The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (18 page)

“I'm still here,” I answered.

“You know what a good idea I thought it was to try to see Jacob and Marianne together?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I think there might be another way to get a picture of them meeting. Or if they don't meet, at least to learn a little more about Jacob.”

“Is it going to get us in trouble with Mom?”

“No, nothing like that.”

I must have looked like I didn't quite believe her, because she said, “Remember, yesterday I went along with your idea to spy on Marianne and I never complained about it once.”

She was right. Fair was fair. So I said, “Like, what exactly were you thinking?”

 

 

Finding out what we needed to know from the Rijksmuseum was easy. All we had to do was make a phone call. Yes, of course she spoke English, the receptionist said. The museum would be open until six o'clock, but the administrative offices closed at four thirty. And the museum's curators worked in a small building in the courtyard behind the museum.

We didn't need disguises, but we wanted to blend into the crowd. So we wore jeans and our hoodies, because the weather was cool and rainy. Lucas had her backpack over her shoulder. Even though we were kind of young, we thought we looked like any of the thousands of kids who flock into town every summer from all over the world.

We found out from a guard which building the curators used, and which door they'd use to leave. I kept watch on that one. Lucas stood near the passageway in case Jacob took a tunnel or something into the main building and came out through the public entrance. We could only hope he wouldn't leave from some other door.

Another thing we didn't know for sure was if he'd go home at four thirty. One of the million things Mom had told us during our walk was that the Dutch get weeks and weeks of vacation every year and they're less likely than Americans to stay late or come in early.

We hoped Jacob was that kind of guy.

At 4:31 on the dot, people started coming out of the entrance I was watching. Then, for about five minutes, they came out in bunches. Then they straggled out. And at 4:43, one of the stragglers turned out to be Jacob Hannekroot.

He was dressed in a tan raincoat with the collar up. The belt was tied instead of buckled around his waist. His shoes were shined. He had a black umbrella that popped up automatically when he pushed a button. He had great posture, holding his shoulders up high the way I'd seen other European men do, and he walked like he had somewhere to go. He carried his leather briefcase with a long strap over his shoulder. I wondered if his briefcase was full of forgeries.

Lucas and I both followed him, but she and I had decided to stay apart. We figured if he thought he was being followed he might try to lose us, or even come right up and tell us to “Go a-way!” But if he did that to one of us, the other could keep on following and find out where he went. And if anything more dangerous than that happened—not that we thought anything dangerous would happen—the other would be more able to help if she wasn't in the middle of it.

Besides, although I didn't say this to Lucas, I was still worried about what he might think if he saw us together—after what Heri might have told him.

We were hoping he'd go to Marianne's place—Lucas had her camera and I'd bought a disposable camera in case I was closer than Lucas when we saw Jacob and Marianne together.

First he walked to a nearby tram stop. When the tram came, he got on in the second car. There were five cars, and I got into the third one. I didn't know where Lucas had gone.

It was rush hour, and a lot of people were getting on. I had to stand in the aisle and hold on to a post. I couldn't see Lucas, but if I stuck my head out far enough over the people who were sitting down, I could see the back of Jacob's head, tilting down as if he was reading something.

Two stops up, we passed right by the place where we'd followed Marianne the day before. If he'd wanted to go to her place, he'd have gotten off there. But he didn't.

On the whole trip, I got only one glimpse of Lucas, who turned out to be in the last tram car. We'd been traveling for what seemed like a long time, and I was wondering whether we were going all the way to the Centraal Station when I saw Jacob's head come up and a corner of a newspaper as he folded it. He stood up and headed for the door. I headed for my door, too.

It was Dam Square. A minute later Jacob was moving around through the groups of kids hanging out, with me behind him and Lucas bringing up the rear.

Jacob was tall and walked fast. It had stopped raining and was just drizzling a little. He looked up at the sky, held out his hand as if checking for raindrops, then gave his half-folded-up umbrella a good shake, as if he'd decided it wasn't worth putting it up again.

We'd followed Marianne the day before, but that was only for a couple of blocks. This time we were walking for a lot longer than that. I've seen enough movies and TV shows to know how to follow somebody without being spotted. The only times I had to duck into doorways or pretend to look in shop windows was when he waited to cross a street. Otherwise he never even slowed down, and he never once looked back. I didn't know what he'd do if he saw me, but if my theory about Heri was true—and my intuition told me it was—I didn't think it would be good.

A couple of times I saw Lucas behind me when Jacob and I were waiting at corners. Otherwise I was too busy following to keep track of her. I had to almost run to keep up.

In fact I was so busy staying behind Jacob and avoiding people on bicycles that it really didn't occur to me where we were going until I saw a guy just lying in the middle of the sidewalk with his eyes half open. This was also like something I'd seen on TV—people totally spaced out from using drugs. Then I started looking around and it suddenly hit me. We were heading for the Quarter.

No, I was wrong. We were in the Quarter.

Those first few blocks in the bad part of town didn't seem so awful. Yeah, it was drizzly and gloomy and there were some weirdos like the guy on the sidewalk. But there were also fast-food stands and flower stalls, and even little flower boxes on the buildings, just like in other parts of town. Plus, the place was filled with people doing regular tourist things like taking pictures and eating french fries from little cups.

I was still feeling okay when we turned left onto a street that ran by a canal. The street sign—which, like most street signs in Europe, was on the side of a building—said OUDEZIJDS ACHTERBURGWAL. I was just thinking what a weird name this was for a street when I looked down into the street itself and started to feel nervous.

This was like places I've seen in previews for the kind of movie I never want to go to. There were buildings advertising sexy girls everywhere. There were stores right on the street where you could buy drugs. Men huddled together on corners talking. It seemed like men were everywhere, alone and in groups. Most of these guys ignored me, but two of them said things to me in languages I didn't understand. A bunch of guys in U.S. Navy uniforms said something creepy to me in English that I don't even want to repeat.

There were a lot of women standing around, too, and some teenage girls. Most of them weren't dressed for the cool weather and they didn't have umbrellas. They must have been freezing. I thought the women at least would be nice, but when I passed them they nudged each other and looked at me. One of them said, “Little American girl should go home to Mommy.” I didn't know how she knew I was American.

The only thing that saved me was knowing that Lucas was around. I took a quick look over my shoulder, but I couldn't see her.

It had been almost two blocks since I'd turned the last corner. She should have been on the street behind me by now. I made sure Jacob was still in front of me, stopped, turned around, and gave a good long look up one side of the street and down the other. I waited to see if she came out from behind somebody or reappeared from a doorway. Nothing.

Lucas just plain wasn't there.

My heart gave a lurch, and suddenly my mouth felt dry. In the whole time we'd been spying on Jacob and solving this mystery, Lucas and I had always been together. Even when we went separately into the Rembrandt room at the National Gallery, I always knew where she was.

Suddenly I thought about the Jaguar that had almost run over Lucas in London and I stopped dead in my tracks. Had the same thing happened here? Had nobody been there to scream at her and save her life? I turned around and took about three steps back the way I'd come before I remembered that the one person who would try to kill Lucas was Gallery Guy, and he was walking in front of me.

I turned back around and had to run to catch up. As long as she didn't get hit by a car, I figured I didn't need to worry about Lucas. The streets we'd been on were extremely busy, and Mom always told me that, except for traffic accidents, busy streets are safe streets.

But I was worried about me. I was alone, following a murderer in a really bad part of town—a murderer who might know I'd been spying on his girlfriend the day before. And where Jacob and I were heading there weren't as many people on the sidewalks, just closed-up buildings and lots of trash everywhere. If Lucas wasn't around, was it smart to keep going?

Jacob was half a block ahead of me when I saw him take a right. I decided I'd just go around that next corner, and if it kept on looking lonely and scary down there, I'd turn back.

I half walked, half ran to catch up, glad my tennies didn't make any noise. But it wasn't the running that made me breathe fast and my heart pound in my ears—I was scared.

Maybe it was intuition, maybe it was fear, but something made me slow down when I came to the street where Jacob had turned. I took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.

And there he was. Right smack in front of me, opening a door. Five more steps and I'd have run right into him.

I froze. Absolutely stopped moving. Stopped breathing.

Jacob hadn't seen me—yet—but as close as I was, he
would
see me when he looked up from turning his key. And when he did, he might kill me.

I knew I should run for my life, but I couldn't move. Couldn't even breathe. I stayed there, rooted to the spot. It was like being in a nightmare.

Then, just then, I heard something. Music. At the other end of the block, the sound of a bunch of drunken men singing a song I'd never heard in a language I didn't understand, then the sound of breaking glass.

The crash brought me back to reality. Jacob turned to look where the sound had come from, and in that instant I pulled back around the corner, ready to run—

And there was Lucas. Closer to me than I'd been to Jacob a minute before, and when she spotted me she opened her mouth to say something.

No time to say
shh
or put a finger to my lips. I jumped toward her just as she said, “K—” and I clapped a hand over her mouth, spun her around by the shoulders with my other hand, and pulled her up, her back to me, my back to the wall. She reached up to pull my arm away, but I just grabbed her hand and held her tighter.

One second, two seconds, three seconds—it seemed like forever. Then, at last, I heard Jacob's door slam.

I sagged, let go of Lucas, closed my eyes, and breathed for what I swear was the first time since I'd gone around the corner.

“What the . . . !” Lucas exploded. I let her rant while my heart slowed down.

At last I was able to say, “I almost ran right into Jacob! He just went into a door!”

“Well, I think a couple of my fingers are broken.” She started to massage her hand. I hadn't realized how tightly I'd squeezed until I saw her fingers were all white and stuck together.

“Where the meep were you?” I asked.

“I was hiding from Heri.”

“Heri the waiter? He was here in the Quarter?”

“Yeah, he was walking around, all alone.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don't think so. The minute I saw him I stopped and pretended to be looking into a window, but he might have.”

She didn't seem to be bothered about this, but I groaned. I wondered if Heri knew Jacob well enough to know he had a place in this part of town and, if he'd seen Lucas just a few blocks away from it, if he'd tell him that we weren't just spying on Marianne, we were spying on him.

“Which is Jacob's door?” Lucas asked. As usual, she was totally calm.

“The one right around the corner. You can't see it from here. But Lucas, I could have been . . .” I was going to say “murdered.”

But before I could tell her how scared I'd been, before I could say that this was really, really dangerous, she said, “Well then, let's go where we can have a look.”

Still rubbing her hand, she calmly walked across the little empty street to the opposite corner and stood under a sign that said MISSION OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE, A SAFE PLACE FOR WOMEN, and what I figured was the same thing in Dutch.

“What, are you crazy?” I hissed. “What if he sees us?”

“You think he's going to start staring out the window right after he gets up to his room? No way,” she said.

The street Jacob's place was on was like others I'd seen in Amsterdam. They're like regular streets, with buildings on each side and front doors and things, except they're not wide enough for a car to get through. Mostly they're a way for pedestrians to get from one normal street to another. In the center of town they're full of shops and restaurants. But this one was just an empty, narrow alley with ugly, depressing buildings. The only interesting thing was the mission, which had curtains with the kind of lace trimming they have a lot of in Amsterdam.