Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (7 page)

“Don’t stress him out, Ma,” I whispered. “It’s okay.”

Mom’s knuckles were white as she gripped the cake knife, and her mouth tightened into a line as she sliced. When Grumps was having a bad day, it was best to just go with it, but she didn’t get that.

“Do you want some cake, dear?” Nini asked. She tucked a napkin under Grumps’s chin and wheeled him closer to the table.

Grumps shook his head. “I don’t like cake,” he answered.

Mom made a funny hissing sound through her teeth. Grumps—old Grumps, pre-Alzheimer’s Grumps—
loved
cake. Like, love-loved it. My heart dropped.

When I visited him on bad memory days, we sat on the porch together and just hung out. Angel told me not to say
much when things were rough, just to try and be still and enjoy Grumps’s company. It was super-hard—some days more than others—but I’d learned to do it. For me, spending time with him, even if he didn’t know I was there, was way more important to me than forcing him to fight the disease that he couldn’t beat.

Mom’s not big into accepting things.

Nini prattled on about graduation, and I sat next to Grumps, just holding his hand. Mom sliced the cake and put it on small round plastic plates and passed out forks. When we’d finished, Mom and Nini took the leftover cake to the rec room so the staff could share it with the other residents. I stayed with Grumps, who’d started mumbling in his sleep. Now would be the perfect time to push him about Sully Cupcakes, but the thought of sending him into a really bad state scared me.

“Hey, Joe,” I said, trying out a deep “tough guy” voice, “it’s Sully. Where’s my stuff?”

He opened his eyes and stared right into mine.

“I hid ’em, Sully, just like you wanted.”

His eyes darted around the room like he wanted to make sure no one was listening, and then he leaned in even closer, whispering even more quietly, “No one will ever find them either.”

Ice water ran through my veins, and my vision got a little gray around the edges from my heart slamming so hard. I had to hold it together. Grumps stared at me like he expected a response—his blue eyes were totally focused on mine and his bushy eyebrows nearly met over his nose—and I needed a
sec to figure out what the right words would be. How could I get him to tell me more about Sully?

“Where?” I tried.

“Don’t ask me
where,”
he said harshly, a wavering finger pointing in my direction. His eyes narrowed to slits. Okay, bad tactic. I tried to calm him down.

“I’m not even going to look,” I soothed.

Grumps laughed a not-funny laugh. “You’ll look, all right,” he said, “but you’ll never find them. I’m not afraid of you, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart?
Who does he think he’s talking to? I doubted he called Sully Cupcakes “sweetheart.”

He put that pointy finger away and folded his hands on the table, right where my cake plate had been.

“I’m sure you hid them really well,” I said. I had one eye on the door. Mom and Nini would be back any second, and if they caught me rattling Grumps, I’d be done for.

Grumps nodded. “Sweetie, you have no idea. The concert, especially. So stop asking me, ’Cause if you don’t, I’ll just make a few phone calls and collect the reward money instead.” He paused, and I thought he was done. But he pursed his lips together and leaned forward, eyes burning into mine. They were not the soft blue eyes of the grandfather who’d swabbed my cuts and taught me to ride a two-wheeler—instead, they were hard and emotionless. Startled, I had to fight the urge not to push away from the table. Was
this
the real Grumps?!

“I’m not afraid of your two-bit gangster malarkey,” he growled. “Don’t even
think
of messing with me.” After he
was done saying that, Grumps flopped back in his seat, tired. Drifting always wears him out, but that one made him extra-tired, because he looked kind of…faded, I guess you’d say. He closed his eyes. I closed mine briefly too, in relief. “I won’t,” I said.

Grumps responded by snoring softly.

Feeling like I’d just won a scary, twisted lottery, I wiped my sweaty palms on my owl tights and skirt and cleared my throat. A second later, Mom and Nini came back into the room. While Nini tucked a blanket around Grumps, Mom turned a critical eye to me.

“You don’t look right,” she said. Curse her magical mom-vision!

“I’m fine,” I said, probably a little too quickly. Her eyes narrowed.

“I’m going to take him back to his room,” Nini said. I lightly pecked Grumps on the head. His fluff of hair tickled my nose.

Mom brushed his hand with hers. “Bye, Dad,” she whispered.

The door clicked as they left. I leaned against the wall thinking about Grumps’s drift. He’d hid Sully’s items, that much was obvious. But who was the “sweetheart” he was talking about? Had The Redhead been to see him? Had she hurt him? Anger boiled in me. I clenched my fists and forced my mind back to what he’d said.

What was up with the concert? Did he hide music? Why would Sully want that?

And what was that bit about the reward money?

Later that night, after the silent ride home from Alton Rivers, I found Ollie online and spilled what had happened with Grumps. He didn’t know what to make of it either.

Oxnfree: Clock’s ticking. What do you think Sully C wants?

HubRockr45: No idea…Let’s exercise the T pass.

Oxnfree: Totally. Tick-tick-tick.

We decided to head into town around mid-morning. After he signed off to check out cache sites for the trip, I opened my browser history to the block of Sully Cupcakes sites. I clicked the encyclopedia article and read it more carefully this time.

Nothing in Sully’s background jumped out at me, so I moved on to the list of crimes. Sully wanted “items” back, and Grumps had said that he’d hid something—actually, he’d said hid “them,” which meant more than one thing—but most of the stuff on Sully’s list was related to money. Or murder. And I still wanted to believe that Grumps wouldn’t do anything as bad as that. I
had
to believe that.

Then, smack in the middle of the article, sticking out like an igloo in a desert, was “1990—Suspected ringleader. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Art Theft.”

Even though it happened way before I was even born, I knew a little about the Gardner case—everyone in Boston did. At least, everyone who went to public school and took the annual Gardner Museum field trip in sixth grade did. Back in 1990, two guys dressed as Boston cops broke in during the middle of the night and stole a bunch of super-expensive paintings and some ancient artifacts, and they’d never been caught. And the stuff has never turned up. But here’s the creeptastic part of the whole story: Because of the agreement that Isabella Gardner, the founder of the museum, had set up ages ago,
the museum has to leave the stolen paintings’ empty frames hanging on the wall.

I shuddered, remembering walking into the gallery and seeing the blank outlines. The spots make you feel both sad and guilty—sad because they’re a reminder that you’ll never see what’s supposed to be there, and guilty because it’s like those empty rectangles accuse everyone who walks in of hiding the missing art.

There was a link to the encyclopedia entry about the Gardner situation, and I clicked over to that. It outlined the basics of the theft—thirteen pieces stolen in one night, including eleven paintings, a ku (which is a museum-fancy word for vase), and an eagle doohickey off the top of an old flagpole. A five-million-dollar reward was offered for their return. Five million! Then there was a list of the names of the paintings, with a little image of each one. I scrolled down, and there, in bright blue letters, I saw:

Vermeer,
The Concert
(1658-1660).

The painting was of three people: a long-haired man, whose back was to the viewer, and two women. One had pigtails and was playing a piano-looking instrument, and the other was singing. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, and the people were way at the back of the painting, with some other instruments closer to the front.

Earlier, when he’d mentioned “the concert,” I thought Grumps was talking about music, but seeing the title of the painting set off a chain reaction in my brain:

Grumps hid stuff. Really well, evidently.

The Gardner art was still missing.

Grumps hid stuff for Sully Cupcakes.

Grumps mentioned “the concert.”

There may as well have been a flashing neon EQUALS sign in my bedroom, it was so obvious:

Grumps had hidden the art for Sully Cupcakes, and now that Sully was out of prison, he wanted it back. That’s what The Redhead was sent to get!

And I realized that I had a very big problem. There was no way for Sully to get the art back, unless Grumps remembered where he’d put it. And based on the conversation I’d had with him at Alton Rivers, even if he
did
still know where it was, he had no plans to tell Sully. Why didn’t he want Sully to have the art (besides the obvious—that it was stolen and belonged in its museum)?

Regardless of Grumps’s motives in keeping the paintings a secret, this was
not
“small-time” work. My hands tingled and my knees went watery. In math, no matter how many times
you do a problem, there’s only one right answer. Every way I looked at the evidence in front of me, Grumps’s involvement in the Gardner heist was the only conclusion. And that was not the answer I wanted.

I counted the squares on my calendar: Eleven days to find out the truth before something awful happened. And, despite all of the doubts I had about Grumps, I was totally certain about one thing: Sully Cupcakes was not messing around. That threat from The Redhead was real. Who should I tell?

What would I do, go into some police station and say: “My Alzheimer’s-suffering criminal grandfather probably hid the paintings from the Gardner museum for Sully Cupcakes, but I don’t know where or when. Oh, and now Sully wants them back or he’s going to do something awful to me. Maybe.” That was crazy! No one would believe me. My mom and grandmother would probably kill me for going to the police and breaking family trust, and Grumps—no matter what state he was in—would be furious. I knew that much. Besides, even if I
didn’t
go to the police, and told Mom instead, she would totally flip over my safety. Before I could climb the flight of stairs to my room, my stuff would be packed and headed to the Granite State. And who knows if Nini would even be able to get Grumps into a facility as good as Alton Rivers up there? Maybe they’d have to stay behind, and Sully would be after them!

Better something happen to me than one of them. I was on my own.

I needed a plan of attack, some logical steps to follow to
make sure I did the right thing. I sat at my desk, doodling in a notebook as I thought it through. What if the paintings were found? What if Grumps’s hiding place was revealed? Sully would go away, we’d be safe, no spontaneous move to New Hampshire, problem solved.

I started to get that nagging “missing piece to a math problem” feeling…

It came to me like a flash as I was shading a question mark. Duh! I was staring at my geometry notebook! The most reasonable of all math. Mr. Crespo had said that we could use geometry proofs to perfectly reason out any puzzle—from what to have for dinner to what movie to see. If I could literally do a proof on the Gardner situation, maybe I’d be able to figure out where Grumps put the paintings!

I flipped to a blank page and drew a giant T. Across the top of the sheet I wrote the statement, which is what the proof is trying to, well, prove. I whack-whack-whacked the table with the pencil, and then printed:
Grumps hid the paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft for Sully Cupcakes.
Seeing the words on the page caused my breath to lock up in my chest, but I kept going.

Underneath the statement came the given, which is what you know so far about the problem you’re about to solve.
Grumps said that he’d hid “them” from Sully, which he’d never find—especially
The Concert—
and now there’s a psycho redhead stalking me and trying to get the art back
, I wrote. I paused, then added,
By the Fourth of July.

Eleven days.

Below those lines was the proof box: that big letter
T.
On the left side, above the cross line, I wrote
Statements.
On the right were
Reasons.
At the very bottom of the statements column, I re-printed the initial statement. Now I just had to go through the steps of filling out the proof: Each time I found out a fact, I’d write it in the statements column. And then I’d give the reason in the reason column. It’d create a step-by-step path right to the truth—or, in this case—the paintings.

I dropped my pencil on the desk, leaned back in my chair, took a deep breath, and surveyed myself. No jitters, no pounding heart. Setting up the proof had calmed me down and now, at least, I had a place to keep my thoughts. The next thing I needed to do was identify the steps needed to solve the problem.

Step one: a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.