The Mistaken Masterpiece (9 page)

Oh, didn’t I mention that she gets up every morning at five? Or that when she is up,
everyone
must be up? Must have slipped my mind.

There are no weekends in a dog’s life.

• • •

At lunchtime, as we regale anyone who will listen with tales of our day on the
No Reflections
set, Sister Bernadette hands Rebecca an envelope with
THE RED BLAZER GIRLS DETECTIVE AGENCY
printed in neat letters.

“I was asked to deliver this,” she says. “I hope and pray that this does not lead to another one of your little adventures. But if it does, girls, know this: I will be watching you. Understood?” She stomps away, glaring at a table of girls loudly singing—for who knows what reason—the theme song from
Gilligan’s Island
.

“Jeez, who peed in her orange juice? Oops, sorry, Margaret. I know you hate when I say that,” Rebecca says with a malevolent grin.

“Seriously,” agrees Leigh Ann. “All we did last time was save the life of a guy locked in a room in the basement, solve an impossible crime, prevent an innocent man from going to jail, and recover a priceless violin. We’re, like, heroes. She should be praying that it
is
a new case.”

“Why, the very fate of the world might be in our hands,” I say.

“Easy there, Sophie. She’s still annoyed that we didn’t tell her about Ben as soon as we knew,” Margaret says.

In the Case of the Vanishing Violin, Sister Bernadette hired us to figure out who was doing unauthorized cleaning and remodeling in the school after hours. It didn’t take us long to figure out who—Ben Brownlow, the new
assistant at the violin shop—but when he became the key suspect in the theft of the violin, we kept that information to ourselves for a while. Like, until we solved the whole case.

Becca tears open the envelope and pulls out a note written on personalized stationery.

“It’s from Father Julian.”

Father Julian is the young, slightly-bigger-than-a-hobbit priest who saved our butts more than once during the Ring of Rocamadour case.

“A favor. Hmmm. Maybe he’s going to ask Sophie to take care of
his
dog, too,” Rebecca says.

In the past, that kind of crack would have earned her a good punch on the arm, but the new, improved Sophie St. Pierre lets it go without a thought. Well, except for the one where I’m thinking about how I’m letting it go without a thought.

“Can everybody make it today?” Margaret asks. “We owe him at least one favor. Maybe two.”

We all nod. We are
so
ready for our next case.

• • •

Father Julian greets us at the door, and after we assure him that we’re in no hurry to get anywhere else, he invites us into a comfortable living room while he goes off to the kitchen to get us some sodas. All the furniture in the room looks like something from the set of a 1960s sitcom, but it’s all still like new. I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have kids running around the place. The TV is my personal favorite; it’s not just a TV—it looks like an actual piece of furniture with its real wood cabinet and carved legs. It even has one of those rabbit-ears antennas sitting on top of it. The thing should be in a museum.

“Ah, I see you’re admiring our antique television,” Father Julian remarks. “It’s a classic. We’re thinking we might upgrade next year to color.”

Leigh Ann’s head tilts slightly to the left, reminding me of the way Tillie looks when she’s trying hard to understand something I’m saying. “What do you mean?”

Father Julian laughs out loud. “I forget how young you girls are. I’ll bet you’ve never seen a black-and-white television, have you?”

Leigh Ann nods. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing. You’re serious—there’s no color at all, like old movies?”

“Exactly. Everything looks like an old movie.” He turns it on, and we wait. “It takes a while to warm up,” he says, tapping his foot. “Like a few days. Okay, here we go. There’s channel two. And channel four. See?
Black-and-white. And no remote control, but that’s not so bad. We only get four stations, so there’s not a lot of channel surfing going on anyway.”

“No cable?” Becca says in disbelief.

“Not yet, but in April we’re going for it, if only to be able to watch Yankees and Mets games. The priests here are split about evenly between the two teams—and then there’s Father Danahey. He’s from Boston.”

’Nuff said.

After clicking the TV off, he sets a large cloth tote bag on the coffee table in front of us and starts to talk.

“Okay, I’ll start with the basics, and then I can always add details later if you need them. But here’s the bottom line: I have a case for you girls.”

Margaret smiles at me, then nods at Father Julian. “I thought you might.”

“Is it something good?” Becca asks. “Don’t tell me someone’s cleaning the church after hours. I want something
juicy
.”

“Hmmm. I think this qualifies. But before we get into all that, are you girls Yankees fans?”

“Not me!” says Leigh Ann. “Mets all the way.”

“She’s from Queens,” I explain. “But the rest of us are. Why?”

“Well, you might be interested in this.” He stops, reaches into the tote bag, and pulls out something wrapped in tissue paper. When he unwraps it, we see it’s an old baseball in good shape—no scuff marks or dings—but the cover has definitely yellowed with age.

“Are those autographs?” Margaret asks, leaning over the table for a closer look.

“Yes, they are. The entire starting lineup for the 1928 Yankees. This one is Babe Ruth, and here’s Lou Gehrig. They’re all there.” He hands the ball to Rebecca to admire. “There’s just
one
little problem.”

He takes another baseball from the bag and holds it up next to the first. It is the same dingy color and has the same signatures in exactly the same places.

“Wow!” I say. “Are they both real?”

Father Julian smiles. “I suppose that is a possibility, but as a reasonable man, I have to think that it is
highly
unlikely, to say the least.”

“Where did they come from?” Margaret asks.

“Ah, now that’s a good story. My great-uncle Phillip and his younger brother Oliver somehow managed to get two tickets for seats in the outfield for a World Series game. According to family legend, they sat just to the left of the foul pole in left field, but I can’t be certain about that. The Yankees were batting in the bottom of the eighth inning and Lou Gehrig hit a long fly ball that curved foul—right into Phillip’s glove.”

“Cool,” I say. I’ve been to the old Yankee Stadium a few times, but I’ve never even come
close
to catching a foul ball.

“After the game, Phillip and Oliver head over toward the Yankees’ dugout, and with a little luck and some good old-fashioned begging, they managed to get every
starter’s autograph. Phillip takes the ball home and is, I’m sure, the envy of every kid in the Bronx.”

Father Julian stops to take a swig of his soda. “But somehow, between 1928 and now, this second ball appeared, and we don’t know which is which. To tell the truth, we’d forgotten about them until Dad came across them when he was cleaning out the garage.”

Margaret takes a closer look at the two baseballs. “I’ll bet we can figure out which is the original. There has to be a way to tell.”

“Well, you’re welcome to try,” Father Julian says. “That would be a huge help. So I guess you now have two cases instead of one.” From behind the couch where we’re sitting, he retrieves a package, about two feet square and neatly wrapped in brown kraft paper.

“This is the real reason you’re here,” he says, carefully removing the paper. “And, Rebecca, I think you are going to find this
especially
interesting.”

“Why her especially?” I ask.

“Because she is an artist, and this case involves a piece of art.”

He holds up a painting—a very modern, abstract picture of rows of overlapping squares in bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens, surrounded by a simple wooden frame that is painted silver. It looks vaguely familiar, like something I’ve seen on a museum visit with my parents.

“Holy cr—er, cow!” exclaims Becca. “Is that a Pommeroy?”

“Elizabeth Harriman wasn’t kidding—you
do
know your art,” says Father Julian. “That’s exactly right. How do you know about Pommeroy?”

“We studied some of his paintings in my class. He always uses those same primary and secondary colors, and there’s always some repetition of a simple geometric pattern—sort of his trademark.”

I look at Becca with a newfound sense of admiration. I had no idea she knew so much.

“Are you saying
this
is by a famous artist?” Leigh Ann says, sounding a bit—no, make that a
lot
—skeptical. “I mean, I guess it’s pretty, but I could—”

“Stop! If you say you could paint something just as good, I’ll slug you,” Becca warns her.

“Jeez. You artists are so touchy!” Leigh Ann says, backing away from
l’artiste
.

“Well, Rebecca can correct me if I get any of the facts about the artist wrong, but let me tell you the story behind this painting,” Father Julian says. “And it starts a generation earlier, with my great-grandfather. He was what they call a finish carpenter—one of the people who did all that fancy woodwork in old houses—and from what I hear, he was one of the best. Sometime in the late 1950s, he was hired by Leonard Pommeroy to put up some wooden ceiling molding in his house out on the North Shore of Long Island. It should have been a quick job, but once Pommeroy discovered how talented my great-grandfather was, he kept finding more and more things for him to do, until he had spent several weeks
there. They were both artists of a kind, I suppose, and became friends. When it came time to settle the bill, the artist was short of cash, and offered
this
to him in exchange. Now, my great-grandfather didn’t know the difference between a Picasso and a paint-by-number, but he was at least aware of Pommeroy’s reputation and he liked the painting. So he made the deal.”

“Ohmigosh, and now it’s worth, like, a million dollars, right?” I say, getting excited.

“Hold on,” Father Julian says. “It’s not that simple. So when my great-grandfather died in the sixties, the painting passed to his oldest child, Alice—my grandmother. She died in 2002 and left it to my father. My brother and sister and I are all trying to convince him to sell it and enjoy the money—travel with Mom, whatever he wants. They’ve lived frugally all their lives; they deserve it. Besides, he has never liked the painting. Goodness knows my siblings don’t need the money. My brother is a successful broker on Wall Street, and my sister is a partner in a big law firm in San Francisco. Which leaves me—and I certainly don’t want or need it. Well, we finally talked Dad into letting me take the painting to an expert to find out its value before trying to sell it. I did a little research and found a gallery that specializes in artists from the fifties and sixties, run by three generations of the same family. I don’t know if they were trying to keep my expectations low or just playing it cool in case they wanted to buy it, but they acted very blasé about it. There’s more to the story—I’ll tell you the rest
in a minute—but the most important part they told me is that before we can sell it, we have to be able to
prove
it was painted before 1961.”

“What’s so special about 1961?” Margaret asks.

“That’s the year Pommeroy was killed in a car accident,” Becca, who has suddenly become a walking and talking Wikipedia entry, answers.

“But …” The gears in Margaret’s brain are spinning so fast she makes a whirring sound when she opens her mouth. “But that doesn’t make sense. If he died in 1961, how could it possibly have been painted
after
1961?”

A perfectly reasonable question,
n’est-ce pas?

“The not-so-reasonable answer to that question is that
he
couldn’t have painted it, but someone in his family might have,” Father Julian explains.

“Oh, right. I heard about that,” says Becca. “After he died, his sleazy family swooped in like vultures and found every scrap of paper and canvas the poor guy ever made a mark on. He used to prepare dozens of canvases in advance, doing really simple underpaintings in light gray or light blue. He would set them up all over his studio, and after a while, if he liked the way the shapes were arranged, he would add the color, and if he didn’t, he would just paint the whole thing over with white and start again. Because he always used the same colors, it wasn’t too hard for them to keep the Pommeroy money train chugging down the track.”

“They kept it up for years,” adds Father Julian. “And since he always had rocky relationships with the galleries
that sold his work, neither he nor anybody else had reliable records of what he painted or when he painted it. It has created quite a pickle for people who want to buy or sell his work today. So here’s the bottom line, Sophie: it’s not worth a million dollars, but it is worth quite a bit
if
—and that’s a big if—we can prove it was painted before Pommeroy died.”

“What’s the rest of the story?” I ask. “You promised to tell us.”

“Oh, right. Well, when I first arrived at the gallery, I spoke to a young woman, but when I showed her the painting, she immediately went into the back room and brought out someone else—a young man who looked like he might be her brother. His eyes lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw the painting. He tried to hide it, but I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me. Then they
both
went into the back for a few minutes. I wasn’t
trying
to eavesdrop, mind you, but I did overhear a few snippets—there were some raised voices. Things like ‘under wraps until we know for sure’ and ‘not according to that moron’s notes’ and ‘make a lowball offer right now, just in case.’ And … I’m not positive, but I am pretty sure I caught the word ‘masterpiece’ in there somewhere. They didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that they were playing fairly.”