The Vanishing Violin (16 page)

I shrug. I nod. I shnod.

“If you’re going, I’m going.”

Behold the power of peer pressure.

We pause at the basement door, opening it a crack to look down into the void. “If she falls on these stairs, she’ll be dead,” I say.

“Maybe she has a light.”

“Good point.” And right on the money, as it happens. I stick my entire head through the doorway and see shadows flickering on the wall as Sister Eugenia makes her way toward the back of the room. “Stay close.”

This last request is entirely unnecessary; Leigh Ann is absolutely glued to my back as we descend the stairs. With her flashlight, Sister Eugenia is able to move much faster and reaches the far end of the basement well ahead of us.

“Oh dear,” Sister Eu says. “Oh, no, no. This isn’t supposed to be here.”

I turn around to face Leigh Ann, whose eyes are WIDE open.

“What isn’t supposed to be there?” she whispers.

“Not sure. Keep moving.” Like a very small herd of very large turtles, we trudge ahead. Finally we’re close enough to take advantage of the dim glow from the nun’s flashlight, and we see the problem.

A pile of construction materials is leaning against the door to the secret hideaway we discovered. There must be ten or twelve sheets of heavy plywood and even more plasterboard, and a stack of those ginormous buckets of paint. Only the top two feet of the door is visible.

“Benjamin!” she says in the loudest voice she can manage. “Can you hear me? Are you in there?”

A muffled “Yes!” comes from behind the door. “I’m trapped!”

“Oh my goodness,” she says, sounding distinctly panicked. “What should I do?”

“Sister, you have to get me out of here!” Ben shouts. “Just get me out. Please.” He sounds desperate.

“Sister Eugenia,” I shout. “We can help. Shine your light over here for a second so that we can see.”

“Girls! Did you follow me?”

“Well, yeah, kinda, but please let us help. We know about the room, but we didn’t know who was staying in it.”

Leigh Ann and I start dragging the plywood and the rest of the stuff out of the way. It takes about ten minutes, and we are sweating like a couple of fat men in a sauna when we get to the last sheet of plasterboard.

As we slide it out of the way, Ben pushes the door open. “Ohmigosh! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank God you found me, Sister. I have been trapped in there since Saturday afternoon.”

Sister Eugenia crosses herself. “Saturday! Gracious. This is Tuesday! You poor thing. What happened?”

“Sister, I promise to tell you everything, but right now I really need to use the bathroom!” He skitters away to the janitor’s closet-size bathroom, leaving Leigh Ann and me stranded with Sister Eu for a few uncomfortable minutes.

When he returns, Sister Eu shines the light on him and I get a look at his scruffy, pasty-white face and the
circles—dark enough to do a raccoon proud—around his eyes. And either his clothes grew, or he shrank a couple of sizes. The poor guy looks awful.

“Whew. That’s better,” he says. “What happened was, I came back here after our walk in the park and was inside reading when I heard people coming down the stairs. They were making a lot of noise moving things around, and I thought they were going to open the door and find me for sure, so I just kept quiet. When they left, I tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I ran out of food and water yesterday, and I’m starving.”

I hand him the full water bottle from my book bag, and he drinks it all without even stopping to breathe.

“You’re not going to believe what’s happened,” I tell him. “Somebody stole a violin from Mr. Chernofsky over the weekend, and he thinks it’s you. And so do the police.”

“What violin?”

“The Frick, er, the Frischetti.”

“But … how? Who even knows about it?”

“We’ll explain everything we know in a little while. Right now we have to get you out of here.”

But how? Where? I feel as if my brain is under enemy attack. Lame ideas are whizzing past, and I’m blasting them out of the sky. Normally, I would just turn to Margaret for a brilliant solution, but this time it’s up to me. I can do this!

Right?

Of course!

In which Quasimodo and some of our other old friends reappear

And then it hits me. “Sanctuaryyyyyyyy,” I say in my best Quasimodo voice.

“You’re taking me to a bell tower?” Ben asks.

“Close,” I say. “But not the church itself—someplace connected to it.”

“Elizabeth’s?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Exactly. We can sneak him up the back stairs.” Elizabeth Harriman’s townhouse used to be owned by the church and is connected to it by a staircase and a long hallway that we discovered when fate led Ms. Harriman into our lives.

“But wait,” Leigh Ann says, pulling me aside for a private confab. “Shouldn’t we ask her first? It is the teensiest bit possible that she might not want a confirmed felon—who’s a suspect in another crime—in her house.”

“Hmm. You may be right,” I say, remembering Elizabeth’s art collection. “I’d better call her.”

Following a quick explanation, in which I leave out every single important detail, Elizabeth insists that we bring our friend up immediately.

Leigh Ann bites her bottom lip. “We can’t get in trouble for this, can we?”

“I … er … well—” I stammer, not at all sure how to answer that question.

“If anyone sees us, I’ll explain everything,” Ben says. “Just get me out of this godforsaken basement. I want to see the sun again.”

“And we’ll bring Sister Eugenia along as a character witness,” I say.

“Bring me where?”

Yipes! In the dark of the basement, I forgot she was so close.

“We have a plan to get Ben out of here so that he can get cleaned up and tell us what is going on. But if we’re going to help him—”

“What do you mean ‘help him’?” Sister Eugenia says, shining her light right in my face. “You girls shouldn’t be mixing yourselves up in this.”

“Sister, we know what we’re doing,” I state with unquestionable confidence. Then I take a Red Blazer Girls Detective Agency card from my wallet and hand it to her. “We’re used to stuff like this.”

With a weirdly chastened Sister Eugenia leading the way, elbows swinging dangerously from side to side, and the rest of us struggling to keep up, we scamper up the back staircase that leads from the school to the church
foyer, where our old friend Robert, the ancient security guard, sits at his post reading this month’s
Vogue
. I smile and wave as I pass, praying he doesn’t recognize me as the girl he once busted for church-snooping.

He seems none too concerned. Or maybe the sneak preview of next summer’s fashions (“Shorts, Shorter, Shortest!”) is simply too fabulous to look away from?

When we get to that very familiar door with the stained glass chalice, the very one that leads to the “secret” staircase to Elizabeth’s, I know exactly what to do—thanks to Becca. I bend a bobby pin just so, wiggle it around in the lock, and then turn the knob with a satisfying click. Sister Eugenia gapes, her hand clapped on her heart.

“I do have a key, Miss St. Pierre.”

I shrug. “Sorry. Old habit, Sister. Hey, get it? Habit? Sister?”

“Keep moving,” Leigh Ann whispers.

As we wind our way up the dark, twisting stone stairs, Ben jokes nervously about us locking him away in another secret room. Then, at the final turn, he stops dead in his tracks. “Holy Catzilla! Look at the size of that thing!”

“Teazle!” I shout. “Come here, big fella.” I hoist up all twenty-five pounds of him. “He belongs to Ms. Harriman—Elizabeth.”

“Who is going to be your new temporary landlady,” Leigh Ann says, patting him on the shoulder. “You’re gonna love her.”

“Some questionable fashion choices, maybe, but she’s cool,” I add.

Elizabeth is waiting at the door, and after quick introductions, she directs Ben to the old servants’ quarters on the top floor. “He can stay in Winnie’s old room. I’m afraid it still smells like stale cigarettes. I’ll open a window to air it out. P.U.!”

Both Winnie and her husband, Gordon, were chain-smokers, and it is going to take about three years to purge the room of the ashtray stink.

“I set some of Malcolm’s old things on the bed, but now that I see you, I’m afraid they’re going to be a bit large on you.”

Malcolm has a good ten inches on Ben. But at least he’ll be warm and nattily attired. Malcolm is the Earl of Tweed. The Count of Cashmere. The, uh, Minister of Merino?

Meanwhile, Teazle leads the rest of us down to the living room, on the ground floor. Seeing Elizabeth’s art collection makes me hope and pray that we haven’t misjudged Ben. That nice little Matisse at the bottom of the stairs is worth a lot more than the violin—even if it really is a Frischetti.

Sister Eugenia tells us half of Ben’s story, and when he emerges from Winnie’s old domain, we get the other half straight from the horse’s mouth. Yes, it’s true he spent time in prison. No, he didn’t kill anyone. (“Not yet, anyway,” he adds with a smile.) Yes, he has been living in the school basement for a few weeks.

And finally, he admits that he is responsible for the cleaning, the painting, the decorating, etc.

“It’s part of my penance,” he says quite seriously. “When I got released, I came back to New York. I wanted to start my life over again. You know, the whole clean-slate thing. But I didn’t have any place to stay. Fortunately for me, I ran into Sister Eugenia in the park one day. She was my eighth-grade math teacher, and I guess I must not have been such a rotten kid, because she wanted to help me out. She knew about the coal door and the storage room. Said it would be our little secret. A place to crash for free, just for a few weeks, until I got back on my feet.”

Sister Eugenia looks at him like a proud mother. “But he wouldn’t agree to it unless he could do something in return. So he started cleaning. And when he ran out of things to clean, he started painting.”

“We know,” I say. “Sister Bernadette hired us to find you. You’re driving her crazy, you know. That was Margaret and me the other day—we almost caught you, and then all those chairs fell, and you disappeared.”

“Well, after what you did to the library,” Leigh Ann says, “I’m not sure we should ever tell her. St. V’s should hire you.”

“I’m sorry I’m making Sister Bernadette nuts—that wasn’t my intention. I suppose I did get a little carried away. The wallpaper was a little much, huh? Maybe when this is all over, I can apologize to her. If I don’t end up back in prison, that is.”

“Impossible,” I say. “You’re innocent, and we can prove it.”

“Well, I’m not so sure you can,” Ben says. “You’re taking my word that I was in that room since Saturday. I could be lying to all of you. Believe me, that’s the way the police will see things. My alibi has a big hole in it because no one saw me between Saturday and today. And then there’s the sticky issue of my button. How did that end up on the floor? It’s always in my pocket. That little piece of plastic is very special to me.”

“What is it from?” Leigh Ann asks. “I’m sorry, is that too personal?”

“No, it’s all right. That button is from the winter coat they gave me in prison. I got it on the first day of my incarceration.”

“Why did you scratch the number thirty-three in it?” I ask.

“Thirty-three months. Nine hundred ninety-nine days, to be exact. That’s how long I knew I would spend in prison. I carry the button to remind me of every day.”

Just then I see my reflection in the mirror. The girl I see has a familiar, full-throttle look about her—the very one I’m used to seeing in Margaret. And I like what I see.

“Well, even if we can’t prove you didn’t do it, we can prove somebody else did. We will find that violin.”

Won’t we?

In which the significance of sushi and Seventeen is debated

With Ben safely tucked away upstairs and Sister Eugenia on her way back to school, Leigh Ann and I thank Elizabeth once more. I’m still a little nervous about the situation, but Elizabeth doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about what the police just might see as interfering with an investigation. Which we are. Definitely. Gulp.