Madhattan Mystery Read online

  “Listen, man, there’s zero time to plot this out!”

  “I know … bloody brilliant alternative … right under their noses … never suspect.”

  What? A rush of people were passing by and Lexi was losing every other word. What alternative they’ll never suspect? She grabbed a pen from her backpack to scrawl random words across her guidebook as she heard them. Shoot. Needle. Oval disk? Park! Lexi dotted the exclamation mark with such gusto, the book went flying. She lunged for it and froze in a heap on the ground. They might have seen her face!

  “—under Grand Central is the best bet,” the American said. “Of course, we’ll have those mole people to deal with.”

  “You mean, the homeless living in the tunnels? I thought that was just an urban myth.”

  “About as mythical as rats and taxicabs.”

  “Alexandra!” Aunt Roz called out, gesturing wildly from the restaurant doorway. “Come on, dear, we have our table!”

  2

  SEVENTY-THIRD AND

  WEST END AVENUE

  Even though she loved them, Lexi couldn’t stomach her crab cakes at first. Overhearing a possible crime in the making was definitely an appetite buster. She thought about mentioning it to Aunt Roz during lunch, but could barely get a word in. Plus, Kevin was right there. New York City was overwhelming enough and she didn’t want to push him over the edge with what she had heard. By the time their leftovers were being wrapped in aluminum-foil swans, Lexi had decided that the men in black were probably just having an innocent conversation that she had blown way out of proportion. Caught up in the moment. Wild imagination. That type of thing. And so while she, Kevin, and Aunt Roz were piling into a taxi, Lexi added the entire experience to her mental list of things that never happened.

  The windows in the back of the cab were filthy and would only go down halfway. Still, Lexi and Kevin stared pie-eyed through the layer of muck at the sights of the city whizzing by. So much concrete and glass. So many weirdos. And to add to the mix, Aunt Roz decided to join Frank Sinatra for a duet when his voice came on the radio singing “New York, New York.”

  “My dah-dah-dah blues,” she sang in a sturdy soprano, “are melting away—”

  “So’s my butt,” Kevin muttered. “Isn’t there air-conditioning?”

  Everyone laughed. Even Akbar, the driver. Aunt Roz had made it a point to get his name after giving him very specific directions on how to get to her apartment, which he said he really didn’t need. Typical Aunt Roz.

  Her singing faded to a hum, thank goodness, which eventually petered out altogether. “Okay, I’ll shut up. I know I’m embarrassing you guys already.” She fanned the kids with her giant hat—her sleek, silvery bob cut blowing in the breeze. “Better?”

  Lexi had almost forgotten what a character her aunt was, but it all came flooding back. She was an actress. Mostly commercials and voice-over work these days, which were difficult jobs to land, Lexi had learned during lunch—especially for a woman of a certain age. Fifty-five? Forty-nine? Thirty-seven? No one knew for sure. According to Aunt Roz, age was just a number—and hers was unlisted. The Putnam County News and Recorder did a little piece on her awhile back when she grew the largest Sweet Surrender rose at the county fair, and Lexi had the article pinned to her bulletin board.

  ROSALIND MCGILL began her career back at the age of twenty as a high-kicking Rockette at the famous Radio City Music Hall in New York. She had barely gotten her feet off the ground, so to speak, when she met her husband-to-be, Ed Lantry, who swept her back to Cold Spring. And according to Ms. McGill (yes, she still goes by her maiden name), she’s never looked back since. Aside from raising her two sons, Brian and Henry, she enjoys baking pies, organizing potlucks, and tending her award-winning roses.

  As it turned out, Aunt Roz had looked back all right. When Brian and Henry grew up and made their moves to the West Coast, Uncle Ed made his moves on the new cashier at the local Walmart. And so Aunt Roz hightailed it back to New York City to pick up where she had left off. That was three years ago. Everyone in the McGill family said she had completely lost her mind, except for Lexi’s mom, who had called her “plucky” and “heroic.” Lexi agreed.

  The first ten minutes in the cab were like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and Kevin was red-faced and white-knuckled, clinging to the armrest. Lexi playfully pecked at him with the aluminum-foil swan to get him to loosen up. Didn’t happen. He decapitated the poor thing.

  “Oh, my goodness gracious, this is it!” Aunt Roz cried out. “I wasn’t paying attention. On your right, Akbar.”

  The cab screeched to a crooked stop on the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-Third Street. Akbar unloaded the luggage from the trunk and Aunt Roz gave him a generous tip and an inappropriate hug before he hopped back into the cab and sped off.

  “You know, Alexandra, in this light you’re the spitting image of your mother.”

  Well, that came out of nowhere. “Huh. Really? The same hair, I guess, kinda-sorta, but …” She hoisted her bag up the curb and headed toward the brownstone, and when Aunt Roz caught up with her to help, Lexi changed the subject. “So, any new acting jobs on the horizon?”

  “Well, I do have a few callbacks coming up. A faded Southern belle in an off-Broadway musical and another commercial—a national.” The glint in Aunt Roz’s eye disappeared when they reached the landing and she dropped her end of the bag. “For adult diapers,” she said out of the side of her mouth as if they were illegal. “Hi-ho, the glamorous life.”

  Lexi managed to keep a straight face reaching for the doorknob. Someone kicked the double doors from the other side and she jumped. A blob of pig-nosed flesh was pressed against the murky glass.

  “Go in, go in,” Aunt Roz said, waving them onward. “That’s just Kimmy, my little neighbor.”

  She turned out to be pretty, this Kimmy, but Weird with a capital W. An Asian-American girl around Lexi’s age, wearing a SpongeBob T-shirt knotted above her belly button, a pair of men’s striped boxer shorts, and bright-orange three-inch platform flip-flops. There were streaks of turquoise in her otherwise ink-black hair, which was gathered into bristly pigtails jetting out of her head like sheaves of wheat. Is the circus in town? Kevin appeared to be studying her as if she were some fascinating abstract painting, but it was dislike at first sight for Lexi.

  “Hi, Kimmy.” Aunt Roz removed her hat and gracefully smoothed down her hair. “Meet Kevin and Lexi, my niece and nephew—or nephew and niece. Well, let’s hope you can figure out which one is which.”

  “Kim Ling Levine,” she said without so much as a glance. Then in a fit of rage, she ripped off the small NO MENUS, PLEASE sign that was taped to the door and crumpled it into a wad. “Look at this pile! Un-freakin’-believable. Westside Wok, Tex-Mex Express, Giovanni’s. How rude!”

  While she collected the menus that were carpeting the hallway by the fistful and stuffed them into a trash bag, Aunt Roz explained what was going on to Lexi and Kevin—how food deliverymen left stacks of menus in their wake every time they made a delivery. And with thousands of restaurants in Manhattan, these things could add up.

  Kim Ling was down on her knees now with a smelly red marker, squeaking a message onto half a piece of poster board. She held the sign up for approval. “How’s this grab you?”

  “Subtle,” Aunt Roz said with a smile dancing on her lips. “But I think it just might do the trick.”

  “Provided these morons can read.”

  Lexi managed a weak “Nice meeting you” as they started up the stairs, but Kim Ling was too busy ripping a piece of masking tape off the roll with her teeth to even notice. How bizarre that this nut job was ranting about people being rude, when she was just about the rudest girl Lexi had ever met. “Uh, nice girl,” she said when they got to the second landing, meaning the exact opposite of course.

  “She really is,” Aunt Roz whispered. “Her mother’s Chinese and her father’s Jewish. They bought the building last January and didn’t even raise my rent—which the
y could have, lord knows. They’re wonderful people.”

  The whispering jolted Lexi’s thoughts from Kim Ling back to Grand Central as they climbed the creaky stairway, and the entire Whispering Gallery scenario replayed in her head—dark and creepy like some old slasher flick. The mysterious men in black. The talk of jewels being stripped and shipped. Mole people. Why did she have to go and eavesdrop? A single droplet of sweat ran down Lexi’s neck, sending an icy shiver up her spine, even on the hottest of days.

  “Your building needs an elevator,” Kevin puffed, and the stairs kept on coming.

  “Nonsense, this is fabulous exercise.” Without warning, Aunt Roz hiked her skirt over one knee and beveled her foot in a chorus-girl pose. “Just get a load of these pins!”

  “I’ll pass,” Kevin said, gliding by without even glancing at her legs.

  “Oh, you!”

  Lexi laughed and sucked in a lungful of cabbage soup stench, or whatever was stinking up the entire third and fourth floors. Finally reaching Apartment 5F, she dropped her bag and shook life back into her cramped fingers. “Aunt Roz, have you ever heard of mole people?”

  “Well, let’s see.” She was catching her breath, struggling with a clump of keys worthy of San Quentin Prison. “There’s that ex-supermodel—what’s her name? Cindy Crawford, that’s it. She’s famous for her mole. More like a beauty mark, actually.” She handed Lexi her hat. “And don’t forget John-Boy from The Waltons. What a whopper he had! Oh, but you kids are too young to remember—”

  “There’s Whack-a-Mole,” Kevin offered, and mimed clobbering a plastic mole with a club. “Poom! Poom!”

  “No, no, wrong moles. I think they’re supposed to be these people who live under Grand Central Station. I forget where I read that.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me, Alexandra.”

  That’s when all the lights went out and Lexi’s heart lurched.

  “Uh-oh.” She clutched her opal. “Kevin, what did you touch?”

  “Nothing!”

  They stood in complete darkness, listening to each other breathe. Aunt Roz started saying something about “These things happen …,” but Lexi was concentrating on twisting her opal pendant nine times—nine being her lucky number. It was quirky and weird, but oh well. So what if she had convinced her dad to move the trip from yesterday to today because it was June ninth? And the fact that she had packed nine lucky pennies, a rabbit’s foot, and a laminated four-leaf clover in case of emergencies was nobody’s business but her own.

  Lexi flinched at the slappity-slappity-slap of climbing flip-flops.

  “Mrs. Krauss must’ve blown a freakin’ fuse again!” Kim Ling yelled up the stairwell. “Looks like the electricity in the entire building’s out this time—and it’s gonna be awhile. Snaggit!”

  There was the sound of keys unlocking locks. A thump. A sigh from Aunt Roz as the door squeaked open.

  “Well, kids, what can I say? Never a dull moment in the Big Apple! Right?”

  She should only know.

  3

  SCOOPS

  The Big Apple was more like the Baked Apple without power in the building. No electricity obviously meant no air-conditioning, lights, television, computer—basically no comfort at all. Lexi and Kevin spent the rest of the day playing Pictionary by flashlight while Aunt Roz hunted for candles, matches, and her blood pressure medicine. The good news came the next morning in four simple words: ice cream for breakfast. Aunt Roz had stocked the freezer with the stuff and it was rapidly turning into slush, so she insisted Lexi and Kevin eat it down on the front stoop where they might at least catch a breeze.

  “‘Member how Mom wouldn’t let us eat ice cream right out of the carton?” Kevin rolled his container of rocky road across his forehead as he and Lexi stepped into the thick summer air. “‘Cause she said we weren’t barbarians and that’s why bowls were invented?” He snickered. “Like barbarians really ate ice cream. Oh, remember when Mom—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember.” Lexi’s stomach still turned into a bag full of stones every time someone even mentioned her mother. Sometimes she missed her so much, she could hardly breathe, but that didn’t mean they had to talk about it every second. “Remind me to remind you to get your stuff ready for City Camp orientation tonight so we won’t have to rush tomorrow morning.”

  “What time do we have to get up?”.

  “I dunno. Eightish? Wait, don’t sit! There’s pigeon poop all over the steps.”

  Lexi set down her carton of French vanilla and dashed into the foyer to get the New York Times she’d seen lying on a stack of phone books. She pulled it apart on the way back and shoved half under her brother.

  “Eight o’clock is totally unfair,” Kevin said, and plopped down on the sports section. “It’s summer vacation. We should be able to sleep till noon at least.”

  “Well, it’ll be noon somewhere in the world.” Lexi spread her half of the newspaper onto the step and shooed an army of gnats away from her face. Just as she was about to sit, the headline screamed off the front page.

  CLEOPATRA’S JEWELS VANISH!

  “Whoa.” It was in bold block letters above a photo of two stunned-looking security guards. Lexi ripped the paper out from under herself and checked the date. “It’s today’s, June tenth!” The images of the two mystery men in Grand Central invaded her brain and her heart was racing all over again. Could there be a connection? It would make total— Without finishing her thought, she began reading the article aloud.

  WHAT SOME HAD CALLED “the find of the century” has quickly turned into “the crime of the century.” An exquisitely well-preserved assortment of necklaces, rings, bangles, and headdresses, possibly dating back to Queen Cleopatra herself, went missing in Manhattan late Monday night after arriving from the Cairo Museum. This astonishing collection, discovered outside of Alexandria, Egypt, by archaeologist Josef Grunberg last April, disappeared en route to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where it was to have been the centerpiece of the highly anticipated “Queen of the Nile” exhibit, scheduled to premiere on June 17th.

  Lexi collapsed onto a smattering of pigeon droppings and sped through the rest of the article in silence. “The Cleopatra? Omigod.”

  “So who cares?” Kevin said, picking nuts and marshmallow chunks out of his mushy ice cream. “Rocky road? More like rocky river.”

  “No, you don’t understand. Remember the Whispering Gallery?” Lexi stopped herself. She didn’t want to turn him into a basket case on the very first day of their visit. Then again, if she didn’t tell someone she might burst. “Listen, Kev, I don’t want you to get all weirded out or anything, okay? Promise?”

  Those words alone brought a look of horror to his face. Luckily, the front door of the brownstone squeaked open just then and Kim Ling appeared with two large garbage bags in tow. She clomped down the stairs between Kevin and Lexi, practically bopping them in the head, unloaded the trash, then took the same obnoxious route back up.

  Lexi waited for the sound of the closing door behind her and turned to see why it never came.

  “Problem?” a smirking Kim Ling asked. She was leaning against the door with her arms folded, staring down at them like she owned the place—which she kind of did.

  “Nuh-uh.” Lexi turned back around and grabbed her carton of French vanilla. The girl was megarude, that was for sure. Still, Lexi was glad for the interruption. Spilling the beans to Kevin would have been a total mistake.

  “That Lincoln’s been parked across the street ever since you guys got here,” Kim Ling said, stroking her chin. “Look, someone’s in there. See—there’s cigarette smoke coming from the window. Strange.”

  Lexi and Kevin scrambled to their feet to get a better look.

  “Sit down!” Kim Ling hissed.

  Lexi crumpled back onto the step like a humiliated puppy, pulling Kevin with her. “You just said—”

  “Well, don’t be so obvious about it.” She rolled her eyes in disg
ust. “You guys won’t last a week in this town.”

  Lexi’s shoulders tightened into a rigid two-by-four plank. Oh, great. Now there’s a suspicious black car with tinted windows to worry about too. The exact kind jewel thieves would drive. Maybe they had seen her eavesdropping at Grand Central and followed her here. Stalking. Plotting.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Kim Ling said, as if she were reading Lexi’s mind. “I mean, while you’re in New York. It’ll get you into trouble.” Her dark, questioning eyes darted between the McGills like they were two mutant life forms that dropped out of the sky and landed on her steps. “Our super’s on vacation, and my dad’s still at my bubbe’s house on Long Island, and I can’t reach him on his cell phone ‘cause he probably forgot to turn it on, as usual, and Grandma Levine’s not answering either, so I’m just here with my mom and neither one of us knows squat about changing fuses.” She sighed like a deflating tire and adjusted one of her pigtail bands with a snap. “You guys don’t by any chance—?”

  “No,” Lexi said flatly.

  “I didn’t think so. What a conundrum.”

  Lexi focused back on her ice cream—stabbing at it, stirring it into a lumpy milkshake. She purposely let her shoulder-length curls conceal her face from the mysterious Lincoln. Just in case.

  “Hey, uh, Madison, was it?” Kim Ling said.

  “Lexi.”.

  “Oh yeah, like Lexington Avenue—I knew it was some street name. Sorry about the no-electricity thing. But you guys must be used to it, right? Living out there on Little House on the Prairie.” She snorted and slapped her thigh like it was actually funny. “No, seriously, though, you’re probably roasting your butts off in your aunt’s apartment.”