by John J. Bonk
“How about we get dressed to the nines for our night out on the town, Alexandra? We can do up your hair in a French twist.”
Lexi gasped. Not because of the hair-don’t, but because of the small headline that jumped off page two of the Post.
PERSON OF INTEREST NAMED IN
CLEO JEWEL HEIST. MET STILL IN
DE-NILE ABOUT INSIDE JOB.
“Uh, what? Sure, I’d like that,” she lied, and made a mental note to rip out the article before she left. Person of interest? We’d better get cracking. She fingered her opal necklace, picturing the day that lay ahead. Maneuvering dark, spooky tunnels with Melrose and Kim Ling—at each others’ throats, spiders in their hair, rats at their feet. She looked down at actual goose bumps sprouting on her arm and noticed something else. “Wait, aren’t those your glasses? Hanging around your neck?”
Aunt Roz’s head dropped. “Well, for heaven’s sake.” Sure enough, her glasses were poking out from her robe. She clucked her tongue and slid on her glasses. “Never mind, Kevin!” she called out. “Sometimes you can drive yourself crazy looking for something that’s right under your nose.”
Lexi’s breath caught. Right under her nose, huh? Was that another mysterious clue from the universe? Are the jewels somehow buried right under our noses? She thought hard about it for a second and concluded that she was being supersensitive—which was normal under the circumstances.
“Look what I found on the bureau!” Kevin said, slipping and sliding back into the kitchen with a large brown package. “Can I open it, Aunt Roz? It’s addressed to me and Lex.”
“Oh, I completely forgot! Yes, go ahead. That arrived for you yesterday from your parents.”
“Parent,” Lexi said with stiff curiosity, but headed in the opposite direction.
Aunt Roz went to get scissors from a kitchen drawer, but Kevin was already elbow-deep in packing popcorn before she got back. “Presents! Score!” he announced, waving a blue package tied with yellow ribbons. Seconds later, the wrappings were strewn all over the floor and he was testing out his shiny gold collapsible mini-telescope. “Awesome!” He demonstrated it for Lexi and Aunt Roz, then flew into the living room, yelling, “There’s something in there for you, too, Lex!”
“Hmm.” Lexi took her sweet time readying Melrose’s food stash before wandering back to the table for her gift. She reluctantly dug out the beautifully wrapped box addressed to her and gave it the teeniest shake. Then a fierce rattle.
“Well?” Aunt Roz said, speed-sweeping up the popcorn as if it were nuclear waste. “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Maybe later.”
“Alexandra!”
“Oh, okay.” Lexi flicked open the note card and read it aloud.
Dearest Alex,
Hope you’re having a lovely time in NYC.
We picked this up for you at a little antique shop
in Paris since we know how much you appreciate
pretty things. It’ll last a lifetime!
Much love,
Dad & Clare
Lexi’s tongue darted in and out. She hoped her aunt didn’t see. It was obviously Clare’s curlicue handwriting—her snooty, stuck-up words. She’s taking over already! In one swift move Lexi tore through the paper to find a long gray velvet box. Alex—ugh, I hate when she calls me that. She flipped it open and her eyes went wide.
“Well, what is it?” Aunt Roz was at the garbage can, craning her neck to see. “What did you get?”
“Just a necklace.” Lexi slowly pulled out the most magnificent strand of pearls she had ever seen. They shimmered against her skin in an iridescent silver-black-purple luster.
“Black pearls!” Aunt Roz practically tripped over herself to come examine them. “Oh, my goodness, and those aren’t faux.”
“They’re gaudy.”
“They’re exquisite!”
“Whatever.”
With purpose in her step, Lexi headed into the living room. The necklace was dragging off one hooked finger as if it were something she had dredged out of a clogged drain.
“Honey,” Aunt Roz called after her, “aren’t you going to try them on? For me? Alexandra?”
She strode past Kevin—who was standing on the chaise lounge, spying out the window through his telescope like the captain of a ship—directly toward Romeo and Juliet and, without even a slight hesitation, dropped the string of pearls into the scummy, smelly fish tank.
13
SUBWAY SANDWICHED
“Omigod, it’s Dora the Explorer!”
“Don’t make a big thing about it, Kim, I can’t deal. Not today.” Lexi stepped onto the front stoop of the brownstone, self-consciously fingering the short, black wig she was wearing from her aunt’s collection. It had been sitting on a Styrofoam blob in the hall closet and sort of called out to her when she was leaving. “I’ll just feel a lot safer being incognito today, okay?”
“Sí, Dora! Te ves muy bonita como una morena.”
“Op-dray ead-day.”
Kim Ling gave her a crooked look. “Oh! Pig Latin—ha, I get it. Touché.”
Lexi hooked the food-filled plastic bag on her arm and threw on Aunt Roz’s movie-star sunglasses—they had called out to her too. She glanced across the street where the mysterious black Lincoln had been parked and breathed a mini sigh of relief. There was no sign of it. In fact, both Seventy-Third Street and West End Avenue were light on traffic because of some sort of street repairs.
“Oh, is that the bribe for what’s-her-face?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Kim Ling peeked into Lexi’s bag. “Smells—interesting,” she said, barely sniffing. “I hope it does the trick.”
The front door of the brownstone sprang open. “Aunt Roz!” Kevin announced. He slammed the door shut and came thundering down the steps. “She’s right behind me. We should scram!” He sailed down the block on his sneaker-wheels and the girls took off at a mad clip, following right behind him.
“So, why’re we running from your aunt again?” Kim Ling asked Lexi over the clattering coming from her bouncing backpack.
“I just told her that your mom had volunteered to walk us to the City Camp bus every day.” She grabbed a quick breath. “That it’s picking us up and dropping us off, making me, like, this horrible, horrible person.”
“Excellent! My mom never leaves the apartment this early, so they won’t be bumping into each other in the hallway. And her Mandarin accent’s so thick, even if they do cross paths later on, your aunt’ll never catch wise.”
That didn’t make Lexi feel even the slightest bit better.
“We’ll never get a cab,” Kim Ling said, huffing and puffing, scanning the congested streets. “Steam pipe must’ve busted—happens a lot in this city—too much hot air. But we have gobs of time before we have to meet up with Cindersmella. Wanna just hop on the subway?”
Lexi’s nose crinkled. “Subway?”
“Yeah, it’s right on Broadway and—” Kim Ling gasped with realization and her slapping flip-flops slowed down. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been? You must! It’s the quintessential New York experience!”
“Are you kidding? If my aunt ever finds out we took a subway on our own, she’ll tell my dad and he’ll hang us by our thumbs from the top of the Empire State Building.”
“Oh, they don’t allow that.”
Lexi didn’t think that was funny. She was already up to lie number gazillion-and-one with Aunt Roz. And what about Kevin? It was bad enough making him go along with all the lies and rule-breaking, let alone forcing him into another dark tunnel. No, she’d use what was left of her emergency twenty dollars for a cab, if necessary, but definitely no subways. No way. That’s where I draw the line. So how they all wound up, a few minutes later, waiting and wilting on the humid subway platform under Seventy-Second Street was anybody’s guess.
“Okay, listen up,” Kim Ling said in her drill sergeant voice. “You have to watch out for jerks on the subway train. Not the weirdos—well, them, too—but I mea
n the sudden jerks when the train stops and starts. All the clueless tourists go flying if they’re not hanging on. It’s hilarious.”
“I’m sure,” Lexi said. Yeah, she had let Kim Ling get her way, as usual, but as it turned out, Kevin seemed happy as a clam—make that a baked clam, considering the sweltering heat. He was obviously putting on a brave front, but whatever. Lexi kept a firm grasp on him anyway, so he wouldn’t accidentally roll onto the tracks with those Heelys he was wearing. After all, it was Friday the thirteenth, the unluckiest day of the year.
Lexi dug past the rabbit’s foot, laminated four-leaf clover, and nine lucky pennies she had stuffed into the pocket of her cargo shorts earlier for maximum protection against bad luck, and pulled out the crumpled article from the Post. She waited for Kevin to pop in his iPod earbuds, then slapped it over to Kim Ling. “Here, read. The FBI thinks the jewel heist was an inside job.”
“That’s yesterday’s news, my friend,” Kim Ling said, and zipped through the entire article in the time it would have taken Lexi to read the first paragraph. “Hmm, the Post, no wonder. Yeah, according to CNN, the person of interest, Benjamin Deets, used to be director of security at the Met, but they gave him the ax because of, quote-unquote, ‘suspicious behavior.’ Translation: the slime bucket was caught on a security cam ripping off pricey stuff from the gift shop. The Met finally came clean this morning.”
“And he’d worked in security at Grand Central before that too,” Kevin said, tearing out his earbuds. “Remember? When we saw the FBI snooping around the lost and found?”
“Oh, that’s right!” Kim Ling said.
“And in case you didn’t know, they just searched his apartment, his storage unit, his gym locker, and his mother’s house in”—Kevin whipped out his cell phone and read from the screen—“B-A-Y-O-N—”
“N-E,” Kim Ling finished. “Bayonne, that’s in Jersey.”
“And came up empty—meaning no jewels, no nothing. Total goose egg.”
“Huh.” Kim Ling scratched her neck. “He probably knew all the obvious places would be searched immediately, so it makes sense that he’d want to hide the booty somewhere really obscure.”
“Like an abandoned train station.”
“Exactly. Wait, how’re you getting reception down here?”
“I’m not. My friend Billy texted me, like, five minutes ago, from space camp. He’s really into this whole crime-solving thing too.”
“What?” Lexi said. That was news to her. “Since when?”
“Since he blew chunks in the Multi-Axis Tumbling Trainer. It really grossed him out. He says he’d rather be solving a real live crime, like us, instead.”
“Kevin, you shouldn’t have blabbed!” Lexi took in a deep breath and reminded herself to lower her voice. “Why’re you being so sneaky about everything all of a sudden—pretending to listening to music and eavesdropping on us just now?”
“You should talk. You’re, like, the queen of eavesdropping.” Kevin jammed his earbuds back into his ears. “Isn’t that what started this whole thing?”
“The kid has a point,” Kim Ling said to Lexi with a crooked shrug. “Anyway, back to Deets. His life apparently fell apart after the Met canned him, and he ended up taking a job as a groundskeeper in Central Park—before vanishing off the face of the earth, that is.” She slid her phone out of her back pocket and jabbed at it until a picture came up. “So?” she said, holding it in front of Lexi. “Is he one of the dudes you saw in the Whispering Gallery?”
Lexi focused in on the black-and-white photo of Benjamin Deets, a man with dark, beady eyes and big teeth. “No. Maybe. I dunno.” That was when the subway train came roaring into the station like a giant, angry bullet and she found herself clamping down on Kevin’s shoulders. “It was kind of shadowy in that Whispering Gallery, Kim, and one of the guys had his head turned most of the time. Plus, he was wearing a Yankees cap.”
“What?” Kim Ling yelled over the noise, squinting from the gust of wind.
“I said I’m not sure!”
The subway train screeched to a stop and the doors barely rattled open before a clump of people spilled out. Kim Ling led Kevin and Lexi into the far end of the train car, where they grabbed onto a metal pole hand-over-sweaty-hand. Slam, whoosh, and the train took off with the threesome jostling, jerking, and staring out the grimy windows. The subway station smeared into black. Tiny lights zoomed by at dizzying speed like some life-size video game.
“Is he British?” Lexi asked Kim Ling. “This Benjamin Deets?”
“No idea. Oh, that’s right, one of the guys you saw was a Brit, wasn’t he?”
“Definitely. I’m guessing. Maybe not.”
“She replied with her usual unmitigated conviction,” Kim Ling finished.
Lexi had no idea what half those words meant, but a smirk seemed to be the right response. She couldn’t concentrate on the jewel heist anyway, wondering instead how the tunnel could possibly hold up under the weight of the enormous city. And God only knew what her brother must have been thinking under that fake grin of his. “This is fun, right, Kev?” she asked him.
He was nodding along to a song on his iPod but his eyes were spinning. He was probably freaking out from the EMERGENCY EVACUATION INSTRUCTIONS posted on the door.
“Yeah, there’re some seats over there, Kim. We’re gonna go sit.”
She waited for the train to make its first stop and rolled Kevin across the car. He grabbed on to every pole they passed like a jungle monkey until they plopped down next to a toddler in a pointy pink birthday hat, who looked relatively unthreatening. Kim Ling wedged in next to them and the entire row of people had to scoot over.
“Sorry,” Lexi said to the little girl’s mother. She had to be the mother—they both had the same auburn hair—just like Lexi and her mom once upon a time. Her stomach was morphing into a bag of rocks again from missing her mom when she noticed Kevin’s telescope aimed right at the same mother-daughter. “Stop acting like a two-year-old,” she said, pushing it down, then quickly turned to the toddler. “No offense.”
The doors snapped shut and the train sped off, sending a plump lady with a Macy’s shopping bag toppling onto an old man’s lap. “See what I mean about clueless tourists?” Kim Ling said, cracking up.
“Happy birthday,” Lexi said to the fidgety little girl, purposely ignoring Kim Ling. “How old are you today?”
“Oh, she’s actually three, but it’s not her birthday,” the mom answered. “She’s just pretending. Ariel’s preschool teacher says we mustn’t stifle her creativity. She’s in the gifted program.”
And the similarities between this kid and Lexi stopped right there.
“See, you can never take things at face value,” Kim Ling said to Lexi. “Every journalist worth her salt knows that. I was digging up some dirt on Cleopatra last night—everyone always assumes she was this ravishing beauty, right? Wrong! Turns out some British academics found an old coin depicting her with this enormous schnoz and a neck like a linebacker. Never assume. Oh, and wanna know something really disgusting I found out?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said, plucking out his earbuds.
“She ended up marrying her younger brother.”
“No way!” Kevin shrieked.
“And how’s this supposed to help us find the jewels again?” Lexi asked.
“It’s not. I just thought I’d work it into my report for a little color. C’mon, we have to switch trains!”
In what seemed like a New York minute, they grabbed their things, scrambled out the doors through a tangle of commuters, and found themselves sticking to the seats of yet another subway train, the shuttle bound for Grand Central. This one was packed and felt like an oven.
“It has to be around a hundred degrees in here,” Lexi said as the doors shut out the sound of a wailing saxophone.
“We got a clunker with no AC,” Kim Ling told her. “Tough it out, Dora, it’s just one stop. You could de-wig, you know.”
Not an optio
n. Not when we’re heading into the danger zone. The smash of people lurched to one side when the train took off and Lexi almost lost her bag of food. She secured it onto her lap with one hand, slipped her NYC guidebook from her backpack pouch with the other, and began fanning herself with it.
“Oh, I almost forgot—this is huge!” Kim Ling gushed. “Fox News announced this morning that there’s even more reward money up for grabs.”
“Right,” Kevin said. “The Mets are kicking in now, too.”
“Not the Mets—that’s the baseball team—but the Met, as in Museum of Art. It’s up to, like, a quarter mil in U.S. dollars! Just think, red, and it’s got your name all over it.”
“Don’t call me ‘red.’” Lexi sat back, still fanning herself with a steady rhythm. She had a crazy thought. Two hundred and fifty thousand big ones would definitely be enough to support our family for a long time—and, heck, maybe even buy a yacht. Dad could take his time getting back on his feet again—plus, he wouldn’t need Clare anymore. Quick annulment. Everyone lives happily ever after on the S.S. Alexandra—well, except for Clare, but that’s just a plus.
“D’you guys ever notice how those news anchors sound all sad when they’re reporting a tragedy,” Kim Ling said out of the blue, “and then instantly turn happy for a fluff piece? ‘The nation mourned the loss of one of its heroes today when blahty-blahty-blah succumbed to a disgustingly disfiguring disease,’” she said, all serious. “‘And on a lighter note,’” she chirped, “‘Zippy the Penguin at the Bronx Zoo just had chicks!’”
Kevin started snorting and puffing.
“C’mon, that was funny!” He gave Lexi a sharp nudge and her guidebook flew out of her hands and landed on the sandal of the turbaned man in front of her.
Lexi snatched it up. “Sorry,” she mumbled, and focused straight ahead on the man’s shirt buttons until her embarrassment faded. A little. When she looked down at the guidebook, she noticed something strange: messy blue ink scrawled all over the back cover. Her first thought was that Kevin had gotten a hold of it. But on closer examination, she realized it was her own handwriting. “Omigod!”