Dawn Schaffer Undercover Baby-Sitter

by Ann M. Martin

  I listed the clues in my mind: “The first is always the most important.” “The signature tells all.” “I didn’t do it: I was ______.” As I lay there pondering the strange words, I felt as if Arthur Livingston’s gaze was still upon me. I wasn’t asleep anymore, but I wasn’t exactly awake, either. My mind drifted along, turning over the clues one by one, then putting them together in different ways. I thought again about the dream I’d had. It was bad enough that I had to look at all those portraits of Arthur Livingston during my days at Livingston House; why did I have to see them in my sleep, too? And why, why was he winking at me? It was as if he were trying to tell me something.

  Suddenly, I sat up straight. “Ha!” I shouted. “That’s it! The answer!”

  And then, almost immediately, I fell asleep again. I knew I was right, I just knew it. And even though it was exciting to have the answer to our mystery, there was nothing I could do with my new knowledge until the next day. Meanwhile, my mind was exhausted. I could finally stop turning over the clues. Now I could rest.

  In the morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I remembered. Had it all been a dream, even the part in which I had come up with the solution? I thought for a second. No, it was true. I knew exactly where to look for the solution to Arthur Livingston’s puzzle. I still didn’t know whether Arthur Livingston was alive, or if Ms. Iorio was up to something — but I knew I’d find answers to those questions, too.

  I pulled on some clothes and headed downstairs. Before I’d even poured out my cereal, I dialed Livingston House, and Amy answered. She sounded sleepy at first, but woke up quickly as soon as I started talking about solving the puzzle. When I finished, she asked me to come over as soon as I could. “If you really have the answer, that would be fantastic!” exclaimed Amy. “None of us can figure it out.”

  After I hung up, I took the time for a quick breakfast. I knew Mary Anne wanted to sleep late, so I didn’t wake her. But Richard was already up, and when I asked, he agreed to drop me at Livingston House on his way to work.

  “… so that’s how I ended up here so early this morning,” I finished, as I stood in front of the Livingston clan.

  Amy was pacing again, and Mrs. Keats was still wringing her hands. The kids were all squirming with impatience. And Mrs. Cornell looked as if she were about to start foaming at the mouth. “So what is it that you figured out?” she asked.

  I have to admit I’d been stalling a little. Could the answer I’d come up with really be right? What if I was just making a great big fool of myself? I gulped. There was nothing to do but dive right in. “Okay,” I said. “Here goes. Framed. That’s the answer.”

  “Framed?” repeated Mrs. Cornell. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “It’s the final word of your clue,” I explained. “Framed. I didn’t do it, I was framed. Framed, like when you set a person up, or … framed, like a portrait is framed. You see?” I heard gasps.

  “Wow!” said Amy.

  “What about my clue?” asked Mrs. Keats. “About the signature?”

  “It goes with Amy’s clue,” I said. “About the first being the most important. Every one of the portraits of Arthur Livingston is signed, right? And dated, too. All we have to do is find the earliest one — the first one. That’s the answer to the puzzle. The first picture, which is signed and framed.” I was trying to sound confident.

  “Could it be?” asked Mrs. Keats.

  “It’s so simple,” Mrs. Cornell mused, shaking her head.

  “But it sounds right!” said Amy. “Let’s start looking!”

  “Yay!” yelled the kids, as they tore out of the room.

  For the next hour or so, we went all over Livingston House, checking the signature and date on each portrait. There must have been over thirty paintings of that man, and I have to admit I became pretty tired of seeing his face. The dates were a little confusing, too. Once Arthur Livingston reached middle age, the pictures started to look alike, and it was hard to keep the order straight. Our search was not easy. Amy even remembered a couple of old paintings that had been stored in the attic, so we checked those, too.

  Katharine was keeping track of the date of every painting as we went along. Finally, we ended up back in the library. She looked over her notes.

  “Well?” asked her mother.

  We leaned forward. Katharine ran a finger down her list. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “It’s the one in the parlor.”

  “The awful one?” asked Mrs. Keats.

  “Don’t say that,” Mrs. Cornell protested. “Mother painted that one. She was taking art lessons at the time. I remember her telling me about it.”

  “Well, what are we sitting here for?” asked Amy. “Let’s go take a good, close look at the painting.”

  “I’ll call Lyn Iorio,” said Mrs. Keats. “She’ll need to be here to tell us whether or not we’ve found the treasure.”

  The rest of us trooped downstairs. Amy and Mrs. Cornell lifted the painting off its hook and lugged it back to the library. They propped it on a chair and we gathered around to stare at it. Sure enough, the painting had been signed by Diana Livingston.

  “It sure is ugly,” whispered Hallie.

  “Shh!” said Katharine.

  “But it is,” protested Tilly.

  Arthur Livingston stared back at us with a stony gaze. There was no sign of a wink, and no sign of whether or not we had really found the answer to the puzzle.

  Within a few minutes, Ms. Iorio arrived. “Is this the answer?” Mrs. Keats asked her eagerly. “This painting?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” said Ms. Iorio, giving the painting a curious look. “Check the back. There’s probably a code on it somewhere. My directions say to award the fortune to whatever daughter brings me the code.” She looked around. “It looks as if you’ve all found it together, though. That’ll change things. If you’ve solved the puzzle, you can split the fortune. If you want to, that is.”

  “It’s here!” shouted Amy, who had been examining the back. “Look, this must be the code!” She showed it to us: it was a series of numbers.

  “That sure looks like a code,” said Ms. Iorio. “But there’s only one way to be sure.” She pulled an envelope from her briefcase and began to slit it open.

  Just then, I heard a loud sneeze. But when I looked around to see who to say “gesundheit” to, everyone else was looking around, too. Whoever had produced that sneeze was not in the room — at least, not in any visible form.

  I looked around the room again, more carefully this time. Here’s what I noticed: Ms. Iorio appeared to be bewildered. Mrs. Keats and Mrs. Cornell looked confused. The kids seemed clueless. But Amy looked scared.

  What was she scared of? The ghost of her father? Or was it that Mr. Arthur Livingston was still alive, and this was the moment he had chosen to reveal himself?

  The room was silent for about ten seconds after the sneeze. Then, suddenly, I heard a loud, slow creaking noise. Everybody else heard it, too. I could see it in their faces. Now everybody was looking a little frightened.

  Then I saw Ms. Iorio’s eyes widen as she looked past me. I turned and saw — nothing. Just the same old bookcase full of the same old books. I couldn’t figure out what had made her face go white.

  Then suddenly, I understood. Slowly, heavily, inch by inch, the bookcase was moving. It was swinging out into the room, making creaking, cracking sounds as it opened. I held my breath. This was awesome. I thought suddenly of Claudia and her love of Nancy Drew books. This was right out of one of them! She would have died to have been there.

  Who — or what — was behind the bookcase? In a way, I was hoping for a ghost. A ghost emerging from a secret passage behind a moving bookcase would be hard to beat. On the other hand, if it were a living, breathing Arthur Livingston, that sure would explain a lot. And maybe this whole silly family feud and mystery could be put to rest once and for all.

  Guess what? It was neither.

  When the bookcase fin
ally stopped moving, a shadowy figure stepped out of the secret passage.

  “John!” cried Mrs. Keats.

  “What are you doing in there?” asked Mrs. Cornell.

  It was John, the butler. He looked pretty sheepish, too. “I didn’t mean to press the switch,” he said. “If I hadn’t sneezed and hit the switch with the back of my head, you’d never have known I was there.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” said Mrs. Cornell, who was starting to look a little angry. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Spying,” admitted John, even more sheepishly.

  “Was that you I heard creeping around behind the doors?” I asked. “And following us all over the house? And watching us while we were in the attic?”

  “I wasn’t in the attic,” said John with a little grin. “You must have just heard the house settling.”

  I almost laughed. Here he’d been spying on my friends and me all this time, and he had the guts to point out the one time he hadn’t been spying. I shook my head. This was too much. While I’d been acting as an undercover baby-sitter, John had been an undercover butler!

  “But why?” asked Mrs. Keats. “Why would you want to spy on the girls?”

  Good question. I wished I had thought of it.

  “Because I thought they might be lucky and stumble on the key to the fortune,” said John.

  “And why, exactly, would you care about our fortune?” asked Mrs. Cornell.

  John didn’t answer for a moment.

  Ms. Iorio was looking stunned. She looked back and forth from one speaker to the other as if she were watching a tennis match. Her mouth kept opening and closing, but no words came out.

  The kids seemed to have been shocked into silence, too. And Amy still hadn’t said a word.

  Then she stepped forward. Her eyes met John’s, and I saw their glances hold for just a second. She cleared her throat.

  “Um, Justine, Sally,” she said nervously. “Say hi to your little brother.”

  At that, Ms. Iorio let out a shriek. “I thought you were dead!” she cried.

  Now I was totally confused. Brother? Suddenly I remembered Ms. Iorio telling me about a younger brother who had died.

  “Patrick?” whispered Mrs. Keats, stepping forward to take a closer look at the man in front of her. She looked as if she were seeing a ghost.

  “Is that really you?” asked Mrs. Cornell, peering at his face.

  He nodded, smiling. “It’s me,” he said. “In the flesh.”

  “Your father told me you were dead,” gasped Ms. Iorio. “He said you died in a mountain-climbing accident.”

  “I guess I was dead to him,” said John — Patrick — sadly. “We never did see eye to eye on anything. That’s why I left home when I was seventeen.”

  “I remember it well,” said Amy. “I was twenty at the time. You had always been the black sheep of the family, mainly because you were the only one who wouldn’t put up with Dad’s games and manipulations.”

  “I hardly even knew you,” said Mrs. Keats softly. “Sally and I left for college when you were still very young — around Jeremy’s age.”

  “That’s why we didn’t recognize you,” said Mrs. Cornell. “That, and the beard.”

  Patrick (I guess I’ll just call him that from now on) stroked his beard and grinned. “Right,” he said. “I always felt as if you two were more like aunts than sisters. But Amy and I were close. We even kept in touch after I left, right, Ames?”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you two that I was in touch with Patrick,” she said to her sisters. “It’s just that you both seemed so caught up in your own disagreement. I thought adding Patrick into the equation might be a little too much. I brought him into the house as the butler, hoping that over time you’d come to know him and like him. Then we could reveal our secret.”

  “So you’re our uncle?” asked Katharine. She was the first of the children to speak. Somehow, even the youngest ones had known enough to hang back and stay quiet at first.

  “That’s right,” said Patrick, smiling.

  “My uncle, the butler,” said Eliza with a giggle.

  “Uncle Butler,” echoed Tilly.

  “Not any more,” said Mrs. Keats. “We’ll find another butler, if we really need one. Patrick is family.”

  I could tell she was pleased to be reunited with her baby brother. So was Mrs. Cornell.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Family.”

  “Ahem,” said Ms. Iorio, who also seemed to be calming down. “That brings up an interesting point. As far as the will is concerned, Patrick is dead.”

  “That’s right. I’m not in the will,” said Patrick. “Father wrote me out of it when I left home.”

  “What a meanie!” cried Hallie.

  “He thought he was teaching me a lesson,” said Patrick. “But the money didn’t matter to me.”

  “It didn’t then,” Amy put in. “But now you have that house you want to buy, and a business you’d like to start up.” She smiled fondly at her brother. Then she turned to her older sisters. “That’s why I told him he could have half of the estate if he helped me to solve the puzzle.”

  “I came back, thinking I could do some detective work and figure out the mystery in no time,” Patrick told them. “I didn’t think I’d be here long at all. I didn’t even bring many clothes. That’s why I had to borrow some of Father’s old things, including those clothes that were stored in the attic.”

  Aha! I had just known there was something strange about those freshly pressed clothes, and the dust-free zones in the attic. The mystery was being revealed, piece by piece.

  Patrick went on. “It was fun trying to figure out the clues, but what was best of all was being near my family again, and meeting my nieces and nephew, even though they didn’t know I was their uncle. I missed having a family. I’m glad to be back with you, money or no money.”

  “Oh, Patrick,” said Mrs. Keats. “I’ve missed having a brother! I’ve thought of you so often, but all that junk Father put into my head kept me from trying to find you. He told us you’d been awful to him, and that we’d better forget about you if we wanted to stay in his good graces. I feel stupid for believing him.” She sniffed, and wiped away a tear. Patrick stepped forward to put an arm around her shoulders.

  Mrs. Cornell rushed to hug Patrick, and so did all the kids. “We’re a family again,” she said.

  “Well,” said Ms. Iorio, with a little sniffle of her own. I saw that her eyes looked moist. “This is all very fine and good, but there are still some legal matters to clear up.”

  Mrs. Keats and Mrs. Cornell exchanged a glance, and then, without speaking, nodded to each other and smiled. I guess it was one of those mysterious, unspoken sister communications, the kind I sometimes have with Mary Anne.

  “Lyn, all we need to know is this,” said Mrs. Keats. “Can the estate be divided four ways?”

  “After all, there are four Livingston children,” Mrs. Cornell added.

  Amy and Patrick smiled, and so did I. The two older Livingston sisters had come a long way since I’d first met them.

  “Hold on there. It can’t be divided at all unless the code you found matches this one,” said Ms. Iorio, waving the envelope she’d begun to open before we’d heard that sneeze from behind the bookcase.

  She opened it up and looked at it. Then she looked again at the code on the back of the portrait. “It’s a match!” she announced. “The puzzle has been solved! Oh, I’m so happy for all of you.” She looked around at the four siblings and smiled. “Your mother would be happy, too,” she said. “She was my dearest friend, and I know she thought the world of all of you. She’d be so glad to know you were all together here today.”

  Suddenly, I realized that Ms. Iorio probably didn’t have any financial reason for wanting the puzzle solved. She wasn’t going to receive any money from the estate. She just wanted to see the family together again. I felt bad for having suspected her of anything e
lse.

  “So can we divide it four ways?” asked Amy.

  “Definitely,” said Ms. Iorio. “If that’s what you all want, I’ll make sure it happens.”

  “That’s what we want,” declared Mrs. Keats. “Right, Sally?”

  “Absolutely, Justine. Absolutely.”

  The two older Livingston sisters hugged each other tightly, and their two younger siblings joined in. The kids cheered. The puzzle was solved, the mystery had been unraveled, and — best of all — the family feud was over.

  Sunshine is what my dad started calling me when I was a baby. Normally I can’t stand it when he calls me that. It makes me feel like a little kid. But sometimes, especially when I’m missing him, it feels good to think of him calling me Sunshine.

  I was missing my dad that morning, but as I said in my letter I was almost too busy to think about it. I had only a few more days in Stoneybrook. The mystery at Livingston House had been solved, which was great, but I still had a lot of things to do before I headed back to California. For instance, spend some time with everyone I care about in Stoneybrook.

  That wasn’t going to be easy. I have a lot of friends here.

  But I’d planned carefully, and Mary Anne had helped. And when I woke up on Friends Day and looked out the window, I had to smile. The weather had definitely cooperated. The sky was blue, the sun was shining; everything was perfect.

  By ten that morning, kids had started to arrive, and Mary Anne and I were ready for them. We had arranged tables around the yard for a picnic lunch, and we’d strung streamers from the trees. There were baskets of favors for everyone, too, just little things we’d picked up at the dime store.