The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (2 page)

When he was muttering to somebody on the other side of the room, Lucas turned to me and whispered, “This your first class?”

I said, “Yeah. This your first class?”

She shook her head. “I've been taking classes for three years.”

I didn't say anything else for a while, so finally she said, “Can I see your drawing?”

“Sure,” I said, “if I can see yours.” I was proud of what I'd done. I always felt like I was pretty good in art. My dad is a professional artist, and he helped me learn how to draw and paint. All my life I'd gotten As in art. Even that morning the teacher had looked at my picture a few times and told me I was doing a good job. I was secretly hoping I'd be the best one in the class.

So Lucas came over to my easel and said, “That's really good.” And of course I was proud.

Then we went over to look at Lucas's picture. I couldn't believe it. She'd drawn the basket and the fruit perfectly. Perfectly. And she'd put in shading, and even drawn the pattern in the tablecloth. It looked like something somebody would put a frame on and hang over their fireplace.

It really ticked me off. I figured she just said my picture was good because she felt sorry for me. Okay, I admit it. I was also jealous because she was better than I was.

It turned out she was better than anybody. She was the best in the whole class, easy. I think even the teacher was impressed. After that first morning I didn't talk to Lucas the whole rest of the week.

About a month later I was standing in line to get a cone at an ice-cream place near my house. Somebody behind me said, “Kari?” and I turned around, and there was Lucas.

It was a surprise. Neither of us knew the other one lived in Saint Paul. She went—well, I guess I should say she goes—to this really fancy private school, and I go to a regular public school.

By the way, for those of you who are bad in geography, maybe I'd better explain that Minneapolis and Saint Paul are right across the Mississippi River from each other. That's why they call them the Twin Cities. It's all like one big town, and people go back and forth all the time, so it's not a surprise that our class was at a museum in Minneapolis, even though we're from Saint Paul.

Anyway, we might not have gotten to be friends even then if it hadn't been for the idiot clerk in the ice-cream shop. Here Lucas and I were, next in line, ready to buy ice-cream cones, and the girl just ignored us. Yeah, we were only ten. But that wasn't any reason she should wait on everybody else before us.

But she did. First there were two women who ordered complicated sundaes. When they were finished, the two of us looked up, ready to give our orders. But the clerk looked right over our heads and took an order from a man and his two little kids.

“This stinks!” Lucas said.

“It's totally not fair,” I said. I was whispering, but it was a loud whisper.

Now, you probably can't tell it from how I treated Lucas in that class, but I can be kind of timid. Lately I've been getting better, but when I was ten I was really shy. I don't suppose I'd have said anything to the ice-cream clerk even if I'd been waiting for an hour.

But Lucas isn't timid
at all
. She wants to be an environmental lawyer when she grows up, and I feel sorry for the lumber and oil companies she goes out to get. You'd never know it to look at her—she's thin, has curly reddish blond hair and glasses, kind of cute, and looks like any normal kid—but inside she's tough. I call her Lucas the Lionheart.

So when the clerk took the money from the man and began looking over our heads at the adults around us to find her next customer, Lucas banged her fist down on the counter and said, “We were here before your last two sets of customers, and if you don't serve us next, I'm going to report you to your manager.”

Remember, Lucas was ten.

Everybody in the store looked at us, and I thought I was going to die of embarrassment. But we got our ice-cream cones, and when we got outside we started laughing and we've been friends ever since.

We took another museum course together that summer, this time in painting, and I found out I'm better at that than she is. She draws well because she can remember almost every single thing she's ever seen in her life and draw it the way it looked. Her mind works like that. They call it photographic memory. Also, she's very careful and tries to get everything exactly right. I think the word is analytical. I don't have photographic memory and I'm not very analytical, but I'm more creative than she is. I'm good with color and composition, and I can come up with new ideas.

She draws what she sees perfectly. I see something and make something new out of it. We make a good team.

Okay, here's another beginning. The first time we saw Gallery Guy.

Now, most of this story happened last spring and summer in London and Amsterdam and a little bit in Paris. But this part happened right here in Minnesota more than a year before that, before I turned thirteen.

One of Rembrandt's two Lucretias is owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the place where Lucas and I took the classes. It's the second one, where she's already stabbed herself and her dress is bloody. Mom and I have been going to the Art Institute for as long as I can remember. We were able to go even when we were poor, because it's free.

I like lots of things in the museum, but for some reason I've always been totally interested in the Lucretia painting. It's not that she's so beautiful or anything, because she's not, really. It's more because of her story and because she looks so sad. And also because I just like the way Rembrandt paints.

Anyway, the Art Institute was having an exhibit where they showed both of Rembrandt's Lucretia paintings. The second of the Lucretias is owned by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The two museums got together and shared them that year for a special exhibit. So for a while both paintings were in Washington, then they were here. Or maybe it was the other way around. Whatever. Anyway, Mom and Lucas and I made a special trip to see the paintings one night.

I don't know if you've ever spent much time in a museum, but if you have you've probably seen somebody with an easel set up, copying a painting. This happens in almost every museum. In fact, when Lucas and I were taking those art classes at the Art Institute, we had to go out and copy from the paintings in the galleries. My mom says that people who aren't taking a museum's art classes have to apply and get special permission in advance. Mostly they're art students from colleges, but almost anyone can get permission to copy a painting if they just ask.

Well, that night there was this guy copying one of the Lucretias. He had kind of thick, mostly gray hair in a ponytail. Mom and Lucas weren't especially interested in what he was doing, but I was. Maybe it was because I'd spent so much time watching my dad paint. Anyway, this guy had his stool in one corner and his easel was turned so you couldn't see what he was painting unless you walked around it on purpose.

I wanted to see how it looked when somebody copied a painting, but first I wanted to learn all about the two paintings in the exhibit. There were a lot of big signs on the walls telling about Rembrandt, and about Lucretia and ancient Rome, and I wanted to read everything. Lucas stayed with me in the little exhibit room while Mom looked at the paintings in the main gallery just outside. There weren't many visitors in the museum that night, so Lucas and I were alone in the
Lucretia
room except for the man at the easel.

Finally I finished looking at the pictures and reading about them, and I wanted to go over and look at what the guy was painting. So I walked over to the corner where he was sitting and started to kind of slink around behind his easel.

I was just ready to ask him if I could look at his painting when he said, “Go a-way.” In fact, he didn't say it so much as he snarled it. “Go a-way.” Just like that. I wasn't sure, but it sounded like he might have an accent.

I turned around and started walking out of the gallery really fast. Lucas was coming the other way, toward the guy, as if she was going to ream him out for being mean to me or something, but I caught her arm and said, “Let's just get out of here,” and she came along.

From that day on we started calling the man Gallery Guy. It was a bad enough experience that it kind of stuck in my mind. And although it wasn't very much fun when it happened, it's a good thing he told me to go a-way, or we would never have solved the mystery of the Third Lucretia.

Okay, you've met Lucas, Lucretia, Rembrandt, and Gallery Guy. It's probably time you got to know a little bit about the other important people in this story: my mom and me.

I was born at a very early age in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My parents have been divorced since I was three. My father is Karl Sundgren. Like I said, he's a painter. Which is probably why I like to draw and paint. A genetic thing. He lives on a houseboat in a little town on the Mississippi River. I usually go stay with him a few weekends during the school year and for a week during the summer.

He's great on the weekends. But the time I spend with him in the summer isn't as much fun. It always starts out fine—we go fishing and he teaches me to paint—but after about a week I'm glad to go home to my mom in Saint Paul. It's not that I don't love him, but I start to feel in the way. I think it's because he likes to party and have girlfriends around, and he can't really do those things when I'm there. Besides, it's a small houseboat, and it gets crowded.

Mom is Gillian Welles Sundgren. Her first name is pronounced like Jillian, but it's spelled the English way. She's kind of tall, has green eyes and naturally curly black hair. I look like Mom, only I'm shorter, my hair isn't as curly, and my eyes are more hazel than green.

Mom works for The Scene magazine. If you get The Scene, look in the front where everyone who works on it is listed. That's called the masthead. Usually they make you look through about a million pages of advertising before you find it. Now, see where it says “Contributing Editors”? She's the fourth one down.

It says “International—Europe” next to her name because she does a lot of stories from outside the United States. I have to admit, it's pretty cool having a mother who writes international stories for one of America's most popular magazines for teenagers. But believe me, it wasn't always like this.

For a long time Mom had a job writing for a newspaper. She didn't make much money, but eventually she saved up enough to take me to England for two weeks. When we got back, she wrote some articles about it during her spare time, sent them to The Scene, and they liked what she wrote and offered her this job. They said she'd need to be out of the country about three months during the year.

She thought about it for a long time. She wanted the job. The problem was me.

We talked about it one night when we were both getting ready for bed. The discussion started while we were brushing our teeth. Then we moved to my room.

“Why can't I just stay with Dad while you're gone, at least during the summer and school holidays?” I asked as I pulled on the “Greetings from Ancient Troy” T-shirt I wear to bed.

“Forget about it,” Mom said. She was sitting cross-legged on the foot of my bed. “You have trouble staying with him for a week. How could you stand it for a month at a time?”

“Well, how about Uncle Geoff? I don't get tired of him, and he lives right downstairs.”

“He has a busy life. We can't expect him to give it up to stay home with you if I'm gone for more than a week. Besides, he's out on a dig half the time.”

Uncle Geoffrey, Mom's brother, teaches archeology at the university and goes to Turkey and Greece and Egypt three or four times during the school year and all summer to dig up ruins. He's the one who brought me my Ancient Troy T-shirt.

“Well, how about if you took me along and scheduled your trips for the summer and during school vacations? I want to go back to Europe. Can't I, please?” I was sitting up in bed by that time, and now I was trying to wear my most angelic look. Sometimes that works.

“I'd love to take you, honey. You don't know how much.” Mom looked like she wanted to fling her arms around me. Fortunately she was sitting too far away. “But I have to work, and you'd be locked up in our hotel rooms like a prisoner. Plus you'd miss a lot of school.

“And don't say,” she said, holding up her hand like a traffic cop, “that I should get somebody to go with us. I've already thought about hiring a tutor, but I can't afford it.”

So that was the end of that discussion. But she kept thinking about it. And I kept thinking about it. And then I told Lucas, and she figured out what to do.

I've learned a lot from Lucas since we got to know each other, and the first thing I learned was that money doesn't buy happiness.

When I met Lucas, I was used to not being rich and I never minded it that much. Mom and I always had a good time even when we were broke. We found lots of things to do for free or cheap and we never were hungry or homeless or anything, which is luckier than a lot of people. But I guess somehow I thought rich people were automatically happier than poor people.

Wrong.

Lucas's family has tons of cash, and they're miserable.

Lucas's dad is a very big-deal lawyer here in the Twin Cities. He's been the lawyer for some really famous cases. Do you remember when that petroleum plant blew up in Saudi Arabia and all those American employees were killed and injured? Well, Allen Stickney was the lawyer who sued the company, Ibis Petroleum, and got over a billion dollars for his clients. He was on the network news and CNN and
The NewsHour
on PBS.