Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (10 page)

“Wait, though. That can’t be right,” said Ollie.

“Why not?”

“Think about it: If Grumps had time to plan where he was going to put the pieces, chances are he’d have to run the hiding places by Sully Cupcakes—or whoever was in charge—first.
And we wouldn’t be here. My guess is that they freaked out at the reaction that the theft caused, and panicked…”

“And then they went to Grumps!” We slapped hands. “I’m pickin’ up what you’re laying down, Ols.”

Under statements:
Thieves panicked, went to Grumps to hide art.
Reasons:
Surprised by intense reaction; don’t know where paintings are.

“So Grumps probably wouldn’t have had a lot of time to figure out good hiding places,” I said. My hands were sweating, heart racing. We were so totally onto something!

“And he would’ve picked places he was already familiar with!” Both of us said it at the same time, and—I’ll admit it—I squealed like Jolie Pearson when she sees a
darling
accessory.

I couldn’t sit down anymore. I paced in front of the bench. “So now it’s just a matter of narrowing down the right places,” I said. A gaggle of moms pushed squeaky strollers past us.

“Which is kind of what we’ve had to do from the beginning,” Ollie pointed out. “We need a list of the places in town where he worked.”

I was about to scowl at him, but then it hit me:

“We might have everything we need right in our hands!” I exclaimed. I spun, ready to race to the T, and barely heard his startled “Huh?”

“The list!” I tossed over my shoulder. “It’s the photo album!”

Ollie pounded the pavement behind me.

We didn’t let up our speed until we were back in my bedroom, photo album in our hands. I clicked on a Boston tunes playlist, and The Dropkick Murphys’ “Shippin’ Up to Boston” filled the room.

“I’m shippin’ up to Bos-ton…to find my wooden leg!” we both shouted. I laughed my first real laugh in a while. Aside from the family in danger/being threatened by a psychotic redhead thing, being a quasi-detective was
fun.

We sat on the floor, backs against my bed, and flipped the pages. Shots of Grumps, eyes crinkled, hair kaleidescoping from salt and pepper to all salt and back again, holding a hammer in almost every one, dashed by: in front of the USS
Constitution
, in a pew in a church, standing in front of Paul Revere’s house—it was like a historical tour of the city.

“How do we know when he was working on what?” Ollie asked as my flipping became more frantic.

I slowed turning the pages. “Good question.”

Ollie carefully peeled back the plasticky coating on the pics and pulled out a photo of Grumps in front of Faneuil Hall. It came off the gluey paper with a slight kissing sound.

“Bà dates the back of all the pictures she sends from Vietnam,” he said in response to my cocked eyebrow. He turned the photo over.

Written in Nini’s black, spidery writing:
6/94.
No matter where they’re from, I guess grandmas are alike.

“Disco,” I whispered. In that second a zillion feelings raced through me: total happiness, excitement, and—okay, I admit it—fear. Add gratefulness to Ollie’s Vietnamese grandmother to that list too.

I grabbed a pen and pile of sticky notes off my desk.

“What’re those for?” Ollie asked. He peeked at the back of a different picture and returned it.

“So I can mark what picture goes where when we find the right ones,” I explained. Even though part of me was dying to just rip everything out and toss it onto the floor, the other—more rational—part remembered how important this album was to me, Nini, and Grumps. I couldn’t just tear it apart.

Ollie and I went through each page (of course, the photos weren’t in date order), peeling off the pictures, checking the back, and re-sticking them in the book.

Halfway through the album, none of them matched the date we needed.

“Maybe there aren’t any in here from 1990,” I said. “I mean, wouldn’t it be kind of dangerous to have a record of where the pieces could be?”

Ollie shrugged. “Could be. But wouldn’t that
also
tell us something?”

Yeah, I wanted to say—it would tell us that finding the
missing art was going to be way harder than we thought. But I kept that to myself.

My butt was numb. Ollie turned a page and I tugged on a shot of Grumps standing in front of an apartment building somewhere. Half expecting another dead end, I flipped it over and saw
2/90
in Nini’s scrawl.

Numb butt forgotten, I popped off the floor and rocked out a twirl.

“Yeah, baby!” Ollie cheered.

I didn’t even care that the picture was taken
before
the Gardner heist—photos from the right year existed!

Three pages later, we had it: a shot of Grumps, standing on the stairs in front of a brick building. Squinting into the camera, he had one foot propped a step above him, hands in his pockets. And there, on the back:
3/90.
My heart thudded.

“This could be it,” I whispered. Ollie nodded.

“Where is it?” Ollie said. We both stared at the photo: concrete stairs, a black iron gate, blurry bricks in the background. “It looks familiar…”

I raced to my computer, scanned the photo, and uploaded it for a Google Image search. The search wheel spun and spun…then…“Look!”

Best guess for this image: the Massachusetts State House.

Set back on a hill, behind a big iron fence, the state house manages to be both welcoming—it does kind of look like a giant house, with big columns and normal-sized doors and whatever—and intimidating, like the person who lives there
would never let you in. The trim around all the doors and windows is white, the actual building is red, and there’s a gold-covered dome that shines like the sun on top. During World War II, they painted the dome black so it wouldn’t be a target for the Germans (seriously, Massachusetts public education teaches you the most random historical facts ever).

“Same stairs and gate,” Ollie said, looking back and forth between the two images.

“And look at the arches,” I added. He nodded.

“It’s the state house,” he said.

I scrawled
state house stairs
on a sticky note and we placed it in the blank album spot. As I did, a chill ran down my spine: The space in the middle of the other photos reminded me of the empty frames left behind at the Gardner.

I shook it off and dug through my desk for an empty envelope. I took another look at the photo, where the not-lines were on Grumps’s face, and tucked it away.

“Could he really have gotten all that art into
that
building?” Ollie said. He’d closed the album and laid it across his knees. “I mean, we’re talking about where the governor works. And all kinds of officials. And security guards. That’s gutsy.”

Still standing, I stretched my cramped legs. “Yeah, but it kind of makes sense,” I said, thinking it through as I spoke. “I mean, he’d have tools and stuff that he’d have to carry in, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what if he was able to disguise the art like it was
part of his gear? If the stuff
is
actually in there, it’s not like he hung it on someone’s office wall or anything. It’s been hidden for over twenty years.”

“True,” Ollie confirmed. “Now we just have to figure out where in the building it is. And,” he added, “it might not even all be there, if he was working on more than one place at a time. I still think it’s worth it to check the house too.”

Before I could agree with him, there was a knock at my bedroom door. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Moxie!” called my mom. “Hey!”

“Just a sec!” I called back. I grabbed the album, shut and stuffed it back into the bag next to my bed. Then I raced to the door, a jittery ball of nerves. I didn’t dare look at Ollie.

“Hey,” I said, opening the door. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Not over the music,” she said. She was still wearing her work clothes, which meant she hadn’t been home for very long. Where had the day gone? Her eyes skipped behind me, to Ollie. Immediately my face flushed.

“Hey, Ollie,” she said. Eyes back to me, narrowed in the Death Glare.

Technically
, I was not supposed to have anyone over when my mom was at work. Not even Ollie, unless we were hanging out in Nini’s apartment.

Another family rule.

“Er, hi,” Ollie said. His face was as red as mine felt. I’m sure my mom took our joint humiliation explosion as acknowledging that we’d broken the rules, not that we were hiding the potential solution to a decades-old, multi-million-dollar mystery.

Mom stuck her hands on her hips.

“Ollie, it’s time for you to head home,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he muttered. He scrabbled for his hat, patted his pockets to make sure he had everything, and squeezed past me. “Later, Mox,” he said.

My mom still blocked the door, her five-foot-nothingness seeming to fill the whole space. “You and Moxie know the rules, Ollie,” she said with a deadly calm. I watched the back of his head bob up and down. Mom was scarier than The Redhead, for sure.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Ollie said. Ollie was polite to adults, but he only busted out the
ma’am
when it was serious business—like now. “It won’t happen again.”

“Damn straight,” Mom said. She shifted to the side, allowing him to pass, and shifted her gaze to me. He pounded down the stairs. I heard the apartment door click closed behind him.

“You didn’t have to scare him to death,” I said. I’d regained control of my jumpy nerves. “We weren’t up here that long.” My mom knows Ollie and I are just friends—the idea of kissing him would be like kissing my cousin. Or brother—but she short-circuits sometimes.

“I don’t care
how
long you were up here,” my mom snapped. “You know he’s not supposed to be up here. At. All.” She clipped those last two words. “Keep it up and you won’t be doing
anything
this summer.”

I puffed air out from my cheeks. “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Mom. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“Consider this a warning,” she said. “Break a second house rule this summer and you’re immediately grounded. No T pass.”

If you only knew how many house rules I’ve broken this summer, I thought. But I knew better than to speak. I smiled, instead. “Got it, Mom,” I finally replied, when it was obvious that she was waiting for me to say something.

“I brought sandwiches home for dinner,” she said. “Wash up and come down.” She turned and headed down the stairs.

Quickly, I checked my room: album put away, photo in envelope. I tucked the envelope between my mattress and box spring for safekeeping.

Now, how was I going to find millions of dollars of art hidden in the busiest—and probably most well-guarded—building in the state?

That night, I barely slept.

First, I waited till a little after midnight, to ensure Mom had conked out, so I could do a quick search of some of the random storage areas in our house. I was pretty sure that Grumps wouldn’t have packed up zillions of dollars of art and stuck it in our eaves, but, as Nini says, “Why jump over the fence when your own backyard bears exploring?”

So I grabbed my flashlight and hit the cupboard under the stairs (no wizard boy or stolen art—just our winter jackets, clothes, and Christmas decorations) and the eaves storage in the hallway outside my bedroom (dusty boxes wrapped in green-and-white twine labeled
TAX RECEIPTS, ANNE
’
S ROOM
, and
MISC—HOUSEHOLD
.) Although in theory Grumps could have hidden at least
some
of the Gardner art in one or two of the boxes, it didn’t seem likely. Mom and Nini did actually put stuff in there, and I didn’t think Grumps would take the chance that they’d accidentally find something they weren’t supposed to.

I crept out from the eaves as quietly as possible, closing its Hobbit-door behind me, and clicked the flashlight off. Was there any place I was missing?

Leaning my head against the bathroom door, I closed my eyes and visualized my house: three floors, with Mom and me taking up the second and third levels. Nini’s apartment didn’t have a lot of extra closet space—there were two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, dining room, and den—and she and Grumps stored most of their extra stuff in the basement. Right away, I realized that the basement would be a bad hiding place. It was damp and musty-smelling, and Nini frequently moved stuff around down there, keeping an eye out for mold.