The Vanishing Violin (9 page)

Margaret and I are on the stairs Thursday morning, on our way to Mr. Eliot’s class, when we’re almost run down by Sister Bernadette barging through the doors from the fourth-floor classrooms. Her face is—well, if she were wearing a red blazer, you wouldn’t be able to tell where blazer ended and head began.

“Sister Bernadette! What’s the matter?” Margaret asks. I cower behind her skirt. “Don’t tell me. He struck again. What was it this time?”

Too stunned to speak, she motions for us to follow her into the fourth-floor library.

Oh my gosh. This place has been transformed into something out of a Jane Austen novel. The cracked, peeling drab green walls have been expertly covered with a pale blue striped wallpaper, all the wood trim around the windows and doors has been repainted in a tasteful soft cream, and here and there on the walls are wallpaper decorations that look like sculptures and
paintings. There’s even a nice-size matching rug in the center of the room. It’s all really quite stunning. And we’re stunned.

“Wow,” I finally manage to say. “This is beautiful.”

Sister Bernadette, she harrumphs.

“No way one person did this in one night,” Margaret says, examining the workmanship. “Look at it. It’s perfect.”

And then she sees it. There’s a new bookcase against the wall near the door, filled with the Harvard Classics—salvaged from our moldy basement. For a second, I think Margaret is going to … cry? She was heartbroken back in September when Mrs. Overmeyer, the librarian, told her those books were in storage. Slowly, lovingly, she runs her hand over the spines of the books, stopping only when she gets to a gap near the end of the fiction volumes.

“Volume eighteen is missing.” She thinks for a moment. “Dostoyevsky.
Crime and Punishment
.”

I knew that. Of course. Really. You dare to doubt me?

“Girls, I want answers!” Sister Bernadette says, and storms out.

A few minutes later, Mr. Eliot stands before his podium and utters the two words that strike a note of dread into our hearts: “group project.” Teachers love them; we hate them. Yes, I know, I know: there are going to be times in life when I’m going to have to work with other people, and I’m going to have to be collaborative and flexible
and learn to delegate responsibility, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Mr. E. loves to use open-heart surgery as an example of a group working together toward a common goal—you know, everyone is responsible for some part of the procedure, and if somebody screws up, the patient kicks it. Well, my argument is, if the anesthesiologist (let’s call her Bridget O’Malley) decides the night before surgery that she absolutely must spend six hours online instead of preparing for the operation, it’s not the patient who suffers. It’s me.

Though Mr. Eliot is unmoved by our howls of protest, he’s at least letting us choose our own groups. Rebecca’s not in our section of English, so Margaret, Leigh Ann, and I quickly size up the rest of the class, looking for our fourth. Miss O’Malley, thank God, has found three other unfortunate victims, and strangely enough, everyone seems to be already in groups of four. Fine by us. We are more than happy to divide the work three ways; the extra 8⅓ percent of the labor each is fine by us.

Our joy is short-lived, however, as Mr. Eliot reminds us that there is one girl absent. Olivia “Livvy” Klack. He declares himself to be certain we will be thrilled to have her as our fourth. Here’s everything you need to know about Livvy:

Before Leigh Ann showed up, she was the prettiest girl in our grade. Ergo, she hates Leigh Ann.

She hates Margaret with a deep and irrational passion.

She would sell her soul to the devil to be at one of those real Upper East Side private schools instead of having to slum it with us nonrich, unfabulous peons at St. Veronica’s.

I open my mouth to protest, but Mr. E. cuts me off. “Don’t waste your energy, Miss St. Pierre. Ah, speaking of which …”

Livvy strolls into the room and hands a late pass to him with a dramatic flourish. “I couldn’t get a cab. It’s raining, you know.”

We all roll our eyes at each other. A cab. She lives, like, three blocks from the school, for crying out loud.

“Well, I just assigned a little project for next week, and you are going to be joining these girls. They’ll fill you in on the details.”

“Su-per,” she says with the fakest smile.

The project: each group is assigned a punctuation mark and is responsible for teaching the rest of the class everything about it—the rules, the exceptions, and of course, some examples. Mr. Eliot walks around the room with folded pieces of paper in his hand, passing them out. On each paper are two critical pieces of information: the punctuation mark and the date the group must be prepared to present. Livvy unfolds our paper and reads it. “Apostrophe,” she says. “Awesome. We’re presenting on Tuesday.” She sticks the paper in her bag.

“Well, the apostrophe is much better than the comma,” I reply. “Those rules are impossible.”

“Then I suppose you three just have all kinds of wonderful ideas, being the famous Red Blazer Girls and all. Maybe somebody will write another story about you in the paper—you know, how you girls made learning about the apostrophe just so interesting.”

I resist every urge and instead go with: “Jeez, Livvy. All we have to do is make a PowerPoint presentation with all the rules and some kind of handout to give to the whole class.”

“Don’t forget the ‘creative’ element,” Leigh Ann adds. “Mr. Eliot said we can do anything we want as long as it is creative in some way.”

“We have to get creative using apostrophes?” Livvy whines. “This is stupid.”

“How about a poem?” I suggest, ignoring her. “Or even better, a song. We could sing it. What do you think, Margaret?”

She sets her mouth into a grim line. “I think it’s going to be a long week.”

I receive a text from my mom saying Mr. Chernofsky would like Margaret and me to stop by his shop after school (they know each other from violin stuff).

“Welcome, ladies. This was on the floor when I came in this morning,” Mr. C. says when we enter, handing an envelope to Margaret. “Someone must have slipped it under the door. No postage, no address, just your name.”

This time the envelope is plain, white, and very
businesslike in appearance. Margaret gives it a good sniff, tears it open, and then unfolds a sheet of paper with this message:

To which I can only add: Huh?

And penciled in the margin are the words “Leave your answer on the underside of the park’s biggest mushroom.”

The lines on Margaret’s forehead grow deeper and deeper, and her lips pucker and twist as she reads it and then rereads it. She takes another good whiff of the paper, shakes her head, and hands it to me.

“Do you smell anything?”

“Paper.”

“Yep,” she says, retrieving the letter from my hands.

“Happy to help,” I say. “I do know where the biggest mushroom in the park is, though. You know the statue
from
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
? Alice is sitting right in the middle of a huge mushroom.”

“Thanks, Soph. At least if we ever solve the clue, we’ll know where to leave the answer,” Margaret says.

Ben comes out from the workshop, and even though it is late afternoon and we presume he’s been hard at work all day, his apron is still spotless. His shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows—the first sign of casualness I’ve seen in him—but further investigation reveals that they are perfectly rolled. I find myself wondering how he accomplished this.

“Hi, girls,” he says, tossing a coin high in the air and catching it. “What’s new?”

Margaret holds out the letter to him. “Can you do me a favor? Read this, and tell me if it means anything to you.”

He scans it once quickly, makes a similar confused face, and then reads it slowly out loud, as if hearing the words will help make sense of them.

“Is this supposed to be a poem?” he asks.

“Allegedly,” Margaret says, “this is a clue to help locate the person who has the violin that goes with the Berliner bow. We already solved the first one—something about a piano player living on Hester Street, but not at certain addresses or apartment numbers. But what all that has to do with the violin, I got nada.”

Ben hands the letter back to her with a shrug. “Sorry I can’t help. Try looking online—type it in and see what turns up.”

“He used lemon juice for invisible ink in the first letter,” Margaret explains. “Well, I guess it was too much to ask that he use the same method twice. Still, there must be other things you can use for invisible ink.” She holds the letter up to the light and looks at it from the back and at every angle imaginable.

“You see anything?” I ask.

“Not yet. But let’s go to your apartment and take another look at that magic book of yours. And then I suppose we should do some work on this goofy project for Mr. Eliot. I can’t believe we have to work with that Livvy. I would almost rather have Bridget.”

“At least Livvy cares about getting a decent grade. That’s about the last thing on Bridget’s mind.”

“True, but at least we now know that Bridget is completely undependable. We don’t know what to expect from Livvy.”

Over the next two hours, my bedroom is transformed into a forensics lab as we subject the letter to all sorts of tests. My beginner’s magic book had only one more possible invisible ink to check, but a quick online search came up with a few more. First we rubbed the dust from pencil lead over a small section to see if a secret message had been written in milk. Nothing.

Then we tried a cotton ball dipped in ammonia. Phenolphthalein, the active ingredient in Ex-Lax, of all things, makes another great invisible ink. You grind up a tablet with some rubbing alcohol and write your
message. Later, when you touch it with ammonia, it turns red. Pretty cool, and worth remembering for the future, but our letter remained stubbornly black and white.

Another good candidate for the ink is laundry detergent, which glows brightly under black light, but the only place we can think of with a black light is the shop on St. Marks Place where I bought my mood ring. It’s packed with clothes (polyester!) and albums (vinyl!) from the seventies, along with a collection of those wacky psychedelic black-light posters. However, it’s almost time for dinner, and there’s no way my mom is going to let me go downtown to some sketchy psychedelia shop on a school night.

“So, tomorrow?” I ask, completely out of ideas. “Maybe something will come to you tonight. It’s probably right in front of our eyes. Between the ring and this case, just think of all the clues you’ve deciphered. You’ll get this one, too. And just imagine, an Italian violin—yours.”

I thought that would bring a smile to Margaret’s face, but she is frowning stubbornly. “I don’t know. The more I think about the whole thing with the violin, the more I doubt I’m ever going to get it. And I feel bad dragging you all over town when you’re not going to get anything out of it in the end. It’s not like the ring—at least there we were doing something really good. We were even bringing a family together. This time it’s all for me.” She turns away so that I won’t see her eyes watering up.

“If it will make you feel better, we’ll sell the violin
and split the money, and I’ll spend mine on something you’d never approve of.”

“Growf.”

While I’m trying to translate that, she reads the new text message on her phone. Wait a second—is that a smile I see just before she turns her back on me?

“Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” I say. “No secrets. Hand it over, or ve vill be forced to find other vays to make you talk.”

She holds it up, and this is what I see:

“Is this another kind of code?” I ask. “And why are you smiling? Fifteen seconds ago, you looked like you got a B on a test.”

“I’m not smiling,” she says.

I drag her over to the mirror on my wall. “That, my dear friend, is a smile. And you have some ’splainin’ to do. Oh my God. ‘A’ is Andrew.”

She nods, still grinning.

“And ‘affrettando’?”

“It means ‘hurrying’ in Italian. Musical term.”

“Okay, now explain that,” I say, pointing at her mouth. “I’ve seen these symptoms before. Googly eyes. Perma-smile. Now, where was that? Let me think. Oh yeah—ME! You looooove Andrew.”

“That’s ridiculous. I hardly know him.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

“Tell you what?”

“That you two had a text-lationship.”

“This is, like, our third text.”

“How did he get your number? Did he ask you for it? Tellmetellme.”

“Actually, that was your mom’s idea—in case we had questions for each other between rehearsals.”

“Way to go, Mom!”

At that moment, Mom knocks on my door and sticks her head in. “Way to go, me! What did I do?”

“Nothing,” Margaret says before I have a chance to leak the legumes.

“Well, it’s time for dinner. Margaret, do you want to stay? There’s plenty. It’s just us girls tonight. Nothing special, hamburgers.”

“C’mon, Marg. Stay,” I say. “Burgers and ice cream.”

Seriously, who could say no to that?

Besides a lactose-intolerant vegan, that is.

“Okay, okay. Thanks, Kate.” She recently started to call my mom Kate, which kills me.

“We’ll be there in a minute, Kate,” I say. “Margaret was just helping me understand something really complicated. Weren’t you, Margaret?”

“You two,” Mom says, closing the door.

I block the only exit. “So, are you going to go out with him?”

“Let’s not get carried away. Three text messages. That’s all. And even if I wanted to—and I’m not saying I do—my dad is not quite as open-minded as yours when it comes to boys.”

Hmm. “Open-minded” seems like a generous-to-the-point-of-completely-inaccurate description of my dad’s attitude on the topic.