13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  It was only now that they were spread out and lined up that Ginny could understand what the paintings were. She looked over to Richard, who was looking at them the same way, running his eyes down the line as if reading a sentence from a book.

  The images started off bright and clear and powerful, like cartoon art. The next ones were similar but done in angry, quick slashes of paint that suggested haste. Then the colors began to fade and become muddled together, and the proportions became very strange. The last ones were in many ways the most beautiful and certainly the most striking. The bright colors and strong lines were back, but the images were fantastically wrong. The Eiffel Tower split into two pieces. The London buses were fat and comical and purple, and flowers grew along the city streets.

  “She was sick,” Ginny said, mostly to herself.

  “This work is a record of her illness, which makes it very unique,” Cecil said carefully. “But you should know that your aunt’s work had started to attract attention before she fell ill. She was being promoted as the next Mari Adams, who has been quite a vocal supporter of your aunt. We had a few major buyers ready and waiting for these paintings months ago.”

  Mari Adams…Lady MacStrange. From the way Cecil’s voice went up just a little on saying her name, Ginny could tell that Mari really was a big deal, at least to him.

  “So why didn’t she sell them?” Ginny asked.

  Cecil folded himself in even lower.

  “You must know that she was fully aware that the collection’s value would increase after her…passing on. That is the way of the art world. She deliberately delayed the sale.”

  “Until…afterward.”

  “Until I was contacted by you, but yes. That was the impression I was given.”

  He bent his knees and came down even farther until his head was completely level with theirs.

  “I understand that this may be a bit odd for you, but everything is arranged. Your proceeds will be wired to your bank account as soon as the sale is finalized.”

  His attention was drawn to the buzzing of his cell phone.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” Cecil said, cupping his hand over his phone. “It’s Japan.”

  Cecil retreated to the side of the room, and Ginny fixed her eyes on the back of the head of the man sitting in front of her. He had a large red blotch that the buttery comb-over of his four remaining gray hairs couldn’t hide.

  “We don’t have to do this,” Ginny said. “Do we?”

  Richard didn’t reply.

  This room was too mute. Too cool for the weirdness that was going on in her head. She wished Keith would make a crack about the entire nation of Japan calling for Cecil or the fact that she had scrubbed the final remains of what was probably a valuable work of art off her arm just that morning. But he said nothing.

  Ginny bored her eyes into the head blotch. It kind of looked like Nebraska.

  “All right.” Cecil was standing next to them again, clicking his phone shut. “Are you ready?”

  Ginny noticed that Richard was intently keeping his eyes off the pictures. They were causing him real pain.

  “I guess,” Ginny said.

  Cecil took his position at a stand at the front of the room. Instead of putting away their phones, the people without them suddenly pulled them out and put them to their ears. A few more laptops opened up. He gave a very prim introduction and politely started the bidding at ten thousand pounds.

  For a moment, nothing happened. A gentle buzz spread around the room as this figure was repeated into the phones in a variety of languages. No one spoke out or raised a hand.

  “Ten thousand at the front,” Cecil said. “Thank you.”

  “Where?” Keith asked, his mouth half full of strawberry and cream.

  “And twelve,” Cecil said. “Twelve. Thank you, sir. Now at fifteen thousand.”

  Ginny still saw nothing, but Cecil caught these gestures through some kind of magical transference.

  “Fifteen thousand from the gentleman on the right. Do I hear eighteen? Thank you very much. And twenty? Yes, sir. Very good. On to thirty?”

  Keith very slowly lowered his plate to his lap and grabbed the sides of his chair.

  “Did I just bid that twenty?” he whispered. “When I was eating. Do you think I…?”

  Ginny shushed him.

  “Thirty. Very good. Thirty-five? Thank you. Forty. Forty to madam in the front…”

  Richard hadn’t lifted his head from the program that sat closed on his lap. Ginny reached over and found his hand, and she didn’t stop squeezing it until the bidding stopped at seventy thousand pounds.

  Seventy Thousand Burlap Sacks

  The next morning, Ginny woke up feeling like she’d grown several inches. She squirmed on the bed, twisting toward the right and left, trying to determine if this was just a dream hangover or if the sudden influx of money had actually expanded her spine. She reached her toes down to see if she was taking up the same amount of space on the bed as she had all along. It seemed to be the same.

  The money would soon be shifted from one computer to another, and then it would just appear in her bank account. Like magic. It seemed strange to her that it would come down to money. A figure. It was just a number, and you can’t leave someone a number. That was like leaving someone an adjective or a color.

  She imagined the tiny burlap pound sacks again. This time, there were seventy thousand of them. They filled up this room, stacked high against the yellow and pink walls, covering the carpet…covering her, going right over the top of the Manet print until they hit the ceiling.

  It was a little alarming, actually.

  She rolled out from under the phantom pile and slipped out of bed. She’d slept late, she noticed, and Richard had already come and gone. He’d left the newspaper spread open for her on the table, with a circle around the day’s exchange rate. He’d also penciled in the margin $133,000 US.

  The imaginary pile reappeared in her mind, and doubled. This time, it was a sea of light, loose dollars, waist high, filling the kitchen and swallowing up the table.

  This couldn’t be Aunt Peg’s big surprise. There had to be something more, she was sure of it now. But she was going to need help figuring out what that something was, obviously. Which meant only one thing.

  The television was on when she arrived, but Keith wasn’t watching it. A long-haired man was opening up cans of paint for two surprised-looking people in matching shirts. Keith was bent over his notebook and didn’t even look up as Ginny came in and sat down on the sofa.

  “Listen to this,” he said. “Harrods: The Musical. In a modern mythological context, the department store represents…what?”

  She could feel that her eyes were wide and her expression was blank and frozen.

  “What do you think she wants me to do with it?” she asked.

  “The money?”

  Ginny nodded. Keith sighed and closed his notebook on his hand to hold the page.

  “I don’t mean to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “but she is dead, Gin. She doesn’t want you to do anything with it. The money is yours. You do with it what you want. And if what you want is to invest in Harrods: The Musical, it is not my place to stop you.”

  He looked over at her in anticipation.

  “Worth a shot,” he said. “All right, then. Why not travel?”

  “I just traveled.”

  “You traveled some. You can always travel more.”

  “I don’t really want to travel,” she said.

  “You could stay in London. Lots to do in London.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Look,” he said with a sigh, “you’ve just been given loads of cash. Use it on anything you want. Stop wondering about that last letter, which must be what you’re wondering about. You figured it all out. It all worked out.”

  She shrugged.

  “What did you want it to say?” he asked. “You know it would have led you back to the poster. You managed to get what
she was trying to give you. You found out Richard is your uncle. What more is there to know?”

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Apparently there is something you want to know.”

  “Are we dating?” she asked.

  “What is dating, really?”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Seriously.”

  “All right.” Keith reached over and switched off the television. “It’s a fair question. “But you’ve got to go home, eventually. You know that.”

  “I know,” she said. “I was just checking. But are we kind of something?”

  “You know how I feel.”

  “But,” Ginny said, “can you…say it?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “We’re definitely kind of something.”

  There was something in the fact that he said it—said something—that made Ginny incredibly happy.

  And in that second, she knew exactly what it was the thirteenth envelope would have told her to do.

  Lucky Thirteen

  It wasn’t logical, but in Ginny’s mind it seemed like there should have been something special to commemorate the sale of the “Harrods paintings.” But Harrods seemed unaware of the event or the artist it had been harboring in its eaves. Harrods was just Harrods. Busy, crowded. Life was moving on here as it had before. The woman at the chocolate counter rolled her eyes as Ginny approached.

  “Just a moment,” she said. “I’ll call Mr. Murphy.”

  Ginny had stopped on the way to see if any money had appeared in her account. It had, in fact—so she took out a hundred pounds for good measure. She pulled it out of her pocket now and concealed it in her palm.

  “He’s on his way down, miss,” she said unenthusiastically.

  “What’s the best chocolate you have?” Ginny asked, looking over the display.

  “It depends on what you like.”

  “Which ones do you like?”

  “The champagne truffles,” she said. “But they’re sixty pounds a box.”

  “I’ll take one.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows as Ginny slid over the money. A moment later, she was presented with a heavy bronze box. Ginny tucked the receipt under the brown ribbon and slid the box back toward the woman.

  “These are for you,” she said. “Thanks for everything.”

  As she walked away from the counter, she wondered if this having money thing might not just work out after all.

  She took Richard to the fancy tearoom. It seemed like the right thing to do. For all the time she’d spent in England so far, she hadn’t had any fancy tea. Now they were facing down a multi-tiered tray of tiny sandwiches and cakes.

  “Come to spend your fortune?” Richard asked.

  “Kind of,” she said. She stared down into the delicate porcelain teacup their waiter had just filled.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I was right to sell the paintings,” she asked, “wasn’t I?”

  “I was there for that bit,” he said. “The end, all the confusion. That’s what those paintings caught. I don’t want to remember that bit, Ginny. It wasn’t always her.”

  “How did she even write the letters?” Ginny asked.

  “She was lucid sometimes, and in the next moment, she’d think that the walls were covered in ladybugs or that the postbox had just spoken to her. To be honest, sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was painful or if she was enjoying all the strange things she was seeing. Peg was…full of wonder.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ginny said.

  They filled their plates with the tiny sandwiches. Richard ate for a few minutes. Ginny assembled hers in four points along the edge of her plate like a compass, or maybe a clock.

  “In the last letter I read,” she began, “she told me something. It just occurred to me that she may not have told you.”

  Richard froze mid-reach for a tiny cucumber sandwich.

  “She said she loved you,” Ginny went on. “She said she was head over heels for you. She was mad at herself for leaving, but she was just frightened. But just so you know.”

  Judging from the look on his face (she thought his eyebrows might come loose from all the wiggling up and down), Ginny knew that he hadn’t known this. And she also knew that now, she was really done. She suddenly felt very light.

  In fact, she wasn’t even embarrassed when Richard came over to her side of the table and wrapped his arms around her.

  * * *

  #13

  Dear Aunt Peg,

  Not sure if you know this, but the thirteenth blue envelope is gone (it was stolen along with my bag in Greece). Anyway, I figured I’d take over. Just so you know, Richard got me back to London, and I figured it out. I should have realized about the green slippers.

  We made a lot of money. People really liked your paintings. So, thanks for that.

  You know, I wanted to write to you for a long time, but I never could. You never left an address where I could reach you, and you never did check your e-mail. So now I’m writing to you when you’re dead, which is kind of dumb. There’s nowhere I can send this letter. I have no idea what I am going to do with it. It’s kind of ridiculous that the only one of the famous thirteen letters I’ll have is one I wrote.

  The truth is, if I had been able to write to you, I probably would have just yelled at you. I was mad at you. And even though you’ve explained it all to me, I’m still kind of mad at you. You went away, and you never came back. I know you have “issues,” and I know you’re different and creative and all those things, but it really wasn’t okay. Everybody missed you. My mom was worried about you—and as it turned out, she should have been.

  At the same time, you pulled off this incredible trick. You got me over here, made me do all of these things that I’d never have done otherwise. And I guess even though you were telling me what to do, I still had to do them on my own. I always thought that I could only do things with you, that you made me more interesting. But I guess I was wrong. Honestly, I pulled some of this stuff out of my butt. You would have been proud. I’m still me…. I still find it hard to talk sometimes. I still do incredibly stupid things at inappropriate moments. But at least I know I’m capable of doing some things now.

  So I guess I can’t be too mad. But I can still miss you. Now that I’m here, in your room, spending your money…you’ve never seemed farther away. I guess it will just take time.

  Since I won’t need the blue envelope to mail this, I’m going to put half of the money in it and leave it for Richard. I know you gave it all to me, but I’m also pretty sure that you wanted him to have some of it. He is my uncle, after all.

  I’ve also decided to do what you never managed to do but what I know you probably wish you did…I’m going to go home.

  Love,

  Your Interesting,

  International Niece

  P.S.

  Oh, and I told him for you.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the trustees of Hawthornden Castle. This book began there, during my residency, when I also learned to navigate the roads of Midlothian, Scotland, in the pitch dark, in the rain, in winter. (An accomplishment, but not something I recommend.)

  Simon Cole and Victoria Newlyn provided safe haven in London and never once asked annoying questions like, “What are you doing here?” or “When are you leaving?” Stacey Parr served as resident expatriate and lovable mad aunt, and Alexander Newman as the Englishman in New York and ever-supportive uncle. John Jannotti is long overdue thanks for sharing his much-varied expertise and for his tolerance of my coffee-drinking.

  Without the editorial guidance of Ben Schrank, Lynn Weingarten, and Claudia Gabel of Alloy Entertainment, and Abby McAden of HarperCollins, I would be nowhere at all.

  About the Author

  Because everyone has to start somewhere, Maureen Johnson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She soon ran off to New York City to study writing and theatrical dramaturgy at Columbia Uni
versity. Along the way, she served up hamburgers in the company of mad scientists and talking skeletons in New York, tended bar in Piccadilly Circus, nervously worked alongside five tigers in Las Vegas, and once got mixed up with the entire cast of a major West End musical. She is the author of THE KEY TO THE GOLDEN FIREBIRD and THE BERMUDEZ TRIANGLE. When she is not writing, she spends her time in a relentless pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee. You can visit Maureen online at www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  ALSO BY MAUREEN JOHNSON

  The Key to the Golden Firebird

  The Bermudez Triangle

  Credits

  Cover photograph © 2005 by Hubie Frowein

  Cover design by Amy Ryan

  Copyright

  13 LITTLE BLUE ENVELOPES. Copyright © 2005 by Alloy Entertainment and Maureen Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub © Edition JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780061973802

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