The Mistaken Masterpiece (26 page)

Mr. Eliot looks in Livvy’s direction. “How about you,
Miss Klack? Do you agree with Miss St. Pierre’s assessment of the story?”

Curious—him calling on Livvy right after me. I wonder if he has already heard about the elevator ordeal, and that’s why he’s picking on us. That would be so like him. I resist the temptation to turn around and look at Livvy, but I hear the familiar annoyed sigh of someone who would rather be left alone.

“Yeah, I mean, no. It was better than ‘The Interlopers’—that one just wasn’t very realistic. True enemies don’t just become friends like
that.
” She snaps her fingers—inches behind my head—for emphasis.

Was that a not-so-subtle message for me?

“Interesting point,” Mr. Eliot says. “Sophie, care to rebut?”

“Well, I think it
is
possible. Especially if they, you know,
share
some kind of, um, traumatic experience.” I know Livvy is looking right at the back of my head, and I can feel my ears turning red.

Leave it to Margaret, who seems to be sensing my discomfort, to change the subject by pointing out something in the story that I (and everyone else in the class) had completely missed.

“I agree with Sophie that maybe ‘The Open Window’ doesn’t have that same kind of ‘wow’ ending, but the story itself is still
full
of irony. The girl’s name is Vera—and well, to me, that just says it all.”

There’s a moment of silence as everyone waits for the punch line.

Finally, a befuddled Leigh Ann asks, “Says
what
, exactly?”

“Vera. From the Latin
veritas
, meaning ‘truth.’ Get it? Her name is Vera, but she’s practically incapable of telling the truth. She’s pathological. It’s
incredibly
ironic.”

The rest of us mere mortals stare openmouthed, first at her and then at Mr. Eliot, who’s looking at Margaret like a proud parent.

“Well played, Miss Wrobel.” He writes the word
veritas
on the board.

Behind me, I hear Livvy mutter, “Good Lord. Latin? Is there anything she
doesn’t
know?”

I’ll let you know when I find something, Liv.

After school, I find a strange package sitting on my shelf in the locker that I share with Margaret. It’s not at all like Margaret to put something of hers on my shelf; we have strict rules about whose stuff goes where.

When Margaret squeezes in next to me to pack up her book bag for the night, she notices it, too.

“That yours?” she asks.

“Nope. I thought it was yours.”

“You’re saying you didn’t put it there?”

“Nope.”

“Nope, you didn’t put it there, or nope, that’s not what you’re saying?”

“You’re making my brain hurt,” I say as I lift the package out. It’s the size and weight of a book, wrapped
in plain brown kraft paper. My name has been printed diagonally across the paper. “That’s the same printing as on all the other boxes.”

We both look around at the noisy crush of girls that surrounds us.

“Open it,” Margaret commands.

I peel off the paper to find a hardcover copy of
The Secret Garden
, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite books. Right away I notice that this isn’t just any old copy; it is
my
copy, the very same one that disappeared when I was in the fifth grade. My mom bought it for me in London, and it has a little sticker that reads “£5.99”—which I left on because I thought that having a foreign price tag was just the coolest thing
ever
. I touch the sticker affectionately and open to the inside cover, where my own handwriting confirms: “This book is the property of Sophie Jeanette St. Pierre.”

“Is that—” Margaret starts.

“The one I lost,” I say, hugging it to my chest. “I remember I had it with me in school for a book report. I left it on my desk when we went down for lunch, and when we came back, it was gone.”

“So how did it get into our locker two years later? Have you told anyone our combination?”

“I don’t think so. Except Becca and Leigh Ann, of course. But they wouldn’t … I mean, there’s no way one of them took it. We didn’t even know Leigh Ann then.”

Before she can respond, I have a moment of panic. I lunge into the locker and dig into my jacket pockets. My fingers wrap around my iPod and phone, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Whew! My stuff’s still there.”

“Yeah, everything else looks normal,” Margaret says. “Save the paper it was wrapped in. There might be clues.”

“Clues? Where? For what?” Becca asks.

Leigh Ann pokes her head into the huddle. “What did I miss?”

I show them
The Secret Garden
. “Somebody swiped this from my desk in fifth grade, and now it suddenly appears in my locker. You guys—you’re not messing with me, are you, sending me all this stuff?”

Becca shakes her head. “Scout’s honor.”

“Never seen it before,” adds Leigh Ann.

“Okay, this is officially creepy,” I announce. “We need a new lock, Marg.”

“I’ll check with Sister Eugenia tomorrow,” Margaret says. “She’ll let us trade this one in. In the meantime, don’t leave anything valuable inside.” She pauses, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “So, is everybody ready to pay Miss Prunella a visit?”

First stop: the red door of Elizabeth’s townhouse. Father Julian left his father’s copy of the painting with her, and Elizabeth, with the help of a friend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has confirmed our suspicions. It is
definitely a fake; there is no underpainting. They didn’t have time to do a full analysis of the paint, but it doesn’t appear to be the same kind Pommeroy usually used.

“It’s a beautiful forgery, though,” Elizabeth says. “Skillfully done. Whoever did it had some talent. He—or she—simply wasn’t aware of Pommeroy’s unusual method of working. Or didn’t expect anyone to look quite so carefully at it.”

Before we leave for Prunella’s apartment, Margaret goes through the painting’s backstory one more time for Elizabeth’s sake, emphasizing the word “borrow.”

“We just want to make sure you’re okay with it,” she adds.

Elizabeth nods enthusiastically. “Oh, I’m always up for a little adventure. And this is a mystery that needs solving.”

Just as we’re leaving Elizabeth’s, Mom calls to tell me that she’s going to be late getting home, and that I need to go home and walk Tillie right away.

“It’s okay,” I tell Margaret. “I’ll run ahead of you guys, pick up Tillie, and meet you outside of Prunella’s. Becca and Leigh Ann can watch her while I go inside.”

“For a price,” Becca shouts at me as I skedaddle up Lexington.

Tillie greets me at the door like she hasn’t seen another human in months. She almost knocks me over, and then lies down flat on her back so I can rub her belly. Reality hits me: I am going to miss her craziness when Nate finally returns. In a few days, she’ll be gone forever
and I’ll be back to begging and pleading with my parents to let me adopt a poor, defenseless mutt from a shelter.

We bound out of the building and Tillie pulls me all the way to Prunella’s. She seems to know exactly where we’re going, and the sight of everyone waiting outside the scary iron fence sends her into a full-blown tizzy.

“What’s she so excited about?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Who knows? It’s like she’s going to visit her best friend.”

Tillie looks up at the apartment building and barks.

“Okay, Becca. She’s all yours.” I transfer a handful of small dog biscuits from my coat pocket to Becca’s. “If she gets too excited, give her one of these.”

Margaret hands me a coiled length of vivid yellow twine with a sturdy safety pin tied to one end. “Hold on to this. And
please
don’t leave it behind when we leave.”

Sheesh. Make
one
little mistake and you pay for it the rest of your life.

“Oh, stop pouting,” Margaret says. “If you stick that lip out any farther, a little bird is going to land on it.”

“I’m not pouting,” I lie.

“Good, because it’s time to get to work.” The gate swings open and all five of us (plus Tillie) go through, but Becca and Leigh Ann, our “ground crew,” take a hard left turn once inside the fence, ducking down behind the hedges with Father Julian’s painting.

Prunella is expecting us, thanks to Father Julian’s phone call. He assured her that we weren’t looking for
donations; we were simply recruiting new, like-minded members for an organization that she would almost certainly want to join.

Margaret presses the button for apartment 5B, and after we identify ourselves, Prunella buzzes us into the building.

When she opens her front door, Prunella seems normal—almost charming, even.

“It’s nice to see young people taking an interest in their country,” she says after Margaret has explained the purpose of our visit—recruiting new LOONYBIN members. (Of course, we’re not referring to the organization by its acronym in front of her.)

“And such nice, fair-skinned girls, too,” she continues. “There aren’t too many of us left—what with all these immigrants taking over everything. Come inside.”

My skin starts to crawl as she leads us into the room she calls the sitting room, which is not at all what I expect. Instead of floral wallpaper and maybe a doll collection, or even a big-screen TV, the walls are covered with dead animals. There are several deer heads, including one that looks suspiciously like Bambi’s mother; a moose head that is, I admit,
much
bigger than I expected a moose head to be; a bearskin with the head still attached; the head of some animal that looks like a really ticked-off pig; a fox; a bobcat; four fish; and strangest of all, in the corner of the room, a complete stuffed coyote, its nose raised as if on high alert.

Elizabeth turns in a performance equal to one of my
finest. She gushes over all the dead animals in a way that makes me believe that every interior decorator in New York will be hanging deer heads and bearskins in apartments all over town.

Frankly, I think the whole place is positively creepy—especially that poor coyote, who, to me, looks a bit too much like a lighter-colored Tillie. And, unlike his cartoon character cousin, not wily at all. I stop for a moment, perching on a stool (supported by real deer legs—yuck!), and try not to focus on all the eyes that seem to follow my every move.

“We’re just trying to make America a better place,” Margaret says convincingly as our hostess continues the tour of her very peculiar theme park: Prunella’s Tacky Treasures of Taxidermy. “We need to start taking care of the
real
Americans—like us. The ones who have been here the longest.”

Oy. Margaret’s family has been in America for all of five years. My phone is resting in the pleats of my uniform skirt, and Becca and Leigh Ann, listening in from outside the building, are laughing so loud that I have to cough to cover it up.

But Margaret is on a roll. “As you can see here on our flyer, one of our boldest ideas is to sell American citizenship. Every year, millions of immigrants come to America, and we don’t charge them a cent, when we could be charging them
thousands
of dollars. If they really want to come here, they’ll be willing to pay—don’t you think?”

There’s no doubt that we have Prunella’s undivided
attention, so Elizabeth suggests that she and Prunella go into the kitchen and make a pot of tea before we all continue this important discussion in the living room. She
insists
on helping out in the kitchen, leaving Margaret and me alone with the Pommeroy, which, in the midst of all those dead animals, sticks out like a Michelangelo in a room full of macaroni sculptures. Elizabeth’s job is to keep her new best friend in the kitchen for an absolute minimum of two minutes, even if it means blocking the door with her own body—something I would pay
plenty
to see.

As soon as the kitchen door closes behind Elizabeth, Margaret swings into action. We can’t risk using the front window, where everybody in the neighborhood can watch, so she yanks open a window on the side of the apartment and signals to Becca and Leigh Ann to get into position.

“Okay, Soph, unwind that piece of twine and hand me the safety pin.”

While I’m doing that, she takes the painting off the wall and heads for the window.

The kitchen door squeaks, and we freeze. “Do you girls want tea?” Elizabeth sticks her head out the door and gives us the okay sign.

Margaret snaps the safety pin onto the wire across the back of the frame after giving it a good tug to make sure it is solidly attached to both sides. She then starts lowering the painting out the window while I try to keep it away from the building, tree branches, and the nasty,
sharp points of the iron fence on the way down. Becca reaches up and snags the painting just as a gust of wind hits it, almost pulling the twine out of Margaret’s hands.

“Got it!” Becca yells up at us.

Leigh Ann makes the switch, attaching the twine to the wire stretched across the back of Father Julian’s almost-but-not-quite-perfect copy of the Pommeroy.

“Okay!” she shouts. “Take it away!”

Margaret starts quickly reeling in the twine hand over hand. Five feet. Ten. And then … disaster! A strong gust of wind gets under the painting and blows it sideways, and the twine wraps itself around a section of the scary iron fence.

“Uh-oh,” I say.

For a few precious seconds, no one has anything to add to my rather astute analysis; “uh-oh” seems to have said it all.

But wait. We don’t
do
quitting. It’s simply not in the RBGDA playbook.

“I have an idea,” I tell Margaret. “It might just work, but I have to leave you here for a minute. I’m going downstairs; if you don’t see me in thirty seconds, tell Becca to bring the other one back to the lobby. We’ll put it back if we have to.” I make a beeline for the door.

“Where are you going?” Margaret asks. She glances worriedly at the kitchen door. “Never mind. Just go!”

It’s an old building, the kind in which the stairs are not enclosed, and as I’m racing for the third floor, I hear the unmistakable sound of a dog skittering across the tile
floor in the lobby and then bounding up the steps. Tillie practically knocks me off my feet when she sees me. But we’re in the middle of a crisis situation and I simply don’t have time to ask how or why. I grab her by the collar and knock firmly on the door to apartment 3B—the one belonging to Livvy’s former nanny, Julia Demarest, and two floors directly below Prunella’s. (How do I know which apartment is hers? Easy—her name was right there on the door buzzer panel. A simple matter of observation, as Sherlock would say.)