Light Up New York

by Natalie Grant

  Lulu looked up, her eyes full of hope and disbelief.

  Maddie smiled. “And she said yes.”

  “And I still get to?” Lulu asked. “Even after . . .?”

  “If there’s one thing I trust you with,” Mia said, “it’s that song. You are amazing in that song, Lulu.”

  “But no going wild on camera,” Maddie warned. “Promise?”

  “I promise,” Lulu said, and then crossed her heart. “No, truly, I promise. I’ll be on my best, best, best behavior.”

  Mia quirked an eyebrow. “Best?”

  “Yes!” Lulu launched herself at the bed to give both of her sisters hugs.

  Mom cracked open the door. “What’s this I hear? I thought you were going to bed?”

  Lulu scrambled back onto the rollaway and pulled her covers up to her chin. “Yep, right now!”

  They all lay back, and Mom kissed Lulu, then Maddie and Mia.

  “I’m proud of you,” Mom whispered in Mia’s ear.

  Mia closed her eyes. The feeling of Mom’s pride, Dad’s love, Lulu’s happiness, Maddie’s honesty, and her own twinge of sadness and anger over having lost the snow globe all mixed together. If she could do it over, she’d definitely choose not to lose the snow globe. But even though what she gained couldn’t be held in her hands like a snow globe, it still seemed significant.

  Thank you, she prayed silently. Thank you for giving me the words. And, God? Please make me patient tomorrow. Oh, and bless Lulu too.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mom came in and woke them up the next morning, kissing each girl on the forehead. “Today’s a big day. First, we’re going to the Met. Then, later this afternoon, we have a rehearsal booked at Rise and Shine, so you’re ready for the concert tomorrow.”

  “Can we go now?” Lulu asked, leaping out of bed, her hair sticking up in clumps.

  Everyone laughed. It felt good to start the day with a laugh, especially after all of yesterday’s tension.

  “We can go as soon as you’re dressed,” Mom said. “Well, and as soon as you brush your hair. And teeth.”

  “And wash our faces!” Maddie reminded her.

  “Right,” Mom said.

  They clambered over one another to get out of bed, and piled into the bathroom. Everywhere they went, it seemed like everyone else was exactly in that spot too. Soon enough, they were all dressed and ready to go.

  “Coffee!” Dad said, causing all the girls to groan.

  “How about we take a cab over to the Met, and have breakfast somewhere close to the museum?” Mom suggested. “And coffee,” she added, before Dad could grumble.

  “Can I bring my detective kit?” Lulu asked.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find the Snow Angel,” Mia said. As she said it, she felt the reality of her words settling in. Today, they’d be at the Met for a few hours, and then at the Rise and Shine studio. Tomorrow, they had the televised concert in the morning and the Light Up New York performance in the evening. How would they have any more time to sleuth? The window of opportunity seemed to have passed.

  “You could use it for the scavenger hunt, though,” Maddie suggested.

  The thought of the scavenger hunt filled Mia with a little fizz of happiness. Maybe they couldn’t solve a real mystery in New York, but the scavenger hunt was a kind of mystery. Sort of.

  Lulu packed her detective kit into her backpack, and they knocked on Miss Julia’s door. “Are you ready for a scavenger hunt?” she asked the girls, waving her list as she opened her door.

  “Yes!” they said, and Lulu did a little on-the-spot dance.

  “Off we go,” Mom said.

  The cab ride didn’t take all that long, hardly long enough for Dad to decide which coffee shop he wanted to try. But in the end, he chose one. The girls thought he’d made an excellent choice, because the baked goods case had Belgian waffles.

  “Just like Captain Swashbuckler’s Adventure Park!” Lulu cheered.

  Mom also found fruit and yogurt to round out their breakfast. They sat at a table near the window, watching snow drift slowly onto the sidewalk. Each flake melted the minute it touched down. Mia had just taken a bite of her sweet, crunchy waffle when Maddie leaned forward, staring out the window, curiosity written all over her face.

  “What?” Mia asked.

  “Do you see that woman? With the sunglasses and hat, and the way-too-full bags? Come over here, Mia, and look.”

  “Girls, don’t stare,” Mom warned, glancing over her shoulder.

  Mia hurried around the table to look, and Lulu crowded in too.

  “She keeps looking over her shoulder,” Maddie said. “Like she doesn’t want anyone to notice her.”

  “Like she has a secret!” Lulu said, bouncing on her toes.

  “What do you think she has in her bags?” Maddie asked.

  “You don’t really think she could be the Snow Angel, do you?” Mia asked. “I mean, she could just be finishing up a shopping trip and she bought too much, right?”

  “But look. There, she did it again. Do you see how she keeps looking back? You can tell she’s not happy waiting at that crosswalk.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Lulu asked, springing away and toward the door.

  “Oh no, no, no,” Miss Julia said, catching her. “Where are you off to?”

  “To follow the Snow Angel!” Lulu said.

  “Please, Mom, can we go? Just for a second? Just to see?” Mia asked.

  Mom seemed at a loss for words. She looked questioningly at Dad.

  “You know what?” Dad pushed back his chair. “I’ll take you. Let’s go and see what’s going on.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Lulu said, pumping her fist in the air.

  Mia and her sisters followed Dad out the door and down the block. The crosswalk light had just changed, and the woman was hurrying across. The light started to flash orange, counting down. Mia wanted to jaywalk. They might not make it all the way to the crosswalk, and if they didn’t get there in time, the woman would get away. If she did, how would they ever know whether she was the Snow Angel?

  As they reached the walk, Dad put his arm out to keep them from crossing. Seconds before, the light had changed to red. Even though Mia knew it wasn’t safe, she couldn’t help feeling frustrated.

  “Can’t we just walk? The cars don’t hit pedestrians here,” she said.

  Dad shook his head. “I’m definitely not risking the lives of all three of my beautiful daughters on that chance.”

  Anticipation dissolved out of Mia, making her feel suddenly hollow. She’d been ready to accept they wouldn’t find the Snow Angel. Now, they’d come so close. What if they were watching the Snow Angel walk away right now? How long would they have to wait for the next light?

  “Look, Mia!” Lulu pulled on Mia’s arm and pointed.

  The woman had stopped about halfway down the block and was waiting at the bus stop. She’d set her bags down on a bench.

  “She’s taking something out of her bag!” Maddie said.

  Everyone leaned forward, wondering what it would be—a blanket, a coat, maybe socks, or even something else. No one expected it to be a purse, stuffed with tissue paper. As they watched, the woman pulled out the tissue and put it in the nearby trash can. Then, she took a few other items out of the bag—a makeup bag, a couple fancy boxes that probably held lipstick or mascara or eyeshadow, and a fancy leather-looking notebook and pen.

  “She’s packing up her purse?” Lulu asked, disappointed.

  “That seems to be what’s happening,” Dad said.

  The light changed, but no one moved.

  “Should we go see?” Dad asked.

  “No,” Mia said, and the others shook their heads.

  “She’s obviously not the Snow Angel,” Maddie said. “I just figured her bags were full of gifts.”

  “They were,” Mia said. “It’s just that they were gifts for herself.”

  “Yeah.” Maddie sounded as disappointed as Mia felt.

&nb
sp; “On the bright side, I’ll bet my coffee isn’t cold yet,” Dad said.

  “And we have waffles!” Lulu said, already in motion back toward the coffee shop.

  “Hold up,” Dad said, catching up with her.

  Mia and Maddie hurried to join them. Soon, they were back to their breakfast. They explained what they’d seen to Mom and Miss Julia.

  “Too bad,” Miss Julia said. “But remember, we do still have the scavenger hunt. That’s like a mystery.”

  “Kind of,” Mia said. She had to admit it was pretty fun thinking about seeing everything at the Met that Claudia and Jamie had seen. Plus, she couldn’t wait to see what surprises Miss Julia had included in the hunt just for her.

  “Ready?” Lulu asked, her mouth still full of her last bite.

  “A few more minutes,” Dad said, showing her his half-full mug.

  Lulu wiggled and squirmed, waiting for Dad and everyone else to finish. Mia felt impatient herself, and excited to get to the museum.

  “All right,” Dad said, looking around the table and making sure everyone was finished. “Now we can go to the Met.”

  “Yay, yay, yay!” Lulu said, leaping to her feet. “The Glimmer girls are on the case!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  People clustered in clumps in the Met’s Great Hall, removing damp gloves, hats, and scarves and inspecting museum maps.

  “We’re doing a scavenger hunt in that?” Lulu’s eyes widened as she took in the many colors and numbers that filled the complicated map.

  “How big is the Met, anyway?” Maddie asked.

  “Two million square feet,” Miss Julia said, checking her phone. “And the collection here has more than two million works of art.”

  Mia blinked at her. Two million? She had no idea what two million square feet even meant. Big. Enormous. Too large to imagine.

  “So, bigger than the London Art Gallery?” Maddie asked.

  “Yes.” Miss Julia tapped her phone screen, checking facts. “Wow. Maddie, the London Art Gallery is 12,260 square feet. So that means”—she checked the numbers on her phone’s calculator—“that this building would hold more than thirteen London Art Galleries.”

  “And we have to walk through all of it?” Lulu’s face wrinkled in concern.

  Mom laughed. “Don’t worry, we won’t try to see the whole thing today. We’ll count this as a reason to come back to New York.”

  “So, what are we looking for in that scavenger hunt of yours?” Dad asked.

  Miss Julia passed the list to Mia, who read the list aloud.

  1.The Fountain of the Muses

  2.The jewelry of Princess Sit Hathor Yunet

  3.A bronze cat in the Egyptian Wing

  4.An ornate bed with curtains

  5.A giant urn

  6.King Henry VIII’s armor

  7.The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer by Edgar Degas

  8.Woman with a Lute by Johannes Vermeer

  9.The Manneport by Claude Monet

  10.Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze

  “What’s a man-e-port?” Lulu asked, sounding the word out.

  “I think Maddie will especially like that one,” Miss Julia said. “I put that one on the list for her.”

  “Okay, number one,” Lulu said, ready to take off. “Where’s the Fountain of the Muses?”

  “I’m not sure we should go in list order,” Mia said. “We don’t want to have to wander all over the museum.”

  “Good thinking,” Dad said.

  The Great Hall didn’t offer any places to sit down, so they climbed the giant stone staircase to look for a bench. They found one positioned in front of a few paintings and sat to make a plan. Miss Julia let the girls use her phone to map out where each piece of art generally should be. Each room was numbered. The colors on the museum map showed the categories of each wing, such as the Greek and Roman Art wing or European Paintings. Soon, they’d found everything on the list, except the Fountain of the Muses.

  “It looks like it’s not installed here anymore.” Mia sighed. Seeing the fountain had been the thing she’d looked forward to most.

  “So the hunt is ruined?” Lulu blew out a sigh of exasperation. “We didn’t find the Snow Angel, and now we can’t even win the scavenger hunt?”

  “I’ll bet there’s a fountain somewhere in this museum with pennies in it,” Dad said. “What if we swap that item for any fountain?”

  The girls looked at one another, uncertain. On the one hand, Mia felt the whole point of a scavenger hunt was finding the things on the list. Still, they’d made the list up themselves, and there was no reason they couldn’t change one.

  “As long as we don’t change any others along the way,” Mia said. “Or we don’t win.”

  “What do we win, if we find them all?” Lulu wanted to know.

  “A hug and a kiss?” Dad suggested, eyes twinkling.

  “Maybe one souvenir each from the gift shop?” Maddie asked.

  “I think that’s fair,” Mom said.

  They shook on it, and then they were off toward the Egyptian Wing. Like the London Art Gallery, the Met was a maze of galleries. They couldn’t walk directly to the Egyptian Wing without passing through other galleries. They wound through room after room of paintings. Maddie stopped every once in a while to look at one of the paintings, but Mia wasn’t very interested. None of the paintings on the list were in this gallery. This gallery was full of European paintings from a different era than the ones on their list. Most of these were older, and many of them were yellowed with age.

  Finally, they stepped out of the maze into a large, open gallery. Two hallways stretched the length of the room, overlooking the downstairs cafe and an indoor courtyard filled with statues. Here was an interesting room. Mia slowed down to take it all in. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over Central Park, where snow was starting to stick to the ground.

  “Come on, come on!” Lulu grabbed Mia’s arm and held the map two inches from her nose. “The Egyptian Wing is this way.”

  “I don’t think we meant to skip over everything that wasn’t on the list,” Mia grumbled.

  “We haven’t found anything on the list yet,” Lulu said, complaint lacing her voice. “Come on.”

  She didn’t have to worry for long. Across the gallery, they found themselves in the American Wing. It wasn’t hard to find Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting took up an entire enormous wall. Mia had never seen a painting so big, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to try to paint something like it.

  “Do you think the artist stood on a ladder? And how did they frame it?” Maddie wondered.

  “The painting is about twelve by twenty-one feet,” Miss Julia said. “That’s bigger than your average bedroom.”

  They took the steps down, and soon found themselves in another giant gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “What is that?” Lulu asked.

  The room held a stone temple. Miss Julia read the description aloud. “The Temple of Dendur, an Egyptian temple built around 15 B.C.”

  “Look at all those hieroglyphics,” Maddie said.

  “A fountain!” Lulu said, taking off across the room before Miss Julia could catch her.

  Sure enough, they’d found a fountain, complete with coins. They marked it off the list and headed into the Egyptian Wing. The princess’s jewelry and the giant urn weren’t difficult to find either.

  “So that’s what an urn is,” Lulu said when they found it.

  They had to look harder for the stone cat, but soon they’d found that too. Next, they found their way into the Gallery of Arms and Armor and spotted King Henry VIII’s armor. They decided to walk through a few rooms that may have a bed in them on their way across the museum. As they wound through room after room toward the 19th and Early 20th Century European Paintings and Sculptures, they found one. Jackpot!

  “That’s seven!” Lulu said, crossing the bed off the list.

  The 19th and 20th Centur
y gallery was just beyond. Soon, they’d crossed the Vermeer off the list and had found the beautiful statue of the dancer by Degas.

  “This one is my favorite.” Lulu mirrored the position of the statue and posed for a picture.

  “We’re almost done!” Mia said. “All we have left is the Manneport by Monet. What does Manneport mean, anyway?”

  Miss Julia shook her head. “I’m not telling. It’s a surprise for Maddie.”

  So, Maddie led the way as they searched. When they found the seascape painting, Mia understood why Miss Julia had added it to the list for Maddie. The painting depicted a natural arch cut into a cliff, done in Monet’s typical splattered style.

  “It’s like Sun-Splattered Afternoon!” Maddie said, breaking into a giant smile.

  It did look remarkably like the painting they’d all loved, but which had been particularly special to Maddie, in the London Art Gallery.

  “And that’s ten!” Lulu said, crossing the last item off the list with a flourish.

  “Congratulations!” Dad said.

  “Thank you for the scavenger hunt,” Mia said, hugging Miss Julia. It felt nice to have solved a puzzle, even though the bigger puzzle, the mystery of the Snow Angel, remained beyond them.

  “What do you say we go have a little lunch and then make our choices in the gift shop?” Mom suggested.

  Mia’s feet were sore from all that walking. She knew Maddie and Lulu must feel the same way. Everyone agreed, and they made their way back toward the cafe.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After a lunch of sandwiches and soup, they went to the gift shop. No one had any trouble choosing a souvenir. Maddie chose a tiny watercolor kit in a wooden box. Lulu chose a miniature figurine of the Degas dancer. Mia found a snow globe with Central Park’s Alice in Wonderland statue inside. It wasn’t the special snow globe from Rise and Shine, but still, it was a snow globe. Mia loved the way the sparkling snow settled on and around the statue.

  Outside, the snow had started to come down a little harder. Still, Lulu begged to have a chance to see Central Park, and especially Mia’s Alice in Wonderland statue. The park was beautiful, with a dusting of white covering the grassy hills and paths. Little hats of snow rested on the statues that Mia could see out the window.