly, “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“You’d better hope I don’t,” Mimi said. She put on her sunglasses, even though we were inside. She wrapped the belt of her Granny-Smith-apple-colored trench coat tighter and turned up the collar. If she’d had a fedora, she would have totally looked like a cartoon spy. Well, except for the bright green coat and the fuchsia turtleneck underneath. She wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
James beckoned me to the door.
“Tell me, have we met before?” Mimi asked. Her eyes looked me over, up and down.
“Um …” I was about to remind her of Dorothy Powers’s apartment when her cell phone rang again.
“Yes?” she said into the phone as she turned away from me. And I am not making this up, but she waved as if she were dismissing me, as if she were shooing me out the door. “No, no. He’s on his way with the real one. On a bike. Trust me. It’s faster this way. Traffic is terrible …” Mimi went toward the back of the studio to keep talking.
“I will make sure that Nina gets your note,” James said. He held the door wide open for me. I can take a hint.
What the heck was Mimi Hansen doing at Studio 4? And why did she mention a bike?
“Mimi Hansen was at Nina’s studio?” Mom asked. We were eating Trader Joe’s burritos in Owen’s dining room. The sun was heading down toward the horizon in the west, making the lower sky a warm mix of pinks and oranges that shimmered in the water of Elliott Bay. Dinner with a view. “Did M
imi see any of Nina’s work?”
“Dunno,” I said as I took a bite of my burrito. “It seemed like she was there to see James. They wanted me to leave.”
“James? The cute dreadlocks guy? Hmm … he just got a space in Studio 4,” Mom said. “Maybe she’s mentoring him or something.”
“Mimi Hansen doesn’t exactly seem like the mentoring type,” I said.
“Did you see his work? It’s pretty fabulous. He does those bright geometries based on body organs. It sounds weird, but his paintings are amazing.”
“Maybe you don’t really know this guy, Mom. Because the James I met was doing street and alley scenes, not livers and kidneys. They were this intense blue. One looked like Post Alley down at the Pike Place Market. Another one reminded me of Pioneer Square. Wait. Let me show you. I mean, I can’t really show you the paintings, but I did a quick sketch of the alley that looked like Post Alley.”
“An interesting departure,” Mom said as she studied the sketch. “Maybe James ran out of organs. And you’re right; that’s Post Alley. That looks like the door to Kell’s Pub. Really, Hannah, this is quite good.” She clicked on the TV. Even with Owen Henderson’s five hundred premium channels, Mom switched to the local news on KOMO-4 to see what her college friend Mary Perez was covering. If Mary was reporting, it was usually something juicy.
“Let’s go to Mary Perez for more of the story,” the news anchor said.
“Oh, good. Perfect timing,” Mom said.
“I’m outside the Von Hiers Gallery in the downtown neighborhood of Belltown, where a thief just stole two paintings by celebrated artist Mimi Hansen,” Mary said.
“That’s right around the corner!” I said excitedly.
“Shhh! I want to hear this,” Mom said.
The camera had started with a close-up of Mary Perez. Now the view widened to show the VON HIERS GALLERY sign and the front of the gallery.
“I spoke with gallery manager Cleveland Mathis a few minutes ago. The paintings disappeared some time shortly before six-thirty this evening. The two stolen paintings were part of Hansen’s latest Seattle Streetscape series. There are two things that make these paintings special. First, they’re rather small, just thirteen by eleven inches. Second, each painting has a distinctly different style, use of color, and overall look. In fact, the only thing that these paintings have in common, art experts tell me, is that they are by Mimi Hansen, and they do, in fact, have that distinctive ‘Mimi Hansen signature’ on them. The Von Hiers Gallery had six of these Hansen paintings on display. After today’s theft, only four are left.”