13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  Now she had done it. Now she had said it. Now her voice was starting to crack. Ginny dug her fingers into the blanket. Keith sighed, then sat down next to her.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Ginny clenched a fistful of Death Star.

  “All right,” he said. “You can sleep here, but in the morning I’m driving you back to Richard’s. Deal?”

  “I guess,” Ginny said. She rolled over toward the back of the sofa and felt Keith’s hand slowly rest on the back of her head and slowly stroke her hair as she broke into sobs.

  The Green Slippers and the Lady on the Trapeze

  The spare key to Richard’s house was there in the crack of the stair, waiting for her. On the table, there was a note that read: Ginny, If you’re reading this, you’ve come back, and I’m happy about that. Please stay until this evening so that we can talk some more.

  “See?” Keith said, spying a loose piece of breakfast cereal and popping it into his mouth. “He knew you’d be back.”

  He drifted out of the kitchen and looked around the rest of the house, stopping at the door to Ginny’s room.

  “This is my…” Ginny began. “My…it was my aunt’s room. I know it’s a little…”

  “You aunt painted all of this?” he said, running his hand along the trail of cartoons that decorated the wall, then stooping to look at the patchwork on the blankets. “It’s bloody amazing.”

  “Yeah, well…this is what she was like.”

  “It looks a bit like Mari’s place,” he said.

  He circled the room, taking in all of the details. He walked over to the Manet poster.

  “This is her favorite painting?” he asked.

  “She loved it,” Ginny said. “She had a copy of it in her apartment in New York, too.”

  She’d stared at this poster so many times before…but like Piet, she’d never noticed much about it. Aunt Peg had explained it, but she’d never gotten it. Now the girl’s flat expression in the midst of all the activity, all the color…it made a lot more sense. It was a lot more tragic. All of that activity in front of her and the girl wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t enjoying it.

  “When you look at it,” she said, “you’re standing where the artist is supposed to be. The thing that she loved about it, though, was that nobody ever notices the green slippers in the corner. It’s a reflection of a woman standing on a trapeze, but you can only see her feet. Aunt Peg always wondered about her. She was always talking about her green slippers. See? Right here.”

  Ginny stepped on the bed and poked at the upper left corner, where the little green slippers dangled their way into the picture. As she touched the poster, she felt a lump under the corner, right where the green slippers were. She ran her fingers along the surface. It was all smooth except for this point. She pulled on the corner. The poster was attached to the wall with sticky blue putty, which gave way easily when Ginny peeled it back. Under the corner, there was a larger lump of this blue stuff.

  “What are you doing?” Keith asked.

  “Something’s under here.”

  She pulled the entire corner of the poster down. They both stared at the glop of blue putty and the small key that was pressed into it.

  The key sat between them on the kitchen table. They’d tried it in all of the door locks to the house. Then they’d looked all through Ginny’s room, trying to find anything that it might fit into. Nothing.

  So now there was nothing to do but drink tea and stare at it.

  “I should have known to look there,” Ginny said, putting her chin on the table and getting a close-up view of the crumbs.

  “Was there anything in any of the letters telling you to open something?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever give you anything else?” Keith asked, flicking the key across the table with his finger. “Besides the letters.”

  “Just the bank card.” She reached into her pocket and set the Barclaycard on the table. “It’s useless now. There’s nothing left in the account.”

  Keith picked up the card and flicked it to the edge of the table.

  “All right,” he said. “What now?”

  Ginny thought this one over.

  “I guess I should take a bath,” she said.

  Richard had anticipated this need as well. Sitting on the floor by the bathroom door were some of his smaller clothes, some running pants and a rugby shirt. She soaked herself until she pruned. She hadn’t had this luxury in a while—really hot water, towels, the time to actually get clean.

  When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine.

  “Put your clothes in for a wash,” he said. “They were disgusting.”

  Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning them in scalding water and then whipping them around in a violent centrifugal motion that caused the entire washing machine to vibrate and the floor to shake. You beat them clean. You made them suffer. This machine used about half a cup of water and was about as violent as a toaster, plus it stopped every few minutes, as if it were exhausted from the effort of turning itself.

  Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

  Click.

  Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.

  “Who thought to put a window on a washing machine?” Keith asked. “Does anyone just sit and watch their wash?”

  “You mean, besides us?”

  “Well,” he said, “yeah. Is there any coffee?”

  Ginny got up, tripped over the long running pants, and went to the cabinet for the jar of Harrods instant coffee. She set it on the table in front of Keith.

  “Harrods,” Keith said, picking up the jar.

  There was a nearly-audible click in Ginny’s head.

  “Harrods,” she repeated.

  “Harrods, indeed.”

  “No. The key. It’s for Harrods.”

  “Harrods?” Keith said. “You’re telling me your aunt had the magical key to Harrods?”

  “Maybe. Her studio was there.”

  “Inside Harrods?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was her bedroom? Inside Parliament? Top of Big Ben?”

  “Richard works at Harrods,” Ginny said. “He found her a space to work in. She kept everything in a cabinet there. A cabinet would have a small key, like this one.”

  Keith shook his head.

  “Why does this surprise me?” he asked. “Come on, then. Let’s go.”

  The Magical Key to Harrods

  Ginny had switched off the “what am I wearing?” impulse in her brain several hours before as a means of survival. It wasn’t until she caught her reflection in the window at Harrods that she suddenly remembered how she was dressed and that she was accompanied by someone wearing a shirt that said, CORPORATE SWINE ATE MY BALLS.

  Keith looked equally distressed as he peered in through the door that the Harrods doorman was holding open for them.

  “Cor,” he said, his jaw dropping at the sight of the oozing mass of humanity that completely filled every square foot of space. “I am not going in there.”

  Ginny grabbed his arm and pulled him inside, leading him down the now-familiar path to the chocolate counter. The expression on the chocolate woman’s face said that she was not impressed with either of their outfits. But it also said that she was a professional and that she had seen every kind of insane person pass through Harrods’ doors.

  “Just a moment,” she said, “Murphy, yes?”

  “How did she know that?” Keith asked as the woman walked to the phone. “How do you have all of these strange connections inside Harrods? Who are you?”

  Ginny realized that she was biting at her cuticles. She never did that. She was suddenly very nervous about seeing Richard. Her uncle. The one she’d run from.

  “My mum used to drag me here whenever we came down to London at Christmas,” he went on, bending down low and scanning the contents of the chocolate counter. “It’s eve
n worse than I remember.”

  She had to move away from Keith, from the chocolate lady…and she had to fight the desire to slip into the crowd and disappear. She almost lost the battle but caught sight of Richard’s short curls and his silvery tie and dark shirt coming at her through the crowd. She couldn’t look up at him as he approached. Instead, she simply opened her hand and stuck it forward, revealing the tiny key that had imbedded itself in her palm.

  “I found this,” she said. “It was in Aunt Peg’s room, behind a poster. I think she left it there for me, and I think it’s for something here.”

  “Here?” he asked.

  “The cabinet. Is it still here?”

  “It’s in a storage closet upstairs. But there’s nothing in it. She brought her paints home.”

  “Could this be the key for it?”

  Richard took the key and looked it over.

  “It could be,” he said.

  Ginny snuck a quick look at him. He didn’t look angry.

  “Come on,” he said. “I have a minute. Let’s go have a look.”

  Aunt Peg’s Harrods studio was not a glamorous place. It was a very small room on a top floor with a bunch of deformed mannequins and discarded hangers. There was a cloudy window that pushed open and revealed only gray sky.

  “It’s one of these,” Richard said, pointing to a clump of large, brown metal cabinets in the corner.

  It wasn’t any of the front ones, so Keith and Richard were forced to start pushing the cabinets around so that Ginny could squeeze between the row and try the other locks. The fifth one was a perfect fit. The inside of the cabinet was completely hollow. There was plenty of room for the pile of rolled canvases at the bottom.

  “The dead Harrods scrolls,” Keith said.

  “It’s strange that she would take her paints home but leave the paintings here,” Richard said. “I never would have found them. They would have been thrown away.”

  Ginny unrolled a few of the canvases and spread them out on the floor. The work was clearly Aunt Peg’s: bright, almost cartoonish representations of now-familiar sights. There were the Vestal Virgins, the Eiffel Tower, the white-paved paths of Greece, the London streets, Harrods itself. A few were almost direct copies of the pictures on the envelopes. There was the girl at the base of the mountain under the castle from the fourth letter, the rising sea monster island from number twelve. Ginny had seen lots of amateur painters painting these sights on her travels to sell as souvenirs to tourists. These paintings were very different. They were alive. They seemed to vibrate.

  “Hang on.” Keith reached over and pulled off something taped to the inside of the door. He looked at it and then held it over for Ginny and Richard to see. It was a heavy, dove gray card, with a name and number darkly imprinted.

  “Cecil Gage-Rathbone,” Keith said. “That’s a name.”

  Ginny reached for the card, then flipped it over. Scrawled in pen were the words CALL NOW.

  They got the paintings, twenty-seven in all, out of the cabinet in packing tubes and oversized Harrods shopping bags. Richard had to spend a few minutes in the hallway convincing a very old security guard that they weren’t actually stealing things from the storeroom and finally had to flash something he carried in his wallet. The man backed away and apologized profusely.

  They made their way to his office, which was a tight space entirely occupied with file cabinets and boxes. There was barely enough room to get over to the desk to use the phone.

  Cecil Gage-Rathbone had a voice like ringing crystal.

  “Is this Virginia Blackstone?” he asked. “We were told you’d be contacting us. We have all the paperwork ready—we’ve been preparing for this for months. I think we could manage…Thursday? Is that too soon? That only gives you two days.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said, having no idea what he was really talking about.

  “When would you like us to collect them?”

  “The paintings…right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Um…whenever.”

  “We could send someone round this evening, if that is agreeable. We’d like to get them in-house as soon as possible to prepare things.”

  “It’s…agreeable.”

  “Excellent. Is five o’clock all right?”

  “Sure?”

  “Splendid. Five o’clock, then. Same address in Islington?”

  “Yes?”

  “Very good. You’ll just need to come here at nine in the morning on Thursday. Do you have our address?”

  After taking all the information from Cecil, who worked for something called Jerrlyn and Wise, Ginny set down the phone.

  “Some people are coming to take the paintings,” she said.

  “Who?” Richard asked.

  “No idea. But we have to go to this address on Thursday at nine. Or at least I do.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, you’ve sorted that, then, haven’t you?” Keith said. “Mystery solved.”

  He looked between Richard and Ginny, then back toward the door.

  “You know what?” he said. “I’ve been meaning to have a better look at those famous food halls. Get something for my gran.”

  “Sorry about…leaving,” she said, once Keith was gone.

  “Well, you’re Peg’s niece,” he said. “It’s in your blood. And it’s all right.”

  Richard’s phone began ringing. It was a very loud, insistent phone. No wonder he always sounded hassled here.

  “You better get that,” she said. “The queen might need underwear.”

  “She’ll wait a moment,” he said. “I’m sure she has lots of pants.”

  “Probably.”

  Ginny kept her eyes on the dull green carpet. There were little paper circles everywhere, obviously fallen from the reservoir of a hole punch. It looked like snow.

  “We should really get you some clothes,” he said. “Why don’t you go pick out some things, and I’ll have them charged to my account? Nothing too crazy, if you don’t mind, but get yourself something you like.”

  Ginny nodded heavily. Her eyes were tracing patterns of dots on the floor. A star. A one-eared rabbit.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you on the train. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. Sometimes I just say things.”

  “It never seemed real,” she said.

  “What didn’t? Peg and I? I don’t know what it was, really.”

  “Her being gone,” Ginny explained. “She sometimes did stuff like that.”

  “Ah.”

  Another, even louder line started to ring. Richard glanced over at his phone in annoyance, then depressed a few buttons, which silenced it.

  “She always promised me she would be there,” Ginny said. “For high school, college. She would promise things and then just not do them. And just leave without telling anyone.”

  “I know. She was awful like that. But she could get away with it.”

  It took effort, but she pulled her gaze from the floor. Richard was absently pushing a folder around his desk.

  “I know,” she said. “She could. She was really irritating like that.”

  “Very,” he agreed. There was a thoughtful sadness about him—one that seemed very familiar.

  “I guess she did know what she was doing, a little,” she said. “I got an uncle out of it, at least.”

  Richard stopped pushing his folder and looked up.

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “It’s nice to have a niece, too.”

  The Padded House

  On Thursday morning, a black cab containing Ginny, Richard, and Keith wound its way down a quiet London street—the kind of quiet that whispers wealth, tradition, and the presence of lots of high-tech security systems.

  Aside from being a bit bigger than the buildings around it, the Jerrlyn and Wise building had nothing to suggest that it was anything other than a house. The only thing identifying it was a tiny brass
plate by the front door, which was swung open immediately by a man with frighteningly perfect blond hair.

  “Miss Blackstone,” he said. “You look so much like your aunt. Please, do come in. I’m Cecil Gage-Rathbone.”

  Cecil Gage-Rathbone’s dove gray suit matched the business card that they had found stuck to the cabinet door. His cuff links shimmered discreetly from the ends of sleeves that had to be made of obscenely high-count cotton. He smelled tailored.

  If Keith’s green Jittery Grande kilt, black shirt, and red tie threw Cecil at all, he didn’t show it. He introduced himself and shook hands with genuine pleasure, as if he had waited all his life to meet Keith and was full of sweet relief now that the moment had finally come. He took Ginny gently by the shoulders and glided her along past the antiques and the handful of gathered people as well tailored and coiffed as himself.

  Cecil offered them food and drinks from an impressive display of silver pots and plates arranged on a long mahogany sideboard. Ginny couldn’t take anything, but Richard accepted a cup of coffee, and Keith took champagne, strawberries, tiny scones, and a huge dollop of cream. Cecil led them through a long hallway to the auction room. Everything was thick and plush—the heavy drapes on the windows, the soft, overstuffed leather chairs. It was so padded and low-key that it was hard to hear Keith’s murmured monologue on how much he’d always wanted to play James Bond and was very happy to be at the audition.

  They stopped at the end of the hall, at a room where even more people in suits sat and chatted quietly into cell phones. Blue chairs had been set up along the sides, along with tables that were wired up for laptops. The canvases had been put into simple glass frames and set up on easels at the front of the room.

  Cecil ushered them into seats in the corner and then hovered over them, poking his head between them to speak in confidence.

  “What I think,” he whispered, “is that we’re quite likely to get a good offer for the collection as a whole. People are calling them the Harrods paintings. Everyone loves a good story.”