Madhattan Mystery (6 page)

All of a sudden Kim Ling sprang up like a jack-in-the-box on caffeine. “Guys! You want horses and grass? Follow me.” She flew off the steps and plunged into a thick cloud of manhole steam without even turning to see if Kevin and Lexi were behind her.

But they were—watching her curse out a speeding cab.

“The light is still red, moron! Drive much?”

“Okay, tell me, why're we following her again?” Lexi asked Kevin.

“You got me. But she does crack me up.”

Lexi shook her head in wonder. “She's like the Pied Piper of Manhattan—with road rage.”

As it turned out, destination Central Park was beyond spectacular! A humongous oasis right in the middle of the city, with more grass and trees than all of Cold Spring. Maybe not, but a full 843 acres, according to Kim Ling. And since the park was blocked off to afternoon traffic, there wasn't a car in sight. Bikers, joggers, and Rollerbladers shared the roadway instead, along with those hansom cabs. And it was cool. At least ten degrees cooler than the rest of the city, Lexi guessed, and seemingly miles away from Grand Central Station with its lurking jewel thieves and mole people. Finally she could breathe.

“Oh, look, you can see 'em from here,” Kim Ling said, picking up speed. “A bargain at two bucks a ride.”

“You said nothing in New York was cheap,” Lexi reminded her.

“Wrong. I said everything in New York was
expensive
.” See, it was answers like that that made Lexi want to
scream. But she didn't. She took a calming, cleansing breath and scoped the area instead. Sure enough, the bobbing helmets of horseback riders were visible just beyond a thick row of trees. Kevin must have noticed them too. He was suddenly clinging onto Lexi's dangling backpack strap.

“Where're we going?” he asked Kim Ling. “I mean, just ‘cause I took a picture of a couple of horses—”

“—doesn't mean we know how to ride,” Lexi finished. “Don't we need, like, special boots—and an insurance policy?”

“You guys don't ride at home out there in Amish country?” Kim Ling asked, her neon flip-flops kicking up dirt.

“It's not Amish!” Lexi said. “And no.”

“Doesn't matter.”

“How could it not—?”

“Because I'm not talking about those horses, Patty Paranoia.” Kim Ling pointed across the road to a clump of vendors in front of some round brick structure. “I'm talking about
those
horses. Let's go. My treat!” Once again, she took off with no group consensus. And once again, Lexi and Kevin followed her. To the Central Park Carousel?

What a relief!
For Lexi anyway. But she wasn't exactly sure how Kevin would react.

“This goes a lot faster than your average carousel,” Kim Ling had to go and say when they met up with her at the ticket booth. “A
lot
faster. And no brass ring. That's ‘cause they don't want kids reaching for it and busting chins.”

“What?” Kevin turned that greenish shade again. “I don't know about this.”

“C'mon, Kev, it'll be fun.”

“Geez, man up!” Kim Ling said to him, handing three tickets to the ticket-taker. “It's not like it's a mechanical bull—it's a baby ride.”

That remark got Kevin unstuck somehow and he followed the girls onto the carousel platform with the enthusiasm of someone boarding the
Titanic
.

“That's what they said about the Haunted Mansion ride at Kingsley Park,” Lexi whispered to Kim Ling. She helped Kevin onto the smiliest horse with the shiniest gold mane and just as she was about to mount the one next to it, a boy in a plastic fireman hat beat her to it. “Shoot. Are you going to be okay by yourself, Kev, or should I—?”

“Just go already,” he said, wrapping his arms around the shiny pole.

“I'll be on this one right in front of you. Hold on tight.”

A rinky-dink rendition of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” began playing loudly and Lexi quickly hopped onto the horse Kim Ling was saving for her. As soon as the carousel came to life, Kim Ling leaned over to her and shouted, “So, what's the scoop?”

“Shhh! Kevin fell off a ride. He was around five. Split his head open.”

“No way.”

“Way. They had to shut it down and everything. Me
and my parents and a few park people went back into the tunnel …” Reliving it made Lexi's mouth go dry. She forced a swallow. “He was wedged between some giant pulleys and cables but I could see the Day-Glo number nine on his football jersey. I was the only one small enough to fit in there—you know, to yank him out.”

“Wow. So you're his
y
Ä«
ng xióng
.”

“What?” Lexi could barely hear over the music.

“His hero! No wonder he worships you.”

“He does?”

“And let me guess—nine has been your lucky number ever since.”

Yes!
Lexi had never made that connection before.
The girl really does have a brain the size of Utah
. She brushed a clump of curls off her astonished face and leaned closer to Kim Ling, girl genius. “I mean, he tries to hide it but he's still afraid of, like, absolutely everything. Things got worse when Mom died, but Dr. Lucy says he's making steady progress.”

“Dr. Lucy?”

“Our therapist. Lucille Dixon.”

“Huh. Well, that explains a lot.”

Lexi wasn't sure how to take that remark. “Like what?”

“Like, why your brother is over by the cotton-candy stand right now.”

Lexi whipped her head around and saw an abandoned horse grinning back at her. A blur of reds, blues, and yellows spun around the girls as they rose up and down, up
and down, waiting for the carousel to stop. It made three more revolutions along with Lexi's stomach before the thing finally slowed down. She flew off her horse before it came to a full stop and rushed over to Kevin, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground. Texting?

“What happened?”

“I'm not riding that death machine.”

Kim Ling showed up a second later. “You okay?”

“He'll live,” Lexi said. “Who're you texting? It'd better not be Dad.”

“Billy Campbell. At space camp.” He looked up at Kim Ling with a dim glint in his eyes. “We're both gonna be professional astronauts.”

“Oh, interesting,” Kim Ling said, nodding. “Lemme get this straight. You can't even survive a carousel ride and you wanna be—?”

A sharp look from Lexi shut her right up. “C'mon.” Lexi gently pulled Kevin to his feet by both hands and brushed off his bottom. She was being a parent again big time, but oh well. “We should probably get going.” But the park was a gigantic green maze. “Hey, Kim, point us toward the street so we can catch a taxi back to the brownstone.”

“Yeah, right—by yourselves? Just follow me.”

Kim Ling took charge again, which was no big surprise, and led them past a huge fenced-in spread of grass she said was the Sheep Meadow, but it was peppered with sunbathers, not sheep. They kept trudging along the roadway with Kim Ling pointing out every single statue and
endless “flora and fauna” until she took a sharp left, shouting, “Behold, Bethesda Terrace!”

“I thought we were going home,” Lexi said.

“We're taking the scenic route.
Trés
European, no?”

Not a big selling point, what with her dad trekking through Europe with her evil stepmother, but when Lexi peered down at the courtyard, she was awestruck by the lovely view. The statue of a glorious angel rose from the center of a circular fountain and there was a small river gleaming in the background alive with ducks and rowboats. The sky couldn't have been more crystal blue—and suddenly there was a billow of white.

“Oh, look, a bride. That's good luck!” Lexi pointed to a wedding party posing on the cement staircase leading down to the courtyard. “Who'd get married on a Wednesday?”

“Well, it does have the word
wed
in it,” Kim Ling said to no response. “Oh, wait, that's not real. It's a photo shoot. See? The bride's wearing sneakers and there are clothes-pins cinching the back of the groom's tux. Nothing escapes the well-trained eye of an investigative journalist.”

“How exciting!” Now this was the New York City Lexi had in mind. She did a quick check on Kevin, who was back to quasi-normal, doing his own photo shoot of break-dancers behind them, and returned her gaze to the model bride. “Wouldn't you love to get married in a beautiful dress like that?”

“Who said I want to get married at all?”

A loud blast of music turned the girls' heads. There was a scraggly man on a beat-up bicycle pulling up next to them. He was rapidly changing channels on an old-fashioned radio duct-taped between two whirling pinwheels on the handlebars. Kim Ling gave Lexi a distorted look of horror.

“Seriously?” Lexi said, trying to keep a straight face and get back to the subject at hand. “You never dream of getting married?”

“I guess we're pretty much antipodes, you and me. Total opposites.”

The music was too loud for Lexi to think of anything else to say. She looked down at the photo shoot again just as a wind was lifting the fake bride's veil into a gauzy, white swirl. A picture immediately flashed in Lexi's mind. Her parents' wedding photo. It always used to sit proudly on top of their antique dresser in a sterling silver frame but disappeared when the dreaded day had arrived: the day her father had married Clare.

That wasn't a real wedding, either, as far as Lexi was concerned. A quick, blah ceremony at the Putnam County Courthouse. Clare had carried a bunch of pigmy orchids and worn an icy-blue skintight dress that made her look like a Popsicle. In a moment of panic, she had asked Lexi to lend her the rhinestone hair clip she was wearing. So she did. Reluctantly. “That takes care of something borrowed,” Clare had told her. “And my dress is brand new and it's blue—so that's like killing two birds with one stone. Okay,
all I need is something old.”
Well, you're pretty old
, Lexi had thought.
Now as far as killing things with stones
…

Classical music blasted to a static-filled finale on the strange man's bike-radio and a newscaster's voice came on.

“This is Marcia Whitaker in for Lloyd Marsh. The FBI remains baffled …”

With a watchful eye on Kevin, Lexi was pondering how her new life would be with Clare as her stepmother.
Just like Cinderella's. Before the magic and the prince
. “Kevin Andrew McGill!” she called out. “Don't wander off!”

“Shhh!” Kim Ling hissed. “I wanna hear this.”

Lexi turned back and quickly honed in on the newscaster's voice.

“—disappeared without a trace. On loan from Egypt's Cairo Museum, the astonishingly rare jewelry that experts believe can be traced back to Cleopatra herself was to be featured in the Queen of the Nile exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer, now postponed indefinitely. Early this morning, Cairo authorities announced a reward of one million Egyptian pounds—roughly, one hundred and eighty thousand U.S. dollars, to anyone with information leading to the recovery of the irreplaceable artifacts.”

Adrenaline rushed through Lexi so swiftly, she thought she would launch clear out of Central Park.

That weird man appearing out of nowhere with a radio blasting
that
particular news story at
that
particular time—it was a definite sign that it was time for Lexi to face facts. She had to spill her guts to someone about what she had overheard in the Whispering Gallery before she burst. It couldn't be Kevin, for obvious reasons. And it couldn't be Kim Ling—could it? No, it just couldn't! Then again, she had already told her about Kevin and Kingsley Park. And the girl was megasmart. Maybe she'd know what to do.

“Kim,” she said, dragging her behind a nearby ice-cream cart, “swear on your life that you won't repeat what I'm about to tell you to a single, solitary soul.”

“Have you lost it? Let go of—”

“Swear!”

With one hand on her heart and the other on a stack of invisible bibles, Kim Ling swore to secrecy and Lexi quickly filled her in on the Whispering Gallery, the mysterious
men in black, their plot to bury the stolen jewels in Grand Central Station. Every single detail.
Such a relief!
Then again, watching Kim Ling's face light up the way it did, maybe it was a big mistake. The would-be journalist's mind was obviously already spinning—probably wondering where to score a few pickaxes and night-vision goggles double-quick.

“But how could you not report it?” was the first thing out of Kim Ling's mouth. Not a hint of concern for Lexi's safety or well-being. “Don't you see the exigency of the situation? Urgency?”

Another ten-dollar word. And the definition thrown in afterward felt like an insult. “I know what exigency means.”
Now
she did.

“You have to call the cops. Immediately! Never mind the reward money, it's your civic duty. Where's your cell?”

Lexi started clawing through her backpack. “Uh, it's back at the apartment, I think. I could use Kevin's.”

“Here, use mine.” Kim Ling instantly produced her phone, jabbed the power button, and shoved it over to Lexi. “Dial four-one-one. Ask for the number of the NYPD.”

“I know that.” She stared at the phone. “But then what do I tell them?”

“Your shoe size,” Kim Ling spurted, cocking her head. “Just tell them what you told me. You want me to do it? Here, gimme back my phone.”

“No, I can do it.”

Lexi kept zipping and unzipping her backpack,
rehearsing what she'd say in her head while she waited for the operator to put her through.