The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (5 page)

“Well, actually,” Celia said, “I think when I was their age I got along quite nicely in London on my own. But of course I knew my way about.” Celia doesn't sound like Robert when she talks. She sounds more like the rich English people that you see in movies.

I came up with a good argument. “We do know our way about. I mean around. We're always the ones who tell Mom which way to go on the Underground, and we always find the right bus to catch. And by now we're used to looking right instead of left before we cross the street. And last time we were in London, Mom and I walked all over. I remember exactly how to get to almost all the places we saw, and I know where we can find the public loos. I mean bathrooms. Whatever.” Loo is the English word for bathroom.

“But how about safety?” Mom said. “London attracts some pretty bizarre characters.”

“Not in April,” Robert said. “We don't start attracting the swarming hordes of bleeding tourists until at least May. It's that lot gives us trouble. We native Londoners are angels. Good Church of England stock.”

“Yeah, right,” Mom broke in. “Bet you haven't been to church since the day you were christened.”

Robert turned to Celia just as if he'd never been interrupted. “What say we let Gillian and these young women use our mobiles?” That's what they call cell phones over there.

“Brilliant,” Celia said, and nodded.

“Besides,” Robert added, “we don't have more than seven, eight cases a year of young girls being captured and sold into white slavery under Lord Nelson's column.” He gave Lucas and me a big wink.

“Please, Mom?” My mom is not one of those mothers who change their mind if their kid whines enough, but I thought a little begging couldn't hurt.

“Why do I have the feeling I've lost control of this argument?” Mom said.

“Why does your mum feel she ever had control of the argument?” Robert said, and gave Lucas and me a second wink.

So we spent the rest of the night getting about a billion instructions from Mom. She said we should call her every hour. Plus she told us don't talk to strangers, stay together, always stop and look at which way the cars are coming before you cross the street, be polite to everyone, etcetera, etcetera.

She did not say, “And if a mystery pops up right in front of your face, stay out of it.” Which was a good thing. Because the next day we stepped right into the middle of a mystery, and we could start solving it with a clear conscience.

Here's another place the story begins: in the National Gallery.

Lucas and I were supposed to meet Mom at the National Gallery entrance at five thirty. We chose to meet there because it's in the middle of London on a place called Trafalgar Square, right across from the Lord Nelson column Robert had talked about. By the way, Lord Nelson is the guy who led the Battle of Trafalgar, where the English navy defeated Napoleon. If you're interested in that kind of thing.

Anyway, we were having a totally cool time. First I showed Lucas the Tower of London, which is an old, old castle kind of place with teeny slits for windows and a stone wall around it. Famous people used to have their heads chopped off there in the olden days, including a couple of the wives of Henry VIII. While we were there we also went into the part where they keep the Crown Jewels, which are the crowns and things that all the kings and queens of England have worn for hundreds of years. You wouldn't believe how many diamonds there are on the main crown they use these days, or how big the diamonds are and how they sparkle.

After the Tower of London we found a McDonald's. Mom had told us that the menu at McDonald's is different in different countries. She was right. I had a Toasted Deli Sandwich Chicken Salad on a brown roll and an Orange Matchmakers McFlurry. Then we went to Piccadilly Circus, which is not a circus at all. I guess circus is an old word for a ring or circle, and this is a circle right in the middle of town that's kind of like Times Square in New York only with smaller buildings and not as many signs. We went to a few stores and scoped out the boys. We decided most of them looked just like the guys from Minnesota.

We planned to keep walking around central London all day and not get to the National Gallery until the last minute, but it started to rain, and the museum isn't far from Piccadilly Circus, so we got there early.

In America, the word museum can mean a place where they have a collection of almost anything, or a place where they mostly have art. But in England, places where they have just art are usually called galleries. So the National Gallery is a place where they just have art. We still called it a museum most of the time, because that's what it seemed like to us. Besides, it's kind of confusing, because
gallery
is also another name for a room inside the museum.

Anyway, like I said, the National Gallery is full of nothing but art, mostly thousands and thousands of old paintings. So we started looking at the paintings, just to pass the time. I actually like a lot of old paintings, but after I've seen a few hundred of them, the only way I can possibly not be bored is to try to look for funny things in them.

A lot of the people in paintings are naked, and if you try to have a sense of humor when you look at them, you suddenly see that they're doing all sorts of weird things, like riding horses and tending sheep and having picnics together in the country and talking to angels, all without any clothes on. If you look at the paintings that way, a lot of them are really funny.

So Lucas and I went from room to room laughing and having a great time, until we got to the Rembrandt room.

One of the things that's cool about the paintings by Rembrandt is that there are kind of darkish parts, and then there are parts that look like there's a light shining on them, and Rembrandt was able to make that happen just by using paint. I love that. Also I've painted enough to know how hard that is, so I wanted to look at all his pictures carefully to see how he did it.

But Lucas isn't as crazy about them as I am, and it wasn't long before she seemed to be more interested in a man who was sitting on a stool with an easel, copying from a big painting called
Belshazzar's
Feast, which takes up most of a whole wall at the end of the room. She was trailing along with me, but she kept turning around and looking over at him, obviously trying to see his work. He was sitting just a few inches away from his easel, blocking the view of what he was painting. I kept going around the room looking at one painting after the other and not paying much attention.

It just so happened that we were standing in front of one of the paintings close to Belshazzar's Feast and Lucas was still glancing at the guy painting at the easel when all of a sudden this bratty ten-year-old boy breaks away from the school group he's with, comes up really close to the man, and tries to peek between him and the canvas he's working on. Lucas says the painter actually reached out and shoved the kid away. My back was turned so I didn't see it, but I heard what he said to the kid plain as day.

You guessed it. He snarled, “Go a-way.”

I turned around. In fact, I probably spun around. I could only see the side of the man's head, but he must have been giving the boy the world's dirtiest look, because the kid was moving backward across the room, his eyes huge, like he was scared.

My heart was pounding about twice as fast as usual, and I felt like my face had turned bright red. For some reason I had the feeling that Lucas and I had to get out of there before the man turned around and recognized us from when he'd seen us in Minneapolis.

I did almost the same thing I'd done when we'd been there with him in the Art Institute. Trying to seem as cool as I could, I walked over, grabbed tight on Lucas's arm, and pulled until she started walking with me out of the room.

Once out, Lucas wanted to stop, but I kept walking, holding on to her arm and almost dragging her until, halfway through the next room, she gave up and fell into step beside me.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Where are you going?” But I didn't answer her. I didn't even look at her. I just walked fast, zigzagging through a bunch of rooms of paintings until I figured that if the guy left the Rembrandt room for any reason, there was no way he was going to find us. Then I dropped onto a bench in the middle of a very crowded and noisy gallery, and Lucas sat down beside me.

“It's him,” I said.

“Him who?” “Him who?”

“Him the man we saw in the Art Institute painting the Lucretias. Remember? I went up to look at his easel and he said, ‘Go a-way,' just like that guy just did. We called him Gallery Guy.”

First Lucas looked blank, and then all of a sudden her face changed.

“Gallery Guy! I remember now,” she said. “He did sound the same. But he doesn't look the same. Didn't the man in the Art Institute have gray hair?”

I nodded. “Back then he didn't look anything like he does now. He had a gray ponytail. And I'm almost sure he didn't wear glasses. And when he was in Minneapolis he was wearing something scruffy, like an old flannel shirt and jeans.” The guy we'd just seen had slicked-back dark hair, a dark beard, and a mustache. He wore a nice black shirt tucked into black trousers, loafers, and trendy glasses. The one thing the two men had in common was that they both had broad shoulders and looked like they'd be tall if they stood up.

“It must be a coincidence,” Lucas said.

I looked at the gazillion people milling around near our bench and lowered my voice. “What do you think the chances are that two totally different men would be copying paintings by the same artist, and when someone went up to look at their work they would say, ‘Go a-way,' just like that guy did? Huh?”

She looked up and stared at a corner of the ceiling—sometimes she does that when she's thinking—but this time she sat that way for what seemed like a long time.

“Earth to Lucas, Earth to Lucas,” I said at last.

She turned back to me. “I was just trying to think of what that man in Minneapolis would look like if I drew him with dark, slicked-back hair and a beard. You're right, it is the same guy,” she said.

I thought I'd stopped being surprised by Lucas's photographic memory, but it seemed incredible that even after more than a year, she could just think back about the man we'd called Gallery Guy and remember what he looked like so perfectly that she could have drawn him. I was also totally glad I wasn't the only one thinking there was a connection between the men we'd seen in the two museums.

I didn't want to show her how impressed I was, or how much it meant to me to have her agree with me. So I just said, “See, I knew it was the same guy!” Then I added, “I wonder . . .”

“What he's doing that makes him think he has to wear a disguise?” Lucas finished for me.

“Uh-huh.”

Now we were both quiet for a minute. “What are you thinking?” I asked finally. She had an expression I'd seen before.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Nothing my meep. When you get that look, it usually means you're making some plan that's going to get us in trouble.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” she said, trying to sound all innocent.

But I was right. She was planning something. In fact, that afternoon in the National Gallery was the beginning of something that would get us into more trouble—and put the whole Gleesome Threesome in more danger—than we'd ever been in before.

I looked at my watch. “It's almost five thirty already. Mom's going to be here in a minute.”

We got up from where we were sitting and headed for the front steps, where we were supposed to meet her.

I was still worried about what Lucas was thinking. I figured it had to do with Gallery Guy, and I had a really bad feeling about him. “I want to stay away from that man,” I said as we walked into the next room. “He might recognize us.”

“From the Art Institute?”

I nodded.

“Are you nuts? He must chase away kids who are trying to look at his canvas all the time. How could he remember all of them? Besides, think about how different we look now than we did then.”

She was right that we'd changed a lot. In the last year both of us had gotten our braces off, Lucas had grown about two inches, and we'd both gotten—well, not big boobs exactly, but a more womanly shape, as they say. I'd cut my hair to just below shoulder length, and I'd stopped wearing glasses and started wearing contacts.

“But you remembered his face well enough to know it was the same guy even with his disguise. What if he has a photographic memory, too?”

“Not many people do. Probably not more than one in a thousand. And besides, what if he did recognize us? It's not like seeing him in both places is against the law or anything.”

“I'm not so sure about him needing a photographic memory to remember us. My dad doesn't have a photographic memory, but he's painted enough portraits that he has a good memory for faces. Besides, there's something about that guy that just creeps me out. He's mean.”

“You're right. Even I can tell that.” Lucas may be smarter than I am, but I have a lot more intuition than she does, and a lot of the time I feel things that she doesn't. If she felt something was wrong about Gallery Guy, I knew he must be sending off some scary vibes.

When we got to the building's big entryway, it had stopped raining. We went outside and hung over the railing at the top of the entrance steps and looked over Trafalgar Square. Part of the reason we did that was just because it was a great view: the square with its pigeons and tourists, the huge, enormous column with the Lord Nelson statue on top of it, the other statues, the big fountain spurting up and landing in a pool, the red double-decker buses and all the other traffic racing around.