The Red Blazer Girls (2 page)

“Well, that was interesting,” says Rebecca as we wander through the double doors and into the actual church.

“If we can't sneak by
him
, we are without a doubt the worst snoops in history,” Margaret declares.

St. Veronica's is pretty spectacular, and I am actually looking forward to a little “snooping.” But Margaret is all business.

“We have to figure out a way to get up there.” She points to a series of arches at least thirty or forty feet above us on the wall of the opposite side of the church. “If you were looking from Mr. Eliot's room, that's about the right height.”

“What's this part of the church called?” I ask.

“The long part, from the doors to the altar, where the highest part of the ceiling is, is called the nave. This part, where we are, that goes across the nave, is the transept.” She emphasizes the “trans” so I am sure to get it. (Margaret is
very
big on vocabulary—root words and prefixes and all that stuff.) “If you were to look down on the church, it's shaped like a big cross.”

“I never realized that. Makes sense, though. How do you know all this again?”

“Victor Hugo.”

“Ahh. Thank God and the Harvard Classics.”

“Amen,” says Margaret. “Now, do you see where those confessionals are?” She points to the three identical wooden doors where parishioners go to confess their sins. (Now here's a confession for you: sometimes I “embellish” my own confessions to make them more penance-worthy. Pretty sad, huh? All in all, I'm a distressingly good girl.) “Now look to the right of them. See that door?
That's
where we need to go first.”

We aren't too concerned with Robert, the security guard—and I use that title loosely—but we still try to look
très
nonchalant as we make our way to the door we have targeted. It is near a painting on the right side of the church, and we suddenly become
very
interested in all the artwork. The door is heavy, built of dark, deeply carved wood with a grid of twisted iron over a stained glass picture of a golden chalice.

“Zee Holy Grail. Very Monty Python.” Rebecca,
assuming this really bad French accent, quotes one of her favorite lines: “I fart in your general direction.”

We all giggle because, let's face it, saying the word “fart” in church is deeply wrong and funny.

I put my hand on the doorknob and look at Margaret. “What do you think?”

Margaret is nervous but determined. She knows her parents would kill her if she got into any trouble. She takes an audible deep breath: “Go ahead. Try it.”

I try turning the knob. Locked. “Now what?”

“Let me see.” Margaret kneels in front of the door. “This lock is ancient. Rebecca? Can you pick it?”

Rebecca joins Margaret on the floor, inspecting the lock. “Got a bobby pin?”

Suddenly Margaret stands up. “Someone's coming. Look interested in the painting.”

A middle-aged man in a chocolate-brown suit several sizes too big appears from behind the altar, straightening candles and trimming wicks. Margaret coughs, and he looks up, a bit surprised to see us.

“Good afternoon, young ladies.” He comes closer and looks up at the painting of the sixth Station of the Cross,
Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus
. “Beautiful, isn't it? Captures the weightiness of Christ's burdens, don't you think? It's my favorite.”

I have spent enough time with my parents in museums in New York and Paris to have at least a vague idea of great art, and this ain't it. Rebecca, the artistic one
among us, could do much better. We all nod in agreement anyway.

“We're doing a class project. Do you happen to know who the artist was? It doesn't appear to be signed.”

Oh, yeah, my friend Margaret, she's smooth.

“It's no one famous. Sadly, we can't display any truly valuable art anymore. We've had a few pieces by better-known artists stolen right off the walls. Can you imagine—stealing from a church! All fourteen Stations of the Cross were painted in the 1930s by a former parishioner, a Mr. Harriman. There are several more of his paintings in the rectory. Mostly copies of Caravaggio.”
(Bad
copies, I'll bet!) “His granddaughter is still a parishioner; in fact, she lives right next door.” He lifts the bottom corner of the painting and pulls it away from the wall, examining the back. “Ah, there it is. ‘M. Harriman 1934.’” He then sticks out his hand to each of us and smiles pleasantly. “I'm Gordon Winterbottom, the church deacon.”

I smile politely as I shake his hand with the firm grip my dad taught me to use. “Hi, I'm Sophie St. Pierre, and this is Margaret Wrobel and Rebecca Chen.”

As he shakes Margaret's and Rebecca's hands, I get a better look at him. It isn't only his suit that seems not to fit, it's like his
skin
is two sizes too big, too. It hangs down in flaps around his cheeks and is the color of old cheese. But even though he absolutely reeks of cigarettes, he
seems
nice enough. Don't judge, I think to
myself. My dad was an enthusiastic smoker until Mom became pregnant with me, and he's always telling Mom that her labor pains were nothing compared to what he went through while he was trying to kick the habit.

“Pleasure to meet you girls. Seventh grade?”

“Do we look
that
lost?” I say.

He laughs—sort of a half laugh, half lung-about-to-come-flying-out-his-throat cough. “No, it isn't that. Mostly it's the blazers. The high school girls' blazers start to look a little shopworn. Your lapels are still nice and crisp.”

The guy is good. A week earlier, the entire seventh grade went through St. Veronica's elaborate “Blazer Day Ceremony,” in which we traded in the red sweater vests of the lower school for the plaid skirts and shockingly red
(crimson
, officially) blazers of the upper school with the crest that reads
Maiestas et dignitas
. Very cool. Really.

“Our blazers
are
new,” Margaret says. “My, you could be a detective.”

“Maybe I have missed my true calling,” he says with a jaunty wink. “Well, I'll leave you to your research. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask. Of course, I don't have
all
the answers—I'm just the deacon. But perhaps one of the priests can help.”

Wait a second. Was that a note of sarcasm in his voice? Or just your basic New York attitude? I'm detecting a bit of a Brooklyn accent.

“Thank you,” I say. “I think we have what we need.”

“So far, at least,” adds Margaret. He returns to the altar while Rebecca bends my bobby pin into a makeshift key, and ten seconds later, we hear a click.

Rebecca looks up, grinning. She turns the knob and pushes the door open a few inches, just enough to look inside. Then she gasps and pulls the door shut.

“Oh my God!”

“What is it? What's in there?”

“Gotcha!” she says, laughing at our shocked expressions.

Margaret shakes her head and nudges past Rebecca. “Hilarious. Let me see.”

Rebecca checks the door to make sure it won't lock behind us and pushes it open the rest of the way. “After you, m'lady.”

Margaret strides right in, with Rebecca and me hustling after her into the unknown. When Rebecca gently closes the door, all is suddenly quite dark. The sounds of Lexington Avenue penetrate the front portion of the church, but once we pass through that door, it is so quiet I can hear my heart whim-whamming. A cold draft comes right through the stone walls and shimmies out into the darkness. Rebecca elbows me, pointing out the image of the stained glass chalice at my feet, projected onto the floor by the dim light of the church.

I feel goose bumps popping up under my blazer. “This is more
Indiana Jones
than Monty Python,” I whisper.

The church isn't that old—it was built around 1900—but I feel like I am back in the Middle Ages. The floor, the windowless walls, the arched ceiling, are all made of roughly cut stone; it seems more like a cave than a hallway. Last summer vacation, my parents took me into some catacombs beneath a church in Paris where there are
thousands
of people buried. Reeeaaaally creepy, and definitely
not
something I want to discover here in St. Vs.

Margaret leads us deeper into the abyss. “There must be another passage directly above us.”

“Or a crypt,” says Rebecca, reinforcing my fear that we're about to stumble onto a bunch of final resting places.

And suddenly there it is—an incredibly dark, low-ceilinged, twisting, narrow, scary staircase.

“Do you think—” Rebecca starts, but by the time she gets to “think,” Margaret's feet are the only part of her still in sight.

Up and up and round and round we go till we find ourselves standing at the end of another long passageway, lighted—barely—by two porthole-size, grime-covered windows set into the two-foot-thick walls. I wipe away some of the schmutz from the one closest to me and take a peek outside. I am looking straight at my desk in Mr. Eliot's room! When I move to the other window, I see that it has recently been wiped clean.

“Regarde!”
I say.

“Holy crap!” says Rebecca.

“Practically proof positive,” says Margaret.

Then, from the end of the hall, a door hinge squeaks one short
errkkkk
. We stare at the shaft of light coming from inside the heavy wooden door as an enormous orange cat squeezes through the opening. Roughly the size of a small car, the cat takes a few steps down the hall before it sees us. Then it arches its back, every hair on its body standing straight up—kind of like the ones on the back of my neck are doing—and then makes a god-awful hissing, spitting, growling yowl.

“Go 'way hellcat! Shoo. Shoo,” says Rebecca, backing up. “I don't think it likes us.” She turns and runs for the stairs.

Margaret and I are on her heels, but then I hear it—a woman's voice, with an accent that sounds a lot like Margaret's mom's. Polish? Russian?

I freeze. “Listen!” We all strain to hear the voice coming from behind that door.

“… I don't know
where
she found it, but it's definitely something from
him
. She said something about a card or a letter, and needing to get into the school library. This could be what we've been waiting for, after all these years. And it's about time. I don't know how much more of that old dingbat I can take.”

Margaret and I look at each other. The school library?

“Hold on a second,” the voice continues, sounding harried. “She's looking for that damned cat. He must
have gotten out again. I have to go—she's coming up the stairs.” I hear her set the phone down. We are trapped between that open door, whoever—or whatever—is coming up the stairs, and the demon feline.

And that's when I hear the second voice, this one belonging to a much older woman.

“Can you help me catch my kitty? He likes to go down those old stairs.”

I slowly turn to face the voice—is it an elderly female Quasimodo, freshly sharpened edge of her ax glistening inches above my head? Nah. Standing before me is a tiny old lady. She has long, straight hair that appears to be nearly pure white in that dark hallway, but her skin is remarkably smooth and unwrinkled, making it difficult to tell how old she is. Fifty? Seventy? Clothing-wise, she looks like some kind of sixties flower child—a floor-length, tie-dyed tunic with six or seven strands of different-colored beads paired with Birkenstocks. It is the woman from the window. No doubt about it.

I must have a frightened look on my face, because she smiles reassuringly at me. “It's all right, dear. I'm not going to hurt you. Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could.”

Hellcat, halfway between us, roars as if to add,
“But I could.”

“Oh, don't worry about him,” she says as I back away. “He's a darling old fuddy-duddy. All hiss and no bite. I must not have latched the door, and he just lets
himself out. That
was
you I saw a little while ago, wasn't it? I'm sorry if I spooked you. But how nice of you to come looking for me.”

“I wasn't scared,” I lie. “Just a little … surprised.”

“Well, Teazle just
knew
you were coming. He's been carrying on all morning. This is the second time I've found him out here in the hallway—why, we might never have met if not for him. You know, I've always suspected he's a bit psychic—perhaps the reincarnation of my dear old great-aunt Maysie. Now
she
was gifted. Predicted the stock market crash in twenty-nine. Her father never forgave her for not telling
him
.”

Eyes wild, Margaret's face finally appears around the bend in the staircase, with Rebecca an inch behind.

“Well, hello to you all. I'm Elizabeth Harriman, and this big ol' monster is Teazle.” She hoists him off the ground, holding him the way I used to hold my dolls, his feet hanging down almost to her knees. Still shaking a bit, and wary of the cat, I sort of grope her hand as we introduce ourselves.

“Won't you girls come in for a cup of tea?”

Come in
where?
Where did she come from?

Rebecca speaks up. “Um, Sophie, the bell's in like two minutes.”

“Oh, dear,” said Ms. Harriman. “Well, might you come back after school, mmm? I have something
very
important to ask you.”

We all look at each other. “Are you guys in?” I ask.

“Uh, sure,” says Rebecca.

“Absolutely,” says Margaret.

Really?
What are we getting ourselves into?

“Wonderful! Shall we say three o'clock?”

“Should we come back
here?”
I look uncertainly at the dimly lit passageway.

“Oh. No. Just come to my front door on Sixty-fifth Street. Right next door to the school. My home is the old convent, back when there were more nuns around. That's why it is connected to the church. It's the bright red door—just like your blazers. You've probably walked past it a thousand times. Ring the bell. Teazle and I will be waiting for you. Young ladies, I think karma has brought us to this fortuitous meeting. Our fates have become intertwined.”

“Um, see you at three,” I say, and we hustle the heck out of there.