The Gallery

Dial Books for Young Readers

Penguin Young Readers Group

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Laura Marx Fitzgerald

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eBook ISBN 9781101614259

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fitzgerald, Laura Marx, author.

Title: The gallery / Laura Marx Fitzgerald.

Description: New York, NY : Dial Books for Young Readers, [2016] |

Summary: In 1929 New York City, twelve-year-old housemaid Martha O'Doyle suspects that a wealthy recluse may be trying to communicate with the outside world through the paintings on her gallery walls.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015029009 | ISBN 9780525428657 (hardback)

Subjects: | CYAC: Mystery and detective stories. | Household employees—Fiction. | Art—Fiction. | Irish Americans—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—History—1898–1951—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Mysteries & Detective Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / United States / 20th Century. | JUVENILE FICTION / Art & Architecture.

Classification: LCC PZ7.F575357 Gal 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015029009

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket illustration © 2016 by Sarah J. Coleman

Art direction by Lindsey Andrews

For Mom and Dad

and

Anne
Cope

Chapter

May 2016

O
ne of the tabloid papers, the
New York Yodel
, has a midsection where they feature some poor sap who's hung around long enough to make it to one hundred.

This time, the poor sap is me.

Last week the paper sent this young whip of a girl to interview me. She bounced around the linoleum room, poking around the photos on my bureau.

“Is she awake?” she asked Jolene, the day nurse, like I wasn't even there, and as soon as I stirred, she started shouting questions like “What's the secret to happiness?” in my ear.

Like living to one hundred makes you happy, and not creaky and constipated.

I just gave the addled smile I use to make people
think I'm senile and pointed lamely to my throat. I haven't been able to speak for thirty years, since I had my voice box removed. Cancer of the larynx. Don't smoke, kids.

“Oh, right,” the young reporter ducked her head. “I forgot. Well, here—” she thrust a legal pad and a pen into my lap. “You can write the answers.”

I held up my gnarled hands and shrugged. Arthritis.

“Oh.” She gingerly picked up the pad and pen again, afraid to brush against my paper-thin skin. Back they went into this large satchel like newsboys used to carry. “Do you know,” she said, rustling around for something else, “I looked you up in our archives, and I found you! Martha O'Doyle, right? I checked the dates. This must be you.” She pulled out a regular sheet of paper, but printed on it was an old newspaper article. It was the last time I was in the papers, eighty-seven years ago. I recognized the headline.

March 26, 1929

BOMB KILLS NEWSPAPER TYCOON AND HIS “WILD ROSE”!

Priceless Art Collection Destroyed!

Rose “battier than a church bell!” says maid.

New York society was rocked last night by a bomb that exploded just past midnight in the home of newspaper tycoon, J. Archer Sewell. Killed in the blast were both Mr. Sewell and his wife, the former Rose Pritchard, heiress to the Union-Eastern Railroad fortune.

The couple's lavish Fifth Avenue mansion, once site of some of society's most opulent entertainments, was destroyed.

Lost, too, was Mrs. Sewell's art collection, described as “unrivaled” by experts and glimpsed only by guests of the increasingly reclusive Sewell family. The collection—which included paintings by great artists like Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Courbet, as well as living painters like the “modern” sensation, Pablo Picasso—was speculated to be worth millions.

As of this morning, it is an ash heap.

The attack came as no surprise to J. Archer Sewell's detractors. As publisher of this newspaper's rival, the
Daily Standard
, Sewell was known as a staunch defender of traditional American values in today's rocky times. His hard-charging rhetoric made him not a few enemies, especially among immigrants, “wets,” anarchists, and other targets of his paper's wrath.

Yet the drawing rooms of Fifth Avenue are abuzz that “Wild Rose” herself may have been behind the bombing. The former Miss Pritchard's outrageous teen-aged antics are familiar to the
Yodel
's more faithful readers. The young heiress was rumored to have suffered a mental breakdown shortly after her marriage.

Sources close to the heiress say that her behavior had become increasingly erratic, and in recent years she often refused to leave her rooms. Mrs. Sewell's more recent outbursts were captured in this very paper.

But was this former debutante capable of an act of such shocking violence?

“I wouldn't put it past her,” shared Martha O'Doyle, a young housemaid of Irish extraction. “She was nuttier than a fruit cake, always howling in her room like a right lunatic. If you ask me, she set off that bomb herself.

“She should've been locked up in a madhouse,” continued the outspoken young “colleen.” “It was only through Mr. Sewell's kindness, God bless him, that she could remain in her home, with all her comforts about her.” Here young Martha stopped to wipe her eyes. “He was a true gentleman, Mr. Sewell was.”

However, detectives are investigating all possible suspects, including members of the Sewell household staff, one of whom is said to have recently fled the country. Police were unable to share more details, but have asked readers to come forward with any information that might aid their investigation.

I let the page flutter to my lap.

Like most stories in the paper, it was full of lies.

“I've been reading up on the bombing. Did you know you're the only living eyewitness?” the girl reporter said breathlessly, her pen at the ready. “The only one who knows what really happened.”

I shrugged again.

She heaved a frustrated sigh, her schemes to move off the back page human-interest stories clearly roadblocked. “I mean, you're a hundred years old! You won't last forev—”

Here I pretended to fall asleep, which I sometimes do in the middle of conversations anyway. By the way she poked my arm with her finger, I could tell she thought I had joined the heavenly choir. When I heard her footsteps die away, I opened my eyes again. Her business card was resting on my lap.

—

Today, a week later, the morning staff crowded around my bed singing
Happy Birthday
, and Jolene brought me the paper.

“Now, looka you, Miz O'Doyle. You just as pretty as evah,” she said as she opened it up to my photo.

LOCAL LASS LICKS 100!

—

Miss Martha O'Doyle, lifelong Brooklyn resident and longtime bon vivant, raises a glass of bubbly to celebrate her hundredth! She credits her astonishing longevity to “always looking on the bright side.”

I didn't say any of that. The picture shows me sitting in my wheelchair with a glass of champagne the girl reporter stuck in my hand; I didn't drink that either. All I can take are these energy shakes now.

“And whatta nice smile,” continued Jolene. “Like a beauty queen.”

I was just trying to stifle a belch. Which was nice of me, I thought, because usually I don't bother. I gave the paper back to Jolene and had her wheel me over to the window.

Most folks at Shaded Acres (actually a sun-blasted high-rise surrounded by “acres” of Brooklyn concrete) won't take rooms on the cemetery side. But I
requested this side for the same reason I always ride in the front seat: I like to see where I'm going.

I can see where I've been, too. Because from my window, I can make out Rose's final resting place on the hill. Even though it's surrounded by auto-body shops today, Green-Wood Cemetery was once the final destination of the rich and fancy, and lucky for me those folks paid their gardeners in perpetuity.

At this time of year, I have front-row seats to the spectacle. First the shock of yellow forsythia against the bleak gray sky, then the Japanese magnolias, the cherry blossoms, the lilacs. After the grand finale—the climbing roses—the summer leaves fill in like a curtain coming down on a show. And I have to wait until winter strips the place bare before I catch sight of the Pritchard family plot again.

Every spring, it's like Rose is signaling me in this blooming-and-dying Morse code: Meet me here.

That girl reporter was right. This would likely be my last spring show, my last message from Rose, my last chance to tell my story.

—

The next day, I got one of those youngster volunteers to show me how the computers work. He brought me the kind that folds up and showed me how to open a page, type on it, erase my mistakes.

The day after that, I rubbed some Ben-Gay into my hands, gave up my Jell-O to Saint Peter for a little more longevity, and, with my crooked fingers, I looked for the truth among the keys.