The Red Blazer Girls (8 page)

“Yeah, I'm actually pretty good at them. Why?”

“Meet me at Perkatory. Tomorrow, about four-thirty?”

“Wait. What's the big secret?”

“Just come. All will be revealed.” And I hang up.

Hey, hold on a second. Did I just ask a boy out?

Since the clutter in my room is too much of a distraction for Margaret, I usually go to her apartment when we study together.
(Much
easier than cleaning.) It is a bit of a surprise, then, when she offers to come over that evening to study for a history test. I still have the phone in my hand when she plops down on my bed next to me.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Raf.”

“Ohhhh.”

“Whaddya mean, ‘ohhhh’?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Just ‘ohhhh?’”

“Yep.” She smiles. “Just ‘ohhhh.’”

“Ohhhh-kay What's up with you? You hate studying here.”

“I do not.” She glances around the room at my books, some neatly stacked, others distinctly
not
. “All right, the, uh, disorder does trigger my OCD, but I have
a solution.” Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she closes her eyes and turns her palms upward, pretending to meditate. “Ohhmmmmm … Sophie's mess will not distract me … her ohmmmmess does not bother me … ohhhmmmmess …”

“We can go to your apartment,” I say.

“Ooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmm—nope!”

I tackle her, pinning her shoulders to the bed. “Margaret Wrobel. What is going on with you?”

She tosses me off her. (For a skinny kid, she's freakishly strong.) “It's kind of nutty and crowded over there right now, with my grandmother, and my brother, and my parents. There's no privacy. It's more peaceful here.”

“Right, I completely forgot about your grandmother. You haven't said anything since she got here. Is she sleeping in your room?”

Margaret's grandmother, eighty-four or eighty-five or eighty-six (no one seemed to know exactly), had recently arrived from Poland and was staying with them for a few weeks.

“Yeah.”

“I thought she was your favorite. What did you call her?”

“My
babcia
. And she was my favorite. She
is
. I'm just…” Margaret rolls off the bed and starts to zip open her book bag. “Nothing. Forget it. Let's study. Where's your book?”

“Wait, for five years, all I've heard was Babcia this and Babcia that. About how
wonderful
and
amazing
she was, and about all the things you did together when you were back in Poland, and how much you missed her—and now she's here, and you haven't even introduced us yet.”

Margaret looks miserable. “I know, I'm sorry. When my mom and dad told me she was coming, I was
so
happy. When I was a little kid, Babcia and I did
everything
together. She gave me my first violin and paid for my first lessons. I used to sit on her lap and fall asleep while she read to me. I remember riding the bus with her into Warsaw, singing our favorite song, and sometimes the other people on the bus would sing along with us. Almost all of my best memories from Poland are connected to her.” She takes a deep breath and puts her head in her hands. “And now I just can't handle her.”

“Why? What is she doing?”

“Well, for one thing, she talks
nonstop
. Since my grandfather died, she lives by herself in Poland, and I guess it's a treat having people to talk to. She goes to bed at seven-thirty so I can't turn on the light or use my computer. And she keeps rearranging all my stuff! She says my skirt is too short and my shoes look like the ones the prostitutes in Warsaw wear—which is definitely
not
true. And every day, she tells my parents that I'll be ruined because I have a cell phone.”

Hmmm. Doesn't sound
that
bad to me, but I want to
be supportive. “Maybe she's still settling in, you know, still getting over the jet lag, and once the novelty of having people around to talk to wears off, she'll be fine. Give her some time. In the meantime, we can hang here more often.”

“Okay but how about we straighten up those piles?” “You mean you want to rearrange
my
stuff?” I am whacked in the head with a pillow. Twice!

During our review of the finer points of the French and Indian War, I clue Margaret in to my including Raf in our efforts to solve the puzzle. After all, if we can trust Leigh Ann, who we've known for like ten minutes, we ought to be able to trust an old friend like Raf, right? It takes a little convincing, but in the end she agrees that we aren't betraying Ms. Harriman. Having one more decent brain put to the task can't hurt. Never once do I let the fact that he seems to get better looking every time I see him or that I (kind of) miss having him around enter my decision-making process.

The next day, we walk into Perkatory a few minutes after four-thirty, and there he is, feet propped up on a scuzzy coffee table.

“Hey, losers. You're late.” He flashes his gleaming white teeth at us.

We hug him anyway and squeeze in beside him on the couch.

“Where's Becca? I thought you three did everything together, like the Three Stooges.”

“She had to stay home, but she knows what's going on,” I assure him.

Leigh Ann walks in a few seconds later and takes a diet soda from the cooler. She catches a glimpse of us as she pays the cashier.

“Oh, hi, guys. What's up?” She smiles right at Rafael.

You should see the way they are looking at each other. And most unfortunately, Leigh Ann is kind of the female equivalent of Rafael. Face it, she's beautiful—the whole package. She's from the Dominican Republic and has this totally amazing skin and big brown eyes. Guys just go all stupid over her. She and Raf look like they just stepped out of a catalog.

Margaret, whose crush on Rafael is more theoretical and whose manners are
way
better than mine, introduces them. “Leigh Ann, meet our friend Raf. He used to go to St. Andrew's, but now he's over at Aquinas. Leigh Ann is new this year, but she's already part of the gang.”

“Like Shemp,” I say.

“Hi,” says Leigh Ann.

“Hey,” says Raf.

Genetically fortunate? Yes. Sparkling conversationalists? Not so much.

Boo-hoo, Leigh Ann can't stay! Alas, she has dance class and has to pirouette her way downtown. An awful shame. As soon as she leaves, I shove Raf on the shoulder. Hard.

“What's that for?”

I mimic the posture and smile he had affected for Leigh Ann. “Hey.”

“What?” he says, totally pretending not to know what I am talking about.

“Could you be any more obvious?”

Margaret nods her assent. “She's right, Raf. You
were
kind of obvious.” She leans forward and opens her backpack, ready for business. “But enough of this hormonal distraction.”

Margaret and I tell him the whole story. If one of us leaves something out, the other jumps right in.

“Can I see this letter?” he asks.

Margaret hands him the copy.

Raf reads silently. “Jeez, who
was
this kid?”

“C'mon, you're
supposed
to be smart,” I tease.

“Margaret
is the smart one.
I'm
the good-looking one.”

“Hey, what does that make me?”

“You—you're the—well—”

Is he blushing? Something strange is going on here. Another mystery?

“Focus!” says Margaret. “Does it make sense to you, as a puzzle? See, that's what I don't get. You have these two simple equations with six blanks, but only one clue. Find the answer and you get the next clue. But let's say we're able to figure out the clues. How does that help us solve the puzzle?”

“Yeah, shouldn't there be a map or something?” I say.

Raf hunches his shoulders. “Maybe one of the clues leads you to the map. So, what's in this for you guys, if you find it?”

“Well, nothing, really,” Margaret says, “if you are referring to financial compensation.”

“So you're doing this out of the kindness of your hearts?”

“We're
doing this out of the kindness of
our
hearts,” I correct. “You're going to help.”

“Okay okay, I'll do what I can. But I can't be coming over to this side of town every day. Crosstown buses are a nightmare.”

Margaret shakes her head. “Oh, quit whining. You won't have to. This is a logic problem, and we're going to approach it logically—one step at a time, one clue at a time. No matter how smart this Caroline was, between the three of us and Rebecca and Leigh Ann, we should be able to solve it—
unless
…”

Wait a second—is that a crack in her relentless confidence?

“Unless what?”

“Well, what if one of the clues refers to something personal—something that only Caroline and her grandfather knew about?”

“Then we'll just have to ask Caroline,” I say. “We know enough about her to track her down. But other than something like that, you guys do think we can solve it, right?”

Raf nods confidently. “Why not?”

Margaret snatches the letter back from Raf. “You see how he says that it's one of a pair, and that the other one is in the Met? We should go to the museum and look for the other one!” She is getting really excited again, her confidence firmly reasserted.

“Um, guys,” Raf says. “Have
you been
to the Met? It could take you a week to find it there. Or it might be in storage someplace, or they could have sold it to another museum.”

“Au contraire,” I say. “We know exactly where to look. This guy, Caroline's grandfather, was an expert on early Christian relics, according to Ms. Harriman. That's where we'll go.”

“Saturday?” Knowing that it is more command than question, both Raf and I agree to be on the steps of the museum at noon.

“Now, let's take a look at clue number one.”

Time Management Margaret. We're together and we have a task to complete, so why put it off?

The three of us put our brains together and figure out the first clue right there in Perkatory. Like
that!
I notice something about the letter from Caroline's grandfather that seems strangely coincidental. He said that he was certain that Caroline's knowledge of religion, classical languages, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art should be sufficient to solve the puzzle. Six subjects, six clues. A coincidence? I think not. Were they listed in order? How the hell should I know? But it seems perfectly reasonable.

We settle on the idea that the clue refers to something in the field of religion and feel thoroughly confident. We
have
gone to Catholic schools all our lives, after all. Using a Magic Marker, Margaret prints the clue on a sheet of notebook paper and sets it on the table: