The Vanishing Violin Read online

  Ben comes out from the workshop, and even though it is late afternoon and we presume he’s been hard at work all day, his apron is still spotless. His shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows—the first sign of casualness I’ve seen in him—but further investigation reveals that they are perfectly rolled. I find myself wondering how he accomplished this.

  “Hi, girls,” he says, tossing a coin high in the air and catching it. “What’s new?”

  Margaret holds out the letter to him. “Can you do me a favor? Read this, and tell me if it means anything to you.”

  He scans it once quickly, makes a similar confused face, and then reads it slowly out loud, as if hearing the words will help make sense of them.

  “Is this supposed to be a poem?” he asks.

  “Allegedly,” Margaret says, “this is a clue to help locate the person who has the violin that goes with the Berliner bow. We already solved the first one—something about a piano player living on Hester Street, but not at certain addresses or apartment numbers. But what all that has to do with the violin, I got nada.”

  Ben hands the letter back to her with a shrug. “Sorry I can’t help. Try looking online—type it in and see what turns up.”

  “He used lemon juice for invisible ink in the first letter,” Margaret explains. “Well, I guess it was too much to ask that he use the same method twice. Still, there must be other things you can use for invisible ink.” She holds the letter up to the light and looks at it from the back and at every angle imaginable.

  “You see anything?” I ask.

  “Not yet. But let’s go to your apartment and take another look at that magic book of yours. And then I suppose we should do some work on this goofy project for Mr. Eliot. I can’t believe we have to work with that Livvy. I would almost rather have Bridget.”

  “At least Livvy cares about getting a decent grade. That’s about the last thing on Bridget’s mind.”

  “True, but at least we now know that Bridget is completely undependable. We don’t know what to expect from Livvy.”

  Over the next two hours, my bedroom is transformed into a forensics lab as we subject the letter to all sorts of tests. My beginner’s magic book had only one more possible invisible ink to check, but a quick online search came up with a few more. First we rubbed the dust from pencil lead over a small section to see if a secret message had been written in milk. Nothing.

  Then we tried a cotton ball dipped in ammonia. Phenolphthalein, the active ingredient in Ex-Lax, of all things, makes another great invisible ink. You grind up a tablet with some rubbing alcohol and write your message. Later, when you touch it with ammonia, it turns red. Pretty cool, and worth remembering for the future, but our letter remained stubbornly black and white.

  Another good candidate for the ink is laundry detergent, which glows brightly under black light, but the only place we can think of with a black light is the shop on St. Marks Place where I bought my mood ring. It’s packed with clothes (polyester!) and albums (vinyl!) from the seventies, along with a collection of those wacky psychedelic black-light posters. However, it’s almost time for dinner, and there’s no way my mom is going to let me go downtown to some sketchy psychedelia shop on a school night.

  “So, tomorrow?” I ask, completely out of ideas. “Maybe something will come to you tonight. It’s probably right in front of our eyes. Between the ring and this case, just think of all the clues you’ve deciphered. You’ll get this one, too. And just imagine, an Italian violin—yours.”

  I thought that would bring a smile to Margaret’s face, but she is frowning stubbornly. “I don’t know. The more I think about the whole thing with the violin, the more I doubt I’m ever going to get it. And I feel bad dragging you all over town when you’re not going to get anything out of it in the end. It’s not like the ring—at least there we were doing something really good. We were even bringing a family together. This time it’s all for me.” She turns away so that I won’t see her eyes watering up.

  “If it will make you feel better, we’ll sell the violin and split the money, and I’ll spend mine on something you’d never approve of.”

  “Growf.”

  While I’m trying to translate that, she reads the new text message on her phone. Wait a second—is that a smile I see just before she turns her back on me?

  “Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” I say. “No secrets. Hand it over, or ve vill be forced to find other vays to make you talk.”

  She holds it up, and this is what I see:

  Measure 44, affrettando??? A

  “Is this another kind of code?” I ask. “And why are you smiling? Fifteen seconds ago, you looked like you got a B on a test.”

  “I’m not smiling,” she says.

  I drag her over to the mirror on my wall. “That, my dear friend, is a smile. And you have some ’splainin’ to do. Oh my God. ‘A’ is Andrew.”

  She nods, still grinning.

  “And ‘affrettando’?”

  “It means ‘hurrying’ in Italian. Musical term.”

  “Okay, now explain that,” I say, pointing at her mouth. “I’ve seen these symptoms before. Googly eyes. Perma-smile. Now, where was that? Let me think. Oh yeah—ME! You looooove Andrew.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I hardly know him.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you two had a text-lationship.”

  “This is, like, our third text.”

  “How did he get your number? Did he ask you for it? Tellmetellme.”

  “Actually, that was your mom’s idea—in case we had questions for each other between rehearsals.”

  “Way to go, Mom!”

  At that moment, Mom knocks on my door and sticks her head in. “Way to go, me! What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” Margaret says before I have a chance to leak the legumes.

  “Well, it’s time for dinner. Margaret, do you want to stay? There’s plenty. It’s just us girls tonight. Nothing special, hamburgers.”

  “C’mon, Marg. Stay,” I say. “Burgers and ice cream.”

  Seriously, who could say no to that?

  Besides a lactose-intolerant vegan, that is.

  “Okay, okay. Thanks, Kate.” She recently started to call my mom Kate, which kills me.

  “We’ll be there in a minute, Kate,” I say. “Margaret was just helping me understand something really complicated. Weren’t you, Margaret?”

  “You two,” Mom says, closing the door.

  I block the only exit. “So, are you going to go out with him?”

  “Let’s not get carried away. Three text messages. That’s all. And even if I wanted to—and I’m not saying I do—my dad is not quite as open-minded as yours when it comes to boys.”

  Hmm. “Open-minded” seems like a generous-to-the-point-of-completely-inaccurate description of my dad’s attitude on the topic.

  “It’s not like he’s a gangster.”

  “Let me put it this way, Soph—if Andrew were one hundred percent Polish and Catholic, played for the Philharmonic, and owned Carnegie Hall, I could possibly go out with him when I turned sixteen.”

  “Eek. Then you need to have a talk with your dad.”

  The look on her face tells me that’s probably not going to occur.

  “Two questions. One, do you like Andrew?”

  The grin reappears.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Two, would you go out with him if you could?”

  “It doesn’t matter what—”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Now let’s eat. I’m going to need lots of energy to figure out how to bring the dashing young Romeo/Andy and his stunningly beautiful Juliet/Margaret together.”

  “Um, Soph? Could you maybe use a different literary allusion? Things didn’t exactly work out for those two.”

  “Gotcha. Ixnay on the Omeoray and Ulietjay.” See, I can code stuff.

 
Chapter 10

  In which a less glamorous use for nail polish is discovered

  Two smile-inducing events occur in the cafeteria just before the first bell. First, Leigh Ann breaks the seal of the Tupperware container full of chocolate cupcakes her mom sent in for a Drama Club bake sale, and we help ourselves to another gorgeously unhealthy breakfast. Second, Becca puts her arm around Margaret’s shoulders, jangles an enormous set of keys, and says, “Guess what I found.”

  “Are those the janitor’s?” I ask.

  “Even better. Sister Eugenia’s. Word is that she has a key to every lock in the building.”

  “Where did you get those? You have to take them back,” I say quickly. “You really don’t want to mess with Sister Eu.”

  “Sophie, are you afraid of Sister Eugenia?” Rebecca teases. “She’s, like, ninety years old.”

  “I—I’m not afraid of her. I just don’t want her mad at me. Please take her keys back to her.” I stand up, because when Sister Eugenia sneaks up on us—which is going to happen—I don’t want to be anywhere near those keys.

  “Relax, she’s at Mass. Guess she must be getting forgetful; she left these in the door to her office. Look at it this way: I’m doing her a favor. If I hadn’t taken them, somebody else, someone not nearly as—ahem—trustworthy, would have grabbed them.”

  “But now that you have them,” Margaret says, “you’re thinking that you might as well use them, especially if it is to help solve a mystery for Sister Bernadette.”

  “Exaaactly. Let’s hurry.”

  We gather our book bags and follow Margaret to the basement door. The only flashlight we have is the tiny one on Margaret’s key chain, so we go down the stairs in conga-line fashion, hands on the shoulders of the person in front.

  “Tell me again why there are no lights down here,” Leigh Ann says. “I mean, I know it’s the basement, but isn’t there electricity?”

  “Sister B. says they started rewiring it a few years ago,” Margaret explains, “but the electrician disappeared before he finished the job, and they haven’t gotten around to replacing him yet.”

  After quietly winding our way past the junk piles, we come to a stop in front of Mount Textbook, which seems to have grown since our last visit. Margaret tries the door, but it is still locked.

  “Maybe you should knock, just in case,” Leigh Ann says.

  In case what? I wonder.

  Margaret raps twice, then puts her ear to the door and shakes her head. “Can I have a look at those keys, Becca?”

  I get a second look at Sister’s key ring, and a glance at my watch, and start to panic. The ring is about three inches in diameter, so the circumference is a little over nine inches. (That’s pi times the diameter, if you’re keeping score—I love math.) If there are eight or nine keys per inch of key ring, that means we might have to try seventy or eighty keys before we find the one we need. And in five minutes, we have to be out of the basement, up four flights of stairs, and ready for a Spanish quiz. Numbers don’t lie.

  Margaret, in the meantime, has yet to try a single key in the lock. She is taking her good old time flipping through them.

  “Ah, here we are,” she says. “This is it.”

  I’m dying to know how she knows, but I don’t want to slow her down in case she’s right. Which, of course, she is.

  The key turns easily in the lock, but when she pulls on the door, it doesn’t budge.

  “Ohhh, I almost forgot. The first lock. Becca, can you take care of it?”

  Rebecca holds up her library card. “See, Sophie, I do use this thing.” She then slides it into the space between the door and the frame, and turns the knob. “Ta-da.”

  Becca pulls the door open a few inches and peeks inside. After determining that it’s safe, she throws it open the rest of the way so that we can all see. It’s a storage closet, about eight feet long and six feet wide, lined with shelves crammed with more old textbooks—and an army cot with a pillow at the head and a blanket, neatly folded, at the foot. Next to the cot is a low table with a battery-powered lantern, a portable radio, a windup alarm clock, and, Margaret solemnly points out, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—the missing volume 18 of the Harvard Classics.

  A suitcase covered with stickers and looking like a prop from a 1950s movie is shoved under the cot, but otherwise, the room is uncluttered and spotless. The shelves have been dusted and the floor scrubbed clean.

  “This is cleaner than your room, Sophie,” Margaret says.

  All too true. “You think whoever sleeps in here is the person doing all the cleaning and painting?”

  “Yep. They can use the coal chute to get in and out of the building without being noticed.”

  “Um, Soph, we really need to get upstairs,” Leigh Ann reminds me with a tug on my blazer. “Remember the quiz?”

  “She’s right,” Margaret says, pushing us out the door and locking it with the key. “Here you go, Becca. You’d better get these back to Sister Eugenia. We need to digest all this. Crime and Punishment. Not your typical bedtime story. Yet another mystery.”

  “The mystery I’m most interested in right now,” I say as we trudge up the stairs, “is how, with a choice of, like, a hundred keys, you chose the right one on the first try.”

  “A tiny dot of nail polish on the key. Exactly like the one on the lock. It’s a super’s trick—and I am a super’s daughter. Except my father uses paint.”

  “Excellent work, Sherlock.”

  “Why, thank you, Watson.”

  “Feeling better today?”

  “Thanks to you—and the magical healing power of ice cream—I’m ready for anything.”

  Perkatory is strangely quiet as we order our after-school libations. (I may be developing a piña kid-lada problem. Is pineapple juice habit-forming?) Jaz is in a much better mood than the last time we saw her. A few minutes later, she throws four bags of chips in front of us and pulls up a fifth chair.

  “These are on the house. Mind if I join you for a while? It’s dead in here today.”

  “If only you had some live music,” I say with a snap of my fingers.

  Jaz’s face lights up. “Exactly. You are so right. How are the Blazers coming along, anyway? You guys almost ready?”

  Becca nearly chokes on her Dr. Brown’s. “Um, that would be a no.”

  “Oh, come on, Rebecca,” Leigh Ann says. “We just need a little more practice. We’re starting to come together.”

  “We are?” I say. “I mean, we are.”

  “Did you ever hear back from that Mbingu girl?” Leigh Ann asks.

  “No, and I’ve left a couple more messages. I must have really ticked her off.”

  “She’s real, I swear,” Rebecca says. “I’ll call her.”

  “Well, let me know when you’re ready,” Jaz says.

  Margaret, who is ready for clue business, unfolds the letter that has been tormenting her since yesterday and sets it on the table.

  “Okay, we are usually four intelligent girls. No one leaves until we solve this thing. Agreed?”

  “What is that?” Jaz asks.

  Margaret avoids giving the details about the violin, instead saying only that it is some kind of puzzle we are trying to solve.

  Jaz reads the letter and makes the same face everyone else has made. “I’m definitely not smart enough for your school.”

  “I don’t know,” Rebecca says. “I’ve been taking Spanish for two years now, and I just pray I never get lost in Spain or Mexico—or Washington Heights. And they won’t even let me into the same English class with these three.”

  “Oh, please,” says Leigh Ann. “What about me? Most of the time when Margaret was explaining all that graphing stuff, trying to figure out where the ring was, I got so lost I started thinking about what color to paint my nails.”

  I tap Jaz on her arm. “Don’t listen to either of them. They’re both really smart. And, Becca, I don’t know why you’re not in our section of English. I mean, jeez, Bridget
O’Malley is in there.”

  Margaret has been ignoring our conversation completely, focused instead on the paper in front of her. “I’ve looked between the lines. I’ve read it backward. Every other word. Every third word. If it’s a code, it’s not like any code I can find anywhere.”

  “We should take another look at that first letter,” I say. “You know, maybe you have to put them together or something.”

  “Ohmigosh,” Margaret says, her eyes racing back and forth over the letter. “That’s it.” Her head snaps around to face me. “Sophie, you’re a genius.”

  “I am? I mean, yeah, I know. So you think they are connected somehow?”

  “What? No, just the first thing you said—about looking at the first letter.”

  “I am one confused genius.”

  “Shhh! Listen!” Becca says. She points at the heating vent next to her on the wall. “I can hear someone talking through this.”

  We all lean toward the vent, straining to listen.

  “It’s coming from Mr. Chernofsky’s shop,” Margaret whispers. “Remember, Ben said they could hear the music coming from over here. There’s probably one furnace in the building, and these air vents go everywhere.”

  “I think that’s Ben’s voice,” I say.

  Becca and Margaret each have an ear pressed against the vent, and Jaz is right between them. Leigh Ann and I give each other the what’s-the-big-deal shrug.

  “And I’m telling you, this is huge,” the voice says. “No, he’s gone for the day. Got the place to myself. Remember, I told … fiddle in the shop, belongs to … that’s right … the Longfellow Quartet … at auction … a little digging around … nothing about the sale in … Childress doesn’t know … but he likes … thinks it might be worth … so he has us checking it out … [long pause] … doesn’t look … special … no label inside, but I … flexible camera that I can stick in through the f holes … nosing around … I see it, plain as day … by the neck … three letters carved … NAF, Niccolo Antonio Frischetti … yeah … positive … all his instruments … front has never been off, so it’s not a fake—no one could have done it later … bottom line is, with the paper label missing, the only way to … be sure it’s a Frischetti is to take the front off … until my little camera … yeah … that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question … quick online search … Frischettis sold at auction … past ten years … to guess, I’d say it’s worth—”