Vanished (5 page)

That evening
, a bunch of things happened. First, Neela's father filed a police report.

“A what?” asked the clerk at the police station when Mr. Krishnan explained what had been stolen. Neela, who went with him, listened as he patiently spelled out the word.

Mr. Krishnan was given a form to fill out, and a case number when he was done.

“We'll call you if we find anything,” the clerk said, without looking up.

Her father didn't have much hope. When they returned home, he said, “I don't know what they'll do about it.”

Then the family had a conversation about “What to Do Next.”

“Let's play Transformers,” Sree said. He held a toy up in his hand as if he was ready to pound it into someone.

“We can search the church again,” Neela said. “We can also put an ad in the paper.”

Neela saw her mother purse her lips but say nothing.

“Those are all good ideas,” Mr. Krishnan said. He sighed as if he didn't have any good ideas of his own.

Neela thought this was the moment to tell them that she had heard what they said the night before. Her parents would be annoyed for a minute or so, but then they would have to tell her about the curse. And she was dying to know. But just as Neela was about to speak, the phone rang.

Mr. Krishnan went to answer it. “Hi, Amma,” he said.

Neela gulped. She listened as her father talked to Lalitha Patti. He said pretty much what he had the night before, except with the added bad news that the church hadn't turned up anything. “I'm sure we'll find it,” he said again and again. But it sounded even less reassuring today, especially when he kept repeating “I'm sorry” in between.

Neela stole a look at her mother. Was she still planning not to look for the veena anymore? Mrs. Krishnan's face was tight, even a little angry, but as soon as she saw Neela watching her, she relaxed her expression and began straightening the items on the coffee table. “Sree, don't throw your Transformer around,” she said, a little too sharply.

“Neela, here,” Mr. Krishnan said. He held the phone out to her.

Neela looked beseechingly at him. Was there some way out of it? In her father's eyes she saw that the answer was no.

She wiped her hands on her pants and took the phone. “Hi, Patti,” she said. She tensed, waiting to hear a sobbing person on the other side.

But surprisingly, her grandmother's voice was calm. “Neela, how are you? You're safe? Nothing happened to you?”

“Uh, no,” Neela said, startled.

“Good,” Lalitha Patti said. “I don't want you to feel bad about this. I know you probably think it's all your fault.”

“But it
is
all my fault,” Neela said. “I'm the one who lost it.”

“It isn't so simple. You might have left the veena alone in the church. But maybe you were destined to do it.”

“I was?” Neela blinked. She glanced at her parents, who were sitting on the couch with Sree. What did Lalitha Patti mean? Was she talking about the curse? “Are you saying it's okay the veena is gone?”

Lalitha Patti sighed. “What's done is done.”

“But what if there were some way to get the veena back?”

Lalitha Patti paused. “Do you know who took it?” There was a faint hope in her voice.

Neela looked again at her parents. “Not exactly.”

“Forget about the veena.” Her grandmother lowered her voice a notch. “Unless you can't.”

“But—” Neela was about to say more, when her father interrupted.

“I have one more thing to ask her,” he said.

Wordlessly, Neela gave him the phone.

“June or December,” she heard him say. “We're still deciding.”

Neela went to the living room and frowned at the empty spot where her grandmother's veena used to be. Her conversation with Lalitha Patti had unsettled her. Even more puzzling were her last words:
Forget about the veena. Unless you can't
. Was this her grandmother's secret way of telling her to keep looking?

Saturday evening, Pavi's family came over for dinner. Neela opened the front door to find her best friend in corduroys and an apple-green sweater, wearing a small, glittery sticker on her forehead.

“What's with the
bindi
?” she asked.

“My mom's been on my case about it,” Pavi said. Behind her, her brother, Bharat, ran upstairs to play with Sree, while the parents sat down in the living room.

“My mom gets on my case, too,” Neela said, “but that doesn't mean I'll wear one.”

Both their mothers wore bindis, the traditional dots that adorned women's foreheads in India.

“Yeah, but I changed my mind. They're kind of cool. Gwen Stefani wears one.”

Neela considered Pavi's bindi. It was a pretty light green, bordered with glitter, and Pavi wore it low, just above her eyebrows, as was the fashion these days.

Still, Neela didn't like to wear one in public. Once in first grade she wore a bindi to school, and Amanda and Michelle Manser had run around screaming,
Neela has chicken pox cooties!
The worst part was that until then, she and Amanda had been friends. In fact, Amanda, Penny, and she used to sit next to each other at snack time, play on the swings together, and share their crayons at the drawing table. But then the chicken pox cooties thing happened. After that, Neela never wore a bindi to school again. She figured that just a small dot on your forehead made you eligible for embarrassment. And she wasn't sure, but somewhere around that time, even though Penny would still do things with both of them, Neela and Amanda stopped being friends. It was gradual, one of those things she didn't notice, like the sun setting, until it was gone.

But Neela didn't mention any of this now to Pavi. “It is pretty,” she said instead, trying to be agreeable. “I guess it isn't a big deal.”

Pavi's eyes flashed. “Not a big deal?”

Neela sighed. Pavi could be so touchy. “I just meant, it's cool, that's all.”

“People treat you different when you wear a bindi.”

“Then why do you wear it?”

Pavi grinned and answered in typical Pavi style, “Maybe I
want
to be different.”

After dinner, the conversation turned to the missing veena and what to do next.

“Well, there's the insurance,” Mr. Sunder said. “You would get some money back.”

“Are you going to buy another veena for Neela?” Mrs. Sunder asked.

Neela's mother shrugged. “She was doing fine on Sudha Auntie's student veena. Maybe she can go back to playing on that.”

“Sudha Auntie's veena?” Neela repeated. Her heart dropped. She had not considered this yet. Her teacher's squeaky, oversized veena suddenly seemed like a punishment after being spoiled for half a year on Lalitha Patti's gorgeous-sounding one.

“Sure,” Mrs. Krishnan said. “It was good enough before.”

Neela felt herself on the verge of tears. “But it's so…squeaky,” she faltered.

“You can play out of tune on it just like you did with Patti's veena,” Mr. Krishnan joked. “Maybe we won't even be able to tell the difference.”

Neela stood up and glared at her father. “I don't play out of tune.”

“What? I was kidding. Besides, you're not playing
any
instrument right now.”

“Fine. Maybe I should play on Sudha Auntie's veena for the rest of my life.”

She ran up to her bedroom. Upstairs, she nearly tripped on Sree and Bharat, who were playing in the hall.

“Neela, you want to push the red engine?” Sree asked, when he saw her.

But Neela was in no mood. “Find somewhere else to play with your stupid trains,” she said angrily, stomping past them.

“She's mad because she's a loser,” Sree said to Bharat.

“I'm not a loser!” she yelled behind her. She knew it was Sree's four-year-old way of explaining what had happened. Still, she didn't want to be called a loser—even if it was true.

Neela closed her door and lay down on her bed. She wasn't sure what she was angrier about—the idea of going back to Sudha Auntie's veena, or her father saying she played out of tune in front of Pavi and her family. As long as Neela could remember, Pavi was better at everything than Neela was—a better swimmer, a better student, a better veena player. Pavi would never lose her veena in a church. The worst part was that the veena wasn't even something Pavi really wanted to play in the first place. It was her parents' idea, which they got from seeing Neela, and Pavi had simply gone along with it. Pavi's parents had bought a veena over the Web for cheap. It wasn't a great veena, but it was adequate. Then, on this adequate veena, Pavi breezed through the early exercises with little effort. Of course she never had a problem with playing in front of people.
Picture everyone in their underwear
, she would say.

And now Pavi would have all her exercises memorized, and Sudha Auntie would lavish her with praise. At the same lesson, Sudha Auntie would yell at Neela for losing her veena.

The door opened. “It's not as bad as you think.” Pavi flopped onto the bed next to her.

“Easy for you to say,” Neela mumbled.

“You just need Sree to screw up big so your parents can forget about you. Maybe he can set the rug on fire? Or leave the water running in the tub?”

Neela smiled in spite of herself. So many times she wished Pavi lived in Arlington and went to school with her. She had known her for more than six years, from the time they met at a swimming class, and Pavi was the only one who could really make her laugh. She could do impressions of just about anyone, including her whole family, the swimming instructor, and even the priest who presided at the temple their families both visited. This was all, of course, before last summer, when they stopped taking swimming lessons together, after Pavi suddenly became really good.

Neela turned over. “You want to hear the weird stuff that happened at the church?”

Pavi looked interested. She nodded.

Neela described Mary's embroidery of the dragon, and the way she hid it away, and how her shoes squeaked just like the sound outside the door the day the veena was taken. When Neela got to the part about the kitchen and the metal dragon head falling on the ground, Pavi shivered with a mixture of horror and delight. “Did you get busted?” she asked.

Neela shook her head. “That's the weird part.” She explained how Lynne appeared in the kitchen and fixed the dragon. “So it's like having three suspects.”

“Three?” Pavi asked.

“Hal is number one. Mary with the shoes is number two. And Lynne.”

Pavi looked doubtful. “There's nothing that links Lynne to the veena.”

“But isn't it strange she showed up in the kitchen at the same time as me?”

“She had a photography class.”

“Or she was following me.”

“But what does your veena have to do with that coffeepot?”

“Teakettle.”

“Whatever.”