Free The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt

Academy,” she said, holding the shoe as if it were the Oscar, “and we’d like to thank Gillian Welles Sundgren, who made our performance possible. And Mr. Gallery Guy, without whose help we wouldn’t be here this evening.”
    She looked at me and bit her lip, as if she knew there were more people to thank, but she’d forgotten who they were. She was totally getting into this.
    I whispered to her.
    â€œAnd Camellia Stickney for supplying the costumes, and Rembrandt, and The Scene magazine. Oh, and a guard at the National Gallery in London, who inspired our performance.”
    She stepped aside, still holding Oscar. I approached the invisible mike with the other shoe.
    â€œAnd we’d like to thank our families, except for Allen the Meep and the Brat Child, who don’t deserve thanks for anything.” We’d just watched the Academy Awards a few weeks before and I’d seen some guy talking about some political thing until he had to be almost shoved off the stage, so I added, “And while I’m at the microphone, I’d like to call the Academy’s attention to the continuing problem of discrimination against people who wear size eight shoes. . . .”
    Lucas cracked up.
    We’d promised each other we wouldn’t let ourselves get too excited until after the whole day was over and we’d managed it all without being found out. Now we let it all loose, and we laughed and hooted and joked around the whole time we were getting back into normal clothes, and all the way down to the tube station where we started our trip back to Robert’s house.
    After the morning at the British Museum, Mom had gone back to Hackney to do some writing. So together with her we’d plotted out our route home taking the tube and a bus, and she left us on our own with our London Transport passes. She only asked that we call every hour again, and one last time when we were ready to start back so she’d know when to expect us, and we’d done that.
    We spent the entire tube ride talking about what had happened—what good actresses we were, how neither Bert nor Gallery Guy seemed to have noticed us, how glad Lucas was that in her stuck-up private school she’d been taking French since third grade, how well I’d managed the German tourist thing, etcetera, etcetera.
    Once on the bus, we pulled out what we’d written and drawn. Lucas had her drawing on the inside back cover of her guidebook. I’d used the back of two postcards. We’d drawn everything we’d seen of Gallery Guy’s canvas.
    But the only thing we’d seen that looked like anything in particular was exactly one fingertip.
    That’s it. Just a fingertip. It looked like a woman’s fingertip. The fingernail side.
    I was the one who’d seen it sticking up about six inches from the top of the canvas. Lucas had seen something that looked like gold, lacy fabric on the left side, and we’d both seen dark red on the right that we thought was like a background or something.
    Of course we’d used plain old pencils to make our copies, so nothing was in color.
    From what we’d seen, it was hard to figure out what part of Rembrandt’s painting Gallery Guy was copying. I suppose I should explain about Belshazzar’s Feast. It’s big, about seven feet wide and as tall as I am. In the middle is this guy in a turban—Belshazzar, from the Bible story. God warned him about something by writing a message to him on the wall when he was surrounded by people, having a holy feast or an orgy or something. You know how people say, “I saw the handwriting on the wall”? Well, Belshazzar was the first one to see the handwriting on the wall. At least that’s what it says in the Bible.
    In Rembrandt’s picture a bunch of people are sitting around a table with grapes on it. (Grapes seem to be big in famous paintings.) Everybody in Rembrandt’s picture has clothes