The Mistaken Masterpiece (18 page)

“Ha ha,” I say. “I’ll have you know that Tillie hasn’t chewed anything in days. She’s been absolutely
perfect.
”

As we pack up our stuff to head upstairs, Leigh Ann takes me by the arm. “I know this is a sensitive subject,” Leigh Ann says softly, “but did you hear from Nate after Friday night? He was really weird.”

“No,” I admit. “Not a word. How about you? Anything from Cam?”

She can’t help grinning a little as she nods. “Last
night. I was going to call you, but I had to finish my homework and then I fell asleep.”

Rebecca sticks her head in between us. “What are you two whispering about?”

“I’ll tell you at lunch,” Leigh Ann promises. “C’mon, we’re going to be late for class.”

Mr. Eliot’s English class is even more entertaining than usual. He assigned a short story, “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” over the weekend, and the threat of a quiz ensured that everyone actually did the reading. At the beginning of the story, Leiningen, the owner of a plantation in South America, is warned that a mile-wide horde of man-eating ants is headed right for his land. He stubbornly refuses to leave, convincing himself that he can outsmart a bunch of stupid ants. Seems logical, right?

Not so much, it turns out. These ants are
seriously
intense; they know what they want, and nothing he can do is going to make them change their minds. They cross rivers, walk through fire, and cooperate with one another in a way that’s so diabolical it kind of freaks me out.

Somehow Margaret turns this into a discussion about whether “the end justifies the means.”

Mr. Eliot just kind of stares at Margaret after she brings it up. “Well, I wasn’t really expecting anyone to be familiar with means-end analysis, but I seem to have underestimated you once again.”

“Not all of us,” someone in the back of the room says.

“Amen,” I say, turning around to see that I’m
agreeing, probably for the first time in my life, with Jessica Glenn. “Margaret, what are you talking about?”

Margaret explains, “It’s really not that complicated. People are always asking whether the end—in other words, your goal—justifies
any
means of achieving it. So, is it okay to do whatever you have to in order to make something good happen?”

“Can you give us an example?” Leigh Ann asks. “Like, from real life?”

Margaret scrunches up her nose and thinks for a second. Then her eyes open wide. “Let’s say the police arrest Sophie because they heard that she’s going to blow up the world. When they question her, she admits that she is planning to do just what they say, and that she already started the timer on the bomb. She’s not about to tell them where the bomb is hidden, though, so the police have to ask themselves: Does the end—saving the world—justify
any
means of getting it, like torture?”

“Yes!” cries Jessica. “Rip her fingernails out!”

“Hey!” I protest, making fists to protect my nails. They may not look like much (I’m a biter), but I still don’t want anyone yanking them out.

Mr. Eliot nods in admiration at Margaret. “Good example. But it doesn’t always have to be a life-and-death situation. Sophie, you make the calculation all the time; you just don’t realize you’re doing it. Remember when you made the decision to disobey Father Danahey’s order to stop snooping around the church for the Ring of
Rocamadour? Finding the ring was an end that, for you, justified almost any means, including breaking the rules.”

“So you’re saying it’s okay to do whatever it takes to get what you want,” Leigh Ann concludes.

“No, no, no,” Mr. Eliot says. “And
please
don’t tell your parents that’s what I said. There is no easy answer. Philosophers have been arguing about it for centuries. The point is that you have to really weigh the two sides in your mind every time. You have to use your own conscience as a guide.”

The Blazers meet in Elizabeth Harriman’s basement after school, and we decide to stick with the songs we know for our regular Friday evening gig at Perkatory. We know that we need to add a few more to our repertoire, but it’s hard with the limited time we have for rehearsal.

“Maybe we should just drop out of school now,” Becca suggests. “Think of all the time we’d have to rehearse then. And you know, lots of famous musicians didn’t go to college.”

“But I think most of them at least went to high school,” I say. “I don’t think that’s a very practical solution.”

“Yeah, Becca, something tells me your mom wouldn’t be too thrilled,” says Leigh Ann.

“Or my dad,” says Mbingu, shivering. “I think you would hear him screaming at me all the way from Africa.”

“I was
kidding,
” Becca says. “It’s just frustrating sometimes. Especially when I see some of these people on TV—I mean, we are so much cooler than some of them. And we’re starting to sound better, too.”

“We just have to keep working at it, doing what we’re doing,” Leigh Ann says. “Cam says we sound great—especially when you know we’ve only been playing together a couple of months.”

Mbingu, Becca, and I stare at her. “
Cam
says?” we all say together.

With a flash of perfect white teeth, Leigh Ann brightens the dim basement with her smile, and I remember her (broken) promise to tell us about him at lunchtime.

“Oh yeah. I guess I forgot to tell you. We were so busy arguing about all that means-and-end stuff that it just—”

“Slipped your mind?” I say, finishing her thought. “A movie star calls you and you forget to tell us.”

“Oh, come on—you guys met him, too.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t ask for
our
number,” I point out.

Becca looks like she’s going to explode. “He asked for your number? When did this happen?”

I explain about the Saturday morning encounter in the park and the voice message that followed, which leaves Becca and Mbingu shaking their heads.

“Man, life is so unfair,” Becca notes.

“Tell me about it,” says Mbingu.

“Guys, it was just one phone call. We talked. That’s it. He’s nice, and funny, and he’s not even conceited—not
like Nate at all. I mean, Nate is really good-looking and everything, but he
so
knows it. Cam totally admits that he just got lucky.”

Becca wags her eyebrows at me, which makes me and Mbingu laugh. A couple of seconds later, Leigh Ann realizes what she has said. “I mean, with his acting career! It all started with one commercial when he was a little kid in Chicago. But guess what—he’s coming to Perkatory again on Friday. We have to keep it secret, though. If everybody finds out ahead of time, there will be, like, a million girls there, and then he’ll never get in. Heck,
we
probably wouldn’t get in. So, promise?”

We all make a solemn vow to keep the secret,
if
Leigh Ann agrees to dish on everything they talked about.

“So, does he
like
you?” Becca asks.

Leigh Ann shrugs, her perfect skin blushing slightly. “I don’t know. I mean, I guess he does a little.”

“Do you like
him
?” asks Mbingu, diving right into the heart of the matter.

“He is cute,” Leigh Ann admits. “But it’s all so … temporary. I mean, I’m trying to be realistic. They’ll be done shooting the movie in a couple of weeks, and then he’ll be gone. It’s not like you and Raf, where he just lives on the other side of town. I’ll probably never see him again.”

“Or,”
I say, “he falls madly in love with you and never forgets you, even when he’s starring in a really romantic
movie with some beautiful actress, and then he comes back for you and you two live happily ever after.”

Becca scoffs at my vision of Leigh Ann’s future. “And let me guess, in this little fairy-tale fantasy of yours, they live right next door to you and Raf—and Tillie, of course—and your kids play together every day.”

Wait a minute. Has Rebecca been reading my diary?

Leigh Ann uses the mention of Raf’s name to steer the conversation away from her and in my direction. “What’s the latest with you two, anyway? Is he still acting weird?”

Despite my best efforts to hide it, my friends know I’ve been obsessing about Raf’s Friday night good-night non-kiss.

“It’s been a pretty quiet week so far,” I say. “He won’t admit that anything’s wrong, but he still isn’t really talking to me. I tried calling him last night, but he said he had to do his homework.”

“Ouch,” says Becca. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“Gee, thanks, Bec,” I say. “Now I feel
much
better.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for,” she adds, grinning.

Leigh Ann throws her arm around my shoulders. “Don’t listen to her, Sophie. Just give him a little time. He’ll call. I promise.”

Later, while Tillie is helping me study for a Spanish quiz by eating my vocabulary flash cards, my phone rings. I cross my fingers as I flip it over to see the screen; it’s
still
not Raf. I try not to sound too disappointed when I answer.

“Hey, Bec.”

“We have a problem,” says a more-serious-than-I’m-used-to Rebecca.

“Who’s we?” The first thought that races through my brain is that this is where she tells me that she’s really sorry, but Raf is dropping me to go out with her. The second is that the rest of the Blazers have decided to kick me out of the band. I brace for the worst, wondering how I’ll respond to either piece of news.

I’m dead wrong, of course; it’s something completely different. “You, me. Margaret. Leigh Ann. The Agency.”

“Ooh, I like the sound of that: the
Agency
. Sounds very clandestine.”

“Clan—what?”

“Secret. So, big problem or little problem?”

“Huge. It’s about the painting.”

“What? Did you find something?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bummer. So it
was
painted after 1961.”

“I dunno. Probably.”

“Becca, what are you talking about? Was it or wasn’t it?”

“This is a different problem. Remember that nice big picture that Father Julian gave us? Where the painting is really clear? Well, I was looking at it, and then comparing it to the picture that I took of the actual painting that Father Julian showed us in the rectory. And guess what—they’re not the same. It’s just a slight difference, but they are two different paintings—I’m positive.”

“How can that be?”

“Somebody made a copy—an almost-perfect copy. They made one little mistake in the bottom right-hand corner, six or eight inches up. There’s a place where two squares are on top of each other. In Father Julian’s painting, the darker square overlaps the lighter one, but in the old photo with his great-grandparents, it’s the other way around. There are dozens of overlapping squares, so this one doesn’t stand out. The only way anyone can possibly tell is by doing what I did—comparing the original to the copy.”

“We need to tell Margaret and Leigh Ann,” I say. “And Father Julian. This changes everything. If the painting is a fake, then it really doesn’t matter when it
was painted. Can you print out a nice big copy of your picture for tomorrow?”

“Way ahead of you, St. Pierre. Oh, and, Soph?”

“Yeah?”

“About Raf.”

Uh-oh. Here it comes.

“Uh-huh. What about him?”

“I’m sorry about earlier—you know, when I said that about it not sounding good. L.A.’s right. He’s gonna call. And if he doesn’t, I’m gonna go over to the West Side and kick his skinny little butt.”

“Thanks. That’s really sweet.”

After school on Tuesday, Becca presents her two-paintings theory to a bewildered Father Julian. It is hard to argue with her analysis of the two pictures. Even though the portrait of his great-grandparents is black and white, the contrast of the light and dark squares is unmistakable, especially when viewed through the loupe. When Father Julian breaks out the painting, we go over every square inch, comparing it to the painting shown in the portrait. Everything else about it is perfect, down to the little curlicue in the bottom of the
y
in Pommeroy.

“This is remarkable, Rebecca,” Father Julian marvels. “I might have looked at those two pictures side by side for ten years and not seen what you saw in a few moments.”

“I guess that’s what they mean by an ‘artistic eye,’ ” I say.

“So now what?” Margaret asks. “Even if we know this painting isn’t the same as the one in the old picture, it still doesn’t tell us about
that
picture. Do you have any idea how—or when—the two paintings could have been switched? Or where the other one might be?”

“No, but I know who would know, if anyone does,” says Father Julian, standing. “Girls, it’s time for a visit with Aunt Cathy.”

“Right now?” Leigh Ann asks.

“No time like the present,” he replies. “And besides, I know she’s home today. You’ll get to meet my cousin Debbie, too. You know, this makes me wonder about
everything
those folks in that gallery said. I’m more convinced than ever that they weren’t being completely honest with me.”

Margaret gives me a nudge with her elbow and whispers in my ear, “Maybe this is a good time to tell him about the baseball.”