The Secret Cellar (21 page)

“Yeah, um, thanks,” I say. “It
was
pretty nice.”

Okay, maybe I’m not going to put Shakespeare out of business, but it was sincere.

And then something completely unexpected happens: Livvy Klack actually blushes. Of course, it’s nothing like the classic dunked-in-red-paint look I’m known for, but there is definitely a pinkish glow to her cheeks.

“It was no big deal,” she says. “You guys would have done it for me.”

Becca, who says pretty much everything that crosses her mind, regards the faces around the table and announces gloomily, “Well, it’s official. The world is coming to an end. I mean, if Leigh Ann worrying about a rat and these two becoming friends aren’t sure signs, I don’t know what is.” She shakes my hand. “Been nice knowing you, St. Pierre. See you on the other side.”

When the school day ends—finally!—we stop by Ms. Lonneman’s room to bail out our incarcerated friend, Humphrey.

She has his jail cell on her desk, and is feeding him baby carrots when we walk into the lab.

“I was hoping you’d forgotten him,” she says. “I’m getting kind of attached.”

Leigh Ann is standing directly behind me, looking over my shoulder. “He
is
kind of cute,” she admits. “Do you think I could … hold him?”

Ms. Lonneman takes Humphrey from the cage and places him in Leigh Ann’s (trembling) hands.

Leigh Ann cradles him gently, her impossibly perfect face breaking into a huge grin. “I can feel his whiskers when he sniffs me. And his tiny little claws, holding on.”

I nudge Becca with my elbow. “I think you’re right. This is a sure sign of the apocalypse.”

Field Marshal Margaret musters the troops. “Okay, time to go, everyone. We have a … job to do.”

“Oh?” inquires Ms. Lonneman.

“Not a job, really,” says Margaret. “More like an assignment.”

“Thanks for taking care of Humphrey,” I say.

“Anytime,” Ms. Lonneman says with a wink. “And we won’t let Sister Bernadette know what we’re up to.”

Now that Leigh Ann has Humphrey, she won’t let him go. She stashes him in a zippered pocket for the frigid walk to Eighty-First Street. Because we couldn’t risk taking a full bottle of wine to school—a live rat is one thing, but the wine? Way too hard to explain to Sister Bernadette!—Margaret and I dropped it off with Shelley early in the morning.

The setting sun is well hidden by thick gray clouds when we knock on the door at the house on Eighty-Second Street. Shelley gives the wine bottle to Margaret, who hands it off to Becca, to be hidden away in her backpack.

“Boy, I hope no one else saw that,” says Shelley, smiling. “I’ll end up in jail. Giving booze to a bunch of kids.”

“They’ll wonder what kind of a school you’re going to open, that’s for sure,” says Becca.

“Well, this is it. Wish us luck,” I say.

“Good luck, girls. And thank you for trying, even if you fail.”

“Oh, we won’t fail,” I say. “That word is not in the Red Blazer Girls’ vocabulary.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that,” Becca scolds after Shelley closes the door. “You’re just tempting fate to stick it to you. Not to mention that you seem awful sure of yourself for somebody who ought to be sitting in detention right now.”

“Thanks for not mentioning that,” I say.

“Focus, you two,” Margaret orders. “Is everybody ready? Leigh Ann, are you sure you want to hold the rat?”

“His name is Humphrey, and yes, I’m sure.” She pats her coat pocket and smiles, satisfied that Humphrey is where he’s supposed to be.

“All right, then. Forward, march.”

After making sure that there are no other customers inside, we file into GW Antiques and Curiosities, where we are met by Lindsay.

She acts as if she’s happy to see us, but I see right through her fake smile: she’s annoyed. “Girls! It’s been so long. You know, I figured with Christmas and everything going on, you just … gave up on … well, you know.”

“Oh no,” says Margaret, wandering around the shop and pretending to be interested in a heavy glass paperweight. “We’ve been quite busy, actually. We got to know Shelley—the woman who worked for Mr. Dedmann,
remember? Did you realize that she graduated from our school? Small world, isn’t it?”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Yeah, and she let us do a lot of looking around over there at the house,” I say. “You won’t believe the things we found—”

“Or what we learned about Mr. Dedmann,” Margaret says. She pauses before sticking the knife in. “Did you know that he was a spy?”

Lindsay does her best to hide her surprise/​shock/​horror/​anger/​disbelief, but she’s no Meryl Streep; I swear you can see steam coming out of her ears.

And then Becca sticks in the second knife.

From her backpack, she takes out the bottle of wine. “Check this out,” she says. “From 1949! There’s a whole bunch of these. You know, I thought they’d be spoiled by now, but then Sophie’s dad told us that wine is actually better when it’s old. Who knew?”

“We were kind of hoping you could tell us how much it’s worth,” Margaret says.

Lindsay is dumbfounded, and can’t take her eyes off the bottle. “B-but that’s impossible. He said you needed … C-can I show that to … someone?” she asks.

“Mr. Klinger? Sure, as long as he’s willing to come here. I’m not letting this baby out of my hands,” says Becca.

Lindsay takes out her cell phone and retreats into
the back room, where we hear snippets of her sniping at him.

“How should I know if it’s real? Just get over here. Now!” she hisses.

Through the front windows, I watch as Marcus Klinger exits his shop, locks the front door, and scurries, ratlike, across the street—carrying, as we had hoped, Mr. Dedmann’s walking stick. He barges through the door to Winterbottom’s shop, freezing when his eyes land on the bottle in Becca’s hands.

“Where did you get that?” he snarls. “Let me see it.”

Becca holds it out as if she’s going to hand it to him, but then reconsiders and quickly pulls it back, hiding it under her coat.

“How do we know we can trust you?” Margaret asks. “Before we let you see the bottle, we need some collateral. Something like … that.” She points at the walking stick, gripped so tightly by Klinger that the knuckles of his right hand are white.

“Ha! Just as I thought,” he says. “It’s a trick. Well, I’m onto you girls. What did you do, buy an empty bottle at a wine shop?”

Margaret ignores him and removes an envelope from her bag. “Oh, I almost forgot. Something else we found.” She holds it so that Klinger can see the handwriting on the outside. Rebecca, master forger, has copied the handwriting perfectly. It reads:

Klinger suddenly looks as if somebody has drained all the blood from his body. He tries to speak, but his lips and tongue seem incapable of movement.

I take advantage of his temporary paralysis. “You know, I’m a book person, just like you, Mr. Klinger. There’s nothing like a great read. And, well, let me tell you, this was some interesting reading. Did you know that Mr. Dedmann wrote a new will? Of course, you must have; you two were so close. Strange, though, that he decided to leave everything to Shelley.”

“Well, not so strange,” says Margaret. “She
is
his great-granddaughter, you know.”

I swear that if I had so much as exhaled in their general direction, it would have knocked Klinger and Lindsay to the ground.

Enter Gordon Winterbottom, stage right.

“What, in the name of St. Francis, is going on here?” he growls, storming out of his office. At the sight of four red-blazered girls, he stops and points a crooked finger directly at me. “Y-you! What are you doing here? You and your … friends are not welcome here. After what you did to me, you’re lucky I’m not calling the police.”

He looks so furious that I seriously start to doubt Margaret’s plan. There is no way he is going to help us.

“It’s okay, Gordon,” says Klinger, recovering from the initial shock and trying to play it cool. “They aren’t after you. They’re attempting to pull a fast one on me this time. But it’s not going to work.”

Gordon moves right next to Klinger, just as Margaret had instructed, giving me hope that he hasn’t abandoned us for a twisted revenge plot of his own.

“Whatever you do,” he says to Klinger, “do not trust them. Don’t let them out of your sight for a second. I learned that the hard way. They’re devious, evil little girls. Bad seeds, every one.”

Okay, Mr. W., we get the point. You’re laying it on a little thick. Seriously? Evil?

“What’s this all about?” Gordon asks.

“This,” says Becca, juggling the wine bottle from hand to hand in higher and higher arcs.

“Stop that this instant, you idiot!” Klinger cries. “If that really is a 1949 Château Latour, it’s worth thousands of dollars.”

“What, this bottle?” Becca asks, swinging it over her head and then letting it fly—directly at Marcus Klinger!

It was supposed to be a nice, gentle toss, but Becca has improvised a little, launching the first French wine-satellite into orbit. As it floats high above his head, Marcus Klinger reaches up for it, moving faster than he’s probably moved in years. Lindsay wails. Gordon gasps. And Klinger … catches it, fumbles with it for a second,
and then finally latches on to it, mere inches before it hits the hardwood floor.

Meanwhile, Gordon reaches down and picks up the walking stick that Klinger has dropped in his frenzy to save the wine (and his own head), and Leigh Ann, pretending to tie her shoe, suddenly screams, “RAT!” loud enough to rattle the windowpanes. Humphrey scuttles across Lindsay’s feet, instantly transforming her into a sobbing, foot-stomping banshee.

“What?” Gordon cries. “Where is it?”

“I think it went thataway!” screams Leigh Ann. It’s not hard to believe she’s terrified; a few hours ago, she
was
terrified of rats. Now, though, it’s just darn good acting.

As good as she is, however, there is one performer in this little drama who is even more deserving of the Best Performance Award. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mr. Gordon Winterbottom: he runs in the direction Leigh Ann pointed, swinging the stick back and forth like a maniac. Then we watch in wonder as he drops to the floor, reaching under an old desk and swearing like a sailor.

“I’ll get you, you little—”

With Humphrey safely tucked away in my coat pocket, Gordon, still on his hands and knees, continues the hunt for his nemesis behind an overstuffed chair in the back corner of the shop. More banging and swearing,
followed by a few seconds of silence, and then … “Blast! He got away. There’s a hole in the wall by the radiator.”

“Y-you mean, he’s still … out there?” Lindsay asks, shivering.

“Not for long,” says Gordon, climbing to his feet. “I’ll get some traps and poison. I’ll smoke him out if I have to.” He hands the walking stick back to Klinger, who has been cradling the bottle of wine while all that was going on.

“Oh, right. Thanks.” He looks it over carefully, checking the silver handle to make sure it’s really his stick.

“Beautiful walking stick, by the way,” says Gordon. “Hope I didn’t damage it. Looks like an antique.”

Klinger eyes him suspiciously and grasps the handle firmly. “Yes. Yes, it is quite old. Unlike this bottle of wine,” he adds. “Nice try, girls. It’s quite obvious that this bottle has been tampered with; for one thing, there’s no capsule over the cork. A bottle like this one would have a wrapping of lead foil over the top of the cork. What’s inside, grape juice?”

“Kool-Aid, actually,” Margaret admits.

“I told you, Klinger,” says Gordon. “They’re calculating and conniving little miscreants. How they’ve managed to pull the wool over Sister Bernadette’s eyes, I will never know.”

“I think you give them too much credit,” says Klinger. “They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.”

As he says those words, however, he can’t take his eyes off the envelope in Margaret’s hand.

“I don’t suppose you’d let me take a look at that,” he says.

“You suppose right,” Margaret says. “This is going straight to Mr. Applewood. Carbon paper. Funny stuff, huh?”

Klinger’s eyes narrow, his head tilts to one side, and I read his mind: How does she know about the carbon paper?

He starts to hand the bottle of faux wine to me, but I push it right back to him. “You keep it, Mr. Klinger. To remember us not-so-clever girls.”

He gives us a little smirkle (you know the look: half smile, half smirk) and walks out the door without a word, swinging his walking stick as if he hasn’t a care in the world.

Lindsay, still shaken up, pulls on her coat and announces to Gordon that she is going home. I suspect, however, that there will be a rather lengthy stop at a pub on the way there.

As soon as Lindsay is out of sight, Margaret goes to the overstuffed chair in the corner and reaches underneath.

“How did I do?” Mr. Winterbottom asks.

Margaret’s smile brightens up the whole room. “Perfect.”