The Vanishing Violin (6 page)

“Rock” isn’t the most accurate verb for what we did. We sort of, kind of, more or less played two really easy songs. How easy? Let me just say one of them involved a young woman named Mary and her pet
ovis
. (Means “sheep”—just a little Latin I picked up in our last case.) But the whole idea of the first rehearsal was to learn how to play together, and we accomplished that—to some degree. We also figured out that we absolutely need a fourth Blazer. Leigh Ann’s singing, my guitar, and Becca’s bass are not giving us all the sound we want. Becca says she might have someone to play drums—a girl from her art program—but just to be safe, we post notices on the bulletin boards in the school cafeteria and Perkatory on Monday:
WANTED: DRUMMER OR KEYBOARD PLAYER FOR
ALTERNATIVE, SERIOUS BAND. MUST BE WILLING TO REHEARSE AFTER SCHOOL AND ON SATURDAYS
.

Within a few hours, I have messages from, oh, Elton John, Ringo Starr, Chris Martin, all of the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, and SpongeBob SquarePants (doesn’t he play ukulele?).

After school, we make two stops. First, the Nineteenth Precinct, on Sixty-seventh Street, to see what we can learn about the Carnegie Hall theft. It must be a slow crime day in New York, because the officer behind the desk goes out of her way to help us. After six phone calls, she summons us back to her desk.

“Officially, the case is still open,” Officer Grogan announces. “But the guy down in the archives says no one has pulled the file in at least twenty years. Said there was about an inch of dust on it. He did have one piece of information that might be helpful, though. He says there’s a private investigator’s card stapled to the file, along with a note saying to contact him if anything about the case comes up. Here ya go—I wrote down the poop on the PI for you. Course, you gotta remember, this is twenty-five, thirty years ago. The guy’s probably retired … or dead. Sorry, but them’s the facts.”

“Why would a private investigator be working on a case like this?” Rebecca asks. “According to the records we found, the violin wasn’t insured. Isn’t it usually the insurance company that hires them?”

Officer Grogan shrugs, both shoulders reaching past
her ears. “Who knows? Maybe this German guy—what’s his name, Wurstmann?—thought the good ol’ NYPD wasn’t workin’ hard enough.” She leans over closer to us. “Which, between me an’ you, is not the craziest thing I ever heard. Like we have time to go trackin’ down a violin belongin’ to some fancy-schmancy musician.”

Our second stop is the violin shop, where we are introduced to Mr. Chernofsky’s new assistant, a Mr. Benjamin Brownlow III, who insists that we call him Ben. (I generally have a problem addressing adults by their first name.) My first impression is that he is warm and friendly like Mr. Chernofsky, but different in practically every other respect. Mr. C. is a big man—six feet, with wide shoulders—his hair and beard always appear to be in need of a good cutting (or at the very least, a combing), and I have yet to see him when he’s not completely covered in sawdust or wood shavings. On the other hand, Ben is kinda short, and everything about him is absolutely fastidious (“Word Power”!). If I had to guess his age, I’d say early to mid-thirties; he has perfectly trimmed hair and is—how do you say it?—clean-shaven. Even his shop apron, which he wears over a crisp button-down shirt, looks ironed.

Ben knows about the letter and has already done a very careful inspection of the bow, which he runs back to the workshop to retrieve. On his way in, he stops and wiggles a lever on a wall heating vent, finally pushing it all the way to the right.

“Sorry, it’s a little stuffy in here. We had this vent closed because we had a customer in this morning test-driving a violin, and the music was blasting in the coffee shop next door. Sounded like we had the Stones right in here with us. We couldn’t provide no customer satisfaction.” He smiles at his own joke, but he’s the only one.

I place the tips of both index fingers on my temples, close my eyes, and hum loudly, as if in a trance. “I see three letters on this object you are holding. I see a
J
… I see an
S
… and I see a
B
.” I open my eyes to see a dumbfounded look on Ben’s face.

“How did you …”

“Because I am secretly smart. Something I keep well hidden in order to blend in.”

“She read it on some Web site about stolen instruments,” Margaret tattles.

“Well. Mr. Chernofsky told me you girls were good, but I am still very impressed. You are exactly right. They’re a little worn and hard to read, but if you look right here with this magnifying glass, you can make out the letters
JSB.”

He is vibrating with excitement as he tells us, and I sense his disappointment when we don’t respond with instant enthusiasm.

“Is—is that a good thing?” I ask.

He smiles broadly, revealing perfect white teeth. “It’s a great thing. The ‘JSB’ stands for John Simon Berliner, quite a well-respected bow maker in his day.
I’m ninety-nine percent certain that this is the real McCoy. A violinist in the Philharmonic has one, and I’d like to check it against this bow to be absolutely sure.” He takes what looks like one of those big English pennies out of his pocket and starts flipping it in the air and catching it, over and over.

We’re all thinking it, but Rebecca is the first to blurt it out: “How much is it worth?”

“If—if it’s authentic, it’s worth eight to ten thousand dollars. Maybe a little more.”

Rebecca’s mouth drops open. “Shut up! For a bent stick with a little hair glued onto it?”

“Becca! Jeez!” I say.

“Oh, it’s all right,” he says. “But it is a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

Margaret smiles at me and holds up two fingers. Some of us already have one once-in-a-lifetime find under our belts.

“So, what do we do?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Well, how about we make a promise right now not to tell anyone about this, at least until we figure out what is going on with the violin,” Margaret says. “If this is a stolen bow, somebody, somewhere, is the rightful owner, not me. But if we turn it over to the police now, we’ll never hear from the mysterious, letter-writing possible thief again. So, if it’s okay with Mr. Chernofsky, I think we should keep quiet and the bow should stay here. Promise? Everyone?”

“What if they try to stick those bamboo shoots under my fingernails?” Rebecca asks.

“Wear gloves,” Margaret says.

Rebecca nods. “I can do that.”

Tuesday morning, about ten minutes before the homeroom bell. Margaret and I have our faces buried in her English notebook, studying for a test in Mr. Eliot’s class, when we realize Sister Bernadette is hovering over us, arms crossed. She looks—let’s go with “not pleased.”

“Ladies. My office.”

Yikes. Now what?

We take our usual seats and prepare ourselves.

She closes the door and remains hovering. “Two items. One, I have not been able to locate the key to the storage closet you asked me about. The janitor remembers someone borrowing it a while back, but it wasn’t returned to him. So we’re still looking. And two, something very strange happened in this school building over the weekend. Our … mystery man, or woman, has apparently run out of things to clean, so they have turned to making improvements.”

“What—what kind of improvements?” I ask.

“Painting. Imagine my surprise yesterday when Mrs. Hoffeldt waltzes in here to thank me for having her room painted. She’s been after me for three years to have it done. I, of course, had no idea what she was talking about and looked like someone unaware of the goings-on
in her own school. And you know what, girls? I do not enjoy looking like that. So I have brought you in here in the hope that you’re going to tell me that you’re making progress in your investigation. That you’re this close to solving my little mystery. Now, what do you have to tell me?”

In situations like this, I let Margaret do the talking.

“We’re definitely getting close,” she says. I try not to look too surprised; if what Margaret is saying is true, it’s news to me.

“How close?”

“Give us a few more days, and we’ll have an answer for you.”

“All right, a few days, but then—”

The bell rings, and we are saved—for now.

The four of us enter Central Park at Seventy-second Street, and a few minutes later we are standing before King Jagiello. With his two swords crossed over his head, his armor, and the massive horse, it’s not hard to see why he puts Rebecca in mind of
The Lord of the Rings
.

“Let’s look for the message,” I say. We walk around to the back side of the pedestal, looking up and down the enormous statue, and—spot it! Rebecca pries a small envelope out of the gap between two slabs of marble. It is three inches square, and if there were any doubt about who it was intended for,
MARGARET
is printed in neat capital letters across the front.

We crowd around her. Inside the envelope are two sheets of matching stationery. One sheet has a grid with six rows of squares drawn on it. Two of the rows contain eight blank squares, while the other four have eleven. Additionally, eleven of the blanks are outlined with much darker lines.

The other sheet has this typed message:

Margaret has that nobody’s-going-to-outsmart-me look in her eyes, and I immediately know that she won’t rest until this case is wrapped up tighter than a pair of size-eight feet in size-six shoes.

Rebecca pounds her head against the marble pedestal. “NO! NO! I can’t take another one of these!” She shakes a fist at the sky. “Stop torturing us!”

“Calm down, Rebecca,” Margaret says. “It’s just a little fun with puns. They’re kind of like crossword puzzle clues. And he told us what the category is—all six of these clues are for the names of literary orphans. We can probably solve the whole thing in half an hour.”

“Tell you what, Becca,” I say. “I’ll bet you a
macchiato ice cream soda that Margaret can solve number four right now, in under sixty seconds.” I choose number four because I already know the answer.

Rebecca slaps my hand. “You’re on. No helping.”

“What do you think, Margaret?”

“Start the clock.”

“Ready?” Becca says. “Go!”

Margaret thinks out loud: “‘She’s certainly Anne.’ A character named Anne who is an orphan. I’m thinking Anne from
Anne of Green Gables
seems like the obvious choice. She’s an orphan. But ‘Anne of Green Gables’ is way more than eleven letters. Seventeen, actually. Concentrate! What is her last name? Lennox? No, that’s Mary from
The Secret Garden
. Nolan? Nope.”

“Thirty seconds!” Rebecca shouts.

But I don’t think Margaret even registers her.

“Come on, Margaret. Think. ‘She’s certainly Anne.’ Certainly? Definitely? Obviously? That must be part of the clue. Anne Certainly? Anne Definitely? She’s Anne for sure. Oh my gosh … it’s ‘surely.’ Anne Shirley!”

I pat her on the shoulder. “Seventeen seconds to spare. Thank you, Margaret—I’ll think of you as I slurp my delish macchiato.”

“Double or nothin’ on the first clue—the one with the pennies,” Becca counters.

“Ready, Margaret?” I say.

Margaret closes her eyes. “Pennies. Cents. Coins. Abraham Lincoln. Baseball diamond. Bases. What’s another name for a baseball diamond? Ballpark? A field. A
field of pennies. Penny Field. Wait, what are pennies made of? Copper! A copper field. David Copperfield! Wait, that’s too many letters. Maybe just his last name, Copperfield. Is that the right number of letters?”

“Eleven, right on the nose,” I say. “Two down, four to go.”

“Okay, one more time,” Becca says. “But it has to be this one: ‘Miss Doe’s beneficiary.’”

The Brain That Can’t Be Stopped makes the leap into hyperspace. If she were a computer, there would be flashing lights and whirring motors—maybe even some kind of siren blaring—but instead there is absolute silence.

Becca starts a confident countdown. “Ten … nine … eight, just you wait … seven … six … five, my dream’s still alive … four … three … two, and Sophie’s through—”

Suddenly Margaret’s eyes open wide, and I catch a hint of a smile. “Jane Eyre.”