The Art Teacher's Vanishing Masterpiece Read online

  My notes cover all I know at this point. There’s also the fact that I’m getting paid my regular day rate, and Mrs. Bagby promised to raise my C–in Art to a B+ if I recover the stolen artwork.

  The prospect of getting my first B+ gives me a little boost of extra excitement.

  “We’re here,” Officer Lestrade announces as the squad car comes to an abrupt stop in an alley between two large buildings.

  That’s when I notice Hailey staring at me with a combination of fear, disgust, and horror.

  “What?” I ask innocently.

  “It’s not this car…. It’s you that stink!” she screams, holding her nose. “You smell like gross dog farts!”

  • Chapter 6 •

  Shirt Invaders

  Hailey’s right.

  I’m wearing my favorite shirt, and it smells like a dirty diaper.

  “Dang it!” I gag, sliding out of the police cruiser when Officer Lestrade gets around to opening my door. I pull the reeking shirt over my head, walk over to a Dumpster, lift the lid a few inches, and toss the hideous thing in.

  “Fire in the hole!” Hailey shouts to nobody in particular.

  Already the smell of rotting vegetables starts to fade.

  Now the four of us—Hailey, Lestrade, and my nipples—stand around staring at one another, not sure what to do next.

  Finally Hailey turns to Officer Lestrade. “Did you know this is National Skinny Brother Awareness Month?”

  I give her an icy glare that would surely melt wood, but she just smiles. Even I must admit, I’m slightly less impressive bare chested.

  The reason my shirt stinks like something that died several months ago is no mystery. The culprit is Man Laundry.

  Man Laundry is my dad’s brilliant idea to help out with the housework. He promised to wash my laundry and his laundry together once a week to lighten my mom’s workload. The problem is, he starts the washing machine on Friday night and doesn’t remember to throw our twisted and stiff clothes into the dryer until late Sunday night, after our moist laundry has rotted in the dark for more than fifty-eight hours, growing heaps of mildew.

  The nasty thing about mildew is that it smells when you warm it up, like putting a plate of dead chipmunks in a microwave oven and hitting the Pot Roast button.

  “Follow me,” Officer Lestrade coughs, obviously holding in a good laugh at my expense. We follow him to the museum’s locked front doors. “I told the museum’s curator I’d call him when we got here,” he says, punching buttons on his cell phone.

  “I bet you don’t know what a curator is,” Hailey teases me.

  “Of course I do,” I say unconvincingly. “It’s someone who cures things.”

  “It’s the person in charge of the artwork at a museum,” Officer Lestrade says, trying to save me from the world’s most annoying little sister.

  “Uh-oh,” Hailey says, tapping me on my bare backbone. She points to a sign on the door that reads: NO SHOES. NO SHIRT. NO SERVICE. “You’ll just have to wait in the car,” she says with a shrug. “So, are you going to go quietly? Or are we going to have to cuff you?”

  There’s nothing easy about having a little sister. There’s also nothing easy about solving mysteries. And as I’m about to find out, things are about to get even more uneasy for the half-naked detective.

  • Chapter 7 •

  Crime in a Box

  “Sorry, but the waterslide is not working today,” sneers a strange-looking man who pokes his head out through the museum door.

  I think he’s making a snarky joke about my current state of bare-chestedness. But I can’t be certain, because his eerie face is unmoving and lifeless, like a brick with a nose.

  Then it hits me: He looks like one of those giant stone heads on Easter Island.

  My class learned about Easter Island’s ancient and mysterious stone blockheads in our reading comprehension workbooks. Apparently, some ancient guys carved hundreds of these giant heads on a grassy island out in the middle of the ocean a few million years ago. I distinctly remember not comprehending much of the story.

  “I’ll be right back,” Stone Head sniffs after Officer Lestrade pleads his case for letting in a shirtless kid detective and his walking headache of a little sister.

  He returns in moments and hands me a purple T-shirt. In enormous letters the shirt screams I LOVE ART!

  “Does it have to be a lady’s T-shirt?” I groan.

  “It’s the cheapest shirt on the gift shop’s clearance table,” Stone Head sighs.

  “Does it have to be purple?” I murmur.

  “That’s lavender,” Stone Head corrects me. “And rules are rules.”

  Hailey’s having the time of her life watching me suffer. “At least it doesn’t smell like a sewage treatment plant,” she says, pulling the shirt over my head. “Oh, Sherlock, you could be in a little detective fashion show!”

  “Follow me,” Stone Head orders us.

  We follow his enormous forehead up a wide wooden staircase and to the entrance of the auction room. There is a yellow plastic strip strung tightly across the doorway. It says CRIME SCENE on it every five inches or so. That is so cool.

  Before I can stop her, Hailey runs in slow motion through the yellow tape, her arms raised in the air, like she’s winning a marathon. The tape snaps. She makes the sound of a roaring crowd. “Hailey Sherlock has shocked the world and taken the gold medal!” she shouts like a TV announcer.

  Stone Head doesn’t look amused.

  I walk slowly around the auction room and get a feel for the place.

  I count nineteen paintings of various sizes hanging neatly around the room. There is one empty space. I stare at the tiny hole in the wall that only yesterday was occupied by the hook holding Mrs. Bagby’s painting. I wonder what kind of thief steals a painting and the hook it’s hanging on.

  I stare at that hole for a long time.

  When I turn around, everyone is looking at me like I just kicked a sleeping dog. And I must admit, this case is starting to feel like one.

  • Chapter 8 •

  Lost

  I find myself sitting all alone in the auction room of the museum waiting for a brilliant idea to drop out of the sky and hit me on the head like a falling coconut. But nothing happens.

  I’ve taken several laps around this room. I’ve seen the narrow broken window just wide enough for Mrs. Bagby’s painting to have been slipped through sideways. I’ve spotted the shattered glass in the alley down below in front of Officer Lestrade’s police cruiser. I’ve also studied the remaining nineteen paintings, checked the high ceiling for skylights (none!), and considered the fact that this room has only one way in, or out.

  I can’t help but think that maybe the painting just got stolen, and it’s gone for good, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and Mrs. Bagby will have to continue to teach those yawning, burping kids about dull art for twenty more years.

  I pull Hailey’s Girl Chat Sleepover pad out of my pocket and flip to a new page, thinking that writing down my puzzlements may calm the mad scramble going on in my head.

  Which reminds me of my disastrous oral report from earlier in the day.

  I had the bad luck to go right after Lance. And as always, he knocked their socks off.

  His report was about this genius inventor named Spencer Horgarth. Lance explained that while tinkering around in his basement, Horgarth had a flash of inspiration and invented the spork, a combination of a spoon and a fork. This one idea would change the course of cafeteria eating for generations to come.

  Tragically, Mr. Horgarth wasted his immense fortune on his follow-up invention, the “spife,” a highly unpopular combination of a spoon and a knife that left him bitter, penniless, and lonely.

  At the conclusion of Lance’s report, the class actually applauded. Sharon Sheldon even whistled. Miss Piffle’s eyebrow made waves.

  Then I shuffled to the front of the class to start my report on a guy who never actually lived—with my zipper down and
my favorite shirt smelling of rotting pumpkins.

  “Hey, Sherlock!” Hailey suddenly shouts, breaking the silence like a bull in a china shop. “Why don’t we look at the video from the security cameras?”

  “That sounds promising,” I say, kicking myself for not thinking of it first. This may be the coconut I was waiting for!

  Sometimes you catch a break that’s just too good to be true. And I had a suspicion this clue would fit that description like a glove.

  • Chapter 9 •

  Smile and Say “Nothing”

  “That camera is just for show,” Stone Head explains, staring up at the cameras like he can’t believe it himself. “City Hall slashed our budget during the installation of our security cameras. We never even got the wires to connect the cameras to anything. But they seem to fool just about everybody.”

  “Everyone but the thief,” I think out loud. I wonder if the art thief knew ahead of time that he wouldn’t be caught on camera. Was it just plain luck? Or am I dealing with an inside job? “Dang it! Finally, a coconut falls on my head and it’s hollow!”

  “We don’t need a coconut to tell us that your head is hollow,” Hailey mutters, staring up at the fake cameras.

  “I’ve got to go!” Officer Lestrade announces abruptly from the stairs. “Something’s up. I just got a call from the police chief himself. He wants a big sit-down for some reason.”

  “Boy, this sure is going to be interesting!” I exclaim.

  “You kids will have to get a ride home,” he says flatly.

  “Oh,” I say, deflating like a popped parade float.

  “I’ve got it covered,” Hailey assures him, pulling out our dad’s cell phone. She gives me a wink, acknowledging the fact that our dad trusts her with his cell phone and not me. She turns back to Officer Lestrade. “You roll ten-nineteen. We’ll be ten-eight here for a bit and call if we need a ten-sixteen. Just call us later with your nine-fifty-two.”

  Amazingly, Officer Lestrade seems to know what she’s talking about. He nods crisply. “Ten-four,” he replies, and is gone.

  While Hailey calls our grandparents for a ride, I corner Stone Head and look over my list of questions. I give him my best detective glare and raise an eyebrow so high even Miss Piffle would be impressed. “What’s so special about this painting?” I ask.

  “There are only forty-three paintings by this artist known to exist,” he explains. “For years there has been a rumor about the existence of a forty-fourth, said to be the artist’s masterpiece. And when I saw it, I agreed it was a major discovery. It was to be the star of this auction. The local art world is…was buzzing about the chance to acquire it.”

  “Does this place have a burglar alarm?” I ask quickly, trying to catch him off guard. “And if so, did it go off last night?”

  “No alarms were triggered last night,” he sighs, looking around over my head like he’s searching for someone more fun to talk to. “I would have been called at home if the alarm sounded. I arrived this morning to prepare for the auction, and I was greeted by this large, unseemly gap on the wall.”

  I’m not sure what “unseemly” means, but I decide to let that one go. I push on. “Any cars in the alley outside that window when you arrived?”

  “No,” he sniffs, managing a slight shake of his rocklike head. He must have a strong neck!

  No cameras. Nobody in the alley. No alarms. No witnesses. Basically, I have nothing to work with. I try a new angle. “Anybody else have keys to this place? Somebody who could have come in last night and ripped off Mrs. Bagby’s painting?”

  “I have a set of keys, and so does Clem, our maintenance man for the last eleven years. He also knows the code to deactivate the alarm. But Clem did not come in last night, and there is no record of the alarm being turned off, which would be reflected on the computer printout I gave to the officer.” He looks at his watch for a long time, like he’s counting the seconds till I drop dead.

  Something else occurs to me. “Doesn’t the museum have insurance to pay for this kind of thing?”

  “Ah, there’s the rub,” he says slowly.

  “Okay, I was willing to let ‘unseemly’ go by, but what the heck is a ‘rub’?” I grumble in frustration.

  “What I mean is that your art teacher’s painting was never authenticated,” he explains. “Man with a Cat never received an official certificate of authenticity by an art appraiser who would certify—”

  “That the painting was really created by the artist,” Hailey interrupts from directly behind me. I flinch. Sneaking up on me and scaring the living cheese out of me is surely her most maddening habit. “And without written proof that the painting was genuine,” she continues, “I bet the insurance company will refuse to pony up a settlement to compensate Mrs. Bagby for any monetary losses caused by the burglary.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I agree, trying my best to sound like I actually understand all that jibber-jabber.

  “Precisely,” Stone Head says. “Now I really must get back to work, children. The museum’s chairman is pressuring me to put this whole unfortunate episode behind us as quickly as possible. So I must ask you both to leave now.”

  Hailey starts pulling me by the arm. “C’mon, Sherlock, Grandpappy’s picking us up in Bessie.”

  Hailey calls our grandpa “Grandpappy” because she knows it drives me absolutely crazy.

  Sometimes I try to imagine a world without little sisters.

  Bessie is what my grandpa calls his pile-of-junk old car that backfires so much you feel like you’re riding in a shooting gallery. It also stalls out every time somebody looks at you funny—which happens a lot since that bucket of bolts backfires just about every time you blink.

  “And Grandpappy’s made his famous flat-rabbit stew for dinner,” Hailey exclaims.

  Famous? Famously disgusting is more like it!

  Instantly, my stomach feels like it’s full of ferrets. My neck gets sweaty. I think my gag reflex even fires off a few times before we reach the stairs.

  Surely today could not get any worse!

  “Wait! I’ll need to get that shirt back before you leave,” Stone Head calls after me.

  “Oh, I thought you gave it to me,” I say.

  “No, that was just a loaner,” he says with a sour voice. “And you may also want to know that your zipper’s down.”

  “AGAIN! What the—oh, sorry about that,” I say, yanking the zipper back up. “It must be broken.”

  If something actually goes right today, I may die from the shock.

  • Chapter 10 •

  Rolling Thunder

  Riding shirtless in the back of a noisy, convertible pile of junk doesn’t exactly help me think—especially since this is my most complicated case yet.

  The snarled Friday afternoon traffic is also getting us nowhere fast, so I better come up with something soon, considering the auction is now less than two hours away.

  “So how’s the detective business, Sherlock?” my grandpa shouts back at me.

  “Great!” I reply, but my response can’t be heard because the tailpipe explodes with a large BLAM! just as I open my mouth. My grandpa nods anyway, satisfied with my unheard answer. Maybe this car has forced him to learn how to read lips.

  I pull a small square sticker from my front pocket. I secretly peeled it off the wall next to the empty space recently occupied by Mrs. Bagby’s painting. I don’t think they’ll miss it. I study it for several minutes. I admit that the short list of facts doesn’t seem to move me any closer to a solution, just one step closer to a throbbing headache.

  I need what detectives in the movies call “background.” Background is just a fancy way of saying you need to gather every fact you can lay your grubby hands on about the people, places, and things involved in your case.

  Then I have an idea. “Grandpa, I need to swing by Lance’s house,” I shout over the sputtering engine. “Do you remember where his house is?”

  He turns and says something,
but I can’t hear it because of another cannon blast from Bessie’s exhaust pipe. I’m pretty sure he said, “Yes!” Look, now I’m learning to read lips, too.

  I fold the sticker up and stuff it back in my pocket.

  “What’s your take on that snooty curator guy?” I ask Hailey. But the question just hangs in the air, unanswered. She’s not really paying attention anymore. She’s reading a book about shipwrecks that she pulled from her backpack. The truth is, Hailey seems to view my cases as mild amusements between books. Some assistant!

  I’m struck by the fact that she just happens to be reading about shipwrecks, because this case is starting to give me a horrible sinking feeling.

  • Chapter 11 •

  The Lance and Jimmy Show

  “Hey, we all thought you got arrested,” Lance chuckles when he finally opens his front door. “Did they take your shirt as evidence?”

  “No, I haven’t been arrested, I’m helping the police with a case,” I say, bending the truth just a bit, thinking it might help me convince Lance to use his Internet skills to dig up some background for me.

  “Man, you look like a stick figure wearing shoes,” Lance laughs.

  “Just listen to what I have to say!” I demand. “Mrs. Bagby had a valuable painting ripped off last night at the museum downtown.”

  “I wasn’t anywhere near that museum last night!” Lance snaps defensively.

  “I don’t think you took it, for heaven’s sake!” I shout. “I just need something from you.”

  “Do you want some beef jerky or something?” he asks. “I think I can see your heart beating in your chest.”

  “Not exactly…,” I burble like an idiot, my mouth watering at the thought of food, even if it’s the kind that tastes like dried-up squirrels.