The Vanishing Violin (28 page)

We practiced it so that the song ends the instant Leigh Ann shouts that final line—and we totally nail it! There is this moment of (stunned?) silence, followed by cheering and clapping and a few shouts for encores, which is a small problem for a band that knows only two songs.

“Um, unfortunately, we don’t actually know any more songs, but thanks for asking,” Leigh Ann explains. “And we promise we’ll be back.”

“We don’t care,” my dad yells. “Play that one again!”

Parents!

The rest of the crowd likes the idea, though, and starts to chant, “Blaz-ers! Blaz-ers! Blaz-ers!”

Leigh Ann turns to Becca and me; we shrug and kick the volume on our amps up a notch. Gotta give your fans what they want.

The second time through is a little louder and a little sloppier, but no one seems to mind. We take our bows and run off the minuscule stage to be congratulated, hugged, and kissed. Malcolm, who swears that he saw the not-yet-famous Beatles play in Hamburg in 1962, tells us that we are definitely “the next big thing.”

My parents—you know, my classically trained violinist mom and French chef dad—are in a state of shock. Mom gives me a big hug and then pulls back to give me one of those I’m-so-proud-of-you-I-think-I’ll-cry looks. “I had no idea you were so good. When you said you girls were going to play, I thought … well, I don’t
know what I thought, but it sure wasn’t this. You were amazing!”

“So you’re really okay with me quitting violin?” I ask.

“Honey, I just want you to be happy doing whatever you’re doing. Now, about this song you wrote …”

Uh-oh.

Matters are made far worse by the arrival at my side of one Rafael Arocho.

“Perfect timing,” I say under my breath.

“Hey, Mrs. St. Pierre,” Raf says good-naturedly. “What’d ya think? Not bad, huh?”

Mon père
glares at
l’imbécile
.

“I mean, they were totally awesome!” Raf corrects.

Dad nods. “Much better. Now, young man, I think you and I should have a talk about this song my little baby girl wrote.” He puts his arm around a suddenly uncomfortable-looking Raf.

“Dad!” I scream. “Don’t you dare. Mom, stop him. Please.”

Margaret saves the day—and perhaps Raf’s life—by moving to the microphone and asking for everyone’s attention. “Excuse me, everyone—I have a little announcement and a request for some of you, but first I just have to say one word about my best friends: WOW! I hope when the Blazers are rich and famous, you guys will remember your old friend Margaret.”

“Margaret who?” Rebecca shouts.

“Exactly,” Margaret says. “As I was saying—I think
everyone here knows that not long ago, a valuable violin was taken from Mr. Chernofsky’s shop next door. The police have been working on the case, but we Red Blazer Girls have been conducting our own investigation as well, and during the course of that, a second theft occurred, of a bow, for which I take all the blame.” She pauses for full dramatic effect. “Tonight, however, I am pleased to announce that we have solved the case. We know who stole the violin and the bow, and how the thief pulled it off.”

People turn to one another in a sudden burst of conversation and questions. Becca elbows me. “We do?”

“Just go with it. Act like you know everything Margaret knows.”

She stares blankly at me. “As if.”

“I’d like to ask everyone to move next door to the violin shop, where I will reveal the identity of the thief,” Margaret continues. “Oh, and by the way … it’s someone in this room.”

Instant silence, followed by a moment right out of the movies. Eyes dart around the room, from table to table, trying to guess the identity of the violin villain.

“How exciting! I feel like I just stepped into an Agatha Christie novel,” Elizabeth gushes. “Goodness—it’s not you, is it, Malcolm?”

He smiles slyly, with a quick raise of his eyebrows, but like a great poker player, he reveals nothing.

Margaret asks a still-speechless Mr. Chernofsky to open up the shop, and Ben offers to help set up a few chairs.

“To make this scene completely authentic,” he says, “we ought to have a parlor room full of wing chairs and English antiques, but we’re going to have to make do with some of these metal folding chairs.”

The other Blazers and I follow Margaret up to the counter, where Aldo teases her about taking all his customers away.

“Just for a little while,” she explains. “They can come back afterward.”

“So, this band of yours,” Aldo says. “Who does the talking for you?”

We all point to Margaret. “She’s our manager,” I say.

“Well, manager, do the Blazers have any other engagements for next Friday? There’s five free sundaes in it for you.”

“What do you think?” Margaret asks. “Are the Blazers ready to turn pro?”

“Oh yeah,” says Becca.

Margaret shakes hands with Aldo. “I just have one little favor. You know that long pole that you use for changing lightbulbs? Can I borrow it for a few minutes? And promise me you won’t lock up for a while, okay?”

“I’ll be here for another hour at least. And one lightbulb changer coming up.”

Ah, Mademoiselle Wrobel! Monsieur Poirot and Miss Marple are waiting to welcome you into their club

We settle in at Mr. Chernofsky’s.

Margaret begins: “First, please note a few details about the security system Mr. Chernofsky has in place. Because he often works on very valuable instruments, his insurance company requires it. There are bars on all the windows. Each set is securely bolted to the brick. Each windowpane is also connected to the alarm system, so even if the bars were removed, a broken window would set off the alarm. The front and back doors both have extra-secure dead bolts and are also alarmed. Now, Mr. Chernofsky—at the time of the theft, who knew the alarm code?”

Mr. C. rubs his beard, thinking. “Besides me? Just Ben.”

“That would be Benjamin Brownlow,” Margaret explains, pointing Ben out to everyone. “Your new assistant.”

Lots of suspicious looks at Ben.

Margaret holds up her hand. “Don’t jump to conclusions like I did. I figured it had to be Ben, too. He knew the value of the violin, so he had motive. He knew the alarm code, so he had opportunity. And then there was the matter of his button. Ben always carries around a plastic button from an old coat—sort of a good-luck charm—and on the morning when Mr. C. discovered the theft, he also found that very button on the floor right next to the spot where the violin had been. It seemed like an open-and-shut case. But, and not for the last time on this case, I was wrong. We discovered that Ben had—well, let’s just say he had an airtight alibi. Sorry, Ben.”

“No harm, no foul,” he says with a good-natured wave.

“Which brings us, as they say on TV game shows, to door number three—this one.” She walks across the room to the door that leads directly into Perkatory—the door that can be unlocked only from inside the violin shop. She pulls on the doorknob once to show that it is locked. Then she twists the knobs on all three dead bolts and pulls the door open, revealing the back of the identical door to the coffee shop.

“As you can see, these dead bolts are accessible only from inside the shop. There is no place for a key, and it’s the same thing for the door into Perkatory.” She closes the door and makes a big show of relocking all three dead bolts, then makes it clear that they were locked the morning Mr. C. discovered the violin was gone.

“And that leaves us with one more option, the site of
my second big mistake on this case. If you go into Mr. Chernofsky’s office, you will see a trapdoor in the ceiling, just big enough for a small person to fit through, that is there for access to pipes and wiring. Once I had eliminated Ben from my list of suspects, I started to obsess about that trapdoor, thinking that if there’s one down here, there’s probably one above it, and they’re probably connected somehow. Kind of like those air ducts in the movies. Then we found out that a relative of the two women who live upstairs is a world-class gymnast and only a shade over five feet tall—small and agile enough to fit through the opening. Once again, I was sure we had our man. We set up a little trap using a webcam, making sure that he knew all about a valuable bow that was in the shop. We sat up all night staring at a computer screen, waiting for Sergei—that’s his name—to come crawling through the ceiling like a squirrel. But guess what? He never came. And boy, do we owe him—and those two lovely women, Anna and Natalia—an apology. All that wouldn’t have been so bad, but when Mr. C. told me that the bow—my bow—had been stolen right from under our noses, I figured my career as a detective was pretty much over. But then Sophie’s mom saved the day.”

“I did?” Mom says.

“Yep. I was waiting for Sophie—as usual—the other day, and you used that handy little gadget that lets you grab things to get something out of one of the high cabinets in your kitchen. And coincidentally, we had been at
Perkatory the day before and Jaz was using this contraption,” she says, holding up the lightbulb changer from Perkatory. “It has a suction cup on one end that you can use to change lightbulbs, and it extends to about twelve feet long. And suddenly I knew. Well, I was ninety-nine percent sure I knew, anyway. So I came back in here, made a couple of quick measurements, and took a really close look at one very important detail I had overlooked before.”

Raf clears his throat during Margaret’s dramatic pause. “And are you planning to tell any of us? Or are you just gonna talk all night?”

“Patience, Rafael. I’m not merely going to tell you, I’m going to demonstrate how it was done, so even you will be able to understand,” she adds with a wicked grin.

I scan the assembled audience once more to see who looks nervous, suspicious, or anything out of the ordinary. Malcolm catches my eye and winks. Hey, what’s that about?

Margaret’s eyes twinkle as she gives me that just-trust-me look of hers before asking Mr. C. to lock and bolt the doors and set the alarm after she leaves the shop. He seems a bit unsure, but when she is gone, he does as she asked, and the room grows strangely quiet.

Leigh Ann leans over to whisper to me and Becca, “Who do you think it is?”

“Well, my dad looks pretty guilty,” I say. “Look at him fidgeting in his chair. And he needs a shave. The guilty person always needs a shave.”

“What if it’s a woman?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Well, I think it’s Mr. Chernofsky,” Becca says, folding her arms for emphasis.

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Why would he steal a violin from his own shop?”

“Duh. Ever hear of insurance? He tells everyone the violin is valuable and then arranges this whole phony break-in so that he can collect the insurance money. I’m telling ya—I saw the same thing in a movie. Everybody trusted the sweet, old old guy … until he robbed them blind.”

“Gosh,” I say, “if it happened in a movie, it must be true.”

Leigh Ann shushes us. “I think I hear something. Outside that window.” She points to the round stained glass panel that is situated directly across the room from the door leading to Perkatory.

“What the heck is she doing?” I ask.

“Seriously,” Leigh Ann says, “I know she’s skinny, but no way is she going to squeeze between those bars.”

Everyone leans forward in their chairs, straining to see what the shadow behind the window is going to do next. For the next minute, it sounds like a mouse is scratching at the pane, trying to get in. Then we watch with open mouths as one section of glass—a cobalt blue triangular piece about three inches across—pops out of its lead frame, looking for a second like it is going to fall to the floor. As if by magic, however, it stops in midair before it is slowly lowered to the floor with the help of a
piece of string and the rubber suction cup from the lightbulb changer.

“Okay, I’ll admit it. So far I’m impressed,” Mr. Eliot says. “Assuming, of course, she hasn’t set off a silent alarm somewhere.”

“We would know if she had set off the alarm,” says Ben. “It is anything but silent.”

Silent seconds pass as we all stare at the hole in the window. Then, like one of those snakes coming through the wall in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, the fully extended and wobbly aluminum pole of the lightbulb changer begins to slither its way through the opening and into the room. Two feet … three … four … and more and more, finally coming to rest on the floor against the bottom of the door to Perkatory, ten feet away.

I can almost feel the smile on Margaret’s face as she maneuvers the end of the pole up to the first of the locks. It is then that I notice that the end of the pole (where the suction cup would normally be) has a notch cut into it. She misses a couple of times, but on her third try, the notch lands perfectly on the little wing-nutty-looking handle that you turn to lock and unlock the dead bolt. A confident twist of the pole, and … TA-DA! The bolt opens with a satisfying
clunk
. One down, two to go.

“Oh. My. God,” Jaz says quietly. She is leaning against the back wall, and I almost forgot she was in the room.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” I remark to her, but she doesn’t respond.

The pole, which seems to have a life of its own, moves up to the second and third locks, finishing them off in no time at all.
Clunk. Clunk
. (With a few more hours of practice, I think Margaret could change contact lenses with the thing.) And then we wait. The pole rests comfortably on the floor while everyone resumes chatting.