The Curse of the Lion's Heart

by Angella Graff

  Most of it was old statues and paintings and jewelry and stuff. Hair brushes from the fourteenth century and chairs that used to be in the Louvre when it was the palace in Paris, France. It always made me a little sad to think of all the things stuck in these rooms, never to be appreciated by the public. But then I’d remember what most people were like and I realized they probably wouldn’t get appreciated anyway. Luckily, most of it wasn’t very fragile, so my dad would let me browse around every now and then, as long as I promised not to break anything. To date, I hadn’t, though there had been some very close calls.

  My dad’s office was down the last hall and his window overlooked the center of downtown. I liked watching the people from his window sometimes. All those business people in their suits with their paper cups of coffee, talking really fast on their cell phones and walking like the world would end if they didn’t get to their meeting on time. My mom was like those guys. Always rushing, always freaking out about the smallest thing. I loved my mom but I couldn’t imagine actually ever feeling happy if I was always that rushed and stressed out.

  I was staring down at my cell phone as I came around the corner to my dad’s office, and let out a huge “oomph” as I smacked right into a huge somebody. My eyes darted up and I saw the glaring face of my dad’s boss, Milford Barnes. Mr. Barnes was definitely not my biggest fan. He’d caught me sneaking around looking for ghosts’ lost items more times than I could count, and had threatened my dad’s job. A lot. He was the curator of the museum, and primary stock holder, whatever that meant. It was something important, and he made a lot of the decisions, even though my dad knew way more than he did. He was a tall, man with almost no hair, very round glasses, and despite being thin all over, had a strangely round belly. He had a really annoying laugh, too, like someone pinching their nose shut before they talked, and he always pat me on the head and called me, “Kiddo.”

  I blushed and stepped back. “Sorry, Mr. Barnes. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  “What are you doing here?” he snapped, totally ignoring my apology.

  I blushed. He always had a way of making me feel like I was doing something wrong, even when I was totally innocent and minding my own business. “Just um… just visiting my dad,” I stuttered.

  His eyes narrowed in suspicion and it was obvious he didn’t believe me. “Is that so?” His voice was nasal, sneering, and it made me dislike him even more.

  I straightened my shoulders and took a few steps toward my dad’s office. “Yes, sir. I just wanted to see him and tell him how school was going. I started middle school this year.”

  Mr. Barnes stared at me for such a long time, I wasn’t sure if I was dismissed or not. Eventually, though, he gave a curt nod and stepped aside, letting me go around him. “Don’t let me catch you where you shouldn’t be. Got it, kiddo?” he snapped.

  I gulped and said nothing until he walked down the hall and disappeared around the corner. The man seriously gave me the creeps. Always staring at me, his beady little eyes watching my every move. And yeah, I had sort of done some not-so-great things in the past, and had sort of been where I wasn’t supposed to be, but I never hurt anything. And to date, as I liked to remind my dad whenever he got on my case, I hadn’t cost the museum any money or anything like that.

  I could hear my dad moving around in his office when I approached the door. It was shut, like it almost always was, and I almost barged in but remembered I hadn’t called, so I knocked instead. I heard something moving, probably boxes, and then he threw the door open.

  “Lex,” he said with surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh um… well I wanted to come say hi. You know, after my second day of school or whatever,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  His eyebrows rose and he opened the door. “Oh right, I should have called honey, I’m so sorry,” he blabbered as I moved past a bunch of overstuffed boxes to sit in his desk chair.

  He always let me take his office chair when I was there. He was almost always busy looking through boxes anyway, and immediately started digging once I’d made myself comfortable.

  “Well it was okay, thanks for asking,” I said to him when I realized he wasn’t going to ask me how my day was.

  He blushed a little and shook his head, pushing his crooked glasses back up his nose. “I’ve just been swamped, I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

  I waved my hand dismissively and sat back. “It’s fine. I made a new friend though, that was pretty cool.”

  He looked up and I almost laughed at a huge streak of old dust smeared across his cheek. He swiped at it with the back of his hand, only making it worse. “That’s great, honey. I’m glad to hear you’re finally making friends.”

  I made a face at him, but he was back into the box. “Yeah well… she’s nice.” It always stung when either of my parents made it clear that they thought I was a loser, too. They were supposed to be the supportive ones, telling me that I was cool or something, despite what everyone else thought. I hated that they noticed how different I was than everyone else.

  I looked over at my dad, but he’d gone back to his boxes, making it clear he was very busy with whatever he was doing, and wasn’t going to be paying me any extra attention. If I was going to get any answers out of him, it was best I wait until he was done. I moved the chair over to his computer, checked my email, checked my tumblr and then played a couple of levels of this cool zombie game I’d found online. He finally shoved the box aside with a smile, obviously happy with whatever he’d found.

  He grabbed a bottle of water from the mini fridge and chugged it down before flopping into his more uncomfortable guest chair. My dad always acted like going through those boxes was as tiring as running a marathon.

  “So besides the friend, anything new?” he asked, taking a tissue to the dirt on his face.

  I clicked out of the game and shrugged. “No, not really. I uh… I did get this history assignment that I thought you might be able to help me on, though.”

  He perked up immediately. Those were magic words to my dad. History, assignment, and help. He shifted the chair closer to the desk and looked at me eagerly. “What’s it on?”

  “Uh… Queen Elizabeth the First,” I said, guessing at her exact title.

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Good choice for your grade, excellent history there. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth…”

  “Uh well it’s not about her specifically,” I interrupted, hoping to avoid one of his long, pointless fact lectures about some historical person. Once you got him started, he wouldn’t stop. I fished the paper with the name out of my backpack and put it on the desk. “It’s about this family,” I said, and pushed it across to him. “That name mean anything to you?”

  He looked at the paper, his brows knitted in concentration. “Hmm, Ainsworth is a very popular British name, honey. It would be hard to track with nothing else to go on.”

  “Well, what about the Lion’s Heart locket?” I offered, and the way his eyes lit up, I could see I had hit the jackpot. “My teacher said it was a locket given to Queen Elizabeth by her mother.”

  “Indeed it was,” he said and sat back. “You’re in luck, too, because the museum just pulled that locket out of storage.”

  “Can I see it?” I asked hopefully. Maybe if it was still here, Elizabeth was mistaken and everything was fine.

  “It’s been sent out to be restored,” my dad said. “It should be back by the end of the week.”

  “Are you sure?” I blurted out without thinking.

  My dad frowned suspiciously. “Of course I’m sure. Listen, I’ll call you when we get the locket back in and make a special appointment for you to see it. I’ll even get a couple of photos done so you can take them in to show your class, okay?”

  I let out a breath. “Okay. Thanks.” The truth was, I was disappointed. Chances were, the locket was missing and whatever was going to come back to the museum wasn’t it. Still, I could dig a little further and see who mi
ght have been interested in it while I waited. “So the teacher told me that the rumor was the locket was cursed. Is that true?”

  “What, the curse or the rumor?” he asked.

  I laughed a little and rolled my eyes. “The rumor. I don’t believe in curses.”

  “I wouldn’t discount curses so readily, young lady,” he warned, but he was smiling. “And I do recall hearing something about a curse on the locket. I’ll have to dig around and see if we have any texts about it.”

  “Could you also check into that name?” I asked, pointing to the paper. “My uh… teacher… said that the Ainsworth family was a family of thieves trying to get their hands on it. She said that the Ainsworth’s were always stealing stuff from the royal family.”

  “Sounds vaguely familiar,” he said, rubbing his chin. “I’ll check into it and let you know. I’ll email you, okay?”

  “Yeah okay,” I said. The silence got a little awkward then. My dad and I weren’t ever really the chatty type. Even when it was his weekend, he mostly just ordered me pizza and handed over the TV remote while he was shut up in his study doing stuff for the museum. I mean he was a great dad, he loved me a lot, but he definitely wasn’t one for small talk.

  “So uh,” he said, “your mom coming to get you? Or do you need a ride home?” His face fell and he leaned forward, “She does know you’re here, right? The last thing I need from her right now is an angry phone call.”

  “Yeah she knows,” I said with a sigh. My parents had been split up forever, but they still fought and it still bothered me. “She’s picking me up after her yoga class.” I checked my phone and saw that I’d only been there for half an hour. Which meant I had another two hours to kill. “I’m gonna do homework, okay?”

  He seemed perfectly fine with that, and set me up in the employee break room with a soda, the really bad for you stuff that my mom never let me have, and a bag of chips. A few people slipped in and out, familiar with the sight of me there, and they all said hi. I got a decent amount of work done, texted Penelope a couple of times, and by five-thirty, the museum was closed and I was walking out the front doors with my dad.

  My mom had sent me a message a few minutes before saying she was running late. My dad looked pretty hesitant to just leave me in front of the building downtown, even though I practically grew up there and knew the area like the back of my hand.

  “I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “She’s going to be here in five minutes, I swear. Besides, Amos is still inside if I get freaked out.”

  “Your mom’s going to have my head if she knows I left you here alone,” he said.

  “I’ll just lie and tell her you’re inside still,” I said with a helpful smile.

  He frowned. “Lying to your mother?”

  “Well she is a lawyer, I kind of learned it from her,” I grumbled.

  He sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets, looking up and down the street. “Look, I’m going to go right up there,” he pointed to his favorite coffee shop, “and grab myself a cappuccino. If she’s not here by the time I get back, just call her and tell her I’m taking you home. I don’t want you standing around here by yourself for god knows how long.”

  “Fine,” I said, knowing there was no use in arguing with him. The good news was my dad was good friends with the guy who owned the coffee shop, so knowing him, he’d get into some half-hour conversation and totally forget I was still out here. I flopped down on the entrance steps, my back pack between my legs, and I rested my chin in my hands, elbows on my knees.

  I watched my dad cross the street and slip into the shop and then I started people watching. They really were all the business types, and sometimes I liked to imagine what sort of crazy personal lives they had outside of the court houses and offices. Like one man across the street wearing a really fitted navy blue suit.

  I imagined he had a huge house up on the hill. He was a celebrity lawyer, and got paid buku bucks to defend them in their paparazzi cases. He was married to a librarian, and they went on adventures during his vacation days. The last one was in Costa Rica, where they were chased by an indigenous tribe for stealing cursed gold.

  I smiled at the mental picture I got of him running through the jungle in shorts, holding his wife’s hand with one, and in his other, a giant machete. I pictured him slashing and hacking at the thick jungle leaves while being chased by the natives who were shooting poisonous darts out of blowguns.

  Of course I had no idea if that could actually happen, but it was a lot more exciting than watching him blabber away on his cell phone with a super angry expression on his face. I was so lost in that thought I didn’t even hear the familiar rolling sound of a skateboard until it practically cracked against my knee.

  With a startled gasp, I looked up just in time to see Jack kick his board up and catch it in one hand. He gave me a little smirk as I stood up, brushing the dirt from the back of my jeans. “What are you doing here?” I blurted, feeling a little embarrassed since I’d never really talked to him before.

  He shrugged. “I skate round here. Saw you pop in earlier and was wondering what you were doing. Never thought you were the museum type.”

  I snorted sarcastically. I totally looked the museum type with my big glasses and librarian clothes. I was the opposite of cheerleader Misty and her little gang of pastel pink and furry iPhone cases. “I love the museum,” I said with a little air to my voice, “but I actually came by to see my dad. He works here.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked, raising one of his really dark eyebrows up. “Never thought. Pretty cool you getting to hang out after hours, innit?”

  I smiled a little at the sound of his accent. It was different, which was cool, because everything around here got kind of boring. New school, new people, but same old stuff. “Yeah it’s okay. My dad’s kind of a geek, but I get to see all the stuff they don’t put out on the museum floor.”

  “Geeks aren’t such a bad thing, you know,” he said with a half-smile. It was odd, but right then, he didn’t seem so weird. Penelope made him sound like a creep, but talking to him for just a short minute and he seemed pretty normal.

  “Yeah.” Another awkward silence fell and really, I was getting tired of those. I swung my arms back and forth a little and bounced up on the balls of my feet. “So uh… you live nearby?”

  “Just round the corner,” he said, nodding toward First Avenue. “Live with my uncle, but I’m sure you already heard about him. Suppose it went something like, ‘creepy old man taking care of his niece and nephew’?”

  “Uh, something like that,” I said, feeling a little bad for pre-judging him.

  “He’s not all bad, you know. Mum and dad died when I was three, been living with him ever since. We moved here two and a half years ago and my sister hates it, but me… I don’t mind so much.”

  I felt awful for him now. My parents were huge pains but I couldn’t imagine losing either one of them. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “It’s fine,” he said, waving his hand. “What’s your name again?”

  “Alexandra,” I said. I was a little embarrassed that I knew his and he hadn’t known mine, so when he gave me his, I pretended like it was the first time I’d heard it.

  “I’m Jack.”

  “Cool.”

  Before I could think of anything else to say, my mom’s SUV pulled up at the curb and she leaned over the passenger seat to pop open the door. I groaned, hoping she wouldn’t embarrass me in front of Jack. “Uh, that’s my mom,” I said. “I’d better go.”

  “Me as well, almost my curfew anyway. See you round, yeah?”

  “Yeah, see you tomorrow,” I called and hurried down the steps before my mom decided to get out and introduce herself.

  Throwing my bag on the floor, I slammed the door and looked anywhere but out the window. My mom was smirking at me, though, and when I opened my mouth to ask her what she was smiling at, I heard a knock on the glass.

  Turning beet red at the sight of Jack’s smiling face, I fum
bled with the window switch to lower it down. “Uh,” I said to Jack, who was clearly smirking at my embarrassment. “Hi?”

  “You dropped this,” he said, and shoved a folded up piece of paper into my hand.

  I frowned, not recognizing it, and I shook my head. “It’s not mine.”

  “It is though, fell right out of your bag when you walked off,” he said. With that, he smiled and dropped his board to the ground. “See you tomorrow.”

  Face blazing, I refused to look at my mom who put the car in drive and started to pull out. Just then, my dad came out of the café and tipped us a wave, though I was the only one who waved back. My mom did her usual, curt nod and then drove a little faster than she should have down the narrow downtown street.

  “So… who was your friend?” she asked with that annoying, cute-boy twang in her voice. I’d heard her use it a hundred times with Amanda, and I did not want to be humiliated the way my sister had been over the years.

  “Just some kid from school,” I muttered. “Hardly know him.”

  “He seems nice,” she pressed.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said and fiddled with the paper. It wasn’t mine, I knew that, but I had a feeling it was important. I hadn’t seen Elizabeth, or felt her anywhere, but something told me to hang on to it. I slipped it into my backpack and looked out the window.

  “So, how was your dad?” I could hear the tension in my mom’s voice, and I really wanted to avoid a big, long conversation about him.

  “He’s good. He was busy but he’s helping me with a history project for school.”

  “Project already? On the second day?”

  “It’s middle school,” I reminded her. Even though the project was a total lie, she bought it and nodded. “Anyway he’s just looking up some info for me and he’s going to give me some pictures for my history class.”