The Vanishing Violin Page 6

  “I’ll see him Saturday, after guitar. We’re going to a movie. I have to pick this time, and I’m actually kinda nervous. When it’s his turn, he always finds these amazing old movies that I would never watch if it weren’t for him. Last week, we saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir—I went through, like, a box of Kleenex. It was soooo good.”

  “I can do a little research if you want,” Margaret offers. “We’ll find a movie without any beheadings. Hey, why don’t you have him meet us after school today—down at the St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-fifth? We’re seeing Malcolm there, remember?”

  “Actually, you didn’t tell me exactly where. I’ve never actually met anyone at a bar.”

  “It’s the King Cole Bar. The back wall has a mural painted by Maxfield Parrish in 1906. I’ve always wanted to see it, so this is the perfect chance.”

  “Are you sure they’re going to let us in?”

  “Malcolm said he’d take care of that. Becca has to go home right after school, but I’ll check with Leigh Ann to see if she can come—if that’s all right with you.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Oh, I just kinda remember how you were when you thought Leigh Ann liked Raf. It cost me a fortune in ice cream.”

  I wave off the very idea. Me? Jealous? C’est impossible!

  (But the ice cream part is undeniable.)

  Chapter 8

  Bartender, another round for my friends!

  Raf is waiting for us outside the entrance to the St. Regis Hotel, leaning against the wall in his khakis, navy blazer, and green and gold striped tie. Oy. I’m not exaggerating—I literally have to hold on to Margaret when I first see him.

  For Margaret’s sake, and because the entrance to the St. Regis is kind of intimidating, we keep the PDA to an absolute minimum. A hug. A quick hand squeeze. Inside my red wool blazer, my heart is ker-thumpin’ and I suddenly feel a little … sweaty.

  A few seconds later, we spot Malcolm and Leigh Ann strolling down the sidewalk. Together they’re wearing enough plaid to outfit a Scottish wedding party. With plenty left over for napkins.

  “Hey, isn’t that—” Raf starts.

  “Malcolm Chance,” I say.

  “And Leigh Ann,” Margaret adds. “You remember Leigh Ann, don’t you, Raf?”

  I dig a pointy elbow into her ribs.

  Malcolm gives Margaret and me grandfatherly hugs, and shakes Raf’s hand. “My, you’re all looking well. A veritable vision in vermilion. Elizabeth will be jealous when I tell her I’ve seen you.” He winks at me. “Leigh Ann and I have been having a nice chat about her brother, Alejandro. Apparently, sharp minds run in the Jaimes family.”

  A uniformed doorman holds the door open for us as we enter the hotel lobby, which is beautiful in that don’t-touch-it-it’s-too-too-perfect kind of way.

  “How is Elizabeth?” Margaret asks. “Any news for us?” Since the conclusion of the ring case, Malcolm and his ex-wife, Elizabeth Harriman, have been “seeing one another” again, a development that I find quite ironic. After all, the first time we met him, I thought he was a total creep, and Elizabeth gave him a hearty Bronx cheer as she practically kicked him out the door of her townhouse.

  Margaret’s inquiry puts a cryptic little smile on Malcolm’s face. “Always the detective, eh?” he says, not answering the question. At all.

  Hmmm.

  He leads us to the entrance of the famed King Cole Bar. There are only a couple of people in the bar, so he motions for us to come in for a better look at the mural on the wall behind the bartender.

  “Now, what can I get everyone to drink? Then we can sit and you can tell me what you are all up to.”

  “I would like a martini,” Margaret announces, straight-faced.

  Malcolm laughs out loud. “Oh, would you, now? How about something that won’t get me thrown in jail?”

  “Okay, I don’t really want a martini; I just want to hear what the bartender says when someone orders one.”

  “And I’m sure you have a very good reason for wanting to know that.”

  “An excellent reason.”

  “It’s settled, then. I’ll have a martini. Purely for the sake of research.”

  “Of course,” says Margaret.

  Raf, Leigh Ann, and I sit at a table and listen while Malcolm and Margaret get the bartender’s attention.

  “Yes, sir. And miss. What can I get for you?”

  “Four piña kid-ladas,” Margaret says.

  “And for you, sir?”

  “A martini.”

  We all swivel our heads to catch what comes next. What does the bartender say to the martini drinker?

  “Olive or twist?”

  Malcolm asks for two olives and then looks over at Margaret, whose head is tilted back, staring off into space.

  Across the table from me, I watch Leigh Ann. First comes a smile, then her mouth opens in an oh-my-God-I-know-this expression. “Of course. Charles Dickens. Again. It’s always Dickens!”

  “Is anybody else confused?” I ask.

  Raf and Malcolm raise their hands.

  Leigh Ann explains. “Don’t you get it? The question he asked was ‘Olive or twist?’ Now say it faster.”

  “Oliveortwist. Ohhhh! Oliver Twist!” I shout. Dickens, he loved his orphans.

  Margaret hugs Leigh Ann, who looks like she might just spontaneously combust with pride.

  “I love that story,” Leigh Ann gushes. “Last year, I was Nancy in the musical Oliver!”

  Rebecca, who has sneaked up behind me, whispers in my ear, “What did I miss?”

  “Becca! You made it! I thought you had to babysit,” I say.

  “Eh. They’re fine on their own. No—I’m kidding. My mom came home early and said I could come. Course, I didn’t tell her I was going to a bar.”

  “Well, Miss Jaimes here just solved another clue,” I say. “The bartender said ‘Oliver Twist.’”

  “Of course he did.”

  Margaret then turns to Malcolm. “I guess you deserve an explanation.”

  Over two rounds of sticky-sweet piña kid-ladas and one martini, she fills him in.

  “The story about a violin being stolen from Carnegie Hall sounds vaguely familiar,” Malcolm says. “Sounds like you girls have stumbled your way into another quest for lost treasure.”

  I have to agree—it all seems a very strange coincidence. Is someone playing a game with us?

  “What’s the next step?” Raf asks.

  “There’s still one more of these rows to fill in,” Margaret replies, unfolding the paper with the grid drawn on it. She reads the final clue: “She longs for the coldest season.” Then she says, “When we get that, we’ll have the two words that go in the blanks. Then we write those on the sidewalk in the park and wait for the next clue.”

  Raf takes the paper from Margaret. “So you have everything except number five? I’m guessing ‘she longs for’ means ‘she misses,’ and the coldest season seems pretty simple: winter. The problem is that ‘Mrs. Winter’ and ‘Miss Winter’ are both too short. You need eleven letters.”

  All of a sudden, Becca puts on her sassy face and says, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”—with an accent straight out of Bensonhurst (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, for you non-Gothamites).

  Raf’s face brightens. “I think you’re right, Becca. Mrs. de Winter. Like ‘misses the winter,’ but with a Brooklyn accent. She misses da winter.”

  “Who is this Mrs. de Winter?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “She’s in a book called Rebecca,” Becca says. “I saw it in the Strand Book Store one day and just had to have it because of the title. I never finished reading it, but I did watch the movie.”

  “I didn’t even know there was a book,” Raf says. “I’ve seen the movie a few times. It was one of my grandfather’s favorites. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Grandpa was hot for her.”

  I smile inwardly, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before Raf and I will be sharing a tub of popcorn and ho
lding hands as the opening credits for Rebecca roll.

  “The girl in the story doesn’t even have a first name,” Becca adds. “She’s just Mrs. de Winter.”

  “And she is the second Mrs. de Winter, as I recall,” Malcolm adds.

  “If the girl in the story doesn’t have a name, then who the heck is Rebecca?” I ask.

  “Rebecca is the guy’s first wife,” Raf says. “The first Mrs. de Winter. She’s dead.”

  “She’s dead? Then why is the book called Rebecca? Shouldn’t it be What’s-Her-Name? And where is Manderley?”

  “I’ll explain it later,” Raf promises.

  Good enough.

  Meanwhile, Margaret fills in the remaining blanks on the grid, which now looks like this:

  “The letters in the outlined boxes are P-I-A-N-O-H-E-S-T-E-R. ‘Piano’ and ‘Hester.’ The piano player lives on Hester Street.” Margaret looks up, smiling proudly.

  “And that means something to you?” I say.

  “Is that even a real street?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “Hester Street is on the Lower East Side. As for what this all means, however, you’re on your own. Your young brains are far sharper than mine, I’m afraid.” Malcolm gulps down the last of his martini. “Ahhh. But age does have its advantages.”

  I’m skeptical of Mr. Columbia Professor for Thirty Years’ modesty. His brain is plenty sharp.

  “This is just one clue,” Margaret begins. “If someone really has this violin, they’re going to make us jump through many hoops before they hand it over. We’re supposed to prove we’re worthy of it. I can respect that.”

  Rebecca corrects her. “I think what you mean to say is that you’re going to have to jump through some hoops to prove that you’re worthy.”

  “Well, I still think there’s something fishy about the whole thing,” I say. “It’s kind of creepy. Either someone’s spying on us, or they have someone else doing it for them.”

  “Suspicious much?” Raf says.

  “It’s not suspicion if people really are spying on you.”

  Malcolm roars with laughter at that. “Sophie, I do like your perspective on life. You are truly one of a kind.”

  “Why, thank you, Malcolm.”

  I’ve always thought that one of me is more than enough.

  Chapter 9

  We have met the enemy, and she is part of our group project

  Margaret and I are on the stairs Thursday morning, on our way to Mr. Eliot’s class, when we’re almost run down by Sister Bernadette barging through the doors from the fourth-floor classrooms. Her face is—well, if she were wearing a red blazer, you wouldn’t be able to tell where blazer ended and head began.

  “Sister Bernadette! What’s the matter?” Margaret asks. I cower behind her skirt. “Don’t tell me. He struck again. What was it this time?”

  Too stunned to speak, she motions for us to follow her into the fourth-floor library.

  Oh my gosh. This place has been transformed into something out of a Jane Austen novel. The cracked, peeling drab green walls have been expertly covered with a pale blue striped wallpaper, all the wood trim around the windows and doors has been repainted in a tasteful soft cream, and here and there on the walls are wallpaper decorations that look like sculptures and paintings. There’s even a nice-size matching rug in the center of the room. It’s all really quite stunning. And we’re stunned.

  “Wow,” I finally manage to say. “This is beautiful.”

  Sister Bernadette, she harrumphs.

  “No way one person did this in one night,” Margaret says, examining the workmanship. “Look at it. It’s perfect.”

  And then she sees it. There’s a new bookcase against the wall near the door, filled with the Harvard Classics—salvaged from our moldy basement. For a second, I think Margaret is going to … cry? She was heartbroken back in September when Mrs. Overmeyer, the librarian, told her those books were in storage. Slowly, lovingly, she runs her hand over the spines of the books, stopping only when she gets to a gap near the end of the fiction volumes.

  “Volume eighteen is missing.” She thinks for a moment. “Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment.”

  I knew that. Of course. Really. You dare to doubt me?

  “Girls, I want answers!” Sister Bernadette says, and storms out.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Eliot stands before his podium and utters the two words that strike a note of dread into our hearts: “group project.” Teachers love them; we hate them. Yes, I know, I know: there are going to be times in life when I’m going to have to work with other people, and I’m going to have to be collaborative and flexible and learn to delegate responsibility, yadda, yadda, yadda.

  Mr. E. loves to use open-heart surgery as an example of a group working together toward a common goal—you know, everyone is responsible for some part of the procedure, and if somebody screws up, the patient kicks it. Well, my argument is, if the anesthesiologist (let’s call her Bridget O’Malley) decides the night before surgery that she absolutely must spend six hours online instead of preparing for the operation, it’s not the patient who suffers. It’s me.

  Though Mr. Eliot is unmoved by our howls of protest, he’s at least letting us choose our own groups. Rebecca’s not in our section of English, so Margaret, Leigh Ann, and I quickly size up the rest of the class, looking for our fourth. Miss O’Malley, thank God, has found three other unfortunate victims, and strangely enough, everyone seems to be already in groups of four. Fine by us. We are more than happy to divide the work three ways; the extra 8⅓ percent of the labor each is fine by us.

  Our joy is short-lived, however, as Mr. Eliot reminds us that there is one girl absent. Olivia “Livvy” Klack. He declares himself to be certain we will be thrilled to have her as our fourth. Here’s everything you need to know about Livvy:

  Before Leigh Ann showed up, she was the prettiest girl in our grade. Ergo, she hates Leigh Ann.

  She hates Margaret with a deep and irrational passion.

  She would sell her soul to the devil to be at one of those real Upper East Side private schools instead of having to slum it with us nonrich, unfabulous peons at St. Veronica’s.

  I open my mouth to protest, but Mr. E. cuts me off. “Don’t waste your energy, Miss St. Pierre. Ah, speaking of which …”

  Livvy strolls into the room and hands a late pass to him with a dramatic flourish. “I couldn’t get a cab. It’s raining, you know.”

  We all roll our eyes at each other. A cab. She lives, like, three blocks from the school, for crying out loud.

  “Well, I just assigned a little project for next week, and you are going to be joining these girls. They’ll fill you in on the details.”

  “Su-per,” she says with the fakest smile.

  The project: each group is assigned a punctuation mark and is responsible for teaching the rest of the class everything about it—the rules, the exceptions, and of course, some examples. Mr. Eliot walks around the room with folded pieces of paper in his hand, passing them out. On each paper are two critical pieces of information: the punctuation mark and the date the group must be prepared to present. Livvy unfolds our paper and reads it. “Apostrophe,” she says. “Awesome. We’re presenting on Tuesday.” She sticks the paper in her bag.

  “Well, the apostrophe is much better than the comma,” I reply. “Those rules are impossible.”

  “Then I suppose you three just have all kinds of wonderful ideas, being the famous Red Blazer Girls and all. Maybe somebody will write another story about you in the paper—you know, how you girls made learning about the apostrophe just so interesting.”

  I resist every urge and instead go with: “Jeez, Livvy. All we have to do is make a PowerPoint presentation with all the rules and some kind of handout to give to the whole class.”

  “Don’t forget the ‘creative’ element,” Leigh Ann adds. “Mr. Eliot said we can do anything we want as long as it is creative in some way.”

  “We have to get creative using apostrophes?”
Livvy whines. “This is stupid.”

  “How about a poem?” I suggest, ignoring her. “Or even better, a song. We could sing it. What do you think, Margaret?”

  She sets her mouth into a grim line. “I think it’s going to be a long week.”

  I receive a text from my mom saying Mr. Chernofsky would like Margaret and me to stop by his shop after school (they know each other from violin stuff).

  “Welcome, ladies. This was on the floor when I came in this morning,” Mr. C. says when we enter, handing an envelope to Margaret. “Someone must have slipped it under the door. No postage, no address, just your name.”

  This time the envelope is plain, white, and very businesslike in appearance. Margaret gives it a good sniff, tears it open, and then unfolds a sheet of paper with this message:

  To hear each beat,

  Amid sounds she omits,

  Only names please leave,

  And yearn each return.

  Love is valued ever,

  Silence is never tempered,

  While ordered justice begs

  Untold times, nearer obstacles.

  Thrilling ovations, newborn games,

  Random analogies, naturally denied,

  Occupied recently, easily silenced,

  Such excesses, xylophone.

  To which I can only add: Huh?

  And penciled in the margin are the words “Leave your answer on the underside of the park’s biggest mushroom.”

  The lines on Margaret’s forehead grow deeper and deeper, and her lips pucker and twist as she reads it and then rereads it. She takes another good whiff of the paper, shakes her head, and hands it to me.

  “Do you smell anything?”

  “Paper.”

  “Yep,” she says, retrieving the letter from my hands.

  “Happy to help,” I say. “I do know where the biggest mushroom in the park is, though. You know the statue from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Alice is sitting right in the middle of a huge mushroom.”

  “Thanks, Soph. At least if we ever solve the clue, we’ll know where to leave the answer,” Margaret says.