“So,” I said cautiously, “does that mean we can stay and solve this?”
Bess and George looked at each other and seemed to reach a decision without saying anything at all. They turned back to me, and both smiled and nodded.
“As long as you agree to tell us everything from here on out,” said Bess.
“Definitely,” I agreed. “It’s a promise.” I meant it, and I also felt a surge of affection for my two best friends. Not just anyone would stay with me and help solve this mystery, but Bess and George were special.
“So you’re a detective?” asked Riley. She was still holding the newspaper clipping and looking around at the three of us. “Not a fan?”
“Sorry, Riley,” said Nancy. “I’m not a fan. But you are, and I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
“Sure,” said Riley, taking a slurping sip of her drink. “What do you want to know?”
I smiled. I had a good feeling about Riley and I knew she would want to help, especially once she knew there were people missing.
“First,” I said, “I want to know what exactly this curse is, and where the idea came from.” I had researched the curse online, and the article I was sent contained some information as well. But nothing seemed to match up, and all my sources had a different story. I knew I needed to talk to someone in person.
“Oh,” said Riley, leaning in closer and lowering her voice. “Well, it’s just a rumor. But did you know Christopher DeSantos used to have a work partner?”
I nodded. I had read a few things about Christopher DeSantos’s career online. “His name was Terry Lawrence,” I said.
“Right,” said Riley. “For about two decades, he and DeSantos traveled together and took photographs of the same landscapes. But in the 1970s they had a falling-out. There was this photograph that became incredibly famous, and they both claimed to have taken it. You see, they were so close they shared a darkroom. The film somehow got mislabeled or mixed up. They were never able to agree on the truth, and it ended their friendship. DeSantos ultimately got the credit for it, but nobody really knows for sure. And personally, I think all the gossip eclipsed how good the photograph actually was.”
“And the curse?” I asked.
“Soon after the two of them stopped working together,” Riley said, “Terry Lawrence did an interview where he claimed to have cursed Christopher DeSantos’s entire collection of work. He said that anyone who attempted to display any of his photographs would have something horrible happen to them. And for a while, that’s just what happened. One museum caught fire. Another lost all its funding and had to shut down. And one more had a member of its staff go missing. They were never found.”
“Like what’s happening now,” I said. Riley nodded. “And people think Terry Lawrence was actually capable of all that? That he could curse something?”
“I know it’s weird,” Riley said. “No one believed him at first, of course. But after all that…”
“Didn’t people think that Terry did all those things? To make it seem like the curse was real?” George asked.
“Some people did, but the police were never able to confirm it,” Riley explained. “He always had airtight alibis.”
“So what about now? Would Terry Lawrence have anything to do with this?” asked Bess.
“Yeah,” said George. “He could be trying to sabotage this exhibit, right?”
“Oh,” said Riley. “No. Terry Lawrence died years ago. Years before Christopher DeSantos, even.”
George slumped back in her seat. “So that’s a dead end,” she said.
“Can you think of anyone still living who might want to sabotage the exhibit?” I asked.
“And who would be willing to kidnap people in order to do it,” added Bess.
Riley’s eyes went wide and she said, “Actually, yes. And she even lives in town.”
“Who?” Bess, George, and I all asked at once.
At first Riley looked a little nervous about what she was going to say. But eventually she grinned conspiratorially and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Beverly DeSantos had something to do with it. Christopher DeSantos’s granddaughter.”
“Beverly DeSantos?” I asked. “Isn’t she the one who found and donated all the photographs to the museum in the first place?”
“Well, yeah,” said Riley. “But it’s pretty well known that she never liked her grandfather. She even once said in an interview that she wished she had been born into a different family. It’s very possible that she still holds a grudge against him. In the interview, Beverly said—”
Just then Riley stopped talking. All the color drained from her face, and I saw that she was looking at something behind Bess and George.
I looked up. There had been a woman in the booth in front of us, but we were only able to see the back of her head. Now she was suddenly standing and looking right at us. Her long dark hair hung loose around her shoulders, and her dense eyebrows were drawn together, like she was thinking hard about something. She had a thick curtain of bangs, and I couldn’t help but feel like the rest of her face was hiding behind them. Her eyes were light in color, and they looked vaguely familiar.
“Riley?” Bess asked.
Riley just shook her head and wouldn’t say anything else. I didn’t actually know what Beverly DeSantos looked like, but I was willing to guess she was the woman standing right in front of us. And she had been close to enough to hear our entire conversation.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hidden Doorway
BEVERLY DESANTOS DID NOT STAY or attempt to confront us. There was a long pause as she continued to look in our direction. Then she turned around and headed outside, the door sweeping in a gust of cold wind behind her.
“Was that…?” asked George, looking back at Riley.
Riley nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “That was Beverly DeSantos.”
“It’s possible she didn’t hear that, though,” said Bess sympathetically. “Right, George? Nancy?”
Neither George nor I answered. It was pretty clear that Beverly DeSantos had heard everything, and Riley seemed to know it too. Looking at Riley, I couldn’t tell if she was more embarrassed at being overheard or frightened of becoming the next kidnapping victim if Beverly really was staging a curse. The color had yet to come back to Riley’s face, and she no longer seemed to feel like answering our questions.
Eventually Riley stood and told us she wasn’t feeling that hungry anymore. “I think I’m going to head back to the hotel,” she said. “I need…” She took a break here, as if she was thinking of what to say next. “Something for my camera,” she finally said.
“Of course,” I said, even though I didn’t really believe her. “Thank you for your help, Riley.”
She smiled at that and seemed genuinely pleased to have assisted us. “If it’ll help you find the missing people, then it was worth it,” she said. “I just hope I’m not next.”
“You won’t be,” I promised.
The fabric of Riley’s yellow raincoat squeaked against itself as she put her hands through the sleeves. “Thanks, Nancy,” she said. “I’ll see you guys later.”
Not long after Riley had stepped out through the front door, our food came: Bess’s french toast and fresh fruit, George’s stack of pancakes, and my omelet and toast. Riley’s scrambled eggs came as well, even though Riley was long gone. Bess happily ate them herself.
When our food was nearly gone, Bess turned to me and said, “So what do we do now?”
I already had a plan. “Well,” I said, “I want to head back to the museum to get a good look at both photographs: the one with Grace Rogers, which I didn’t get to see earlier, and the one from this morning, with that girl’s boyfriend. Maybe there are some clues, or something I missed during my first look.”
Bess and George nodded.
“And if it’s possible,” I continued, “I’d like to find that girl from this morning and talk to her. The one who was crying in front of the muse
um.”
“She went to the police station, right?” asked George, around a final bite of pancake. “To be questioned. Should we go there?”
Bess rolled her eyes at George’s table manners. But really, George was correct.
“Right,” I said. “I’m guessing she’ll be there awhile. So the museum, and then the police station.”
We finished up our meals and headed outside. The rain hadn’t started again, but the sky was a dark gray and it looked as though it might pour at any moment. George pulled the hood of her parka up over her head as a precaution, and Bess had her umbrella shut but still at the ready, just in case. I left my hood down and my raincoat unzipped. I don’t mind a little rain.
We reached the museum after just a short walk. Word must have spread about all the excitement earlier this morning, because the museum was now packed with people.
We weren’t able to just slip inside this time. We each bought a ticket, which would be good for the entire week, and headed over to the exhibit to try and look at the photographs. But this was more difficult than it sounded. There were people everywhere. The few benches inside the exhibit room were all crammed full of museumgoers, practically sitting on each other’s laps, and it was difficult to even move around the exhibit’s small space.
The most crowded sections by far were the spaces in front of the two photographs containing the missing people. Everyone seemed to want to see the impossible pictures, and I was sure the upset this morning must have really boosted ticket sales.
“Hey,” I said, turning to face Bess and George. “How about I try and get a closer look, and you two can just hang back? It’ll be easier for one person to make it through that crowd than three.”
Bess and George both looked relieved at that suggestion. They were hunching into each other and unsuccessfully trying to dodge the shoulders of all the people around them.
“Sounds great,” said Bess.
“Yeah,” George added. “Thanks, Nancy.”
“No problem,” I said as I left them behind and headed into the densest part of the crowd.
From everything I’d researched about Christopher DeSantos’s work, I knew he mainly focused on landscapes. He was especially well known for capturing national parks and other parts of the natural world not many people were able to actually visit. But the photographs in this exhibit were different. These were all of Shady Oaks in the 1940s, mainly images of the streets and the storefronts and portraits of the people who must have been living there at the time. They seemed to me less like professional work and more like a personal portrayal of the town where this man had lived, both when he was young and after he had retired.
Even though I don’t know much about photography, I could quickly tell that the photographs where DeSantos captured people were my favorites. It was almost like each image contained clues about who that person really was, and each person had been made into a mystery to be solved.
Eventually I managed to get close enough to the photograph containing the image of Grace Rogers to get a good look at it. Like the image of the crying girl’s boyfriend, this photo showed Grace in the background of the photograph, like she had just happened to be walking through it when the picture was taken. She too was wearing modern-day clothing. The image wasn’t very clear, but it looked as though she was wearing a blazer, which would make sense, since she was a museum employee.
The image of Grace also seemed to have the same coloring and texture as the rest of the photograph. It didn’t look like a separate image at all. Finally, I could also see that there appeared to be a lock on the side of the frame, preventing anyone from taking the photograph—which made sense for an art museum. I couldn’t tell how someone might have tampered with the photograph, but I tried to commit every detail to memory just in case they would prove helpful later.
I made my way over to the second photograph, the one of the crying girl’s boyfriend, by cutting through the crowds once more. The photograph looked nearly the same as the one of Grace. I couldn’t see any flaw in the image; it really did look like he was walking through the background. And like the photograph of Grace, there was a lock on the side of the frame, protected by a combination. A quick glance around was all I needed to confirm that the other photographs in the exhibit were similarly protected by locking frames.
After I felt satisfied with my investigation, I made my way back to where I had left Bess and George. It wasn’t easy, even though I was now trying to move farther away from the photographs instead of closer to them. Everyone in the crowd seemed just as unwilling to let me through.
I couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes, but by the time I got back to where Bess and George had been, they were gone. I quickly looked around. I didn’t recognize anyone. There were a few children running around, boys who must have been around five or six and who were playing tag. There was an older couple, sitting on one of the benches and leaning against each other. There were a lot of people with cameras like Riley’s. I assumed they were all fans who had traveled to Shady Oaks to see this exhibit. But I didn’t see Bess or George anywhere, and for a moment I panicked and wondered if they had been trapped inside the photographs as well. I quickly pulled myself together. Of course that was impossible. People do not get trapped in photographs, and I would just have to look around in order to find my friends.
I stuck to the outer edges of the room, especially the places where there were no photographs, as these were the least populated areas. If Bess and George were still here, I knew they would have kept to these places, anywhere where there weren’t too many people.
I wasn’t having much luck. Bess and George must have left the museum altogether. I was about to go outside when I realized something else interesting. From the outside, the museum had looked gigantic. It was easily the largest building on the block, much taller and wider than the small stores surrounding it. But the room set aside for the exhibit was incredibly small. There didn’t seem to be any way to reach the other sections of the museum, or signs for any other exhibits.
I could only see one door besides the one at the room’s entrance. It was marked STAFF ONLY.
I looked around. No one was paying much attention to me. Everyone was too distracted by the DeSantos photographs, both the impossible ones and the ordinary ones that had not been tampered with, which were distracting enough in their own right. I made my way over and snuck through the door.
It wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped. I found myself in what appeared to be a hallway that also doubled as storage. There were four doors leading off from the hallway, and each of them was shut.
I walked forward slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible, just in case any of the doors led to occupied rooms. The hallway was cluttered with items that appeared to be left over from old displays and other objects from previous exhibits. There were old signs and banners and a large bookshelf pushed against the wall at the end of the hallway. Most everything in here was covered with a thick layer of dust, and I could guess that most of these things had not been used in a long time. I could see other locking frames, like the ones currently hanging in the DeSantos exhibit, except these were leaning up against the wall and all different sizes. Some of them were tiny, while others were taller than I was.
I spent a moment looking at the mechanisms that locked the frames. They were all the same kind of lock that I had seen in the exhibit. If someone wanted to take whatever was within one of these frames, they would need to know the combination.
Cautiously I began opening the doors leading off from the hallway. The two doors closest to me both contained small offices, likewise filled with props from old exhibits. Next there was a storage closet, and finally a closet filled with cleaning supplies. But these were all small rooms and didn’t explain all the extra space that must have been somewhere else in the museum.
I was about to give up and go back out through the STAFF ONLY door, when I looked down at the floor and noticed something interesting. The closer you w
ere to the walls of the hallway, the dustier the floor became. This was true everywhere except the far wall where the bookcase was. There was a clear rectangle of not-dusty floor just to the right of the bookcase. I was willing to bet that was where the bookcase had previously been standing, and that someone must have recently moved it.
I walked quickly over to the bookcase and checked everything that was on it. There wasn’t much. Old lights and some smaller frames. I leaned around to look behind the bookcase, and hiding behind it was another door. I knew there had to be more to this museum!
There was just enough space between the bookcase and the wall that I could squeeze in between them, and hopefully open that door. I began sidestepping and reaching toward the door handle. I was completely behind the bookcase before I realized how much dust I had stirred up. It was floating all around me. But I still managed to get my hand on the door handle and it was—locked.
The light wasn’t great back there, but I could just make out a keypad above the door handle. It seemed that everything in this museum was locked through the use of combinations. If I wanted to get through, I would need to figure out the numerical code specific to this door.
I began to step sideways in the other direction, ready to get out of there, when I heard a door shut behind me. There was someone else in the hallway with me.
Actually, there were two people. I stood still where I was hiding, careful not to make a sound, and I could hear them arguing.
“I’m sorry,” said one of the voices. “But I just can’t help you.” The voice was breathy and wheezy, and I realized I recognized it. It was the woman from this morning, Susan, who worked at the museum.
“You have to,” said the other voice. This one sounded much more steady, and it was also loud, and the speaker was clearly upset. “Do you know what people are already saying? That the photographs are cursed. I overheard someone, some girl, this morning at the diner.”
Oh no. I was willing to bet that the girl they were talking about was none other than Riley. That would mean that this other voice must belong to Beverly DeSantos.
Hidden Pictures Page 2