Girl's Best Friend Page 13

  I’m surprised I was able to admit it out loud. I’d been doing it for years and never told anyone. Even when Ivy and I were BFFs, it was the kind of thing she’d have made fun of me for. But Lucy didn’t even blink when I tiptoed across her room.

  Five, six, seven, eight. I counted in my head because even Lucy must have had a limit to how much dorkiness she could take in one day.

  When I hit twelve I found myself in the center of the room. This made me pause. I looked back at where I’d come from. I’d definitely gone halfway.

  But something struck me as odd. I just wasn’t sure what.

  Lucy pulled out her knitting. “You okay?” she asked.

  Too confused, I didn’t answer right away.

  How could I be halfway across the room at twelve squares? It made no sense. I continued on my way and ended up at twenty-four—at the other end of the wall.

  I wondered if maybe I’d gotten distracted talking to Lucy and counted wrong. So I turned around and walked back across the room. This time when I counted twenty-four squares, I knew I hadn’t made a mistake.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lucy.

  “I’m not sure.” I walked it a third time and came up with the same number. “There are only twenty squares in my room.”

  “Twenty squares?”

  “The parquet tiles on the floor,” I said. “I just counted and you have four more than I do.”

  “Huh.”

  I noticed that Lucy was working on the same green and white scarf she was supposed to have finished by last weekend. “You know, maybe you should give that one to Finn.”

  “No, you were right. He’d just think it was dumb.”

  “That’s not what I said. I just know he wouldn’t buy it. I’m sure he’d be flattered if you gave it to him.”

  Lucy looked up at me. “You think?”

  “Yeah, and I’m sorry I got so sensitive about the twin thing. It looks nothing like the scarf you made for me, and I should’ve known better.”

  “Well, anyway. I’ll probably just put it up on Etsy. As soon as I finish I’m going to try to knit an owl. I found this cool pattern. Hold on, I’ll show you.” Lucy stood up and walked to her bookcase.

  And I continued to stare at the floor.

  “Your room is definitely bigger than mine.”

  “That’s impossible,” Lucy replied. “Our rooms are identical. All the houses on this street went up at the same time and they all have the exact same layout.”

  “That’s what I thought until just now,” I said. “But you have more squares than I do.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Maybe my squares are smaller, so it takes more of them to fill up the room.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, although I doubted it. They seemed the same. I lined up my heel at one end and noticed that the tile ended a couple inches past my foot. Just like at home. The squares were the same size. I was almost sure of it. But there was only one way to know for sure. “Can I borrow a tape measure?”

  Lucy pulled one out of her knitting bag and handed it over.

  I knelt down on the floor and went about measuring. Each square was ten inches exactly. I wrote down the number, not so I wouldn’t forget, but so I wouldn’t doubt myself later.

  Once I finished I snapped the tape measure closed and asked, “Mind if I take this home? I need to go measure my room.”

  “Okay. But how come?” asked Lucy.

  “Long story.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Kermit?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said, slipping the tape measure into my back pocket. “Okay, not at all. But it’s something I need to figure out.”

  “What is it?”

  I paused before answering, not knowing how much to tell her. Whether the strange but strong inkling I had about what’d been going on in my building could be true. It was too soon to tell, but my suspicions were strong … “I can’t say right now, but I’ll explain later. I promise.”

  “Okay.” Lucy shrugged, dropping the subject.

  I gave her a hug and she laughed. “What was that for?”

  “Just because,” I said. “Thanks for being a great friend. I’m sorry I’ve been weird about Ivy lately.”

  “It’s no biggie. And honestly? Having you defend Ivy is a lot more fun than listening to you complain about her all the time.”

  Yikes! “Have I been that bad?”

  “Yup,” said Lucy. “Well, sometimes, but don’t sweat it. Everyone’s weird about something.”

  “That’s a pretty good motto,” I said. “And I’m hoping my weirdness ends soon.”

  Lucy grinned. “Me too.”

  I ran home and measured my room twice. Sure enough, it was more than two feet smaller than Lucy’s room. Yet, Lucy was right. Our houses were supposedly identical in shape, size, and layout. Strange. Or maybe it wasn’t so strange. Maybe something was actually starting to make sense.

  I gazed out my bay window—the one that looked out onto Garfield Place.

  I tapped the wall and found it nice and sturdy—almost an entire foot of solid house between the inside and outside walls.

  Next I tapped the wall by Finn’s bed. It sounded solid, too.

  Same with the wall where our desks were.

  But the wall on my side of the room? It sounded different. Flimsy. Not exactly hollow, but almost. When I knocked harder, it seemed to vibrate.

  It made me think of Easter bunnies. How there’s a big difference between a solid chocolate bunny and a bunny shell.

  That was my room—three solid walls and one shell. A shell with a sealed-up crawl space door—something I didn’t remember ever seeing on any of Lucy’s walls …

  I sat down in the middle of my room, crossed my legs, and rested my chin on my hands.

  Something was up. I had no doubt. But my brain felt fuzzy, trying to figure stuff out. So I stood up again and paced across my room, counting the twenty tiles one way and then the other. And then, very suddenly, it all just clicked.

  It sounds so simple, but that’s really how it happened. Everything came together in an instant—like those Connect the Dots puzzles I was obsessed with when I was younger.

  Some of those puzzles have fifteen numbers and some of them have seventy. You trace your pencil from one to two to three and so on, and at first it just looks like numbers on a page. And then numbers with a random squiggly line going through them. Then they become a familiar shape. And, bam—in a flash, you know what you’re drawing. That mysterious shape is revealed.

  It’s an elephant!

  It’s a unicycle!

  It’s two kids playing in the sand!

  In one instant this problem went from scattered numbers to a clear picture, from nothing to something.

  I suppose it was there all along, but I only just then figured out how I was supposed to see it.

  Isabel disappearing.

  Chloe complaining about mice.

  Glen’s bass and the reverberating E note.

  The “sealed-up” crawl spaces.

  That tiny door in the basement—the one that led to nowhere. Or so I’d thought …

  My room looked so much smaller than Lucy’s for a reason.

  It wasn’t just that I shared it with Finn and we had more stuff.

  Our room looked smaller because it was smaller.

  And it was smaller because it was more than two feet too short!

  As for the missing two feet? Well, that explained even more …

  I raced downstairs and knocked on Isabel’s door. Then, too impatient, I used my key and walked inside.

  “Hey, Isabel?” I called. “Are you home?”

  Isabel stood in her kitchen washing dishes. Her crutches were propped up by the front door, all the way on the other side of her apartment. “In here, dear,” she called. “Didn’t you already take Preston out today?”

  “I did,” I replied. “But I need to talk to you about something. Something I should’ve brought up a long time ago. You know I l
ove taking care of Preston, right? And how, even if you didn’t have a bad knee, I’d still walk him all the time? Since he’s the closest thing to my own dog that I’ll ever have.”

  “That’s so sweet of you to say,” said Isabel.

  I swallowed. “So, um, can you walk? Because I can’t help but notice that your crutches are at the other end of your apartment. And, well, your surgery was a while ago … ”

  Isabel turned off the faucet and looked at me. Then she stared down at her leg. “Well, yes. I suppose my knee has been doing better.”

  “That’s great news!” I said.

  “But I’m not faking,” said Isabel. “It still gets sore sometimes. In the rain, for instance, and when I’ve been on the treadmill for too long.”

  “You still go on the treadmill?” I asked.

  “Care for a glass of juice?” Isabel asked, turning to the fridge. “I have your favorite—pear cider.”

  “No thanks. I actually need to talk to you about something else.”

  “Oh, I see.” Isabel walked (smoothly and unassisted) into the living room and sat down in her easy chair. “Is everything okay?”

  I flopped down on the couch across from her. “Yes! I mean, no. I mean, well, it’s complicated. But I think I’m getting close.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “So cryptic.”

  “Are you, um, looking for something?” I asked. “When you use the secret passage in the building? The one you can enter through that door in the basement, behind the quilt? The one that leads to those sealed-up crawl spaces? Which aren’t really sealed up and aren’t really crawl spaces, right?”

  Isabel looked worried. Or embarrassed. Or maybe both. One thing was sure, though—Isabel looked guilty. And for once, she was completely silent. Also? Her face got really pale, like the time she’d bought the wrong shade of powder but was too stubborn to change it until she’d used it all up.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “And I’m sorry for bursting in here like this. It’s just, well, a lot of things haven’t been making sense lately. And when I finally figured out this one thing, I got so excited, but I shouldn’t have … ”

  Isabel shook her head. “No, it’s fine. You’re absolutely right, Maggie, about everything. You just caught me off guard.”

  “So what are you looking for?” I asked carefully.

  “My money,” she replied.

  “Your money?” My mind raced, trying to catch up to what she was saying. But it didn’t make any sense. “You mean you hid some money and you can’t remember where you put it? But you think it’s in Glen’s or Chloe’s apartment? Or in mine?”

  “No, I’m looking for the money that my ex-husband John hid. The money I thought he stole when he left me fifteen years ago.” She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. “But what I want to know is, however did you figure it out?”

  Chapter 23

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I made Isabel a cup of tea to help her calm down, and once she did, I insisted that she tell me her side of the story first.

  1) Yes, she could walk. She’d had knee surgery in July—she never lied about that—but she’d recovered in a few weeks. Still, she didn’t want anyone knowing how easily she moved around because she didn’t want to get caught sneaking into her tenants’ apartments.

  2) Not wanting to get caught was also why she used the building’s secret passageway. As our landlady, she has keys to every front door in the building, but sneaking in through the back bedroom wall was much, well, sneakier. In other words, she knew she could get away with it.

  3) Isabel said she needed to sneak around in order to find her missing money. She wasn’t interested in other people’s stuff. She was merely trying to recover what was rightfully hers.

  Here’s what happened: when John left Isabel, he stole all of her savings, too. This she’d told me ages ago. But what she never knew was that he felt guilty afterward and decided to return it. Since he felt too ashamed to face her directly, he snuck back into the house—just days after he’d left for good—and hid the money in a safe place. Then he wrote Isabel a letter.

  A letter she never opened at the time because she was too heartbroken to read his final words.

  A letter she put away and then forgot about because it was buried under a bunch of junk in her back closet.

  A letter she only came across last month, while rifling through said closet in search of more jewelry to hock.

  “So he told you he returned the money but didn’t say exactly where it was?” I asked, just to be clear.

  “He told me he left it in our secret hiding place. But that was fifteen years ago! I can’t remember where I left the remote control last night. How am I supposed to remember where I used to hide things way back when?”

  I handed Isabel her remote, which I found wedged between the couch cushions as usual. “Okay, so I get that’s why you were sneaking around everyone’s apartments. But it doesn’t explain why you had that secret passageway built in the first place.”

  “That’s the funniest thing,” said Isabel. “I never did.”

  This I found hard to believe. “What do you mean?”

  “I told you about the famous magician who built this brownstone—The Coney Island Fakir? Well, it seems he had the false wall built so he could do his disappearing act at home.

  “It’s always been there,” she continued. “But I promise you, before I went looking for this money, I’d never snuck into anyone’s apartment. It’s just wrong and I’ve felt so bad about it, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “It’s an amazing story.”

  “What’s amazing is that you figured it out,” said Isabel.

  “I had plenty of clues,” I said. “So it was just a question of recognizing them and sort of … connecting the dots.”

  “How did you do it?” asked Isabel.

  “First there was Chloe complaining about mice in the walls. Or raccoons. Something loud and clumsy, she’d said. And you’d acted so insulted. I didn’t really get it at the time but now it makes perfect sense. You were offended because, unknowingly, she was calling you a klutz.”

  “It’s hard, stumbling around in a dark, dusty secret passageway,” Isabel cried defensively.

  “I’m sure it is,” I said. “And I never would’ve given it a second thought if it weren’t for Glen complaining about the sound quality in his studio. Glen was describing the room right below mine and Finn’s, which is basically identical. I just knocked on all four walls in my room and the one on the left sounded different. Flimsy and hollow. Something that makes sense, considering the little door I found in the basement this weekend. The one that’s the size of the ‘sealed-up’ crawl space in my room.”

  “I should’ve put that padlock on ages ago,” said Isabel.

  “Lucy’s house really confirmed it, though. Our rooms are supposed to be identical, and I’d always figured hers seemed bigger because she didn’t have to share it. But it turns out it seems bigger because it is—by over two feet, since she has no crawl space.”

  “Very clever,” said Isabel.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Do you think I can see the note?”

  Isabel reached for her crutches.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to pretend anymore.”

  Isabel opened her mouth to protest, but instead she smiled. “I shouldn’t have tried to fool you,” she said. “You’re too smart.”

  I shook my head, wishing she were right. But if I were really smart, I’d have rescued Kermit by now. We were running out of time. Ivy’s parents would be home in a few days. And her grandma might actually notice he’s missing before then.

  That reminded me of something. “I think there’s something strange going on at that new veterinarian practice,” I said.

  “I think you’re right,” said Isabel. “I took Preston to his old vet this morning and he’s as healthy as a horse. Not that every horse is so healthy, of course. Have you seen the poor souls pu
lling carriages in Central Park? It’s simply heartbreaking. Anyway, Preston is healthier than them. He hasn’t got any sort of heart problem, just some bad breath. But we had his teeth cleaned and the vet gave me some plaque-busting doggie mints, and—”

  “That’s great news!” It wasn’t until I said the words that I realized how worried I’d been. “This whole thing with Preston really frightened me.”

  “I know, it’s a huge relief,” said Isabel. She handed me a thin yellow envelope. “And you’ve done so much for me already, Maggie. I hate to ask for another favor, but do you think you might be able to figure this out? I feel so foolish for not reading this sooner … ”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Who puts cash in hiding places?”

  “John, apparently,” Isabel said with a sigh. “I can’t believe how long I’ve been angry with him. He still left, of course. Still robbed me of the life I was supposed to have. But he didn’t take everything, like I’d thought. And I’ve wasted so many years being bitter.”

  “It’s good that you know now.”

  “Now that it’s too late,” said Isabel.

  “It’s never too late.”

  “Maggie, he’s dead.”

  “Oh no!”

  Isabel blew her nose loudly. “It happened months ago. I read the obituary. Never in my life did I think I’d have to read about John’s death in the newspaper.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Isabel shrugged weakly. “It happens,” she said. “Of course, now I may never find the money, since I’m out of places to look. And anyway, it’s pretty much too late. My home has been carved up into apartments. I’ve been forced to sell most of my jewelry. And forget about the travel. The parties. All the years I’ve missed. And now I’m an old woman.”

  “You’re only fifty.”

  Isabel dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. “Thank you for humoring me, dear. But since I’ve come clean about everything else, well, we both know that I’m well over fifty.”

  “So quit pretending,” I said, and then I studied the note.

  Dear Isabel,