The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (12 page)

“Remember that day when we saw Gallery Guy in his car outside Charing Cross station?”

“Of course. In his Jaguar.” Then she looked at me, and it was obvious she knew what I was going to say. “Don't even go there, Kari. It was not Gallery Guy driving that car.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it doesn't make sense. He couldn't have known where we'd be today. Even your mom didn't know until she and the photographer decided.”

“I don't think Gallery Guy was stalking us,” I said. “I think he just happened to be driving along King's Road, saw you, and decided in a split second to try to take you out.”

“Take me out! You're always talking like a TV cop.”

“Kill you. Whatever.” I was beginning to lose my temper. A couple hours before, I'd saved her life. Now she was mocking me. I counted to ten, like Mom always tells me to do when I get mad, then said, “I think Gallery Guy will kill anybody who sees what he's doing.”

“You think he just happened to be driving on King's Road, and
happened
to see me, as I
happened
to be crossing a street? You'd have to be stupid to believe in that many coincidences.”

When Lucas starts talking to me like that, I want to hit her. Since I'm not into violence, the next best thing is to say as little to her as possible until we've had some time apart. Thank goodness this was our last day in London.

Flying across the ocean takes a long time, and the day we flew back from London it seemed like I had 283 hours to think. What I was thinking was that I was partly responsible for Bert's murder. And even though I was sitting for nine hours in an airplane between my mother and my so-called best friend, I couldn't talk to anybody about it.

I sure wasn't going to talk to Lucas. I was still so mad at her I probably had steam coming out of my ears. Even if she was right about Gallery Guy not being the driver of the Jaguar, she didn't have to be so snotty about it. Especially right after I'd saved her life. Yeah, it did seem like a lot of coincidences that Lucas would be crossing a street just when Gallery Guy came driving along and could run her down, but coincidences do happen.

If she was miserable sitting on her butt all those hours, it about served her right. Getting back to Minnesota and dropping her off at her house was the one thought that made me happy.

So that took care of Lucas. Trouble was, I couldn't talk to my mom about the Bert thing and how guilty I felt about it either. And I sure couldn't tell her what I suspected about the Jaguar. I don't want to sound like I'm still a little kid or anything, but when I have a really big problem, Mom's always been the person I wanted to talk to. Well, remember what I said about knowing I was going to have to pay big-time for telling all those lies? I thought eventually I'd be grounded or lose my allowance or not be able to use the phone or the Internet or something.

But instead, at least so far, it looked like my punishment was going to be not being able to talk to my mom when I really needed to. What could I tell her? That everything we'd said to her in London had been lies, all lies? To say we did it for a good cause—well, that might mean something to me, but when it came to my mom I didn't think it would cut it.

The only answer was to keep my mouth shut. So there I sat with one part of me feeling like a terrible, no-good murderer, one part still wondering if Gallery Guy had almost killed Lucas, and still another part feeling like an orphan. As punishment went, believe me, this was way worse than losing telephone and IM privileges.

I was so tired because of everything that had happened and the after-excitement letdown that about halfway over the Atlantic Ocean I got all teary-eyed feeling guilty and alone. Just then the flight attendant came by and I got some orange juice and drank it, and I felt a little better.

When I was done I pulled out my journal and did a little summary of the Gallery Guy mystery. I knew Mom wouldn't look at what I was writing because she doesn't believe in reading other people's journals. I wrote:

And then, after writing that much, I added in big letters, AND IF THAT'S TRUE, AND GALLERY GUY HASCOPIED PAINTINGS IN OTHER MUSEUMS, THEN BERT MIGHT NOT BE THE ONLY MUSEUM GUARD GALLERY GUY HAS KILLED!

 

 

I was still thinking about what I'd written when Mom, who was in the window seat, asked us to move so she could go to the loo. The idea that Gallery Guy had killed other guards seemed so important that when Mom left, I turned to Lucas and said, “I've thought of something.”

“Are we talking animal, vegetable, or mineral here?” she said sarcastically.

“Forget it,” I said in my best freeze-out voice. “Just forget it.”

These were almost the first two things I'd said to her since she'd called me stupid. I made up my mind they were going to be the last for a very long time.

Uncle Geoff picked us up from the airport. Exactly twenty-three minutes after getting in his car, we dropped Lucas at her house, and two minutes after that we were home.

Geoff had bought some groceries so we wouldn't be coming home to an empty refrigerator. When we got into the house, I played with Guido, the cat we share with Uncle Geoff, and Mom made us some café au lait—with whipped cream and sprinkles for me—brought it out on a tray with some Mint Milano cookies, and put it on the coffee table.

When we'd both had our first bite of cookie, she said, “Okay, what exactly is going on?”

Mothers have a way of finding things out, even when you don't want them to. They seem to have a special intuition about their kids. This means you can't get away with much. The good side is that if you're far away from your mom and something bad happens, chances are the phone will ring and it will be her. Out of the blue.

Uncle Geoff calls it the Mother Myth, the “myth” being that mothers know everything. They don't, but they know plenty.

I should have known we couldn't get away with what we were doing in London.

So when Mom asked me what was going on, I said, of course, “What do you mean?”

And she said, “What do you mean, what do I mean? You know what I mean. In London. What were you and Lucas up to?”

I took a sip of my coffee. “Isn't a mother supposed to say, ‘Honey, Sweetie, Daughter That I Love, do you have something you want to tell me about?'”

“Don't push it.”

I put my cup down. “Okay, I'll tell you, but my body still thinks we're in London, where it's, like, two in the morning, and I have jet lag. Couldn't we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Nope,” she said. “I want you weak and tired and helpless so you can't come up with any tall stories.”

Here I was, sort of glad to have a chance to talk with my mother about everything, plus trying to figure out what I was better off covering up, and because of jet lag I felt like every movement my brain was making was in super slow motion.

So I told her—very, very carefully. I started out with the man who'd been copying the painting of Lucretia at the Art Institute, and the “Go a-way” thing. And then I told her how we'd seen the same man in London, only disguised, probably doing something that had to do with art forgery.

“How do you know it was the same guy?” she asked.

“It was the way he said ‘Go a-way.' I'll never forget the way he sounded. That was about the meanest thing anybody ever said to me in my whole life up until then.”

“You've lived a very sheltered life,” she said dryly.

“Besides, Lucas recognized his face from Minneapolis, even though he was wearing a disguise.”

“That photographic memory thing of hers,” she muttered.

I told her that we visited the National Gallery every day for the next three days. I didn't tell her that we spent all day every day doing it. I told her about the hands. I told her about a few of the disguises. I told her about our painting and drawing, and I pulled the painting of the hands out of the poster tube and showed it to her. I let her believe we made our copy of the big middle set of hands from what I saw when Gallery Guy reached over to get his paint that time.

“Then,” I said, sitting back down and getting to the end of my story, “when we went back to the National Gallery with you, Gallery Guy was gone, which didn't surprise us, but the guard in the Rembrandt room was also gone.” I hadn't expected it, but saying this made me want to cry. “And we found out from the other guard that he'd been pushed out in front of a bus.”

Now remember, I hadn't had any sleep for something like nineteen hours, and it hadn't exactly been a wonderful day, and all that. I think that was why I started to get tears in my eyes, and I couldn't stop my lip from trembling.

“Oh, honey!” Mom said, and put her arms around me in that embarrassing way parents have. I hadn't planned on breaking into tears, but it happened at just the right time. With Mom fussing over me, I had that many more seconds to figure out what I was going to say next. I was getting to the trickiest part.

“Well, I think it might have been our fault he got killed. I think,” I gulped, “I think we might have been partly responsible.” No way was I going to tell her about the snake.

I straightened up. I finally had my story ready. “See, when I saw what was in the middle of Gallery Guy's canvas, the guard, his name was Bert, saw me looking, and he might have told Gallery Guy, and if he did, then Gallery Guy might have thought Bert knew too much and . . . and bumped him off.”

Mom thought about that for a minute, as if trying to figure out what I'd said. Remember, she had jet lag, too. “No wonder you were looking so miserable on the plane,” she said finally. “Kari, I don't want to discount everything you've told me, but you don't know for sure that Gallery Guy was doing anything wrong. Face it: it's not likely that you and Lucas would have stumbled onto something like that. So it follows that Bert's death probably has nothing at all to do with Gallery Guy.”

Parents should learn that it's exactly this kind of thing that keeps their kids from talking to them in the first place.

I suppose the expression on my face must have shown my feelings, because she said quickly, “Besides, even if it's all true, and even if Gallery Guy did push Bert under the bus, you don't know that you had anything to do with it.”

“No,” I said, blowing my nose. “And I'm not sure that was how it happened. Mom, I'm sure that Gallery Guy is up to something illegal. But I've been thinking about how it was a museum guard that died, and it seems like there's a chance that every time Gallery Guy spends a long time in one museum, he kills off anybody who sees him there who might recognize him later.” I couldn't help thinking about Lucas on King's Road.