The Vanishing Violin (25 page)

“Friday night, seven o’clock. At Perkatory. Wait till you hear these four.”

“And what about you?” Elizabeth inquires. “Will you
be playing a little something for us, too? I’ve heard a lot about your violin playing, but I still haven’t witnessed it firsthand.”

A sly smile sneaks across Margaret’s face. “Let’s just say I have a very special performance planned.”

“We wouldn’t miss it.”

The door closes behind us, and Leigh Ann and Becca are all over Margaret.

“What was that all about? What kind of ‘performance’ are you going to give?” Becca demands to know.

“Soon, my minions. Very soon.”

I can wait for soon. But what’s a minion?

Back inside the school, we scale the stairs to Ms. Lonneman’s room on the fourth floor. Her door is open and Led Zeppelin is jamming on the classic-rock station. She jumps a little when Margaret knocks, then reaches over to turn down the volume.

“Sorry, girls. I am a child of the seventies. Love my Zeppelin, you know what I mean?”

“Definitely,” I agree. “Jimmy Page is a god.”

She looks at me with newfound respect. “You know who Jimmy Page is?”

“I kind of play guitar.”

“She’s a great guitarist,” Margaret says. “In fact, she’s going to be playing Friday. You know where Perkatory is, don’t you? The coffee shop around the corner from the church?”

“Margaret,” I interject. “I doubt that Ms.—”

“On the contrary, Miss St. Pierre. I would love to come.”

“I have to warn you, we only know two songs.”

“Who is the ‘we’ in that statement?”

“You know Rebecca Chen? Her and Leigh Ann Jaimes. And a friend of Rebecca’s. And me.”

“They’re called the Blazers,” Margaret says.

“Hmm. Clever name. Well, count me in—as long as the cover charge isn’t too outrageous,” she adds with a grin. “Did you girls come all the way up here to tell me that?”

Margaret sits at the desk right in front of Ms. Lonneman. “Actually, we were kind of hoping to find out how we did on the test today. Is that what you’re grading?”

“It is indeed. I’m almost finished. That’s the beauty of multiple-choice tests; they take forever to create, but they’re easy to grade.” She holds up a sheet of heavy paper with a lot of holes punched near the two long sides.

“What is that?” I ask.

“My magic grading tool. It fits right over the answer sheet. All I have to do is look to see if the spaces under the holes are blacked out. If they’re clean, they’re wrong.”

“Just like the windows,” Margaret says mysteriously. “Ms. Lonneman, your answer key just gave me the answer to a problem that has been driving me absolutely crazy. Thank you!”

Ms. Lonneman looks to me for an explanation, but I’m in the dark as much as she is.

“It’s sort of complicated,” Margaret says to Ms. Lonneman. “But about our grades?”

“I can play this game, too,” Ms. Lonneman says with a gleam in her eyes. “It’s complicated. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

An incredible aroma of fresh-baked something greets me when I get home. Oddly enough, it’s Mom, not Dad, in the kitchen, and every square inch of counter is covered with sugar cookies.

“What’s going on in here?” I demand. “Does Dad know you’re using his kitchen?”

“You’d better be nice to me if you want any of my cookies.”

“Are you baking for the entire music school?”

“Sort of. We’re having a big anniversary celebration Thursday, and I am the cookie committee. I suppose I should have gone out and bought them, but I had some free time for a change this afternoon, and I haven’t done any baking in a while. Here, taste.”

“Mmm. Cookie-licious!” I pour myself a glass of milk and sit at the table, also covered three deep with cookies. “Think you made enough?”

“The last batch is in the oven. Then I was thinking maybe we’d go out for dinner—just the two of us. Your dad has the late shift; he won’t be home till midnight. How’s your homework situation?”

“It’s a light day. I had a free period and got my math and English done. Just a little Spanish—it’ll take me maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Why don’t you do that right now while I clean up, and maybe we can even catch a movie. Check the paper for times.”

Arms crossed, I confront her right there in the kitchen. “All right, Mom. What’s going on? Are we moving? Did you get a job in Cleveland or something?”

Mom laughs. “Cleveland! What gave you that idea?”

“You baking cookies, dinner out, a movie—on a school night. What’s up?”

“Hey, can’t I spoil my daughter a little?”

“Ohhh. Well, if spoiling is what you have in mind, there’s this awesome denim jacket in the window at—”

“I said a little spoiling. There’ll be no completely ruining you.”

“As long as we’re on the subject of your unruined daughter, I have something to tell you.”

“You’re playing Friday night at Perkatory.”

“Whoa!” I shout. “Jeez, I might as well live in some dinky little town. Everyone here knows everything I do!”

Mom almost drops a tray of cookies because she’s laughing so hard. “It was Elizabeth Harriman. She called a little while ago to ask if she should bring something.”

I get up and hug her. “I swear I just found out for sure today.”

“It’s okay, Sophie. I am so proud of you. What are you going to play?”

I tell her about the Blazers’ tiny playlist. She can’t get over the fact that I wrote a song.

“Maybe we’ll have a look at this denim jacket after all.”

“Really?”

“We’ll have a look. By the way, did you ever call Michelle? If you’re going to join the swim team, I think you need to be at the pool on Sunday afternoon.”

“I’ll call her right now.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

I raise my hands over my head in the dive position. “Mom, I’m taking the plunge.”

Not my best work, but it beats the heck out of a poke in the eye with a big stick, or so I would guess

“Some of you did very well on the test, maybe even surprisingly well in some cases,” Ms. Lonneman announces at the start of science class. Livvy and her crew turn to one another with smug smiles.

“However,” she continues, “some of you ladies have a little explaining to do. I’m not an expert in the field of probability or statistics, but I can’t help but wonder at the likelihood of a number of students—good students—receiving such similar scores.”

Livvy raises her hand. “Maybe they studied together.” She turns and smiles oh-so-sweetly at me.

“Miss Klack, perhaps you will understand my concern better after you see your test.” She passes the papers back without a word.

Margaret holds hers up for me to see. A perfect one hundred. Leigh Ann’s turn. Ninety-eight. Ms. Lonneman hands me my test. Ninety-six! Yes!

Livvy and friends, on the other hand, have gone silent. Livvy spins around, scowling when she sees my score. Then she sees Leigh Ann’s paper. Her jaw practically bounces off her desk; her eyes, they become mere slits; and her face, it gets redder and redder as she glares at Leigh Ann, who looks innocent as, well, a schoolgirl.

“The following students will stay for a little chat after school today: Miss Klack, Miss Aronson, Miss Peters, Miss Welles, and Miss McCutcheon.”

Yikes. I imagine how that conversation will go. (“But, Ms. Lonneman, the answer key that we stole out of a locker—the one that we thought was the real thing, stolen from your computer—turns out that it was a fake. So we’re victims, really.”)

Brrrinnnng!
The three of us RUN down the stairs to the cafeteria. Rebecca holds up her own test—an eighty-six—and grins. “How did our dearest darling do?”

“Shame on you, Rebecca,” Margaret scolds. “And you, too, Leigh Ann. Those poor girls trusted you!” She holds the straight face for a half second longer, then cracks up. “Can you believe how gullible they are?”

“It was a beautiful plan,” says Becca, high-fiving Leigh Ann.

I put an index finger to my lips. “Shhh. Here they come.” Livvy leads the way, with her four stooges in tow.

Becca, she cannot resist. “Hey, Livvy! How’d ya do on the science test? Me? A little ol’ eighty-six.”

“Do not gloat,” Margaret warns. “That’s just what got Odysseus into all that trouble.”

Becca leans back in her chair. “What are you talking about?”

“The Odyssey?
Remember? After Odysseus blinded Polyphemus—you know, the big Cyclops—by jabbing that big stick in his eye, he acted just like you. He couldn’t stop himself from bragging about how he did it and rubbing the guy’s face in it. The Greek-derived word for that kind of excessive pride is ‘hubris.’ And because of that, the gods turned on Odysseus, and it took him twenty years to get home.”

“Are you saying it’s gonna take me twenty years to get back to Chinatown? Because, you know, I can walk there in, like, an hour if I have to.”

I pat Rebecca on the shoulder. “Just know that you probably haven’t heard the last of Livvy Klack.”

We decide to celebrate our minor act of revenge in a let’s-not-tick-off-the-gods way, with ice cream and baked goods at my apartment after school. God knows we have cookies. When we get there, there’s a package wrapped in bright red paper on my bed with a card stuck in the ribbon.

“Look, your parents got me a present!” Rebecca says. She picks it up and shakes it.

Margaret takes it from her. “Easy, Becca. It might be fragile.”

“This is strange,” I say. “It’s not my birthday, is it?”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret says.

“Maybe it’s not for me.”

“See? I knew it was for me!” Becca exclaims.

I tear the card open and read:

I blink back a tear, stuff the card into my pocket, dig into the wrapping paper, and stop cold when I see the store’s name on the box. “No way.” I lift off the top and there it is: the coolest denim jacket ever. It is faded perfectly, with three different-colored bands sewn into the left sleeve, just above the elbow. We’re talking rock-star cool.

“That’s the one you were—” Leigh Ann says.

“I know. Mom and I were out last night, and I showed it to her, but she said it was too much. ‘Maybe for Christmas’ was all she said.” Suddenly I feel very self-conscious, and I put the lid back on the box.

“Try it on!”

“C’mon, I want to see it on you!”

“I feel kind of stupid now,” I say. “It just seems kind of rude, opening a present in front of everybody. It would be different if it were my birthday.”

They jump me and start pounding me with pillows, wrapping paper, my blazer, anything within reach.

“God, could you be a bigger loser?” Rebecca chides. “Rude? If you don’t try that jacket on in the next five seconds, I’m taking it.”

I put it on. “There. Happy?”

“Look in the mirror,” says Leigh Ann. “Raf is going to flip when he sees you in that thing.”

I can’t help smiling when I see my reflection. “Whatever you do, don’t say that in front of my dad. He’ll never let me out of the apartment.” I take the jacket off and lay it gently on my bed.

Parents! Go figure.

Rebecca is already on her way into the kitchen, shouting, “What about this ice cream you promised? Whoa! Are these cookies all for us?”

“No!” I shout back. “We’re only allowed to have the ones in the cookie jar.”

“Why, are these too good for us?” Becca says.

“Becca! You’re being a brat,” says Margaret. “Sophie, come in here so that I can tell you guys how I solved the puzzle with the picture and all the grids.”

“You mean … the …
dun, dun, dun
… final clue?” I ask.

Margaret takes the envelope with the clue out of her bag and spreads the papers on the table. “I went crazy looking at all these grids, trying to find words in every possible direction. I even went to the library and took out a few more books on deciphering codes, but nothing worked. And then …” She stops to take a big spoonful of ice cream, leaving us hanging.

“Margaret!” we shout.

“Okay, okay. When I saw Ms. Lonneman grading those tests with that tagboard answer key, it hit me.
Windows. At first I thought this photograph of the apartment building had something to do with all the clues with addresses and apartment numbers, but I was wrong—again. The picture was telling me how to decipher the code, how to read the grids. It is the key to the whole thing.”

“Ohh,” we say together, not understanding even the tiniest bit.

“See, the picture is a kind of code machine called a grille, or a grid, all by itself. I learned about them in one of the library books. They were used by real spies back in World War I. Now look at the picture again.

“Do you notice anything special about the windows?” she asks. After a few seconds of silence from us, she adds, “Like how many there are or how they are arranged?”

We bend over the table, elbowing each other to get a better look and trying to be first to answer.

“Thirty-six windows. Six by six,” Rebecca says, sticking her tongue out at me.

“Precisely. What else about this clue is six by six?”