The Pirate's Coin Read online

  As soon as all the girls arrived, the instruction started. They learned how to fill pastry bags with frosting and how to use special tools to make perfect frosting flowers, and they practiced cursive writing in icing. Then everyone was encouraged to choose a theme while the chefs gave them large chunks of marzipan paste with which to sculpt objects to place on their cakes. Some girls made animals; others made shoes, handbags, flower arrangements, you name it. The bakers roamed the room, ready with technical help.

  “I love yours!” Kendra declared, coming over to look at Ruthie’s creation. Ruthie had made a small table and chairs, with little plates of food.

  “Thanks. Yours is great too.” Kendra had sculpted some colorful tropical birds.

  When everyone was finished they lined up the cakes on a long counter and all twelve girls stood behind their creation for a group picture. Then Mrs. Connor led the girls into the dining room for pizza, presents and the official birthday cake.

  As the party wound down, everyone went into the living room to talk and wait for parents. Just as Lydia had said, the Connors were collectors, and the walls were covered with large canvases of contemporary art. Ruthie took a moment to look at a particularly colorful painting.

  “Do you like this one?” Mrs. Connor asked, appearing next to her.

  “Yes,” Ruthie answered.

  “You might like to see something we just acquired,” she offered. Ruthie followed Mrs. Connor to a library just off the living room.

  “Oh, wow!” Ruthie spied a large framed photograph. “This is by Edmund Bell, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Connor replied. “We bought two from the exhibition. The other is at my office. It’s wonderful that you found the album! I was impressed when I read that two of Kendra’s classmates had uncovered his lost work!”

  Ruthie felt extremely proud of this. She and Jack had snuck into the rooms for an overnight and Ruthie had found a backpack filled with photographs by the artist Edmund Bell. It turned out his daughter, Dr. Caroline Bell, had also magically visited the rooms as a very young girl and had left the shrunken backpack in a cabinet in one of the rooms. It had been missing for more than twenty-five years.

  “We had really good luck,” Ruthie said modestly. Luck and magic, she thought.

  Returning to the living room, Ruthie found that parents were beginning to show up. While the boxed cakes and party favors were handed out, Ruthie continued to look around the room. Six months ago Ruthie might have been envious of Kendra’s apartment, with its large rooms filled with interesting things. But now that she could go into the Thorne Rooms, she felt as though sixty-eight special places were hers to choose from.

  At that moment something across the room caught Ruthie’s eye just as the elevator bell sounded, like a ding of recognition. On a side table a small metal box with a needlepoint lid seemed out of place in this room: a conspicuously old object amid the modern furniture and art. The needlework pattern was floral, in green, peach and gold. Ruthie couldn’t be positive, but from where she stood it looked an awful lot like the design on her antique beaded handbag—the one Mrs. McVittie had given her with the magic tag sewn into its lining! She wanted to pick it up and inspect it, to see what, if anything, was inside. But the elevator door slid open, delivering her father, right on time.

  3

  THE PIECE OF EIGHT

  “INTERESTING …,” JACK SAID ON THE other end of the phone.

  Ruthie sat on her bed. She had called Jack to tell him about the party and about the metal box she’d seen.

  “Maybe I’m just imagining things. Maybe it’s a common design from that time.” Ruthie wondered if she was beginning to see magic in objects where it didn’t really exist. But who could blame her? After all, hidden in the handbag they had found the mysterious slave tag that also possessed the magic to make Ruthie shrink. The colors and patterns decorating the handbag had led them to room A29, a room from Charleston, South Carolina.

  And that room had led them to Phoebe, a slave girl living in Charleston a few decades before the Civil War. They had met her and talked with her, and Ruthie had given her a spiral notebook and some pencils to practice writing. Even though Phoebe had lived more than a hundred years ago, Ruthie considered her a friend and felt connected to her, separated only by time.

  “When we go to the museum tomorrow I want to show you the ledger of elixirs that I found in the cabinet. The one with Phoebe’s name in it.”

  “I just thought of something,” Jack said. “How are we going to get in there—the American side?” he asked.

  Ruthie thought about this. The Thorne Rooms are divided between European and American rooms, with separate corridors behind them, off-limits to the public. They could easily access the European rooms by shrinking and going under the door. But there was no gap under the door to the American rooms’ corridor for their shrunken selves to go under. Besides, it was right in front of the information booth. So Ruthie had built a climbing strip in the European corridor out of duct tape and they had clambered up like tiny mountaineers, crossing over to the American corridor through a heating duct in the ceiling.

  “Oh, right. I forgot that the maintenance people took the climbing strip down,” Ruthie said.

  “If we build another climbing strip, they’ll be suspicious,” Jack predicted.

  Just when Ruthie needed to brainstorm with Jack, her older sister, Claire, came into their room. “I have a paper due on Monday—can you talk somewhere else?” she asked. But it wasn’t really a request—it was an order.

  Ruthie wanted to say no, since she couldn’t talk freely to Jack anywhere else in the small apartment. But that would cause an argument she was certain she couldn’t win, as her parents always sided with the homework doer. She had zero privacy. “I gotta go, Jack. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She picked up a book and pretended to read but was really trying to think of a way they could get into the American rooms. Whenever they had the chance to sneak into the corridor, they had to use their time wisely. Ruthie didn’t want to be there tomorrow without at least trying to get into the South Carolina room.

  But here was their problem: while tiny, they had to reach a ledge that ran behind all the rooms, about four feet from the floor. Jack had made a ladder out of yarn and toothpicks. It was very useful to reach the ledge, but it wasn’t long enough to reach all the way up to the air duct. Nor was there anything to secure it to. Jack’s ladder design just wasn’t going to work. Then she had an idea.

  Ruthie rummaged through her closet for a box of miscellaneous craft items. She found a large ball of unused yarn and a crochet hook. Perfect. Her sister exhaled loudly.

  Ruthie returned to her bed, trying to remember what she’d been taught about crocheting. It quickly came back to her; it was really just a continuous chain of loops.

  She’d made about a three-foot length when Claire glared at her. “Can you do that somewhere else?”

  “But I’m being totally silent,” Ruthie protested.

  “I can see your hands moving out of the corner of my eye. Please!” Claire was stressed out, so Ruthie decided it wasn’t worth arguing. She went into the living room, where her dad was reading and her mom was grading papers.

  “Making something?” her mom asked.

  “I don’t know. Just seeing if I can remember how to do this,” Ruthie answered. She looped and looped the yarn, and in a half hour she had produced a length of about thirty-five feet—anyway, she hoped that was how long it was. She went into the kitchen and quietly scrounged through the junk drawer for a couple of batteries.

  “Good morning, Ruthie, Jack. Come in.” Mrs. McVittie greeted them at her door on Sunday.

  Ruthie and Jack followed her into the living room. Because she was a dealer of antiques and old books, Mrs. McVittie owned all kinds of wonderful things, but the globe, on a table in the center of the room filled with interesting objects, stood out. After Ruthie and Jack located it, Mrs. McVittie had convinced the police that the globe was
hers so it could be returned to the rooms. Its mate was in room E6.

  “I’m going to miss seeing this every day,” Mrs. McVittie admitted. “It truly is magnificent.”

  “Do you think it’s really three hundred years old?” Jack asked.

  “Most certainly,” Mrs. McVittie answered. “See how the varnish has a golden glow? And the continents aren’t quite correct. The western half of North America is all wrong.”

  As globes go, this one was on the smallish side, barely a foot tall, and it could be disassembled; a wooden set pin held the sphere in place on its tripod stand, which in turn could be flattened. This was useful. Ruthie carefully slid the pin out and lifted the globe and the tripod into her messenger bag.

  “There,” she said. “I’m glad it’s going back where it belongs.”

  “And to think, it could have gone missing forever!” Mrs. McVittie added.

  “Mrs. McVittie,” Jack began, “I have something to show you.” He fished his ancestor’s coin out of his pocket. “Look.”

  Mrs. McVittie lifted the reading glasses that hung on a chain around her neck and examined the shiny old object.

  “My, my! A piece of eight! I haven’t seen one of these in a long time. Where did you get it?”

  “My great-aunt sent it to me,” Jack answered.

  “Jack has a pirate ancestor!” Ruthie broke in. “It was his!”

  “How marvelous!” Mrs. McVittie exclaimed.

  Jack beamed. “I’m named after him. We had to do genealogy reports in school.”

  “Take good care of that coin.” Mrs. McVittie handed it back to Jack. “It’s fine silver.”

  “We should get the key now. The museum will open soon,” Ruthie said, knowing that their mission would be easier before the museum filled with crowds.

  They followed Mrs. McVittie into her guest room, where they kept the wooden box that held three treasures: Duchess Christina’s key, the slave tag and a letter to Ruthie sent by Louisa Meyer, a Jewish refugee they had met in Paris in 1937. Mrs. McVittie opened the box.

  The two pieces of metal glistened and seemed somehow alive, nestled in the box like small creatures waiting to be lifted out. Ruthie picked both up and looked at them in the palm of her hand. Even though the tag with the number 587 stamped on it looked rough and ragged, it flickered and flashed just as much as the elaborately decorated key, as though a beam of light were directed on them.

  “Here, Jack.” Ruthie deposited the key and tag into Jack’s open palm. She couldn’t carry them into the museum, because if she was touching them when she neared the rooms, she would shrink. Duchess Christina had made the magic key for girls—Jack shrank only if he was holding Ruthie’s hand while she was shrinking. Although they didn’t know why, the slave tag worked the same way. He put them both in the front pocket of his jeans.

  “Good luck, you two. Let me know how it all goes!” Mrs. McVittie said at the door to her apartment. Then she noticed an odd expression on Jack’s face. “What’s the matter?”

  “Holy mackerel!” he blurted out.

  “What?” Ruthie asked.

  Jack slid his hand into his front pocket. He pulled out the key, the tag and the now hot and glowing coin!

  4

  THE HIDDEN ROOM

  “STILL HOT?” RUTHIE ASKED AS she and Jack hopped off the bus in front of the Art Institute.

  “And really muggy too. Feels like tornado weather.” Jack looked to the sky.

  “No, I meant the coin!”

  “Oh, right. Yeah, still pretty warm,” Jack answered. Ruthie wanted to know what was causing this; the only other objects that behaved this way were the key and the slave tag—and those were both magic. But the coin had nothing to do with the museum or the Thorne Rooms! They raced up the museum’s broad front steps two at a time.

  “Wait!” Ruthie shouted. “Don’t go in!”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t know what’s going to happen. What if the coin makes you shrink? We should go slow, at least.”

  “Okay.” Jack took a more deliberate step toward the big glass doors.

  “Wait!” Ruthie insisted again. “The coin didn’t heat up for you ever before, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you feel anything funny or strange?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “You don’t feel your clothes changing—getting tighter or looser?” She looked at her friend carefully to see if he was changing size. “I think you should separate it from the key and tag. Put it in a different pocket.”

  Jack looked around and then took the three objects from his pocket with his right hand. He tumbled the glowing coin into his left. As soon as it was separated from the other two pieces, it dimmed.

  “Amazing,” he said, and put them back in different pockets.

  Once inside, Ruthie led the way toward the rooms, but at a slower pace. She wasn’t convinced that simply separating the magic items was enough to stop whatever process might take place. She didn’t want to be in the middle of a crowd and have her best friend suddenly shrink before multiple witnesses!

  But nothing out of the ordinary happened. Since it was Sunday morning and the museum had just opened, Gallery 11 was relatively empty.

  Jack said, “You ready?”

  “Ready,” Ruthie answered.

  Their chance came almost immediately.

  The instant Jack sandwiched the key between Ruthie’s palm and his own, the warmth from the key penetrated her skin. The magic swept around the two of them. Ruthie felt the surreal breeze through her hair, tickling her neck. It was as though they were falling into a small, gentle whirlwind as the space around them grew. And even though their feet never left the ground, they felt weightless for a few seconds until the shrinking stopped. Their arms and legs tingled a little. As soon as they were five inches tall, they scrambled under the access door.

  In the dark corridor, Ruthie asked Jack if the coin was doing anything unusual.

  “Nope.” He patted the outside of his pocket. “Maybe just slightly warm. Let’s return the globe. Then we can try to find out what’s going on with the coin.”

  “Okay,” Ruthie agreed. Room E6 was the first room in the corridor. It was the eighteenth-century English library, where the globe belonged. Ruthie needed to be big to hang the climbing ladder so they could reach the ledge. She dropped the key to the floor. Jack seemed to shrink before her eyes—only it was Ruthie herself who was expanding to normal.

  She took the ladder from her messenger bag, unwound it and secured it to the ledge. “There,” she said, and called down to still-small Jack, “Do you want me to lift you up?”

  “Nah, I’m in the mood to climb.” He scampered over to the ladder and started the long ascent. Ruthie picked up the key, returned to five inches and followed him, careful to climb without jostling the precious globe in her bag.

  “I found the entrance,” Jack said as Ruthie lifted herself onto the ledge. “It’s just over here.”

  They stepped through the wooden framing system to a door that Jack had already opened. “I think it goes to another room behind the main one,” he explained.

  Many of the Thorne Rooms have side rooms that museum visitors can see through open doors. Ruthie always loved peering into these side spaces. But she had never seen this room before because the door that led into it was closed, so it wasn’t visible from the viewing side. It had three doors—the one they had come through, another one leading to room E6 and the other opening to—where?

  “Wow!” Ruthie said. “I had no idea this room was here!”

  They walked in and looked around; since they couldn’t be seen from Gallery 11, they could take their time without worrying about anyone seeing them.

  The small space was more like a storage closet than a room. The one wall without a door was lined with shelves, which were empty except for a framed insect collection—mostly beetles and butterflies—a taxidermy rodent or two, and a few rock and crystal samples. An old leather-boun
d sketchbook—which Ruthie opened carefully—was half-filled with observations and notes, and some incomprehensible diagrams.

  “Okay. So I read up on the eighteenth century—at least the first half of it,” Jack began. “It was the beginning of the period called the Enlightenment. There was a lot of scientific investigation then. I read that people were interested in nature and in trying to understand natural phenomena.”

  “That would explain all this stuff. I wonder who it belonged to,” Ruthie pondered.

  “Me too.”

  “I’d better put the globe back.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Jack said, examining the insect collections like someone looking over delicacies in a pastry shop.

  Ruthie lifted the two pieces of the globe and the set pin from her bag and put the parts back together. She admired the hand-drawn outlines of the continents and the graceful curves of the tripod’s legs one last time.

  She cracked open the door to the main room and listened.

  Is it alive? she wondered.

  During their first magical visits to the Thorne Rooms, Ruthie and Jack had discovered that there were specific objects in some rooms—they called them animators—that made the places outside the doors and windows real, not simply the painted dioramas seen from the museum side. The rooms became time portals, through which Ruthie and Jack entered the worlds of the past.

  Inching the door open further, enough to gaze inside the tranquil library, Ruthie found it still, quiet—but not really dead. The warm glow of late-afternoon sunlight fell across the desk where the globe belonged.

  The sound of a dog barking in the distance drew her attention to the window. A perfectly trimmed topiary hedge bordered the garden and there were houses beyond. She noticed a slight rustling of the leaves in the trees outside the window. The room is alive even without the globe in it. She wondered what the animating object might be.

  A chair sat right in front of the door, so she had to move it a few inches to pass by. Ruthie walked into the room and placed the globe on the desk, making the arrangement symmetrical again, savoring the satisfaction that the job was done. Then she saw why there were two globes; the other one was not of the continents but rather of the stars and constellations. She hadn’t been able to see that detail through the glass.