Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Wright 3 Map Key
About Pentominoes and About What You See
About the Artwork
Chapter One: Invisible
Chapter Two: Murder in the Classroom
Chapter Three: Life & Art
Chapter Four: A Find
Chapter Five: Tales from the Tracks
Chapter Six: New Pentominoes
Chapter Seven: Fear It
Chapter Eight: A Ghastly Face
Chapter Nine: The Bite
Chapter Ten: Do Not Enter
Chapter Eleven: The Haystack Idea
Chapter Twelve: Three!
Chapter Thirteen: A Link
Chapter Fourteen: One Huge Pattern
Chapter Fifteen: Goldman Knows
Chapter Sixteen: Rear Windows
Chapter Seventeen: Part of the Art
Chapter Eighteen: Sacrilege
Chapter Nineteen: Red Herrings
Chapter Twenty: After the Storm
Chapter Twenty-one: A New Code
Chapter Twenty-two: Wright’s Fish
Chapter Twenty-three: A Lie
Chapter Twenty-four: Horror
Chapter Twenty-five: In the Boxes
Chapter Twenty-six: A Silvery Voice
Chapter Twenty-seven: A Triangle of Gold
Chapter Twenty-eight: The Japanese Garden
Chapter Twenty-nine: Inside at Night
Chapter Thirty: The Net
Chapter Thirty-one: Three Little Birdies
Chapter Thirty-two: Lost and Found
Chapter Thirty-three: The Man in the Window
Chapter Thirty-four: Summer in Hyde Park
Author’s Note: The Wright Story
After Words
About the Author
About the Illustrator
Acknowledgments
Copyright
“Fool that I am!”
said the Invisible Man,
striking the table smartly.
“I’ve put the idea into your head.”
— H. G. WELLS, The Invisible Man
A set of pentominoes is a mathematical tool consisting of twelve pieces. Each piece is made up of five squares that share at least one side. Pentominoes are used by mathematicians around the world to explore ideas about geometry and numbers. The set looks like this:
Pentominoes are named after letters in the alphabet, although they don’t all look exactly like their names. With a little practice, they can be put together into thousands of different rectangles of many sizes and shapes.
If the squares are changed to cubes, the same set of pentominoes can appear in three dimensions:
Some of these pentomino shapes are around you now, as are some of the pieces of this story. If you look as you read, you will see them. Don’t forget that sometimes little things can appear big, and big things little — and that what you notice first isn’t always what you’re looking for.
If you study Brett Helquist’s chapter illustrations, you will discover many surprises. One of these appears in a pattern, and contains a creature that people all over the world enjoy. Some like it alive, and some prefer it dead. It changes form, and has appeared in stories and art for thousands of years.
Here’s a hint: Both the creature and the pattern it appears in are hidden by nature, but if you look and count, you may catch what you see.
On the morning of June 3, the mason climbed carefully to the highest level of the roof. He was alone and looked around happily: spring in Chicago, a day with no wind, and a world that was all new leaves. Smells of black earth and lilac mingled with children’s voices from the school down the street, and he felt suddenly lucky.
I’m young and alive and almost invisible up here in the trees, he found himself thinking, and then shook his head at such a strange idea. Turning his attention back to the famous terra-cotta roof, he ran his hand along the chimney. A chunk of brick broke loose, rattling downward and landing with a distant ping on the terrace below.
At that moment he lost his footing. Startled, he flung his arms out for balance. Had he been standing on a loose tile? Was this an earthquake? He listened for car alarms, but the street below him was quiet. There was a second, longer shudder, and he thought he saw the roof itself rippling toward him in quick, irregular lines. The building seemed to have come alive, twitching in the irritable way an animal does when it wants to get rid of a fly. The mason staggered to the left. Muttering “What the —,” he stumbled back to the right and sank to his knees.
His fall was sudden, a whirl of blue and branches and panic. He knew he would hit concrete. Copper gutters flashed by, and he landed heavily on the balcony outside the dining room. From where he lay, triangles in the art-glass panels above his head flashed like sharp teeth. He struggled to breathe but felt as if a huge weight had landed on his chest; he was suffocating.
Invisible, his frightened mind whispered, you’re invisible now. The house was empty, and he knew he was hidden from the street — he wondered if he would die before he was found. In the seconds before his vision melted into blackness, he thought he heard a high voice, the shrill command of a child, but he couldn’t quite make out the words. Was it “Stay away!” or “Stay and play!”?
Return to “Writing Tips”
Tommy Segovia looked out the window of his classroom and chewed on a thumbnail that was already raw. He had been away for a year, and everything had changed — his home, his best friend, his teacher. Coming back to Chicago that June, he felt oddly like a ghost.
His old house on Harper Avenue, in the South Side community known as Hyde Park, had been painted a green that reminded him of unripe tomatoes. The bushes in front where he and his friend Calder Pillay had buried treasures — a rusty switchblade found by the train tracks, a dead balloon filled with bottle caps, a Cracker Jack box of cicada shells — had vanished. White flowers now puffed outward in a stiff circle around the foundation. Tommy felt sorry for his house: It made him think of a birthday cupcake that had fallen upside down.
Even Calder seemed different. Tommy always pictured him with his hair squashed in a straight-up position, fresh from sleep and no brushing, and at least one patch of dried food on his face. Calder’s sneakers were tied most mornings now, and he brushed his teeth. He still carried a set of pentominoes in his pocket, but they weren’t the flat plastic ones that Tommy remembered. These were three-dimensional and made from small orange cubes. The pieces felt slippery and looked shiny, and you could almost see your reflection in the P. Although they were also plastic, they made a different sound when Calder stirred them around in his pocket, more of a sharp clack than a soft clatter. Tommy liked the old sound better.
Calder lived across the street from Tommy’s old house and had made a new friend on Harper Avenue while Tommy was gone. Her name was Petra Andalee. She had curly hair, thick glasses, and small, quick hands. Her eyes made him think of an exotic monkey he had always admired at the Lincoln Park Zoo. He didn’t think she’d like that idea, and he didn’t know if he did, either. They had accidentally collided yesterday on the stairs at school, and he noticed that she wasn’t as bony as Calder, and she smelled like lemons.
They were all sixth graders now at the University School, and all twelve years old. Their teacher was new and young, and her name was Ms. Isabel Hussey. She had long hair and lots of earrings, and yesterday she had worn pajamas. Tommy didn’t think she looked like a teacher at all, but to his amazement the class paid close attention to her. He tried, but there was so much to stare at and think about that it was hard to do anything else.
The classroom walls were covered with newspaper articles and odd quotes and paper footprints of al
l sizes. Appearing in every color of the rainbow, the feet marched clockwise around the room, just under the ceiling, as if a kid were walking parallel to the floor. Calder explained to Tommy that each time you read a book, you wrote the title and author inside a tracing of your own foot and cut it out of construction paper. Then Ms. Hussey stuck it on the wall.
Books were not Tommy’s thing, but looking at all those feet made him want to see his own up there, too. He began wondering what he’d read during his year away that he could write down, but he couldn’t remember even one title. How had Ms. Hussey gotten the feet up there, anyway? He pictured her balancing on the tops of bookshelves and on the tray under the blackboard. No wonder she didn’t wear skirts much.
One of the quotes Tommy first noticed was on the wall at the front of the room. It said, in black capitals on red paper:
ART IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE MODE OF COMMUNICATION THAT EXISTS.
— JOHN DEWEY, ART AS EXPERIENCE
Tommy knew John Dewey had started the University School at least a hundred years ago. He knew he was a smart guy, but he’d never heard Dewey was big on art. This quote seemed kind of silly. After all, art didn’t actually say anything.
Another quote said:
ALL THERE IS TO THINKING IS SEEING SOMETHING NOTICEABLE, WHICH MAKES YOU SEE SOMETHING YOU WEREN’T NOTICING, WHICH MAKES YOU SEE SOMETHING THAT ISN’T EVEN VISIBLE.
— NORMAN MACLEAN,
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
This one was cool but hard to puzzle out, kind of like an optical illusion tucked into an illustration. Tommy loved looking at one particular page in every issue of the kids’ magazines at his dentist’s office, the trick page that had teapots or lizards or fish hidden in a line drawing.
He liked the idea of seeing things you can’t really see.
Tommy knew from Calder that Ms. Hussey and her class had spent most of last fall investigating art. He was secretly glad he’d missed it, until something happened in December: Calder and this girl Petra stumbled on a big discovery. They found a stolen painting, a famous one by a guy named Vermeer. Newspapers wrote articles that praised Calder and Petra for being extraordinary detectives. This hurt for a couple of reasons: One, Tommy was a far better finder than his friend Calder; and two, before this they had done everything important together. If he hadn’t been away, Tommy was sure it would have been Calder and he who had recovered the painting, and recovered it in even less time. There was no doubt about it — he’d missed some major glory.
And then there was a horrible twist to the whole painting adventure: Just over a year ago, Tommy’s mom had met and married a man who had been the reason the three of them moved to New York last summer. At first he’d seemed like a decent guy. That man, Tommy’s stepfather, had played a part in the theft and then died of a heart attack before he could be arrested. Although Tommy had been told that no one blamed him or his mom for the crime, it was embarrassing that everyone in Hyde Park knew, and Tommy hated the idea that people might feel sorry for them.
They had planned to move back to Hyde Park during summer vacation, but Tommy’s mom had been offered her old job at the University of Chicago’s library, plus a small raise, if she started in early June. Because she was back at work, Tommy was back in the classroom. So here he was with ten days left until the end of the school year, and not a lot of time for making things better. He frowned and tried again to pay attention.
The class was now looking at architecture. The week before Tommy returned, they’d visited the Sears Tower and Frank Gehry’s pavilion in Millennium Park. They hadn’t agreed yet on whether either structure was a piece of art. Ms. Hussey asked lots of questions, like: Is a building a piece of art when you can’t see all of it at the same time? Can a building be a piece of art on the outside but not on the inside, and vice versa? She was usually calm and curious, but on this particular morning, Tommy thought she’d gone a little crazy.
She was holding a newspaper article in her hand and hardly seemed to notice that the class was in front of her. Shaking her head slowly, as if whatever she was thinking about was impossible to believe, she said softly, “Plunder in the name of salvation.” Then she repeated it, spitting out the syllables as if they were something disgusting that had gotten into her mouth. All rustling and chair-squeaking stopped.
She waved the article at arm’s length. Her voice now dangerously cheerful, she added, “Or perhaps a better term is ‘murder.’”
The class was silent.
Murder?
Ms. Hussey paced, her arms crossed and her braid flying out like a tail each time she changed directions. Today she wore red sneakers, blue jeans, and a long black scarf covered with a pattern of noodles. They were either noodles or short plumbing pipes.
She stopped. Picking up a fresh stick of chalk, she turned it over appreciatively at eye level. She then dropped it on the floor. The class gasped — she always got grumpy when someone else broke her chalk.
“There. If I pick up those pieces, will it still be the same piece of chalk? Will I have twice or three times as much? Will it still work the way I want it to?” No one said a word. Was this fancy math she was talking about? And what did chalk have to do with plunder — or murder? Tommy had no idea.
“Let’s try it.” Ms. Hussey picked up a jagged chunk and turned toward the blackboard. She wrote LIFE & ART. The chalk made an ugly double line with each vertical stroke.
“Well?” Ms. Hussey had her head on one side. “I’m not really thinking about chalk, you know. I’m thinking about a house that some people see as a piece of art. I’m thinking about what happens when life and art don’t mix well. I read about it in the Chicago Tribune this morning. Anyone know what I’m talking about?”
Calder’s hand shot up. “The Robie House?”
Ms. Hussey nodded.
Tommy swiveled in his seat and studied the faces around him.
Calder went on, “My parents said that people in the neighborhood either love it or can’t stand it.” His pentominoes were lying on his desk, and he now flipped over the L and completed a rectangle made from seven of the twelve pieces.
As Calder’s fingers moved, the words “life” and “art” began to shift rapidly in his mind. If those seven letters were put in another order, “life art” became “a trifle” or “a filter.” Maybe there was a message here. He knew the word “trifle” meant something not too valuable or important, as his Grandma Ranjana had sometimes used that word, and a filter could mean — well, something you looked through or poured stuff through. “Life” plus “art” equaled “a trifle” or “a filter”: Calder couldn’t wait to tell Petra. She always understood when he discovered new ideas by rearranging the old ones.
“Duh.”
Ms. Hussey frowned. “Who said that? Denise? Tell us what you know about the house.”
Denise Dodge raised one eyebrow and studied her fingernails.
“Who built it, for instance?” Ms. Hussey’s tone was crisp.
Denise shrugged.
Ms. Hussey held the now-crumpled article in front of her with both hands, and Tommy noticed that the newspaper trembled. She said, “Listen carefully. Perhaps I’m wrong.”
WRIGHT MASTERPIECE COMING DOWN
In a tragic piece of news for Hyde Park, the University of Chicago, owners of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Robie House, announced today that the 1910 home will be cut into sections and donated to four great museums around the world: the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C., the Deutsches Museum, in Munich, Germany, and the Meiji-mura Museum, in Nagoya, Japan. The university cited an impossibly large number of structural repairs as the reason.
Many consider Wright to be the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and his Prairie Style jewel, the home built for Frederick C. Robie, to be a house that radically changed the domestic architecture of the United States.
The house was owned by three families before 1926, when it was bought by the Chicago Theological Semin
ary. Affiliated with the University of Chicago and located just steps from the Robie House, the seminary used Wright’s building for cafeteria and dormitory space, but allowed the structure to fall into serious disrepair. Wanting the land beneath it for new student housing, the seminary announced in 1941 that the house was going to be demolished.
It was Frank Lloyd Wright himself who came to the rescue. In an unprecedented move within the architectural community, he put together a committee of world-famous architects and art historians and declared the Robie House to be “a source of worldwide architectural inspiration.” The seminary was shamed into keeping it.
The building limped on, looking worse and worse, until 1957, when the seminary announced that it was dangerous and would need to be torn down. They called a public meeting and showed completed plans for a new building on that site.
Wright was then ninety years old, and brandishing his cane, returned to Hyde Park. He had recently completed plans for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and he was, by then, a national treasure himself. Describing the Robie house as “one of the cornerstones of American architecture” and commenting that only the kitchen needed improvement, he persuaded William Zeckendorf, a developer, to buy the house from the seminary. Zeckendorf used it for office space and made plans to give it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1963, however, he changed his mind and deeded it to the University of Chicago, which remodeled much of the interior for office use.
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