The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (6 page)

But mostly it was because we hoped if we got out where there were lots of people and hung way over the side of the railing, Gallery Guy wouldn't notice us if he came out before Mom got there. Somehow, although neither of us could explain why, we just didn't want to be noticed.

“I think Gallery Guy is doing something suspicious,” Lucas said. She kept her voice low so the people around us couldn't hear.

“I think you're right. But if he is, it's something we don't want to know anything about.”

I could have been talking to a wall.

“It's probably even against the law, or he wouldn't be so worried about being recognized. And we're maybe the only people in the entire world who know there's something fishy going on.”

I hadn't thought of it that way, and I had to admit, it was pretty cool being one of the only two people who knew that something against the law was happening. Somehow Lucas always finds a way of getting me interested in whatever
she's
interested in.

“If we only knew what the crime was,” Lucas said. “Let's think. What kind of crimes have to do with art?”

“There's stealing paintings.”

“Art theft,” Lucas corrected.

“That's what I said. Stealing paintings. He could be, like, planning to . . .”

Suddenly somebody was pressing up behind me, and just for a second I was sure it was Gallery Guy and he was going to push me over the edge. I turned around, but it was only a very overweight man trying to work his way between some other people and me.

I started my sentence over again, still keeping my voice down. “He could be planning to copy a couple Rembrandts, then replace the real ones with his own fakes in museums and sell the real ones.”

“That's way complicated,” Lucas said. “I think it's more likely he's going to try just plain art forgery, painting something and pretending it was by Rembrandt.”

“But why would he need to go to two museums?”

“I don't have a clue. But if what he's doing turns out to be big, we'll probably hear about it. If anything new happens about a Rembrandt painting, the story will probably be in Time.” Lucas has to read Time magazine every week for her social studies class.

“I suppose.” It was a relief to think about this. If it was going to be in Time magazine, that meant it would be a big, famous story. Lucas and I were just two normal fourteen-year-old girls, so it wouldn't have anything to do with us.

“One thing is for sure, he has something to hide,” Lucas said. “If he was doing something normal, he wouldn't be so paranoid about having somebody see what he's doing, and he wouldn't be wearing a disguise.”

“Maybe we should ask Mom what he might be up to.”

She turned to look at me. “I don't think we should tell your mom about this.”

I thought for a minute. “Yeah, she might think it was just one of those kid things.”

“Maybe, but your mom has a suspicious mind. I think she might believe something was up, but she'd probably make us promise not to come back here.”

“So?”

“We have to come back!” Lucas said. “Tomorrow.”

“What do you mean, we have to come back?”

“We have to find out what Gallery Guy is up to. It will be fun, Kari! We've already been to a bunch of tourist places. This will give us something interesting to do.”

“You mean, like, spy on Gallery Guy? I don't think that's such a great idea, Lucas. He's not a nice man. Even you think he's mean.”

“Hello-o! How much trouble do you think we can get into in the middle of a crowded museum like this? What's he going to do—pull a gun or chase us around with a knife in front of hundreds of people? It will be fun!” she said again.

Suddenly I realized she was right. We'd been to a whole lot of tourist places, most of which I'd been to when Mom and I were in London before. Most tourist places are more set up for grown-ups than for teenagers, and to be honest, sometimes they're boring. Spying on a guy who might be up to something really big and important did seem way more interesting.

During this whole time, we were so busy with what we were saying that we'd sort of forgotten to look for Mom. Suddenly I felt a tap on my back, which scared the meep out of me, and there she was, standing behind us. I felt like Lucas and I needed more time to figure out how to handle the situation, but we just had to go on the best we could.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, trying to smile.

“Hi, guys,” she said. “I'm glad to see you survived your day in one piece.”

Normally Lucas and I would have made some sarcastic comments, asking her how much trouble she thought we could get into when we had to talk to her on Robert's mobile phone every hour. But I for one was too busy thinking about Gallery Guy to come up with any smart remarks.

Mom squeezed in beside me at the rail. “How was it seeing London on your own?”

“Fine,” I said, “just fine.” Great conversation I was making.

“We're kind of tired,” Lucas said, as if explaining why I couldn't think of anything more original to say. “Why don't you tell us about your day first? How was it? We'll tell you about our day later.” Lucas is always cool in a crisis.

“Okay,” Mom said, but she raised her eyebrows a little, as if she wasn't sure what was going on. She really does have a suspicious mind.

“How was my day? Well, I'm having a heck of a time. I have a photographer to help me take pictures in the British Museum and we're going to start shooting tomorrow, but I don't like any of the themes I've come up with for the story, so I'm not even sure what we're going to take pictures of.”

The National Gallery was about to close, and the landing was getting more and more crowded. A school group had come out behind us, and all these little kids were playing around and jostling us.

I started giving them dirty looks over my shoulder and said, “Mom, could we—” I was going to ask if we could get the meep out of there, when suddenly I saw Gallery Guy coming out the museum door. He didn't have his easel or his painting with him, and he didn't even glance in our direction. I was glad he didn't see us, but having him so close to us still made me nervous.

“You want to go?” Mom said, and turned.

“No!” I said quickly. “I mean, could we just wait here a second?”

Lucas said, “Yeah, we've been inside all afternoon, and just as you came up we were saying how fun it is to look over everything happening on Trafalgar Square. I especially like the buses.”

“Sure,” Mom said, but I saw her following my eyes as I watched Gallery Guy going down the steps to the sidewalk.

“Who's that?” she asked. “What's going on here?”

“That's just a guy we saw in the Rembrandt room,” I said, ignoring her second question. It maybe wasn't the whole truth, but it was the truth and nothing but the truth, and it sounded especially honest coming right after Lucas's lie. I always think it's good to tell the truth to your parents whenever you can. For one thing, it's usually easier.

“You are going to use the mummies, aren't you?” Lucas asked. She was talking about what Mom had said about trying to decide what to feature in her story about the British Museum. They have Egyptian mummies there that Lucas and I really like.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to explain exactly what Mom kept doing in the British Museum. If you read The Scene, you've probably seen some of my mom's stories about museums. She did the very first one the other time we went to London. It was about the costumes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I guess a lot of kids read it. So since then she's done two more, one on the big Louvre museum in Paris, and one on a museum in Florence, Italy.

Mom talked the people at The Scene into letting her do four museum stories a year. She's always telling me she's so tired of articles on supermodels that she could just throw up, and if the magazine doesn't try to do something for the 999 girls out of a thousand who could never be models, she doesn't think they're being very responsible. So she tries to get them to run articles that help get girls interested in things besides just their looks and boys.

Anyway, it was time for The Scene to run another museum story. This one was going to be about the British Museum. So that's mostly what she had to do in London this time, besides another “London Looks.” All the time we'd been in London, she'd been trying to find a theme for her article and decide what to have the photographer take pictures of.

Lucas's question about the mummies had been just the right thing to get Mom started.

“Yeah, I'm definitely going to include them. I figure if you're that interested in them, other kids will be, too. In fact, maybe—” She broke off. “Oh, duh. Good grief. Why didn't I think of it before? How about, ‘The British Museum: A Teenager's Guide'?”

“Sounds like a good theme to me,” I said, though I actually thought it seemed pretty basic.

“Of course! That's it!” Mom said. “I'll take you two around to the galleries tomorrow and we'll take pictures of whatever you're the most interested in.”

I saw Lucas's face fall, and even I felt disappointed. So much for our plans to come back and keep an eye on Gallery Guy.

Mom was too excited with her idea to notice. “I've been racking my brain for almost a week. You'd think I'd have thought of something so obvious at least four days ago. Terrific! I suddenly feel all energized.”

I looked at Lucas. It was obvious she didn't feel all energized, and neither did I.

We were going to eat at Robert's restaurant that night. The restaurant isn't as far away from central London as Robert's house, but it still takes a long time to get there on a double-decker bus. When we got on, Lucas and I went to find a place to sit upstairs. We never got tired of sitting upstairs on double-decker buses and noticing how weird it felt to drive on the left side of the road.

“We've got to figure out something so we can get back to the National Gallery tomorrow,” Lucas said the minute we were away from Mom.

“Well, the only thing I can think of that would keep us out of the British Museum completely would be a bomb scare,” I said, “and I think that might be going a little bit far.”

“Yeah, probably a bit,” Lucas said with a sigh, as if she was sad to give up the idea. “But let's at least make out a list tonight of our favorite things in the British Museum. We'll show them to your mom as fast as we can tomorrow morning, and maybe by the time we've had lunch, we'll be able to go check out what Gallery Guy is doing.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “And sometime tonight I'll let her know we have our own plans for the afternoon and don't want to be stuck in the British Museum all day.”

So we pulled out the little tablet Lucas used for a sketch pad and one of her soft lead drawing pencils and started making our list.

 

 

On the bus I'd been thinking I'd absolutely hate the time we had to spend in the restaurant, because I wanted to be talking to Lucas about our plans for the next day. But believe it or not, when we actually got there, there were so many other things to think about that I almost totally forgot about Gallery Guy.

Mom and I had met the chef and one of the waitresses the last time we were in London, and this was the first time we'd eaten there on this trip, so everybody kept coming over to our table and making a fuss over us, and bringing over tall nonalcoholic drinks with pieces of fruit on little sticks.

What with everything going on, I forgot all about Gallery Guy until we were in the middle of the meal. When I did remember him, I got a little shiver of excitement thinking about being in the gallery with him again, even though I was still worried that he'd remember us from that time in Minneapolis. Then I thought of something that totally spoiled my appetite.

What if Gallery Guy remembered us from Minneapolis and also happened to look at us yesterday when we weren't watching him? He'd recognize us right away and figure out we were spying on him. Even though we had a right to be in the museum, I had the feeling he'd find some way to make sure we didn't find out what he was up to. The thought gave me the shivers.

“Aren't you going to finish the rest of your chicken?” Mom asked as I arranged my silverware on my plate. “I thought you said it was delicious.”

“It is. But I'm full.”

“Well, you're going to have to eat more of it than that if you want dessert,” she said. Typical. I knew what desserts were like at Robert's, so I shoved in a few more mouthfuls.

Mom had been asking where we'd gone before the National Gallery, and Lucas was telling her all about the Tower of London.

While they talked, I was in my own private world, thinking about how to spy on Gallery Guy without having him recognize us. Then I thought of another thing: the guard.

If you go to museums, you know there are usually guards in uniforms hanging around, keeping an eye on all that expensive artwork. Well, the Rembrandt room had one of those guards. A balding guy. I'd noticed him right away because he had such a prissy expression. He had a long, pointed nose, and he held it high up in the air and looked down over it to let you know that he thought he was better than everybody else. He stood by the door scoping out everybody who came and went.

What if he saw us hanging around, trying to see what Gallery Guy was working on? Would he make us leave the museum? Would he tattle to Gallery Guy? That gave me the shivers again.