The Vanishing Violin Read online

  As I say this, I realize I have absolutely no idea how far away it is. I know it’s one of those cities in one of those states in the middle somewhere.

  “But why do things always have to change?”

  It is a very good question. And I haven’t a clue.

  “I—I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

  Chapter 5

  In which yet another of my deeper, darker secrets is revealed

  Back at our apartment, Mom has pushed all the living-room furniture against the walls so that her neophyte (another visit to my orthodontist, another perusal of Reader’s Digest’s “Word Power”) quartet can sit in a semicircle facing her. They are playing a familiar-sounding piece of music, and considering this is their first time playing together, they sound amazing. (I suspect that the Blazers will not come together quite so quickly.) Their backs are to us as Leigh Ann and I tiptoe past and into my room, where Rebecca is waiting, sprawled across my bed, reading Seventeen. She looks up when we come in.

  “Hey, loooosers.”

  “Nice to see you, too, my dearest darling pal,” I say.

  “Funny, I didn’t take you for the Seventeen type,” says Leigh Ann, who has pulled herself together following her emotional meltdown in the park.

  Rebecca makes a shocked face. “But I just had to find out which celebrities have ‘the look’ and which ones have … dun, dun, dun … lost it! Besides, it’s Sophie’s.”

  “Where did you find that?”

  “Right where you left it. Under your mattress.”

  I feel myself blushing—a biological response that I am trying desperately to learn to control.

  “Back up a second. Why are you hiding Seventeen?” a confused Leigh Ann asks. “Won’t your parents let you read it?”

  Rebecca bounces up and down on my bed like an evil monkey. “She doesn’t want Margaret to know she reads it. Isn’t that right, Sophie?”

  “Yeah, well …”

  Leigh Ann looks more confused than ever.

  “Because Margaret makes fun of her for reading it,” Becca reveals.

  “But… but why?”

  Becca shrugs. “Because she’s Margaret. If it isn’t lit-er-a-toooooor, she won’t read it.”

  “Oh, she’s not that bad,” I say. “I know it’s stupid to hide it from her, but I don’t want her to think I’m turning into … well, you know.”

  “Me?” Leigh Ann asks, piling on. “I read Seventeen.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I say. “There’s nothing wrong with Seventeen. I just don’t want to—”

  Rebecca shakes her head sadly. “You know, you shouldn’t let her weirdness—”

  “Well, what about you, Becca? Snooping around my room.”

  “Yeah, I thought I would at least find something with Raf’s name or ‘Mrs. Sophie Arocho’ written out a hundred times.”

  Phew. So she didn’t look everywhere.

  “Where were you two, anyway? Your dad said something about the library? On a Saturday.” She makes that tsk-tsk sound. “And then your dad bet me I couldn’t try some lemon goop and not smile—and I lost. I had to wash dishes. Totally worth it.”

  Leigh Ann, doing a little snooping of her own on Margaret and the kids out in the living room with Mom, says, “Whoa. Who is that?”

  “Who is who?” I ask.

  “The boy,” she answers. “Playing that big violiny thing. He just turned around for a second. He’s so cute—in kind of a dorky-preppy way.”

  Rebecca crowds into the doorway to peek out the crack, so I get up on tippy-toes to look over her shoulder.

  His hair is down to his shoulders, and all I can see of him is the back of his head. “Come on, turn around,” I urge.

  They reach the end of the song they’re playing, and I can barely hear Mom talking to them, pointing something out on the sheet music, when Becca gives me a hard shove and we all fall face-first into the hall.

  “Sophie!” Mom cries.

  “Oh, um, hi,” I say, smoothly covering.

  “Everyone, meet my delicate daughter, Sophie, who knows she is supposed to be quiet and absent when I’m giving lessons. And these are her friends Rebecca and Leigh Ann. They all know Margaret. Girls, this is Denise, Stephanie, and Andrew.”

  We ignore the girls. Leigh Ann is all too right—Andrew is cute.

  “Hey,” we all say, with the same weak, giggly wave.

  He smiles and waves back, hitting Margaret in the head with his bow as he does it. Cute, but klutzy.

  We run like fools back into my room and slam the door, collapsing on the bed together.

  “Yowza.”

  “Holy smokes.”

  “Hot-tieeee.”

  Hey, I never said we were mature.

  Margaret joins us in my room a few minutes later. She tries to be mad at us for acting like morons, but she can’t hold back a smile when she remembers Andrew whacking her in the head with his bow.

  “You should have seen how red he got. Reminds me of you, Sophie.”

  “So, what’s his story?” Leigh Ann asks. “Where does he go to school?”

  “Davidson. It’s on Ninety-first, over by East End. Very expensive.”

  “So he’s a snobby rich kid,” says Rebecca. “Probably has his own chauffeur.”

  “Just because he goes to Davidson doesn’t mean he’s rich,” I say. “Or snobby. They have scholarships and stuff.”

  “Actually, I think he might be rich,” Margaret says. “He lives on Park Avenue. But he seems okay. Nice.”

  “And gorgeous?” Leigh Ann adds, giving Margaret a little nudge, seconded by Becca.

  For a second, I think I might get to see Margaret Wrobel blush AGAIN, but she recovers just in time to suppress it. “Nice try, Miss Jaimes. But it will never work. For I am a Dashwood and he is a Willoughby.”

  Rebecca looks puzzled. “You’re a dashboard?”

  “Dashwood. Sense and Sensibility? Jane Austen?”

  I nonchalantly kick that Seventeen a little farther under my bed.

  “I’ll bet Andrew knows what she means,” Leigh Ann teases.

  But Margaret fires right back. “Maybe you all would if you spent your time reading something … not glossy.” She gives me a knowing smile.

  Our stock rises, however, when we show her the printout of the article from the Standard and the other information we uncovered on the stolen violin.

  “Wow! You did great. What if this really is the same violin? If it was worth twenty or thirty thousand dollars in 1959, do you guys have any idea what it would be worth today? At least ten times that much. We have to find this guy. Tuesday, after school, let’s go to the park to visit King Jagiello.”

  “Who’s that?” Rebecca asks.

  “Oh, you’ve seen him a million times,” says Margaret. “He’s over by Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle.”

  “That homeless guy with all the magazines and the dog? Is that his nickname or something?”

  “No,” Margaret says, laughing. “He’s a statue. You know, the man on the horse, with two swords crossed over his head.”

  “Ohhh! You mean Aragorn!” Rebecca’s Lord of the Rings obsession is legendary.

  “Jagiello was a Polish king. A real king, Becca. Fifteenth century.”

  “Hey, guys?” I say. “Let’s play.” I take my guitar out of its case, plug into my amp, and start strumming some chords.

  Enough of kings and violins and bows and boys. It’s time for the Blazers to rock.

  Chapter 6

  In which we discover some semistrange things. But believe me, there are stranger things to be discovered in Central Park. Much stranger

  “Rock” isn’t the most accurate verb for what we did. We sort of, kind of, more or less played two really easy songs. How easy? Let me just say one of them involved a young woman named Mary and her pet ovis. (Means “sheep”—just a little Latin I picked up in our last case.) But the whole idea of the first rehearsal was to learn how to play together, and we accomp
lished that—to some degree. We also figured out that we absolutely need a fourth Blazer. Leigh Ann’s singing, my guitar, and Becca’s bass are not giving us all the sound we want. Becca says she might have someone to play drums—a girl from her art program—but just to be safe, we post notices on the bulletin boards in the school cafeteria and Perkatory on Monday: WANTED: DRUMMER OR KEYBOARD PLAYER FOR ALTERNATIVE, SERIOUS BAND. MUST BE WILLING TO REHEARSE AFTER SCHOOL AND ON SATURDAYS.

  Within a few hours, I have messages from, oh, Elton John, Ringo Starr, Chris Martin, all of the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, and SpongeBob SquarePants (doesn’t he play ukulele?).

  After school, we make two stops. First, the Nineteenth Precinct, on Sixty-seventh Street, to see what we can learn about the Carnegie Hall theft. It must be a slow crime day in New York, because the officer behind the desk goes out of her way to help us. After six phone calls, she summons us back to her desk.

  “Officially, the case is still open,” Officer Grogan announces. “But the guy down in the archives says no one has pulled the file in at least twenty years. Said there was about an inch of dust on it. He did have one piece of information that might be helpful, though. He says there’s a private investigator’s card stapled to the file, along with a note saying to contact him if anything about the case comes up. Here ya go—I wrote down the poop on the PI for you. Course, you gotta remember, this is twenty-five, thirty years ago. The guy’s probably retired … or dead. Sorry, but them’s the facts.”

  “Why would a private investigator be working on a case like this?” Rebecca asks. “According to the records we found, the violin wasn’t insured. Isn’t it usually the insurance company that hires them?”

  Officer Grogan shrugs, both shoulders reaching past her ears. “Who knows? Maybe this German guy—what’s his name, Wurstmann?—thought the good ol’ NYPD wasn’t workin’ hard enough.” She leans over closer to us. “Which, between me an’ you, is not the craziest thing I ever heard. Like we have time to go trackin’ down a violin belongin’ to some fancy-schmancy musician.”

  Our second stop is the violin shop, where we are introduced to Mr. Chernofsky’s new assistant, a Mr. Benjamin Brownlow III, who insists that we call him Ben. (I generally have a problem addressing adults by their first name.) My first impression is that he is warm and friendly like Mr. Chernofsky, but different in practically every other respect. Mr. C. is a big man—six feet, with wide shoulders—his hair and beard always appear to be in need of a good cutting (or at the very least, a combing), and I have yet to see him when he’s not completely covered in sawdust or wood shavings. On the other hand, Ben is kinda short, and everything about him is absolutely fastidious (“Word Power”!). If I had to guess his age, I’d say early to mid-thirties; he has perfectly trimmed hair and is—how do you say it?—clean-shaven. Even his shop apron, which he wears over a crisp button-down shirt, looks ironed.

  Ben knows about the letter and has already done a very careful inspection of the bow, which he runs back to the workshop to retrieve. On his way in, he stops and wiggles a lever on a wall heating vent, finally pushing it all the way to the right.

  “Sorry, it’s a little stuffy in here. We had this vent closed because we had a customer in this morning test-driving a violin, and the music was blasting in the coffee shop next door. Sounded like we had the Stones right in here with us. We couldn’t provide no customer satisfaction.” He smiles at his own joke, but he’s the only one.

  I place the tips of both index fingers on my temples, close my eyes, and hum loudly, as if in a trance. “I see three letters on this object you are holding. I see a J … I see an S … and I see a B.” I open my eyes to see a dumbfounded look on Ben’s face.

  “How did you …”

  “Because I am secretly smart. Something I keep well hidden in order to blend in.”

  “She read it on some Web site about stolen instruments,” Margaret tattles.

  “Well. Mr. Chernofsky told me you girls were good, but I am still very impressed. You are exactly right. They’re a little worn and hard to read, but if you look right here with this magnifying glass, you can make out the letters JSB.”

  He is vibrating with excitement as he tells us, and I sense his disappointment when we don’t respond with instant enthusiasm.

  “Is—is that a good thing?” I ask.

  He smiles broadly, revealing perfect white teeth. “It’s a great thing. The ‘JSB’ stands for John Simon Berliner, quite a well-respected bow maker in his day. I’m ninety-nine percent certain that this is the real McCoy. A violinist in the Philharmonic has one, and I’d like to check it against this bow to be absolutely sure.” He takes what looks like one of those big English pennies out of his pocket and starts flipping it in the air and catching it, over and over.

  We’re all thinking it, but Rebecca is the first to blurt it out: “How much is it worth?”

  “If—if it’s authentic, it’s worth eight to ten thousand dollars. Maybe a little more.”

  Rebecca’s mouth drops open. “Shut up! For a bent stick with a little hair glued onto it?”

  “Becca! Jeez!” I say.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” he says. “But it is a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

  Margaret smiles at me and holds up two fingers. Some of us already have one once-in-a-lifetime find under our belts.

  “So, what do we do?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “Well, how about we make a promise right now not to tell anyone about this, at least until we figure out what is going on with the violin,” Margaret says. “If this is a stolen bow, somebody, somewhere, is the rightful owner, not me. But if we turn it over to the police now, we’ll never hear from the mysterious, letter-writing possible thief again. So, if it’s okay with Mr. Chernofsky, I think we should keep quiet and the bow should stay here. Promise? Everyone?”

  “What if they try to stick those bamboo shoots under my fingernails?” Rebecca asks.

  “Wear gloves,” Margaret says.

  Rebecca nods. “I can do that.”

  Tuesday morning, about ten minutes before the homeroom bell. Margaret and I have our faces buried in her English notebook, studying for a test in Mr. Eliot’s class, when we realize Sister Bernadette is hovering over us, arms crossed. She looks—let’s go with “not pleased.”

  “Ladies. My office.”

  Yikes. Now what?

  We take our usual seats and prepare ourselves.

  She closes the door and remains hovering. “Two items. One, I have not been able to locate the key to the storage closet you asked me about. The janitor remembers someone borrowing it a while back, but it wasn’t returned to him. So we’re still looking. And two, something very strange happened in this school building over the weekend. Our … mystery man, or woman, has apparently run out of things to clean, so they have turned to making improvements.”

  “What—what kind of improvements?” I ask.

  “Painting. Imagine my surprise yesterday when Mrs. Hoffeldt waltzes in here to thank me for having her room painted. She’s been after me for three years to have it done. I, of course, had no idea what she was talking about and looked like someone unaware of the goings-on in her own school. And you know what, girls? I do not enjoy looking like that. So I have brought you in here in the hope that you’re going to tell me that you’re making progress in your investigation. That you’re this close to solving my little mystery. Now, what do you have to tell me?”

  In situations like this, I let Margaret do the talking.

  “We’re definitely getting close,” she says. I try not to look too surprised; if what Margaret is saying is true, it’s news to me.

  “How close?”

  “Give us a few more days, and we’ll have an answer for you.”

  “All right, a few days, but then—”

  The bell rings, and we are saved—for now.

  The four of us enter Central Park at Seventy-second Street, and a few minutes later we are standing before King Jagiello. With his two swords
crossed over his head, his armor, and the massive horse, it’s not hard to see why he puts Rebecca in mind of The Lord of the Rings.

  “Let’s look for the message,” I say. We walk around to the back side of the pedestal, looking up and down the enormous statue, and—spot it! Rebecca pries a small envelope out of the gap between two slabs of marble. It is three inches square, and if there were any doubt about who it was intended for, MARGARET is printed in neat capital letters across the front.

  We crowd around her. Inside the envelope are two sheets of matching stationery. One sheet has a grid with six rows of squares drawn on it. Two of the rows contain eight blank squares, while the other four have eleven. Additionally, eleven of the blanks are outlined with much darker lines.

  The other sheet has this typed message:

  Dear Miss Wrobel,

  If you are reading this letter, clearly your aptitude has not been exaggerated. Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, we can get on with uniting you and your violin.

  In honor of the many great orphaned characters in literature and our shared love of great books and clever puns, I present your first challenge.

  When you complete the grid, fill in the blanks in the following statement with the words formed by the letters in the bold squares:

  The _____ player lives on _____ Street, but not in Apt. 4M

  and not at no. 127 or no. 301.

  Here are the clues:

  Pennies on a baseball diamond

  Miss Doe’s beneficiary

  What the bartender asked the martini drinker

  She’s certainly Anne

  She longs for the coldest season

  One fewer than nine filled French pastries