Free The Vanishing Violin by Michael D. Beil Page A

going to be joining these girls. They’ll fill you in on the details.”
    “Su-per,” she says with the fakest smile.
    The project: each group is assigned a punctuation mark and is responsible for teaching the rest of the class everything about it—the rules, the exceptions, and of course, some examples. Mr. Eliot walks around the room with folded pieces of paper in his hand, passing them out. On each paper are two critical pieces of information: the punctuation mark and the date the group must be prepared to present. Livvy unfolds our paper and reads it. “Apostrophe,” she says. “Awesome. We’re presenting on Tuesday.” She sticks the paper in her bag.
    “Well, the apostrophe is much better than the comma,” I reply. “Those rules are impossible.”
    “Then I suppose you three just have all kinds of wonderful ideas, being the famous Red Blazer Girls and all. Maybe somebody will write another story about you in the paper—you know, how you girls made learning about the apostrophe just so interesting.”
    I resist every urge and instead go with: “Jeez, Livvy. All we have to do is make a PowerPoint presentation with all the rules and some kind of handout to give to the whole class.”
    “Don’t forget the ‘creative’ element,” Leigh Ann adds. “Mr. Eliot said we can do anything we want as long as it is creative in some way.”
    “We have to get creative using apostrophes?” Livvy whines. “This is stupid.”
    “How about a poem?” I suggest, ignoring her. “Or even better, a song. We could sing it. What do you think, Margaret?”
    She sets her mouth into a grim line. “I think it’s going to be a long week.”
    I receive a text from my mom saying Mr. Chernofsky would like Margaret and me to stop by his shop after school (they know each other from violin stuff).
    “Welcome, ladies. This was on the floor when I came in this morning,” Mr. C. says when we enter, handing an envelope to Margaret. “Someone must have slipped it under the door. No postage, no address, just your name.”
    This time the envelope is plain, white, and verybusinesslike in appearance. Margaret gives it a good sniff, tears it open, and then unfolds a sheet of paper with this message:
    To hear each beat,
Amid sounds she omits,
Only names please leave,
And yearn each return.
    Love is valued ever,
Silence is never tempered,
While ordered justice begs
Untold times, nearer obstacles.
    Thrilling ovations, newborn games,
Random analogies, naturally denied,
Occupied recently, easily silenced,
Such excesses, xylophone.
    To which I can only add: Huh?
    And penciled in the margin are the words “Leave your answer on the underside of the park’s biggest mushroom.”
    The lines on Margaret’s forehead grow deeper and deeper, and her lips pucker and twist as she reads it and then rereads it. She takes another good whiff of the paper, shakes her head, and hands it to me.
    “Do you smell anything?”
    “Paper.”
    “Yep,” she says, retrieving the letter from my hands.
    “Happy to help,” I say. “I do know where the biggest mushroom in the park is, though. You know the statuefrom
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
? Alice is sitting right in the middle of a huge mushroom.”
    “Thanks, Soph. At least if we ever solve the clue, we’ll know where to leave the answer,” Margaret says.
    Ben comes out from the workshop, and even though it is late afternoon and we presume he’s been hard at work all day, his apron is still spotless. His shirtsleeves are rolled to his elbows—the first sign of casualness I’ve seen in him—but further investigation reveals that they are perfectly rolled. I find myself wondering how he accomplished this.
    “Hi, girls,” he says, tossing a coin high in the air and catching it. “What’s new?”
    Margaret holds out the letter to him. “Can you do me a favor? Read this, and tell me if it means anything to you.”
    He scans it once quickly, makes a similar confused face, and then reads it slowly