“He doesn’t have any friends,” I said. “Unless it’s a secret from everyone.”
“Including the Chiangs,” added Margaret. “Because they watch everything he does.”
“So if he’s not meeting a friend, what’s he doing? Walking across the bridge to Virginia? As far as runaway plans go that’s not particularly good.”
“Right?” I said. “Because if you really wanted to get away in a hurry, you wouldn’t walk. You’d take the Metro, which is in the opposite direction.”
“But the Metro has security cameras everywhere,” said Marcus. “Every station. Every car. You’d be easy to find. The CARD team was looking at video from the Metro within minutes of getting the case. We know for sure he didn’t go that way.”
“Walking won’t get you anywhere and the Metro will get you caught,” I said. “How else are you going to get away?”
Margaret happily began slapping the dashboard. “The river!” she said with a huge smile. “There’s a little boathouse under the bridge. My parents and I went there one time and you know what we did? We rented kayaks.”
“Brilliant!” I said. “That’s absolutely brilliant.”
Marcus started driving, and as we rode we filled him in on Yin’s love of kayaking. Going to the boathouse and getting a kayak was at least a viable way of running away. But we couldn’t drive straight there to check it out because the CARD team had control of the case and had staked out the bridge.
This is why Marcus had the idea to borrow a boat from the harbor patrol, which is where this story began. In case there are parts you don’t remember, I’ll retell some of the highlights.
We went to the harbor patrol and Marcus tried to convince the sergeant on duty to loan us a boat. Marcus didn’t have much luck because the police and the FBI don’t get along particularly well. That’s when I helped by figuring out the cop had a son named Frankie and a daughter in the Girl Scouts. I reminded him that if they were in danger, he’d want everyone to help find them.
We got the keys and took off down the Potomac in a Zodiac boat. This was less than perfect for me considering I get seasick just looking at the water. By the time we reached the Key Bridge, I was ready to barf over the side.
In fact, I was just about to do that very thing when two sightseeing cruises passed us. The boats were named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and since they were giving a cruise through the capital of the United States, I thought it was strange that they were playing the British national anthem.
I asked Margaret and Marcus and they didn’t know what I was talking about. She even started to sing the song.
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing
“No, no, no,” I told her. “Those aren’t the lyrics. The song is ‘God Save the Queen.’ ” I grew up in Europe, and lived in England for three years, so I was pretty confident I knew what I was talking about. I started to sing the version that I knew:
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen.
That’s when Marcus figured out the problem. Both of us were right. Both songs had the same tune but different lyrics. And since we only heard the music, we each assumed it was the version we knew best. The same thing had happened when Margaret heard “My Dear Chatham” and thought that it was “Oh! Susanna.”
I don’t know if it was the dizziness, my stomach, the case, the clues, the music, or all of it. But in that moment I felt a surge moving up through my body. I couldn’t tell if I was going to get sick, if my head was going to explode, or if I was going to solve the mystery right then and there. It just bubbled up through me. And then . . .
“I need to get off the boat,” I said urgently.
“What’s the matter?” Marcus asked. “Are you going to get sick?”
“No,” I answered; my nausea had been instantly cured by my realization. “I told you I’d follow the clues wherever they lead, and that’s where they lead.”
“How?” said Margaret.
“It’s complicated,” I replied. “But the first thing you have to understand is that ‘God Save the Queen’ changes everything.”
“Where do you need to go?” asked Marcus.
“Back to the Kennedy Center,” I answered. “The room with all the pianos.”
“Why are we going there?” asked Margaret.
“Because you play the piano and I need you to play one of Yin’s compositions.”
Marcus saw the look in my eyes and needed no more convincing. He headed back for the marina before I even started to explain my theory. (I had to explain it all pretty loudly to be heard over the engine, but the amazing thing was this time the boat didn’t make me feel sick at all.)
“How does ‘God Save the Queen’ change things?” asked Margaret.
“Because it reminded me that we make assumptions based on our experiences. You heard the music and thought it was ‘My Country, ’Tis of the Thee,’ because that’s what you know it as. I thought it was ‘God Save the Queen’ because that’s my frame of reference.”
“Right,” she said. “What does that have to do with Yin?”
“When we all read ‘Help Key Bridge,’ we thought of the bridges that cross the Potomac, because that’s our frame of reference. But it isn’t Yin’s. When he uses the word ‘bridge,’ he thinks of . . .”
“Music,” said Margaret.
“That’s right,” I said. “There’s a musical bridge in one of the pieces. He mentioned it the other day when you two were talking about composing. He said he’d just rewritten it. It’s not the Key Bridge as in the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge literally is a key. A coded message.”
By the time we got back to the Kennedy Center, the concert was over and all the students and musicians had gone home. We had to be careful because we were off the case, but there was nowhere else we could go to get copies of Yin’s music.
“You here to return my car?” asked Kayla when she saw us.
“Sort of,” said Marcus. “I also need to borrow it again. But first Florian and Margaret need to get some music.”
“You are not working on this case, are you?” she asked. “Marcus, you can’t take that kind of risk.”
“They just want to see some music,” he said. “Nothing to do with any kidnapping.”
And in a way that was true, because there hadn’t been a kidnapping. Although I wasn’t sure that’s how Marcus’s boss would react if this went wrong.
Marcus and Kayla stood watch outside the dressing room door while Margaret and I found a binder of sheet music and took it into the piano garage. There were three pianos side by side and when she pulled back the cover from one she couldn’t believe her eyes.
“I guess they just have Steinway grand pianos lying around here,” she said, shaking her head in amazement.
“Is this a particularly nice type of piano?” I asked, totally ignorant.
“It probably costs about a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I’d say that’s pretty nice. Try not to break it.”
She sat down, put the music up on the rack, and turned to me. “I’m still not sure what we’re looking for.”
“Neither am I,” I admitted. “I just think there’s some kind of message hidden in the bridge. Kind of like the way Becca signed her Chat Chat posts with notes instead of letters.”
“The thing is, classical music doesn’t typically have a bridge,” she said. “It’s more common in popular songwriting.”
“But he mentioned one the other day in the practice room,” I reminded her. “So it has to be in there.”
“You’re right. Let’s find it.”
She skipped the first piece, the one we’d listened to earlier, because it was a traditional concerto.
“So if it’s not in ‘Red,’ ” I said, “it’s got to be in either ‘White’ or ‘Blue.’ ”
“Which one do yo
u think?”
“Try ‘Blue’ first,” I suggested.
“Why?”
“Because he wrote the note on a blue sticky note,” I replied. “Maybe he picked the color for a reason.”
She opened the binder to the third piece of music and started scanning it, stopping every now or then to play a few notes. My entire knowledge of musical composition was limited to what Margaret had told me about her song and the little bit I saw when she and Yin worked on it, so I was useless. In addition to the pianos the room had a row of gray metal filing cabinets, a dry-erase board for people to leave messages for each other, and a poster from the musicians’ union taped to the door.
“This might be it,” Margaret said. She played the same eight notes over and over, tentative at first, until she felt comfortable.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s definitely the bridge.”
I walked over to the dry-erase board and grabbed a marker. “What are the notes?”
“B, E, B-flat, E, A, D, E, D.”
I wrote them down as she said them and when she was done she played them one more time.
“Bebeaded?” I said, reading them. “Is that a word? Something to do with a necklace maybe?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered.
I tried it out in a sentence. “The princess was bebeaded with a necklace of gold, silver, and pearls.”
She gave me a look. “Okay, we’re in the middle of a crisis, so I’m going to let it slide. But I don’t love the fact that you went straight to princess. A lot of women wear necklaces, like scientists, CEOs, Supreme Court justices. Also, your knowledge of jewelry is apparently nonexistent. A silver, gold, and pearl necklace would be hideous.”
“That’s you letting it slide?” I said.
She laughed. “Okay, I guess I didn’t let it slide completely. But I’m confident ‘bebeaded’ is not a word.”
“Are you sure you got the notes right?” I asked.
“Positive,” she said with a touch of attitude.
“I know, I know,” I said apologetically. “I’m just trying to figure it out. Maybe it’s a sentence: Be Bead Ed.”
“But the second letter isn’t B. It’s B-flat.”
I added “flat” to the mix and tried to pronounce it. “Bebflateaded?” I looked up at her and said, “That makes even less sense.”
She flashed a smile.
“No, that makes total sense to me,” said Margaret.
“It does?”
She got up from the piano and came over to me. “Some people notate B-flat as H,” she said. “Bach used to use it to spell his name in some of his compositions. I think it’s a German thing.”
She used her thumb to erase “B-flat” and wrote an “H” instead.
“There’s your word,” she said. “Beheaded.”
“Wow,” I said, unsure what to make of it. “That’s kind of a gruesome unexpected turn. Why beheaded?”
The door opened to reveal Marcus and Kayla. She signaled us to hurry up and leave, and Marcus was turned talking to some unseen agent.
“Good luck with everything,” he said. “Let me know if there’s any way we can be any help.”
While he kept stalling, Margaret silently put the cover back on the piano and we slipped out the other door. Amazingly we managed to get out of the building without anyone seeing us. None of us said a word until we made it to the parking lot and Kayla’s SUV.
“Any luck?” Marcus asked hopefully.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “We know what it is.”
“Well, tell us,” he said. “What is it?”
“The Latin word for ‘creepy sculptures.’ ”
30.
Puellae
THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE GARDEN IS a park located next to the museum where my mother works. It’s a little bigger than two city blocks and contains more than twenty large-scale works of outdoor art. We were there to see Puellae, the sculpture of the thirty headless girls that we’d seen posted on Yin’s Chat Chat bulletin board. He’d come here on one of his Saturday adventures with the Chiangs and now I was convinced he’d selected it as a rendezvous point for his getaway.
“Beheaded,” I said as we walked up to them. “This is the message that was hidden in the notes of the music. He wanted someone to meet him here.”
The bronze girls were posed on the lawn in several rows, shielded from pedestrians by a series of long stone benches that lined the walkway. I scanned the faces of the people in the park hoping to see Yin but there was no sign of him.
“How can we even know if he made it?” asked Marcus.
“We could pull security footage of the park,” Kayla suggested.
“Or check out the traffic cameras,” I said.
“Yeah, but that’s kind of hard to do considering we’re not supposed to be on this case,” he replied. “We’d never get a warrant.”
“We don’t need one,” said Margaret. “He was definitely here.”
“How can you be so certain?” I asked.
She walked over to where two of the benches met and reached for something that had fallen on the little patch of dirt between them. “Look familiar?” she said as she pulled it out.
“Yin’s baseball cap.”
The three of us converged on her to give it a closer look. “Happy Birthday, Yin” was written along the inside border.
“Okay, this worries me,” said Margaret.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s not like Yin to leave it behind. If it’s here, that means something’s wrong.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “He’s on the run. He came here to meet someone. Maybe they rushed off and he didn’t realize he’d lost it. Like when we were at the zoo.”
“And you saw how freaked-out he got when he thought it was gone,” she reminded me. “Even if he’s on the run, I think he would’ve come back for it. This worries me a lot.”
I took a deep breath and thought it over. “You may be right.”
“Forget about the hat for a moment and think about the friend,” said Marcus. “Who’d he come here to meet?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think he had any friends.”
“He must have at least one, because he hid the message in the music,” said Marcus. “The only reason to hide it is if someone else can find it.”
Margaret flashed an “aha” smile.
“But that wasn’t his only message,” she said. “He also left the sticky note with ‘Help Key Bridge’ written on it. That was left for the same friend.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “And unlike the music, which was heard by fifteen hundred people, only a few could’ve seen that note.”
“Who found it?” asked Kayla.
“The conductor,” said Marcus. “And then he got Malena Sanchez.”
“You know, Malena has been on the edges of this mystery every step of the way,” I said.
Marcus gave me an incredulous look. “You think a Secret Service agent is involved in an elaborate runaway plan of a thirteen-year-old Chinese national?”
“No,” I replied. “It’s just that she’s always close by to where everything is happening. It’s an observation, not an accusation.”
“It’s because she’s always close by Lucy,” said Margaret. “That’s her job.”
I thought about that for a moment and beamed. “You’re absolutely right. It’s her job to be there at all times.” I turned to Marcus and excitedly asked, “Do you know how to reach her?”
“Malena? Yes. Why?”
“I think she has the answer we’re looking for.”
He was a little hesitant, but he pulled out his phone and called her. He gave me a skeptical look while he waited for the call to connect.
“Malena, this is Marcus Rivers,” he said when she answered. “Do you have a second? Florian wants to ask you a question. He thinks it’s important.”
He listened to her response and then handed me the phone.
&
nbsp; “Here you go.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out something about Yin and I need to ask you a question. I want to know if you’ll make the same deal with me.”
“What deal is that?” Malena asked.
“The one you made in the car the other day when you said I could ask just one question and you’d answer honestly if you could.”
“If I remember correctly, you didn’t ask a particularly good question.”
“No, I didn’t,” I admitted. “But I think this one’s much better.”
It was quiet on the phone for a moment. “Okay, let’s hear it.”
I ran it through my head, making sure that my phrasing was such that no matter what she said, it would tell me what I needed to know.
“After the concert today, did Lucy Mays ask you to take her to the Sculpture Garden?”
There was a long pause during which I could hear only her deep breaths. Finally she spoke up. “Give the phone to Agent Rivers.”
“Wait! That’s not fair. What’s the answer?”
“Give the phone to Agent Rivers,” she repeated emphatically.
I handed it to him and watched as he listened. I couldn’t figure out the conversation because she was doing all of the talking. Marcus nodded along as if he were getting instructions and when she was finished he simply said, “Roger that.”
He looked at us with an expression that was hard to describe.
“Are we in trouble?” Margaret asked warily.
“No,” he said, bewildered. “We have been asked to go to the White House. Immediately.”
He turned to me and gave a little crooked grin and added, “Agent Sanchez wanted me to tell you something. She even repeated it to make sure I got it right.”
“What?” I asked.
“She said, ‘That, Florian, is an excellent question.’ ”
31.
The Blue Room
FOR THE SECOND TIME IN less than a week, I had the privilege of visiting the White House, although this visit was more work-related than the first. It was funny to see how Margaret, Marcus, and Kayla reacted as Malena Sanchez led us to the Blue Room on the first floor of the residence.