Free The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt Page A

on, so it probably wasn’t an orgy. Belshazzar is kind of half getting up from his chair, and looking at this mysterious hand coming out of a cloud or some smoke or something, and writing on the wall in a foreign alphabet. Belshazzar and the people around him all look worried.
    Well, in Rembrandt’s painting there’s some red in a woman’s dress, but it wasn’t the same color red as what I’d seen on the right-hand side of Gallery Guy’s canvas. The lacy fabric Lucas had seen on the left side might have come from the cape or shawl thing Belshazzar is wearing.
    Then there was the fingertip, which didn’t seem to match anything in Belshazzar’s Feast. You don’t notice it unless you’re looking for it, but the painting is full of people making gestures with their hands. Trouble was, the fingertip I’d seen was pointed upward—not straight, but up-ish, if you know what I mean. The only fingers pointed even partly upward in Rembrandt’s painting are on a woman behind Belshazzar who’s holding her hands like you’d do if you were clapping softly and your hands stayed stuck together. Well, it’s a little looser than that, but that’s kind of it. But even her fingertips weren’t pointing upward like the one Gallery Guy had painted. Plus in Rembrandt’s painting, those hands weren’t really next to the gold on Belshazzar’s cape.
    God probably knew what Gallery Guy was painting, but we sure didn’t.
    When we finished comparing what we’d seen, and talking about what Gallery Guy could be working on, we still were a long way from our bus stop, so we began plotting our disguises for the next day.
    â€œWait,” Lucas said, after we’d been talking about disguises for about five minutes. “Let’s stay focused on what we want to do here.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” Focused? We were on a roll.
    â€œWhat I mean is, why are we doing what we’re doing?”
    â€œTo find out what Gallery Guy is up to.”
    â€œExactly. We’re not here to set some kind of record for getting into the Rembrandt room without being noticed.”
    â€œSo what do you think our next step should be?”
    â€œHere’s what I think. I’ll draw Gallery Guy sitting in the middle of the room, just like we planned, since we can’t use the camera. And we can keep looking at what we can see around the sides of his canvas. But mostly let’s just do whatever we can to get a look at what he’s painting in the middle, and copy it onto a big canvas, like his.”
    â€œCopy the colors? Using what? Oil paints? And where exactly would we set up our canvas? And where would we leave it to dry?” This whole thing sounded like a dumb idea.
    â€œThere are some cool starter sets of acrylic paints in the museum gift shop. They dry right away,” Lucas said. “And even if you can’t reproduce oil paint colors perfectly with acrylic, you can get them pretty close. And we can do it right there. The classes must be on spring break just like our schools at home because it seems like there’s never anybody in the loo.” We were calling bathrooms “loos” all the time now. It just seemed to come naturally.
    â€œThe problem is, you remember what you see and draw better than I do,” I said, “but face it: I paint better than you.”
    â€œI know. You mix colors better, and you apply them better, and you’re faster, and all that. But we can solve those problems. Let’s think about it. Remember, we’re soooo GOOD.”
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    When we got back to Robert’s, Mom had been watching for us, and she greeted us with the kind of smile that let us know she’d been worried about us coming back alone, even though we’d called her just as we got on the bus like we promised. Then she said, “So, how did everything go today?”
    Of course we were prepared. All day,