The Red Blazer Girls

by D. Michael Beil

  My dad, on the other hand, came through with a box full of miniature chocolate tortes, Napoleons, éclairs, and truffles. I may have lost the boy (temporarily), but I have the primo goodies.

  At Becca's we order pizza, and after it comes, as Rebecca predicted, her little sibs clamor to watch Balto yet again.

  “No! I can't listen to that damn thing one more time,” she says.

  “You said a swear. I'm telling,” says her little brother, Jonathan.

  “You're damn right I did, mini-man. No more Balto. Look, here are some cartoons that my nice friend brought just for you. There's Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. These are classics. I guarantee you're gonna love them.”

  Jonathan and his twin sister, Jennifer, whine, but after thirty seconds of the Road Runner's “beep-beeps,” they are enraptured. (I just finished the “Word Power” in an old Reader's Digest in my orthodontist's office. I am enraptured by the word “enraptured.”) The disc also turns out to be a serendipitous choice (more “Word Power”). How could I have known that the Road Runner and his arch-nemesis Wile E. Coyote would help us with clue number two?

  “Okay here it is,” Margaret says, printing the letters on a sheet of newsprint torn from Rebecca's sketchpad.

  S

  IE

  AR

  IS

  OV

  LE

  RB

  MA

  HE

  RT

  DE

  UN

  OK

  LO

  We all stare at it for a long, long time, nobody saying anything.

  “Is this the classical languages clue?” I ask. “Because I have to tell you: I've got nothin'.”

  Margaret and Rebecca both look hypnotized—that's how hard they are concentrating.

  “Is it a code?” Rebecca asks.

  “Maybe. But for now, let's look for easier solutions,” Margaret suggests. “What if it's a list of words, and he's only showing us two letters from each one?”

  “But there could be thousands of possible words for some of those,” Rebecca says.

  “Yeah, you're right. Is it, say, a famous quote? Or another Bible verse? That would narrow it down.”

  Rebecca seems skeptical. “I don't know. That seems too hard. Maybe if there were blanks to fill in the missing letters. That way, at least you'd know how many letters were missing. Do me a favor and write the letters out the usual way, across the page.”

  “I think that made it worse,” I say.

  “Are there any recognizable words in there?” asks Margaret. “Anything longer than two letters? What about every other letter? S, E, R, S, V, E—no, that doesn't work. Damn. Reverse? O, K, N, E, T Nope.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Rebecca says. “Let me see the letter. What was the first clue? The exact wording?”

  “‘Look behind L2324.’ Why?”

  Rebecca's brow furrows and she scratches her head, thinking hard, eyes darting back and forth across the paper, and then, finally, a satisfied smile appears on her face. “Look behind—all right! I'm definitely onto something. Look at this. Take the last two pairs of letters.”

  OK

  LO

  “OK and LO, right? Now, move the LO up one row, in front of the OK. What do you have? LOOK, right? Now, do the same thing with the next letters.” She writes:

  UN DE

  LO OK

  “Now, just keep sliding the ones from the bottom of the list up and in front of the next ones up.” She continues on the paper:

  UN DE RT HE

  UNDER THE

  And finally,

  LOOK UNDER THE

  “Damn, Rebecca,” I say, in awe.

  “I'm with Sophie,” said Margaret.

  Now that we (as if I had anything to do with it!) have the pattern, the rest is a snap. We end up with this:

  LOOK UNDER THE MARBLE OVISARIES

  But OVISARIES means nothing to us.

  “Sounds kinda like ‘ovaries,’” I note.

  Margaret chuckles. “I don't think Caroline's grandfather would tell her to look under those. Which leaves us two possibilities. One, OVISARIES is an anagram—”

  “Another one?” says Rebecca.

  “Or this one definitely is the classical languages clue and OVISARIES is Greek or Latin. You don't happen to have a Latin dictionary around, do you?”

  “Yeah, I've got one in the kitchen,” Rebecca says. “I think it's in the freezer.”

  “Margaret thinks everyone has a full reference library in their house,” I assure her.

  “In her house,” Margaret corrects. “‘Everyone’ is a singular pronoun.”

  “Let's just kill her now,” I say. “No one will know, but even if they did, they'd never blame us.”

  “Well, how about a regular English dictionary, then.”

  “That I have.” Rebecca goes into her room to fetch a perfectly ordinary, respectable paperback dictionary. Margaret's personal dictionary is six inches thick and outweighs her by a good twenty pounds.

  While the gears in Margaret's brain whir and click like something out of a cartoon, I head into the other room to watch the real thing with the kids. Rebecca's brother and sister don't even look up when I enter the room; they are deeply involved. I sit on the floor next to them.

  Suddenly Margaret starts shouting out all this stuff about how while she was searching for “ovisaries” in the dictionary, she found the word “ovine,” which means “of, or having the nature of, a sheep,” from the Latin ovis, for “sheep.”

  After sort of half listening for a while, I say, in an offhand kind of way, “Oh, it's probably like Road-runnerus digestus or Carnivorous vulgaris.”

  “Sophie, what are you babbling about? Get back in here,” Margaret orders.

  “I was babbling that it's probably the scientific name for an animal, like Road-runnerus digestus or Carnivorous vulgaris. You know, how in the Road Runner cartoons, about once an episode, they do this thing where the stupid coyote is chasing the dumb bird, and they'll freeze the frame, so it looks like something out of a biology textbook. And at the bottom of the page, they come up with these crazy fake Latin names—well, I assume they're fake, anyway—like, for the coyote, Road-runnerus digestus.”

  “The genus and the species,” says Margaret. “Of course! Ovis aries is the Latin name of some kind of sheep!”

  “So I'm right? Again?”

  Margaret beams at me and immediately runs to Rebecca's computer, and within, well, minutes—using Rebecca's dial-up Internet, no less—we know that Ovis aries is, in fact, the Latin name for the common domestic sheep. Somewhere in the church, we hope, is a marble sheep we can look under. But not at its ovaries.

  Just one more thought about the Road Runner: if that stupid coyote can afford all that stuff from the Acme Corporation, why doesn't he just buy something to eat? Am I right? You know I am.

  In which Margaret discovers

  my dirty little secret

  If we didn't know that the church was locked, we probably would be packing up the kids and taking the subway uptown to Sixty-eighth Street to find whatever it is that awaits us under the sheep. But since we can't do that, and since I just have to tell someone, I have a, um, perfectly valid reason to call Raf. Because, you know, he's my friend. What is going on with me?

  Life in elementary school had been pretty simple; St. V's was like my all-girls galaxy, with St. Andrew's—the boys' galaxy—right next door. Both are smallish galaxies with enough contact between them that I knew just about everyone in my grade in both schools. The St. Andrew's boys may not have been anything spectacular, but they were our boys. Now that we are in the upper school, suddenly they are everybody's boys. People like Leigh Ann, who can't possibly appreciate Raf the way I can, have a chance. More than a chance, actually, because to Raf she is new and different and exciting—not just his good ol' punch-each-other-on-the-arm pal.

  So I call him. And Leigh Ann is right there, with him—well, near him at least. Raf even put
s her on the phone to talk to me. Sheesh! Utterly clueless.

  On the way home from Rebecca's, Margaret asks me about the phone call. “What happened? One second you're happy, you're talking to Raf, and the next second, poof, you're moping around like your dog ran away. Did you tell him how we figured out the second clue?”

  “I tried, but it was hard to hear with the music and everything.”

  “So what else is the problem?”

  “Guess.”

  “What? I have no idea. What is going on?”

  “Oh, it's nothing,” I lie. “It's just—he was there with Leigh Ann. And I think I'm losing my mind.”

  “Oh.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Sophie, do you like Raf?”

  To paraphrase my grandmother, I hem and haw. “I don't. I mean, I don't know. This is so embarrassing. I can't like him. Oh, God, why am I like this?”

  “What exactly are you ‘like’?”

  “Like an idiot girl who is freaking out because he put her on the phone.”

  “He did? That's weird.”

  “Tell me about it. She's like, ‘Why aren't you guys here? I miss you. It's not the same without you, blah, blah, blah.’ And that's the thing that drives me the craziest. Part of me wants to hate her, but I really don't think she was rubbing my face in it or anything. She actually sounded like she wished we were there.”

  “So you want to hate her, but you don't have a good reason, because she really is as nice as she seems. Is that about right?”

  “Pretty much,” I admit.

  “Soph, they just met. You don't even know if anything is—”

  “Oh, come on. You saw them at the coffee shop. The way they looked at each other. They are so going to hook up.”

  Margaret puts her arm around me. “I'm sorry. I'm still a little surprised, but I'm sorry. You might have mentioned this. This is Margaret; remember me? And I don't think you're crazy. But don't jump to any conclusions—yet. Give it a little time. Okay?”

  “Yeah. I do feel better just talking about it a little. This way, I can hear how loony I sound.”

  “You're not loony. It's just love—”

  “Or something like it.”

  In which I learn what stuff dreams are

  made of on a Saturday morning at the

  Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Undoubtedly because she feels sorry for pathetic little me, Margaret agrees to put off going to the church to look under the sheep until after we are finished at the museum. (That sentence must sound totally bizarre to someone who just randomly opened up to this page to see what this story is all about. Go back and start at the beginning!) Rebecca calls me in the morning to say that she, too, will meet us.

  I act incredibly normal when I see Raf, teasing him about how bad his hair looks and questioning whether his shirt should even be on the same block as his pants. (They shouldn't.) What is truly remarkable, though, about his appearance on the steps of the museum is that he is on time for the second time inside of a week. He was always late for everything when he was at St. Andrew's.

  “So, are we goin' in? And, uh, weren't you supposed to bring coffee?”

  “After we find what we're looking for, then we'll stop for coffee,” says Margaret. “But you can't take too long, because we've got to go to the church to look for our Ovis aries.”

  “You know, that reminds me of something I was gonna mention last night,” I say. “I don't think they're going to let us wander around the church looking under statues and paintings whenever we feel like it. Priests and nuns and security guards—even when they're half blind and deaf like that Robert guy—tend to be a little touchy about stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, they're gonna think we're planning a heist or something,” Raf adds.

  “Oh, don't you worry your pretty little head about that,” Margaret says, further mussing up his mussy hair. “I've got a plan.”

  Like Joan of Arc leading the troops to battle, Margaret of Manhattan leads us straight through the museum's main lobby (the “Great Hall”) and then into the Medieval Art wing, where dump-truck loads of the treasures of the churches of Europe are displayed on the walls and in glass cases scattered around the various rooms. “Okay, it should be around here somewhere.” Taking me by the arm, she guides me to a section of stained glass window from the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in France. A good omen?

  She unfolds the paper that contains all the information we have so far. “Remember, we're looking for stuff donated by this Zoltan guy, especially something that could be one of a pair.”

  Zoltan. Sounds like the name of a god, or at least someone with superpowers. Hmm … Zoltan St. Pierre.

  “Like a pair of earrings?” Rebecca wonders.

  “Maybe,” says Margaret. “But he probably wouldn't give her one earring, so I'm guessing it's a ring with some kind of Christian symbol on it.”

  We barely start looking when—ta-da!—Margaret hones in on a beautiful gold ring centered in a display case in a place of honor above the lesser pieces. It is set with a cross of tiny rubies. The plaque sitting next to it informs us that the ring had been found in the ruins of a twelfth-century chapel near Rocamadour, France, and donated to the museum by the estate of one Zoltan Ressanyi, the Hungarian-American archaeologist and explorer. It is “the groom's ring from a pair of wedding rings known as the Rings of Rocamadour.” According to local legend, the rings had been a gift to a young couple from St. Veronica, who had touched them to the famous veil—the one she wiped the face of Christ with. They had been passed down through the centuries, and those who wear the rings, it is said, are visited in their dreams by St. Veronica, who answers their prayers.

  “Holy crap,” I say. “That's what we're looking for? It's beautiful. Oh my God. How much is something like that worth?”

  “It is, in fact, priceless,” says a man's voice.

  We all spin around in shock. And there he is—Mr. Malcolm Chance, decked out in layers and layers of tweed and still carrying that ridiculous walking stick.

  Aha! I had seen someone sneak out of the church. That jerk must have been snooping and heard our plans. The hair on the back of my neck stands up again as I catch another whiff of his strange odor. What is that smell?

  “Of course, it would be worth even more if it were reunited with its companion. There's no telling what the museum might pay to have the two Rings of Rocamadour reunited.”

  Margaret totally keeps her cool. “Dr. Chance, right? We met you at Ms. Harriman's the other day.”

  But old Malcolm plays it pretty cool, too, as if our running into each other in the museum is just a coincidence. “Oh, yes, of course. How do you do? Are you students interested in early Christian artifacts? Or just this one in particular?”

  “We're doing a little research project for school,” I fib. “It's more like one of those treasure hunts where teachers send you out with a list of things to find.” I glance quickly at the others to make sure they are with me.

  “My, my. That sounds interesting. I'm afraid my education was a bit less, shall we say, creative. Lots of memorizing and reciting, I seem to recall. Is there anything else—for your little project—that I can help you find? I'm something of an expert in this field,” he says, gesturing to encompass everything in the room.

  I so want to kick him in the shins.

  Margaret sensibly chooses a more mature response. “No, thank you. I think we're all set. We just need to copy down some information.”

  Malcolm leans over the case. “This ring you're so interested in—the Ring of Rocamadour—quite a thing of rare beauty, no?”

  “The stuff that dreams are made of,” says Raf, quoting his favorite Sam Spade line from The Maltese Falcon. (Every time he says it, Margaret points out that the line was ripped off from Shakespeare.) Raf's grandfather was a projectionist at a theater in Times Square in the forties and fifties, and he and Raf spend hours and hours watching old movies (and yes, I know, lots of great movies are in black and white,
and I should give them a chance instead of watching Grease for the six hundredth time). A lot of the big premieres took place in Times Square in those olden days, and Raf's grandfather has a million stories about all the movie stars who had been to his theater.

  “My, my, a young Dashiell Hammett fan. Or is it Shakespeare? Either way, a great line, isn't it?” Malcolm looks at the three of us and takes a deep breath. “It is apparent that the four of you are quite intelligent, so there's no point in my beating about the bush. I know why you're here and what you're really looking for. I have not yet ascertained exactly how you came to be looking for it, but that's not particularly important right now. What is important is that this—this object you seek—is found, and found soon. You are probably not aware that the church is about to undergo a thorough cleaning and sprucing up, from the tiles of the floor to the limestone blocks of that spectacular vaulted ceiling.

  “And do not forget that I knew Everett Harriman quite well, too. I was, in many respects—regardless of what my former wife may have told you—his protégé. I also knew of his intention to provide my daughter with the puzzle you seem to have stumbled on. And perhaps more than anyone else, I know how his mind worked. Judging from what I've seen and heard thus far, some of what you need may be in danger of disappearing very soon. So, then, shouldn't we join forces to prevent that from occurring?”

  I stand up straight and look him directly in the eyes. “Look, Mr. Chance, we're doing a project for our religion class, and we already found what we were looking for. We are not a force, and we won't be joining you.”

  He stares right back at me, half smiling and half smirking. Smirkling? “It's strange, don't you think, a teacher asking you to remove something from the back of a painting? Risking damage to one of the church's treasures, for the sake of this ‘project.’”

  “We didn't damage anything.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Are you spying on us?” I blurt out. “This is no coincidence—you just happening to be here at the same time as us.”