D. Michael Beil

by The Red Blazer Girls (v5)

  “What is he saying?” I hiss.

  “Maybe she's at a movie with her mom. She probably just forgot to charge her phone. You could try her house.”

  What? I wave my hands back and forth. No, no, no.

  “So, what's new?” she asks. Clever girl. “Nothing? Jeez, aren't you the one who's always telling us how much more exciting life on the West Side is?” She mouths “I tried” to me. “Are you coming to the Dickens banquet on Friday? It's going to be fun—really! We're doing a skit. Sophie, and Rebecca, and me. And Leigh Ann, you remember her? That's right. Friday, seven o'clock.”

  I put my hands over my ears.

  When she finally snaps her phone shut, I am all over her.

  “He's been trying to call you all day,” she says. “What is up with you and that phone? I'm going to start calling you at night to remind you to plug it in.”

  “Nothing about … her?” I can't say her name out loud.

  “Nothing. He might be just playing it cool, but if he is going out with Leigh Ann, why would he try to keep it from us? It's not like we wouldn't find out. You know, Soph, maybe if he knew how you felt—”

  “Stop! I know. I know.”

  Her phone rings again.

  “Oh, hi, Kate! Yeah, she's with me. She forgot to charge her phone again. You want to talk to her? We're on our way right now. Bye.” She stands up to leave. “Your mom wants you to come home.”

  “You call my mom Kate?”

  “Your mom is cool, and she wants me to. So, are you going to be all right?”

  I feel a little better, if a little embarrassed. “Yeah. Thanks, Marg. I don't know what I would do without you.”

  And double pistachio ice cream.

  In which I go on a dream date

  When I get home, I immediately plug my phone into its charger and tell Mom that if anyone calls on our main phone, I'm not home. I need to get down to some serious work on my essay about the first stage of Pip's life in Great Expectations. Margaret showed me her second draft during lunch, and reading it made me realize how lame my final draft was.

  “This is sick, Margaret, way too good. You'll make the rest of us look bad if you turn in something like this.” I even offered to make a few minor changes for her, to bring it down to merely dazzling. “You know, throw in a few grammatical errors, some spelling mistakes, maybe the wrong ‘there’ or the wrong ‘your.’ Mr. Eliot loves that. Or when you use the ‘it's’ with the apostrophe when it should be the other one. That one always gets a ‘for crying out loud.’”

  Personally, I'm not really worried about my grades; I've gotten As and Bs on pretty much everything I have done so far (except for that una prueba horrible). My parents expect all As, but I'm pretty sure that a B won't get me grounded or my cell phone taken away. But a C? That would have dire consequences.

  Margaret has never received a B for a final grade. In her family, even an A-minus is a mark of slight shame, and she's concerned with her English grade. She has aced all the tests and quizzes, but Mr. Eliot gave her—and trust me, this was quite a shock to Margaret—a B-minus on a paper on Francie Nolan's coming of age in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book Margaret absolutely loves. The fact that it was the highest grade in the class was no consolation to her, so she was pulling out all the stops, taking no prisoners, and leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of an A-plus on her Great Expectations paper (take your pick of clichés).

  “No Bs for me,” she said, gritting her teeth.

  I am nearing the point where I can, with clear conscience, press “CTRL-P” and move on to other homework when he calls. I let it ring. Thirty seconds later, the house phone rings.

  Mom sticks her head in my room, her hand over the phone. “Are you here for Rafael?”

  I shake my head. “Tell him I'm working on an assignment that I have to get done.”

  “Why can't you tell him?” She pushes the phone toward me.

  I back away from her like the receiver is radioactive. “Mom. Please.”

  She talks to Raf for a minute and then comes back and stands in my doorway. “Everything okay, Sophie?”

  I play dumb. “Of course. Why?”

  “You seem a little … are you mad at Rafael?”

  I will the blood out of my face. “I'm just busy. I have a lot of homework.”

  “Nothing you want to talk to me about?”

  “I'm fine.” I open my math book and pretend to study.

  “Well, when you change your mind, I'm here.”

  Ten minutes later, the phone rings again.

  “Are you here for Margaret?”

  “Yes!”

  Mom grumbles something about how I'm not even a teenager yet and “it's already starting.”

  Margaret has just gotten off the phone with Raf. “He said he called and you wouldn't talk to him. He sounded a little sad, if that makes you feel better.”

  “I told my mom to tell him I was doing homework. You didn't say anything, did you?”

  “No, but, Sophie, I bet he likes you. I've been thinking about it. The phone calls, the museum, Perkatory, your apartment—he didn't have to stick around for all that.”

  “Maybe. Now explain his call to Leigh Ann.”

  “I can't.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Well, this isn't exactly my area of expertise. Now, if this were, say, the early 1800s, and you were the haughty daughter of a country gentleman who was cheated out of his inheritance by his younger brother, and Raf was a dashing colonel in the British Army, just returned from service in India, then I'd be able to tell you exactly what to do.”

  “Oh, don't give me all that Jane Austen stuff. You've seen just as many cheesy teen romances as I have,” I say.

  That makes her laugh; she knows it is true. Margaret is not-so-secretly addicted to reruns of Dawson's Creek. “Officially, I have no idea what you're talking about. You've obviously confused me with one of your less stunningly sophisticated friends.”

  “That must be it.”

  “It's all going to work out, Soph.”

  “Don't say that! That's what parents always say, and it never works out.”

  We make our plans for an early-morning stop at Perkatory and then hang up. Five seconds later, the phone rings yet again. I take a deep breath and answer.

  “Charge your cell phone!” Margaret shrieks. Click!

  I had the strangest dream last night. Raf and I were on a date, but it was like something from the fifties. (Apparently, I really have seen Grease way too many times.) He was driving me home in this awesome Chevy convertible with his arm casually draped over my shoulder, the wind blowing through his hair. I couldn't take my eyes off him. One second we're going down this country road in the middle of nowhere, and then all of sudden we're at the awning outside my apartment building. He opens the car door and takes my hand, and for a few seconds, we just stand there. He is just about to kiss me when I look in the backseat of the car and see Leigh Ann. She looks up at me and smiles. Bam! I wake up.

  In which Mr. Eliot makes himself

  useful once again, Margaret makes

  herself invisible, I make a connection,

  and we all make a new friend

  In the morning, we walk to school in a downpour of biblical proportions and arrive at Perkatory at seven, utterly soaked. Mr. Eliot is there, in his usual place with his usual coffee, pain au chocolat, and copy of the Times. He pretends to have a heart attack when he sees me. The guy's a regular riot—just ask him!

  “You'll be happy to know that we were right about the clue with the names,” says Margaret. “There was a Dr. Richard Esther.”

  “The fifth clue mentions something about a dumb ox,” I say, taking a huge bite of chocolate chip muffin.

  “A dumb ox, or the dumb ox?”

  “Ahgrowno,” I mumble. Mmmm … really good muffin.

  Margaret looks at the slip of paper. “It says ‘use your left ear to listen very closely to the words of the dumb ox.’”

 
; “‘Dumb ox’ is somebody's nickname. Somebody important. A saint, I think. Ignatius Loyola? No, that's not it. Becket? Ask me later. I'm sure I'll remember. It's right on the tip of my tongue.”

  “How about Thomas Aquinas?” I ask. “You know, like the school where Raf goes.”

  “That's it!” Mr. Eliot practically jumps out of his seat.

  “You knew all along, didn't you?” Margaret says, to which Mr. Eliot slyly grins.

  “Are you serious?” I say, taking another bite of muffin. “I was right? I don't even know who he is. I was just thinking about—I mean, who is he, anyway?”

  Mr. Eliot sounds like an encyclopedia entry. “Thirteenth-century Italy. Philosopher. Saint. Despite the nickname, a huge intellectual. Wrote the Summa Theologica, one of the most influential books of all time, basically a summary of the reasoning of the Catholic Church. Some light reading for your to-do list, Margaret.”

  “If he was so smart, why was he called the dumb ox?”

  “When he was in school, he was bigger than the other kids and must have seemed kind of slow. There's a famous anecdote about it. Somebody said that they could call Thomas a dumb ox, but that one day his bellowing would fill the world.”

  A smile spreads over Margaret's brainy face. “I know where he is. Come on, Mr. Eliot. We might need your help.”

  He eyes his coffee, his pastry, his paper. And then he sighs. “Oh, why not.”

  The church is even quieter—and darker—than usual. Other than a young (and sort of cute) priest, who at first I mistake for an altar boy, and Mr. Winterbottom, who could never be mistaken for a boy of any kind, we are the only people inside. Every sound we make seems amplified by the echoing emptiness. I note Mr. Winterbottom making his rounds, lighting candles and straightening the chairs on the altar for the seven-thirty Mass. He just nods and smiles at us as we pass.

  The left side of St. Veronica's has a series of chapels where people can light candles or pray or just hang out near statues of their favorite saints. A statue of St. Thomas Aquinas, Mr. Not-So-Dumb Ox himself, stands in one of those chapels, cordoned off from the rest of the church by iron bars. But the thing is, there's a slight problem. Old Tom is about five feet tall and he's set into a hollowed-out space in the wall a few feet off the ground, so his head is like nine or ten feet up. We'll need a chair to reach him, but this is pew-ville, so we are going to have to improvise. The good news is once inside the chapel, we are out of sight range of our pal the security guard. And amazingly, Mr. Eliot turns out to be invaluable, as well as structurally sound. He kneels down so Margaret can use him as a stepping stool, and I help keep her steady when I'm not losing it at the sight of Margaret standing on my English teacher's back. Two questions: how did Professor Harriman ever place this clue, and how did he expect Caroline to get it?

  “St. Pete, next time you get to be the stepping stool,” Mr. Eliot grunts. “Okay, Margaret, now that you're up there—do you have a plan?”

  “More or less,” she says, struggling to maintain her balance. “Give me a second. I need to turn a little so that I can—”

  “Margaret, what are you doing?” She has her left ear pressed against St. Thomas Aquinas's mouth and is staring straight ahead at the place where the curved wall of the niche meets the straight marble wall of the chapel.

  “I think I see it. When I put my left ear against his mouth like this, like I'm listening closely to his words, my face is pointed straight ahead. I'm looking right at a narrow gap.” She feels along the edge of the marble tile, her forehead creased with concentration.

  “Boy, she is an intense little thing, isn't she?” whispers Mr. Eliot.

  “You have no idea.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” Margaret says, never taking her eyes off the object of her determination. “I need some tweezers. I can see it—or at least I think I can—but I can't quite reach it. Maybe if my fingernails were a little longer.”

  “Don't look at me,” I say. Between the guitar and a lifelong habit of biting, my fingernails are a disaster.

  “I have tweezers,” says Mr. E.

  He does?

  He reaches into his bag—a ratty-looking green messenger bag—feels around for a few seconds, and finally pulls out a miniature Swiss Army knife. Then, to the anxiety-producing accompaniment of approaching footsteps, he hands Margaret the tiniest pair of tweezers I have ever seen—no more than an inch long. “Will these work?”

  Margaret nods confidently, then waits for the footsteps to pass by. I peek out the door of the chapel and see an old woman in a babushka take a seat in a pew near the front of the church. The priest and Mr. Winter bottom are nowhere in sight. “Everything okay out there?” she asks.

  “Yeah, you're good.” And then, out of the corner of my eye, I see him: the cute young priest we had seen when we came in, about ten yards away and closing in fast. “Behind the statue—quick!” I hiss. “Against the wall. Hide!”

  “Good morning, everyone.” The priest (slightly taller than a hobbit, and nearly as cheerful) greets Mr. Eliot and me but misses seeing Margaret, who squeezes into the niche and crams herself in the best she can behind good old St. Thomas A. “Oh, I thought there were three of you.”

  Mr. Eliot points vaguely in the direction of the other side of the church. “Our third is around here somewhere. We're just admiring some of the artwork.”

  “Ah, yes, the church does have quite an impressive collection.” He reaches his hand out to Mr. Eliot. “I'm Father Julian. I'm new here at St. Veronica's.”

  Mr. Eliot shakes his hand. “George Eliot. I teach over at the school.”

  “A pleasure. Can I give you a hand with anything?”

  “No, thank you. We're just about done. The girls had asked about Thomas Aquinas a few days ago, and when I ran into them at the coffee shop this morning, I figured I'd bring them by for a quick look.”

  “Well, if you change your mind—or if you can't find your friend—let me know.” With an odd smile, he turns and hobbit-walks away.

  As soon as I turn around, I know what he was smiling at. Margaret's shoes, which she had taken off when she climbed up onto the ledge, are sitting right in the middle of the floor, between Mr. Eliot and me. And her feet, in her bright red socks, are ridiculously visible right next to St. Thomas's.

  “Oh my God. He knew! And he didn't say anything.”

  “Knew what?” asks Margaret.

  “Exactly where you are,” Mr. E laughs.

  “Are we gonna get in trouble?”

  “Apparently not. I think Father Julian is, as you would say, ‘way cool.’ But let's not push our luck. Finish up, Margaret, and get down from there before anyone else comes in. I'd really prefer to not get arrested for such an odd violation.”

  Margaret goes right back to work with the tweezers, and a few moments later she holds up a folded piece of paper:

  “Oh my gosh,” Margaret says. “This one really is too easy. Sophie, you get it too, right?” She is jumping up and down with excitement while Mr. E and I stare at the piece of paper, waiting for the answer.

  He looks at me. “I'm stumped. This makes sense to you?”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Does this have anything to do with that painting that we looked at—the very first day we started looking around the church, before we even met Ms. Harriman?”

  “It has everything to do with it.” She grabs me by the arm and starts pulling. “C'mon, you guys. Other side of the church. We have to hurry; Mass starts in five minutes.”

  We run to the far side of the church, stopping in front of the painting that marks the sixth Station of the Cross: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus.

  “This is it,” Margaret says. “St. Veronica—that's her right there—was married to Zacchaeus, who is known in France as St. Amadour. As in Roc-amadour, the town that was named for him and the town where the ring comes from. That's the connection: St. Veronica and the Rings of Rocamadour. All we have to do is look behind this painting and we will have the final p
iece of the puzzle.”

  Margaret confidently raises the same corner that Mr. Winterbottom lifted not so long ago to show us the signature on the back. “And here it is.” She is rather nonchalant about it, all things considered. “Look—it's like two inches from the signature. If he had pulled it out just a little bit more, he probably would have seen it.”

  “And probably would have removed it,” I say. “C'mon, open it up!”

  Drumroll, please.

  Something about that last line really gets to Margaret and me. Knowing all that happened between the time that Professor Harriman wrote those words and our reading them brings us back to a certain sad reality. Finding the ring seems more important somehow—not just because it is beautiful and valuable, but because in some way it represents the lives of Caroline and her grandfather, who never got together to celebrate her success in finding it. It makes us more determined than ever to carry our mission through to the end.

  We get to Mr. E's classroom and Margaret immediately starts graphing while I run down to the cafeteria to find Rebecca, who is studying for a biology test. I look around quickly—no sign of Leigh Ann. I'm okay with that. Very okay.

  Rebecca and I run back up the five flights of stairs and find Mr. E watching in awe as Margaret thinks and points and plots.

  She turns to face us. “Okay are you guys ready for this? Good grief, Rebecca, are you in there? Your eyes look like they're bleeding.”

  Rebecca waves her off. “I was up late studying. Go ahead.”

  Margaret glances my way. “No Leigh Ann?”

  “I looked. Didn't see her. Let's just go ahead.”

  “It's simple,” Margaret says. “In fact, I really don't need to graph it out. I know what the solution to the system of equations is without it, but I'll do it so you can see it, too. All right, the first equation is X + 3Y = 6.” She has her notebook open to the page that shows my solution. “Sophie, here's what you came up with. I'll just graph the exact same points you used.”

  She marks the points (3,1), (6,0), (-3,3), and (-6,4) on her graph and then carefully draws a line through all four points with a yardstick.