Lola Benko, Treasure Hunter

by Beth McMullen

  For my brother, David Von Ancken. Fight on. Never quit.

  CHAPTER 1 EIGHT MONTHS AGO—PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, MY LIFE probably looks pretty good. I travel around the world with my archaeologist father searching for lost things. Not like misplaced keys or that library book you swear you returned. No, Professor Lawrence Benko is a treasure hunter. You know, Montezuma’s gold or the plunder of the dreaded pirate Blackbeard. That kind of stuff. Last year we spent four months searching for the priceless Sword of Honjo Masamune, lost during World War II. The search turned out to be a wild-goose chase and a total bust. But every once in a while, the esteemed professor finds what he’s looking for. That’s when you read about him in the news or see him on television.

  So what is traipsing around the world after my dad really like? Well, at twelve years old, I live out of a suitcase and have extra pages stapled into my passport because I used up the regular ones. I’ve been on all the continents except for Antarctica, and that is only because there are not many treasures buried in the ice. I’ve been to eleven schools in seven years, which means I know kids all over the world, but I have no real friends because who wants a friend who just ups and leaves at the drop of a hat? I learned to read on a boat traveling down the Mekong Delta and to divide fractions on an archaeological dig in Mali.

  Dad says I’m a tinkerer. My current specialty is whirligig wind spinners made from tin cans, wire, and springs. The tinkering comes from having lots of idle time moving from place to place. When my father is in hot pursuit of some missing thing or another and 100 percent focused on his work, I am responsible for entertaining myself. I’m good at being alone. I barely even notice it. Not much, anyway.

  For instance, right now I’m parked in a small dusty apartment that has been our home for thirteen hours. We came from Estonia and before that Bucharest. Or Istanbul? I can’t remember. It all runs together. I’m staring out the window at two kids with backpacks down on the sidewalk. They are probably on their way to school. I notice them because one is laughing so hard at what the other just said, she doubles over to catch her breath. But I’m definitely not wondering what it would be like to have a friend who laughed at my jokes like that. No. I’m looking at the library across the street, so ornate and fancy it could be a royal palace. That’s what I’m doing.

  This morning, Dad took off to meet the archivist before the sun was even up, something urgent about old records and fairy tales. He left a note reminding me to do my homework before getting distracted by other projects. And while I appreciate his effort, this new whirligig I’m building is made from Coke cans and sparkles like a disco ball. It is much more interesting than equations or vocabulary lists. Also, when Dad goes into an archive or a library, he doesn’t leave until they kick him out, which means I have plenty of time to do my homework before he gets back.

  Except it turns out I don’t. It’s not even lunchtime when Dad crashes through the apartment’s front door, hair wild and arms helicoptering. He’s acting like he just got electrocuted. For the record, Dad and I look nothing alike. He’s tall and lanky with silver hair and I’m short and solid with frizzy brown hair. His eyes are green like a cat and mine are brown like a mud puddle. Except Dad says they are flecked with gold and beautiful. Whatever.

  “Lola!” Dad shouts, his eyes frantic. “Things have just taken a turn for the extraordinary!”

  “They have?” I’m about to cut an important piece of Coke can, but I pause. When Dad is excited, the best solution is to wait him out. It never lasts more than three or four minutes. I put down my tin snips.

  “Indeed.” He’s breathless, gulping at the air. “Places to go, people to see, things to do. Come on. Pack up. Time to move.”

  “But we just got here.” This is a quick change of direction, even for us.

  He waves me off. “I know. I know. But things are happening. Stupendous things. Unbelievable things.”

  Boy, he’s really excited. “Stupendous” isn’t an everyday word for Dad. “What are they?” I demand.

  His expression falls flat. “I can’t tell you.” Great. Sometimes I can’t get him to shut up about whatever artifact he’s after and other times he’s silent as the grave. Is it too much to ask for a happy medium?

  “Then you shouldn’t taunt me with ‘stupendous’ and ‘unbelievable,’ ” I grumble.

  Dad takes me by the shoulders. “I share your sorrow that we cannot stay longer in beautiful Prague, but I must take the tiger by the tail on this one. It requires a full-court press.” Dad loves a good idiom, but I’m still annoyed. Clearly he doesn’t care, as he spins around the apartment, picking up the few things we’ve managed to unpack and hurling them into our bags. It occurs to me Dad has not asked about my homework and that is always his first question. Something strange is definitely going on.

  “Fine. But I need an hour to take this apart.” I point at the half-constructed whirligig. It’s my most ambitious creation yet, and there is no way I’m going to mess it up because Dad is having some sort of unexplained meltdown. “Where are we going anyway?”

  Dad eyes the three-foot whirligig with suspicion, as if seeing it for the first time. “Well, I’m headed to Budapest. But you are going to San Francisco.”

  I drop a coil of wire. “Excuse me? San Francisco?” Not that I don’t like San Francisco. I love it there. I stay with Great-Aunt Irma, who is the best, and her companion gray parrot, Zeus, who’s the best at being trouble. Irma always has three flavors of ice cream in the freezer and never nags me to brush my hair, although once Zeus tried to make a nest in there and I knew enough to take the hint. But the point is, Dad is dropping me like a hot potato. “Why?”

  Dad flashes a pained expression. “Just for a few months.”

  “Months?”

  “Weeks? Is that better? I can’t say for sure, but it’s a necessary precaution,” he explains. “It might not be safe.”

  “What’s not safe?”

  “Perhaps that’s the wrong word? Well, in any case, not to worry. Everything is fine. It’s just Irma would dearly love to see you and I figured now that it’s almost summer, it would be a good time. Plus, I have things to do. They won’t be fun for you. Very boring. Dull. Boring and dull.”

  “You said not safe.”

  “You misheard me. And the whirligig will have to stay.”

  I’m pretty good at being spontaneous. I mean, really. Look at me. But even I have my limits. “No. Way.”

  “You can’t fly with it. It’s very… weird.” When I scowl at him, he retreats. “You know what I mean. They are picky about what you can bring on airplanes these days.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not leaving it.”

  “You must.”

  “I refuse.” I cross my arms against my chest defensively.

  Dad’s jaw tightens. In his head, he’s reeling through strategies to get me to comply with his wishes. It won’t work. He might as well give up now and save himself the time. I grimace, just in case my point is somehow unclear.

  After glancing at his watch, he throws his hands up in the air. “Fine! I’ll ship it to you.”

  I narrow my gaze. “You promise?”

  “I swear.”

  “Pinkie swear?”

  “I don’t know what that is,” he replies, perplexed.

  “Never mind, a regular swear is fine, I guess. Just don’t mess this up.”

  Dad looks at me, but really he’s looking beyond me, seeing something in his mind’s eye. A memory maybe or something to come. Whatever it is, it haunts him. “In this situation,” he says gravely, “messing up is simply not an option.”

  Three hours later I’m on a plane to San Francisco.

  C
HAPTER 2 NOW. SAN FRANCISCO. IN THE RAIN. YUP.

  ONE OF DAD’S FAVORITE IDIOMS is “Cross the stream where it is shallowest.” This means the simple solution to a problem is usually the right one. Why go in the deep water and get soaked when you can walk across where the water comes up to your ankles? But if this were really true, I don’t think I would be balanced precariously on a second-story window ledge outside a San Francisco mansion that looks like a wedding cake, in the dark, being pelted by cold winter rain.

  How did I get here? Specifically, I came up the wall of climbing ivy to the window. Fortunately, security never considered a young criminal channeling her inner monkey or they would have gotten rid of the ivy first thing.

  But why is the more important question. And to answer that, we have to go back to when I first arrived at Great-Aunt Irma’s eight months ago. Everything was going fine. We were having fun. In fact, we were playing poker for pennies and I was finally winning, when we were interrupted by a man and a woman, in matching black suits and dark sunglasses despite the fact that it was night. Out of nowhere, they showed up at the door and everything went sideways.

  Agent Star and Agent Fish claimed to be from an organization called Specialty Activities, a sub-sub-subdivision of the United States State Department. They were here to inform me that my father was dead. Great-Aunt Irma gasped at the news, clutching her purple sweater in disbelief while I examined the odd-couple agents. Their claim was ridiculous. I mean, come on. Much was wrong with this situation, starting with Star and Fish and ending with the absurd idea that Dad was dead.

  “The globetrotting archaeologist?” I asked to clarify. “That Lawrence Benko?”

  “Indeed.” Agent Star’s pants were too short and his socks didn’t match. “It was a flash flood. A terrible scene. Chaos, mud, screaming. Two of Professor Benko’s team members saw him washed away.”

  “We are sorry,” said Agent Fish, who, come to think of it, kind of resembled a fish. But she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded anxious, like she wanted to move on to the next thing on her list. Which she did. Very quickly. “Your father kept expedition notebooks, correct? Diaries of his findings? Notes?”

  They had that part right, at least. Dad is never without a notebook. I half nodded in response.

  “Do you have any idea the whereabouts of his latest notebook?” Fish asked urgently. “We understand he was looking for the magic Stone of Istenanya.”

  Really? In one breath they are telling me I’m an orphan and in the next they are asking after the Stone of Istenanya? It seemed inappropriate, all things considered. I told the agents that I did not have his notebook. And I reminded them the Stone of Istenanya is from a fairy tale my mother used to tell me before she left. Were they unaware that fairy tales are generally made up? More important, I informed them they were dead wrong about my dad being, well, dead. If some tragedy befell him, I’d feel it. And I didn’t feel anything but hungry. Which meant something else happened.

  But just try to tell the State Department they’re wrong and see how far you get. Their tolerance for my many follow-up phone calls and pleading emails soon evaporated. It’s possible I was banned from contacting them altogether. In fact, no one seemed interested in my theory that Dad was kidnapped or was suffering from amnesia. They patted me on the head condescendingly and told me time healed all wounds. It did not take long to realize that I had to take matters into my own hands and find him myself.

  No big deal.

  Of course, this was the exact moment my simple solution got very complicated. Several attempts to board an airplane to Budapest were, well, unsuccessful. And trying to get my hands on the information I knew Star and Fish were hiding didn’t work out much better. The police were called. There were lectures about the definition of breaking and entering. And I might as well confess I got into some hot water borrowing my neighbor’s self-driving car while investigating one of Dad’s associates who was also supposed to be dead. Apparently, that is grand theft auto and frowned upon.

  My plan to find my father wasn’t working. I needed a new approach. And that’s exactly when my art teacher happened to mention that in 1990 two men walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and left with five hundred million dollars’ worth of paintings. It was the biggest art theft in history and they have never been caught! It occurred to me that a million dollars would go a long way to helping me find my father. I could buy plane and train tickets. I could pay bribes for information. The possibilities were endless! I just needed to get my hands on some valuable art. How hard could it be?

  Which brings us back to the rain-slicked concrete ledge, where I cling like a drenched, B-team Spider-Man for dear life. From my precarious perch, I can just see my prize, a bronze sculpture of three ballerinas, recently purchased for one million bucks by Benedict Tewksbury, mysterious young tech mogul. No one has ever actually seen the guy, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good person, donating heaps of money to charity, or so it said in the magazine article I found in Irma’s pile of reading material.

  And this makes me feel a little bit bad about taking his ballerinas, but it has turned out getting my hands on valuable art is not so simple. The article included a photo spread of Tewksbury’s art collection, including one of his delightfully cute dog, Byte, sitting in front of the sculpture, which was perched on a pedestal.

  But the photo also happened to capture a bit of the scenery outside the room’s window, in particular a peculiar Monterey cypress tree that looked straight out of Dr. Seuss, a tree I know well because I walk by it every day on my way to Holly Middle School. It was meant to be!

  To be honest, a million dollars seems like a lot for three creepy, spindly ballerinas who wouldn’t survive a minute of actual dancing, but I’m willing to overlook its dubious artistic value because further research showed the sculpture to be both backpack-size and unalarmed. Fabulous! This Tewksbury might be a genius, but he’s not very smart.

  The less-than-fabulous part, in addition to the rain and my slippery shoes, is sitting right there in a red velvet chair, wearing a baseball cap, barely visible in the shadows. Why is there a person in that chair? Is this actually Tewksbury himself? Am I the first person in the universe to see the real man? That’s exciting and all, but mostly it’s inconvenient. The billionaire genius is not supposed to be at home. I did two weeks of covert surveillance on my way to school and again on the return trip and there is never anyone in this house. Never. Ever.

  Finally, after what feels like a geologic era, during which I have plenty of time to consider just how complicated my simple solution has become, the person inside rises slowly. There’s lots of yawning and eye rubbing. This is good. It’s late. Hey in there! You really should go to bed if you want to be awake enough tomorrow to add to your billions. Finally, Tewksbury shuffles out of the room, stopping just beyond the door to throw a glance back at the sculpture. Please hurry. I’m not sure how much longer I can hang on out here. As I gingerly shift my weight, the door closes and the genius is gone.

  I’m on. I blow a wet strand of wayward hair from my eyes and pull out a special tool I designed, meant for jimmying windows from the outside. Necessity is the mother of invention, Dad always says, and the Window Witch 3.0 is absolutely necessary if I’m to get into this room.

  The Window Witch 3.0 is flat metal on one end, so I can wiggle it under the closed window, and flexible enough to bend to whatever shape necessary. Once it’s through, I squeeze the handle and a hook pops out that can liberate any window from its lock. I’m a little anxious on account of versions one and two involving law enforcement, but the window lock springs open with a satisfying pop and no alarms disturb the night. Clutching the wooden frame with one hand, I heave the window up with my shoulder.

  Musty air blasts from the room, like wet dog, leftover meat loaf, and… moldy oranges? Yes, a sweet cloying smell, possibly from morning OJ spilled sometime last century and forgotten. Don’t billionaires clean their houses? I throw my leg over the window
ledge and wiggle inside. The carpet cushions my wet footsteps.

  At long last I stand before my prize. The sculpture is even less impressive up close. I examine the pedestal to make sure it’s not wired to an alarm system. Fortunately, my prize just sits there, as if the billionaire picked it up at a tag sale and not a Sotheby’s art auction. My mouth is dry.

  Gingerly I load the sculpture into my backpack. A few drops of water from my wet hair fall onto its shiny surface, but anything this expensive must be waterproof. Through the pack’s thin nylon, a ballerina elbow stabs me in the spine. But there is no time to rearrange it now. I’ll fix the problem as soon as I’m out of here and on solid ground.

  I just need to get there. I slide through the open window, careful not to bump my precious cargo. Back out on the ledge, I pull the window shut behind me. The rain comes harder now and visibility is zero. Which means I’m not entirely sure how I lose my balance, slip off the ledge, and plunge two stories to the ground.

  Does being dead hurt? Because I don’t feel so good. I twist to find a large rosemary hedge holds me aloft. I wiggle and the hedge belches me to the ground. There’s a sickening crack. Oh please, let it be my bones!

  But it’s not. It’s the million-dollar ballerinas.

  CHAPTER 3 CAUGHT

  WHEN MY FATHER WENT MISSING, I ended up in the permanent care of Great-Aunt Irma, who favors brightly colored shirtdresses and Ugg boots no matter the season. She lives with Zeus in a drafty Victorian out in the avenues. The house is stuffed to the gills with creaky old furniture, science fiction paperbacks, magazines dated from before I was born, and random computer parts that no longer have any purpose other than to gather dust. There’s a rope ladder in my room on the second floor in case the whole place goes up in flames and I have to make a quick escape.

  Irma spends most of her day kicking back in an old recliner held together with duct tape. Laptop warming her thighs, she codes apps for senior citizens. Need to find your car in the parking lot? She’s got you covered. Reminders to take your medication? Why, yes! Want to keep your brain sharp? Irma serves up regularly scheduled trivia questions and puzzles. She’s created games that force you to socialize and even a dating app, which is by far her most popular.