The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (3 page)

Lucas has a nickname for her father, Allen the A——. It's a word I can't say, and I'll probably get in trouble for even putting in this much. Lucas and I came up with a word we substitute for words like that. Our word is meep. Like, we say, “That meeping teacher,” or “Oh, meep, I forgot my library book again.” So when we're around people, we call Lucas's dad Allen the Meep.

There are so many things wrong with Allen the Meep that it's hard to know where to start. The thing that makes me maddest is that he's rotten to Lucas. He never wanted to have a girl, because he's a chauvinist pig through and through, so half the time he ignores Lucas and the other half he yells at her. I've never seen him hug her. Not even once. Lucas doesn't talk about it much. Still, I know it bothers her a lot that her dad doesn't seem to love her, or even like her a whole lot.

It's more peaceful when Mr. Stickney is off on a case, which he is most of the time, but Mrs. Stickney is no prize, either. Her name is Camellia. She's from the South. She has gorgeous red hair, full lips, big blue eyes, perfect skin, big boobs, and long legs. She's absolutely, unbelievably gorgeous. But that's about it. She's just this sort of beautiful, empty person. She's not stupid. Not at all. But all she thinks about are her looks and her clothes and getting away from her husband's temper tantrums by flying off to see her fancy friends in Santa Fe and La Jolla and the Bahamas.

Until last year, when Lucas turned thirteen and her brother went away to school, they always had a nanny because the Fair Camellia, as Lucas calls her, can't be bothered spending too much time taking care of her own kids.

I know I'm making her sound like a monster, and she isn't, really. I think she loves her children, and I think she feels bad that her husband isn't nicer to Lucas. It's just that she's so interested in herself and clothes and other things that have to do with money that sometimes her kids don't seem very important to her.

Then there's Justin, who's eleven now and thinks he's God's gift to the human race. But he's actually one of the world's most obnoxious creatures. We call him the Brat Child. In fact he was such a problem in his school that the Stickneys had to send him off to a private academy. Believe it or not, he's the only person Mr. Stickney isn't mean to. He says Justin is just high-spirited.

High-spirited my meep. The kid's a menace.

Lucas would probably be a little messed up with all these weird people around her if it weren't for her grand-mother. Mom says Lucas's grandma Stickney is one of the world's great human beings. She's really been important to Lucas. She's smart and loving and interesting, and Lucas is just like her. Lucas even looks like pictures of her grand-mother when she was young. Grandma Stickney was the one who taught Lucas to be interested in the environment and women's rights, and to think that who she is inside is more important than the way she looks. Obviously Allen the Meep, her son, takes after his father, who's been dead for years.

When Lucas was younger she used to stay with her grandma a lot. But for the past few years, Grandma Stickney's been the head of an international organization that's trying to improve the way women are treated around the world, so now she's out of town most of the time going to conferences and making speeches.

So that's Lucas's family.

I remember one of the first times I'd been over at their house on a Saturday. Camellia and Allen the Meep were yelling at each other, the Brat Child had his TV blasting in the bedroom next to Lucas's, and when Lucas asked him to turn it down he swore at her at the top of his lungs. Later we went to the kitchen to have some ice cream and get away from Justin's blaring TV, and there was a note from Camellia saying she'd gone out shopping and wouldn't even be back for dinner.

Just about that time my cell phone rang and it was Mom. “Hi, sweetie!” she said. “I've got an idea. I was thinking we should live it up a little tonight, so I got us some movies at the library and I thought we'd order a pizza. Do you want to ask Lucas to stay overnight?”

I was totally glad to hear her voice. It sounded so normal, and so did the part about the pizza and DVDs. Up until then I'd been a little embarrassed to have Lucas come over to my house. See, she lives in a mansion on an exclusive street and we live in an upstairs duplex, and at that time we didn't have really nice furniture or anything.

But the things that had happened that afternoon were enough to teach me that I was a lot luckier than Lucas, money or no money.

So I asked her, and she came over and stayed the whole next day until it was time to go to bed on Sunday night. Since then I think she's spent more time at my house than she has at hers.

She and my mom totally hit it off. So when Lucas and I were younger, the three of us pretty much did everything together. We used to call ourselves the Gleesome Threesome, back when it was fun having a parent around. We'd be in the car on our way to a camping trip and somebody would say, “The Gleesome Threesome Goes Camping.” Or it would be, “The Gleesome Threesome Goes to the Zoo.” We don't do it so much anymore now that Lucas and I are older and would rather not have adults around most of the time.

But the three of us still get along really well, even if my mom is a regular clean-up-your-room-and-do-the-dishes kind of mother. And she is, but she's okay as moms go.

Now we can go back to where I left off. I think I've explained everything I have to, and I can tell you how Lucas helped us figure out a way for my mom to take the job with The Scene.

Lucas isn't just smart, she also knows how to handle lots of things. When I told her about the problem with my mom and the job at The Scene, she played it cool. Didn't say anything.

Then she went home and did what she'd heard her dad talk about doing before he makes an argument in court: she constructed her case. She says that means you have to find the right arguments to use to talk people into doing what you want them to do.

The next day she went to her mother. Remember how I said Camellia was always wanting to fly off to Santa Fe or wherever? Well, since Lucas and Justin were too old for a nanny and since Allen was away a lot of the time, Camellia had to stay home and take care of the kids—or, actually, the kid. Just Lucas, because Justin was in that private academy. Lucas was old enough to take care of herself, but of course her mom couldn't leave her alone for whole weeks.

So Lucas suggested to her mom that she, Lucas, should go along with Mom and me on our trips during those times I couldn't stay with Uncle Geoff. She could keep me company and help pay expenses. Her mom could be free to run around during the time we were gone. And it would get Lucas out of her dad's hair, which might lower the tension in the household.

And, she told her mother, it would give her, Lucas, the chance to see and learn about international culture. She figured that would have real snob appeal for her parents, who go to dinners and parties with people who are all trying to give their children every advantage money can buy and get them into Harvard.

And since my mom would be working as a magazine writer who covered European fashion trends (which, as you can imagine, really appealed to somebody like Camellia), she, Lucas, would be right in the middle of the latest in clothes for young adults, and that might help her have a more fashionable look.

Her mother loved the idea. When it comes to clothes, Lucas and her mom are on whole different planets. On the one hand there's Camellia, who'll go out and spend thousands of dollars on clothes in one day. And on the other there's Lucas, whose idea of dressing up is a clean pair of jeans. Camellia is always telling Lucas she looks like a slob. Actually what she says is that Lucas looks vulgar. Or, as she says it, “vulguh.”

And about missing school—Mom could schedule most of our trips during vacations. Lucas said that because these would be international trips, the schools would probably think of them as educational, and because both she and I are good students, we might be able to take time away from classes if we had to sometimes, as long as we kept up on all our homework.

Well, Lucas's parents bought all her arguments, and they spent one entire evening with Mom having dinner at a restaurant talking about how it would all work. I don't know exactly what they said—they didn't take us along—but they came to an agreement. Problem solved. Mom took the job.

Okay, so the next thing you know, it's March, Mom has had her job with The Scene for half a year, and she's already taken three short trips while I stayed with Uncle Geoff twice and Lucas once. Now her bosses have given her so much to do in London that she's going to have to be away for two weeks, and she wants Lucas and me to go along, so in exactly a month, the Gleesome Threesome is leaving for a trip over spring break.

One Saturday afternoon Camellia called. Lucas and I were in my room, and Mom was in the kitchen paying bills. I answered, as usual, and she said, “Hah, Kar-ih.”

“Hah” is the way Mrs. Stickney says “hi.” I think I told you that she's from the South, and even though she moved here before Lucas was born, she still talks like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Mom always says she thinks Camellia's accent is charming. I'd probably think the same thing if I didn't know it was phony. After fifteen years here, she's really lost her accent, and when nobody special is around—and I haven't been special at Lucas's house since about the third time I stayed overnight—she talks with almost no accent at all. It's plain to Lucas and me that she works hard to talk like a Southerner because she thinks it makes her sound sexy or something. I think she should just give it up.

Anyway, that morning it was obvious she had something in mind, because she was laying the accent on thick. “Hah, Kar-ih, are y'all gonna be home for awhahl?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, I thought I'd c'mon over and show y'all the clothes I got this mornin' for Punkin to wear on the trip. Is that all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I guess.”

Pumpkin, or Punkin, if you're talking like Scarlett O'Hara, is Camellia's name for Lucas. She says she only let her husband name their little girl Lucas because he's such a bully and he was in such a bad mood anyway because they'd had a girl instead of a boy. The only time she ever calls her daughter Lucas is when she's mad at her or is being what my mom calls firm and clear.

“Lucas,” I said when I hung up the phone, “did your mom talk to you about clothes to take to Europe?”

“Kind of,” Lucas said. “She asked me what I was taking, and I said mostly jeans and T-shirts and a couple of sweaters. I told her your mom said we had to pack light, and get everything in one of those little suitcases on wheels. But Mom said we'd have to get at least one or two outfits for going out to dinner and things so I won't look ‘vulguh.'”

“Well, she's been shopping, and she's coming over.”

“Uh-oh,” Lucas said. “I'd better take off my glasses.”

Lucas has contacts, but she hates putting them in and taking them out, so most of the time she wears her glasses. Camellia thinks Lucas looks better without her glasses, so when she's around, Lucas takes her glasses off and pretends to be wearing her contacts.

I headed for the kitchen to tell Mom.

When I gave her the news, Mom moved her reading glasses down on her nose, looked over them, and raised her eyebrows—it was what Uncle Geoff calls her dry look, which means she doesn't smile, but it's still funny—and said, “This should be interesting.” That was all she said, but you could tell she thought it was going to be a disaster, one way or another.

You know how you see people in movies leaving department stores with piles of boxes, but in real life you just get bags? Well, Camellia is the only person I know who actually gets boxes. By the time we'd hauled everything upstairs that Camellia had bought, we had thirty-three boxes, not counting the shoes.

“I was just out at the Mall of America to pick up a few little bitty things, and I saw some clothes I thought would be just
adorable
for Punkin,” she said, after Mom had gotten her a mineral water. She was pulling out clothes and draping them over the couch. “I know how Punkin just hates to go shoppin'.”

“I sure do hate to go shopping, Mom,” was all Lucas said. Last year Mom heard her being snotty to her mother after Camellia had been on one of her Lucas shopping sprees. Mom told Lucas that there are lots of ways to say “I love you.” Some people do it by tucking you in at night, and some people do it by buying clothes for their little girl. Mom said these shopping sprees were Camellia's way of saying “I love you.” So now when Camellia buys clothes for Lucas, Lucas is nice to her.

Camellia must have loved Lucas a lot this time, because the clothes just went on and on.

She started out with the casual things she knew Lucas would at least think about wearing, like jeans, khakis, T-shirts, and sweaters. After she finished with the first bunch, she moved into the noncasual clothes. Blouses. Dresses. Skirts. There was even a black leather outfit. (“'Cause I always think leather looks so European, don't you, Gillian?”)

Our living room and dining room are kind of one big space, and by this time she was hanging things over the dining room chairs. Every time she moved on to another chair I'd want to look at Lucas, but I knew I'd better not or I'd burst out laughing.

As if all the clothes and shoes weren't enough, there was an entire three-section hanging case full of travel-sized cosmetics. There was even a little jar of eye-makeup remover pads, as if Lucas would ever wear eye makeup.