Arts and Thefts Page 8

  Also, no matter what Becca said, I didn’t trust Quinn. She was too confident, too ready to concede winning a competition that was worth so much and had everyone and their parents sweating bullets. She had a connection to Lee that bothered me. She was hiding something, I could smell it. I’d prove it to Becca somehow.

  “We have two strong suspects,” I said.

  “We have one.”

  “Two. Lee and Quinn. Humor me, okay? If Quinn’s innocent, she has nothing to worry about, right?”

  Becca nodded grudgingly, so I continued.

  “How about this? I search their things. Search only. I don’t remove anything. And I do it, not you. That way you don’t get in trouble.”

  Becca stared at me. For a moment I thought she’d nod or something, but instead she turned away and said, “Sorry. We can’t do that.”

  “You go through my stuff all the time.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because I have reason and I’m too young to get a warrant . . .” She froze, then turned back to me openmouthed.

  “Reason,” Becca repeated, and I understood.

  “You search my things because in your mind I’m a thief,” I said. “That gives you a reasonable suspicion.”

  “And we have the same suspicions about Lee.”

  “And Quinn.”

  “Fine. And Quinn.” Becca grinned. “Perfect.”

  “Shall we?” I gestured back to the museum we’d left less than an hour before, and we exited the shed, closing the door behind us.

  Becca pulled out her cell phone.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Calling Heather for a guest list from her pool party when the brushes were stolen. I want to know if both of our suspects were there.”

  “Good plan.” I pushed on the door, which didn’t seem to want to close again.

  “Don’t worry about it. The disguises should be safe there, if we need them again,” Becca said. She dialed a number on her phone as she walked. I followed. “The shed’s better than under a rock or behind someone’s art. Lucky we found one that was unlocked.”

  “I can hardly believe it myself.”

  Becca narrowed her eyes and watched me. I ignored her. She knew I’d picked the lock on the shed, and I waited for the fight to start. But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lips twitch and curl into a smile. Then she raised the phone to her ear, still grinning. I might have been wrong, but I think, in some small way, she appreciated that the best lockpicker in Scottsville Middle had her back.

  TWO KIDS WALKING INTO THE locker room at the museum didn’t arouse any suspicion, but once we got inside, we encountered a couple of problems.

  A couple? More like a couple hundred.

  “How does a museum this small have so many lockers?” Becca marveled as we walked around the small room, which was complete with a single fluffy chair for sitting and waiting while your friends stashed or grabbed their things.

  “To be fair, the lockers are small too.” I found a stretch of one-foot-square lockers with stickers on them: RESERVED FOR YOUNG ARTISTS AND THEIR FAMILIES. “Oh, look. They gift-wrap. Beautiful.”

  But, unfortunately for a poor, hapless retrieval specialist, the museum had forgotten to label each one with the name of the person who rented it.

  “By the way,” Becca said, holding up her phone. “I got the guest list, and it’s disappointing. Heather said she could send me a list of people she invited, but a lot of them didn’t show, and those who did come brought friends who weren’t invited.”

  “Are you going to ask for that list?”

  “No point if it’s not accurate. But Heather did say she remembers seeing Lee, Ethan, and the Eccles sisters at the party.” She fell silent, biting her lip and frowning.

  “So our suspects are still our suspects. Well, better get started.” I rested my palm on the combination lock of the first locker in the row.

  Becca pulled my hand off the lock. “Hang on. You can’t go through all of them.”

  I sighed. “Fine. I will use my magnificent powers of telepathy to mentally read which locker belongs to which contestant. They all look the same! I need a little more to go on if you’re going to be all honest and noble.” I looked at her hand holding mine. “Is there something you want to tell me, now that we’re alone?”

  She let go like my fingernails had started oozing slime. “You’re not as smooth as you think you are.” Backing away, she said, “Wait here. Try not to look suspicious.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. I left the lockers and flopped down in the puffy chair. “I’m just sitting here, waiting for my mom to stop looking at paintings of ballerinas.” That would be my story, if anyone asked.

  Becca rolled her eyes and left, shaking her head. I grinned, pleased that I had managed to annoy her. Come on, it was her fault she was annoyed. She was the one taking everything personally.

  Maybe I should tone it down, I thought. I didn’t want her to throw me off the “team,” or whatever we were (symbiotes, maybe?). Either way, she seemed crankier than usual, and I should probably give her a break.

  As long as we were working toward a common goal, Becca and I were tied together. I needed to protect my friends, and Becca needed to catch a thief (and possibly a pair of saboteurs). That meant me sitting in a comfy chair while Becca got the numbers of Lee and Quinn’s lockers.

  Becca came back in, her dark hair tied into two high pigtails. “Cute,” I said.

  She gave me a look that said, quite clearly, how stupid she thought I was, as she untied the pigtails. “They make me look younger, so the guard was more willing to give me a locker number.”

  “I know. I still own a shirt with a teddy bear on the stomach for the same reason.”

  Becca smiled. “You’d probably look about five wearing it, Short Guy.”

  I smiled back. “Whatever works.”

  It was odd, and kind of nice, to be on the same page as someone when it came to stopping thieves and other bad guys, even if that person hated my guts. Case and Hack fought crime too, but they did it in their own ways. I never had someone who understood and used my own methods before.

  Before Becca and I could have a “moment,” I coughed. “The number?”

  “Lee’s family is number ninety-four. That’s the only one I could get. If I’d asked for more, the guard would have gotten suspicious.”

  “Okay. One safecracking, coming right up.” I flexed my fingers and looked up to see Becca grimacing.

  “What?”

  “Don’t call it that.”

  “Safecracking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. One act of criminal law-breaking, coming right up.” Becca flinched and I added, “You can go outside and wait, if you want.”

  “And leave you here alone with other people’s valuables? Not happening.” Becca plopped down in the chair and folded her arms.

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself.” I knelt down next to Lee’s locker. I placed my hand on the lock’s dial and pressed my ear against the door.

  Scottsville Middle’s lockers can sometimes be opened with a couple of hits or kicks in the right places. Not so at the museum. These were good lockers, new, without the dents that made the school’s lockers easily broken into. I’d practiced on the museum lockers before—over the last school year, I realized I needed to hone my safe-cracking skills, and the art museum’s isolated locker room was a much better training ground than the school’s open halls—so I knew I could open them, but wading through the clicks as contact points spun past, trying to remember each one so I could close in on the combination, took time and patience.

  Patience that Becca Mills did not have. “You’d better be quick,” she said. “The guard will notice if we don’t get out of here soon.”

  “Shhhh.” My eyes were closed, the better to listen with. “There’s an art to this, a music. You have to play it softly and listen for the beats.”

  “Save the flowing metaphors. Just get
the locker open.”

  I smiled and twisted the dial around and around, listening for the next contact point. I found it and made a mental note of it. That was two numbers found, one to go.

  A minute later, I had the three numbers of the combination: 5, 8, and 13. How Fibonacci of them. Opening my eyes, I tried the numbers in different combinations. The first three didn’t work, but the fourth did: 8, 13, 5. The lock unhitched and the door swung open when I tugged on the handle.

  I turned around, ready to counter whatever snide remark Becca might have ready for needing to take four tries to open the door (I’d like to see her do better!), but she didn’t have one. She was sitting, eyes glazed but watching me, her head in her hand. A small smile played on her lips. Oh, that wasn’t worrying at all.

  I coughed. “The door,” I said, gesturing. “It’s open. Shall we see what’s inside?”

  Becca snapped to attention. “Absolutely.” She slid off the chair and pushed me aside. I sprawled dramatically on the carpet.

  “I thought we agreed that I’d do this part,” I said, pulling myself back up.

  “Not letting you anywhere there might be valuables,” Becca reminded me.

  “That doesn’t tempt me and you know it.” I sat up and pushed Becca aside. This was my part of the job, my area of expertise, and I was going to be the one to find the incriminating evidence to prove Lee was a smug, guilty thief.

  Huh. I wondered if that was how Becca felt about me, all the time.

  Becca was still able to see what was in there, but I was the one who pushed aside a purse and a pair of sunglasses that looked too expensive to belong to a kid to reveal a camera and a notebook.

  I reached for the notebook at the same time Becca went for the camera. Our arms tangled.

  “Let go.”

  “You let go.”

  We got free and retreated to opposite sides of the locker room. I flipped through the pages of the notebook and read a few passages of the darkly inked writing. Yep, this was Lee’s, all right. The arrogant voice was the same. I skipped to the last pages. One was torn out, leaving behind a rough edge of paper. Well, that was interesting.

  “This guy likes his own face,” Becca said, pulling me out of Lee’s words. I looked over and she showed me the camera’s history—lots of selfies. “I don’t know why.”

  I snorted. “That’s not the only weird thing,” I said. “Look at this.”

  Becca took the notebook and handed me the camera. “Torn page? Not too weird. Unless . . .” She ran a finger lightly over the next page after the torn edge. “Indentations,” she said. “We can do a rubbing.”

  “We don’t even know if it’s anything worth looking at,” I said. “Let’s try this first.”

  I took the notebook to a lamp and held it under the light, tilting it until the indentations from the words written on the previous page became clear.

  I flipped back to the previous page. “Lee presses hard. We should be able to read it just fine this way.”

  Becca took the notebook back, keeping it angled under the light.

  “ ‘Dear friends and fellow artists,’ ” she read slowly, “ ‘it gives me great pleasure to accept the award for Best Overall. I have to say, I was surprised to receive it. There are so many fine artists here with us today . . . .’ ” She looked up. “An acceptance speech?”

  I nodded. I held up the camera and scrolled through the pictures. Lee really did like his own face.

  “It goes on,” Becca said. “He talks about his inspirations, he thanks his parents, and he talks about the future of his craft.”

  “Does he say anything about tragic events, or sabotage? Like, saying how shocked he is by the turn of events?”

  “No. But that might not mean he’s innocent. He did, after all, rip this page out and take it with him.”

  “For practice or to hide the evidence?”

  “One of those.” Becca laid the notebook on the floor. Then she reached under her skirt and pulled out a piece of paper, a pencil, and her own camera.

  “What the—where were you keeping that?”

  “Grow up.” Becca raised the hem of her skirt. Underneath I could see knee-length cargo shorts with pockets stocked with, well, whatever a gumshoe brings to work.

  She set the paper over the indentations and rubbed the pencil lead over it. A faint image of the speech appeared. She snapped a few shots of Lee’s acceptance speech before returning the book to the locker. “Evidence,” she said, waving the paper and camera at me. “Comes in handy later.”

  I think that was supposed to be an attack on how I’d once deleted a few of her evidence photos. Case’s homemade hall passes were in those shots; I would never feel guilty about erasing them.

  As Becca carefully tucked the rubbing away in a plastic bag and then pocketed her evidence, I scrolled through a few more pictures of Lee and Ethan posing with something that looked like Swiss cheese, melted, reshaped, and colored bright primary shades. His artwork, I guessed. In one of the pictures, though, he wasn’t with Ethan. A certain caramel-haired girl was standing, smiling, beside him.

  “Look,” I said, showing Becca. She took the camera and shook her head.

  “It doesn’t mean Quinn’s guilty,” she said. “You asked Lee if he had any friends here, and it turns out one is his competitor. So what?”

  “So what, she says.” I looked at the shot of Quinn and Lee standing side by side with their art, his a weird sculpture, hers a nasty-looking painting of a pack of rodents. It looked familiar. “Quinn goes to our school. Lee doesn’t. How do they know each other? And I’m surprised that Lee would be so close with a painter after all the things he said about them.” I opened a few more shots. “Here she is again and again. Here they are at the park, and here’s the two of them painting someone’s kitchen. There are more pictures of Quinn than there are of Ethan.” I waved the camera at Becca.

  She took it. “Look. In these she’s alone. Maybe he’s got a crush and is taking pictures from afar.”

  “Is that what you tell people when they see how many shots of me you have on your camera?” Becca blushed and I continued, “A crush could be part of it. But first Lee gives Quinn away as a friend, then they both have weird levels of confidence, and now this? You have to admit, it warrants further investigation.”

  Becca nodded. She took pictures of Lee’s pictures and then handed me the camera. I returned it and the notebook to Lee’s locker, closing the door quietly.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Another locker, I guess. Do you think you can get another number?”

  She frowned. “You want it, you go get it.”

  I sighed. “I should have brought my teddy bear shirt.”

  Becca smirked, ready to make another comment about my short stature, but before she could say anything, we heard footsteps coming from the hall.

  “Is that—” Becca started.

  “Coming our way?” I finished. “Oh yeah.”

  I thought about sitting down, pretending I was waiting for a parent, but something stopped me: I wasn’t alone this time. Becca was with me. What if the person coming wasn’t an adult? What if it was a kid from school who knew Becca and me? I couldn’t let them see us in the same room, working together!

  Becca seemed to be thinking the same thing. She glanced around, looking for a hiding place. “Looking for a closet to hide in? There isn’t one,” I said. “I’ve checked.”

  “We can’t get caught here!” Becca hissed. “I can’t be caught here, especially not with you.”

  “Serves you right for cracking safes.”

  Becca’s lip curled. Some people can’t take a joke. I rolled my eyes and pushed the chair against the wall. Then I dove under it.

  “Really?” Becca bent down to look at me.

  “Do you see anywhere else?”

  “No.” Becca frowned. “So where am I supposed to hide?”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “As long as they don’t see us together.
”

  “People know me, Wilderson. They know I’m a detective. I have no reason to be in this room other than clue hunting. What if it’s the saboteur? They’ll know we’re on to them!”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. “Hide . . . somewhere?”

  Becca snorted. “Move over.”

  “Not enough room.” I thought fast. “Here.”

  I slid the chair out a little and crouched behind it so I was mostly hidden from view. “Now get under.”

  The chair shifted as Becca pulled herself under, her face peering out from beneath the seat. We were close; Becca’s legs and mine touched as I squatted behind the chair and she pushed herself back as far as she could. Not the world’s best hiding spot, but good enough for Becca and me. She wasn’t that much taller than me, and I was in no danger of being asked to join the basketball team anytime soon.

  “Thanks for leaving me hanging,” Becca growled.

  “Sorry. I’m just not used to having to protect someone else.”

  Becca laughed angrily and kicked, hitting me in the shins. I kicked back, and she moved like she was about to turn around and yell at me.

  “Shh!” Someone was coming in. A fair-haired girl. Quinn? It was hard to see without making myself obvious behind the chair. Also, Becca kicked me again, and that was a little distracting.

  I held my breath as the girl went to a locker on the top row and opened it. I raised myself higher. It was definitely Quinn. As she rummaged around, I got a good view of a couple purses, nothing else. Nothing incriminating. Maybe she wasn’t our culprit.

  Quinn removed one of the purses. She reached into her dress pocket and pulled something out.

  Becca pushed off against me, getting closer to the front of the chair. I bit down on my lip to keep from hissing in pain as her shoes dug into my shins.