Xena reached out and pulled him in, then slammed the door shut against the evening chill.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“We need to make a list,” Xander said. “See if you make the same deduction.”
Xena found a piece of paper and drew a line down the middle, dividing it neatly into two columns, the left-hand one headed Clue and the right-hand one Deduction. She passed it to Xander.
He wrote in the Clue column, “We thought Sarah looked like the girl in the missing painting but when she took off the hat and the wig she didn't.” Under Deduction he wrote, “The girl in the Batheson painting didn't necessarily look like the model who posed for it either.”
“So?” Xena asked.
Xander ignored her. “Clue: Little kids don't look especially boyish or girlish. Flower petals around the head of even a very masculine little boy make him look like a little girl.”
“Very masculine?” Xena hooted.
“Shut up,” Xander said and kept writing. “Deduction: The model for the painting wasn't necessarily a girl.”
“Ah,” Xena said. She saw where he was going and it made sense.
“Clue.” Xander paused, then wrote, “All of Nigel Batheson's children were boys. He was very shy and didn't talk to people outside his family. He would never have had a stranger pose for him, even a kid.”
Xander put down his pen and leaned back. “When you have excluded the impossible,” he said, quoting Sherlock Holmes, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” He locked eyes with his sister.
“The girl in the purple hat,” Xena said slowly, “was a boy?”
Xander nodded. He wrote in the Deduction column “The model was either Abner, Cedric, or Robert Batheson!” He sat back.
Xena pulled out the newspaper clipping about the Batheson exhibit from her desk. She and her brother studied the copy of Girl in a Purple Hat. True, they couldn't tell for sure from just the face. The green eyes could belong to either a boy or a girl, and so could the rosy cheeks and the pouting mouth. But the model appeared uncomfortable. Was the dress scratchy, like Sarah's? Or was it because the model was a boy who didn't want to wear a dress?
“I think the real clue,” Xena said slowly, “is in the expression. If most portraits from that time make children look”—she consulted the clipping again—“look overly sweet, why did Batheson make this one look as grumpy as you did when Dad told you that you couldn't quit the soccer team?”
Xander ignored her. “The problem is, this doesn't really help us figure out where the painting is. Even if the model was one of the Batheson boys, so what? We don't have any more clues that will help us find the painting in time for the art opening tomorrow.”
“That doesn't mean we should give up,” Xena said. “We're on to something, Xander! When we go to the opening we're bound to see some of his descendants. I'm sure we'll find more clues there.”
“What do you wear to an art opening anyway?” Xander asked.
“Black,” Xena said promptly. “Whenever you see people on TV at something like this, they're always wearing black.”
Xena had tried on everything in her closet before finally settling on a pair of black jeans and a matching turtleneck. Now, as they waited to get into the Victoria and Albert Museum, their parents were chatting with a woman who had tattoos on both arms and a man with so many piercings in his ears, nose, lips, and eyebrows that he looked like a porcupine. I guess it doesn't matter what you wear to these things, Xena thought.
Xena and Xander checked their coats, then wandered around admiring the paintings and trying not to stare at the blank space on the wall representing the missing Girl in a Purple Hat.
Xander nudged Xena and pointed at something in the brochure. “It says that the artist made the frames himself out of wood and then they were covered in gold leaf—really thin sheets of gold. That's so cool!”
Xena wasn't interested in frames, gold-covered or not. She was scrutinizing the people. The artist they'd met on Wednesday was there with her niece, Sarah, who was wearing her “girl in a purple hat” costume. Sarah waved at Xena, who smiled and waved back. Then Xena spotted Mrs. Emerson, the lady they had met in Taynesbury. She was over in a corner, talking to a group of men. Xena was curious. Maybe they were talking about the missing painting. It was a long shot but worth a listen.
She weaved along the edge of the crowd toward Mrs. Emerson's group. The plan was to get close enough to eavesdrop without getting caught. She could usually blend in without people noticing her. Her mother called this talent “Xena's cloak of invisibility.” Xander called it nosiness. Whatever you called it, it would come in handy now.
But they weren't saying anything particularly interesting, just talking about how bad the traffic had been, and wasn't the weather awful, and what were they planning to do for Christmas. Xena looked at the men out of the corner of her eye. They shared a resemblance to one another and to Mrs. Emerson, especially their bright green eyes. They had to be Batheson descendants.
“What are you doing?” Well, that was the end of her invisibility. Nobody could help noticing Xander, especially when he didn't even try to keep his voice down.
“Nothing anymore,” she said. “Now that you blew it.”
“Why, it's those children,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“The ones who were looking for great-great-grandfather's house. They're doing a school report on him. You children must be real art lovers!”
“We are,” Xena said. “Especially when it comes to Nigel Batheson. I'm Xena Holmes, and this is my brother, Xander.”
“Are you the kids who called me a few days back?” asked one of the green-eyed men.
Xena nodded. “Yes,” she said. “We were disappointed not to be able to see the house he lived in.”
“So much was destroyed during the war,” said a man who was clutching a drink. “Such a tragedy. A lovely old farmhouse, reduced to rubble.”
“No, the real tragedy is that Nigel Batheson's collection is incomplete.” Mrs. Emerson pointed at the blank space reserved for the memory of Girl in a Purple Hat. “It's so sad.”
“True, true,” one of the men agreed.
“It's a shame the world will never get to study his greatest work,” the tall one said. “Even the identity of the model is a mystery.”
“We think we know who the model was!” Xander piped in. “Or at least we think we know who it wasn't.”
Xena nudged Xander with her elbow. It was only a theory, after all.
“Whatever can you mean?” asked Mrs. Emerson. “How could you kids know who the girl in the picture was? Even we don't know that, and we're family!”
“We think,” Xena said, “that it wasn't a girl at all. We think it was a boy, one of Nigel Batheson's sons, dressed up to look like a girl!”
Xena waited for their reaction. Would they laugh at them? Have them thrown out of the museum?
For a moment there was silence. Then the man with the mustache said, “What a fascinating theory! Which son do you think it was?” he asked Xander.
“We're not sure,” Xander answered. “We don't know much about Nigel's children except that they went to boarding school and one had smallpox and another liked toads.”
“Maybe you could help,” Xena said. “Do you know which one might have been about eight years old when Nigel painted the portrait?”
The tall Batheson turned to Mrs. Emerson. “Here, Emily, you always have a little of everything in that bag of yours. Could you find a bit of paper and something to write with? Let's see what we can remember.”
Mrs. Emerson dug in her purse and produced an envelope and the stub of a pencil. One of the Batheson men cleared a space on a small table that was littered with paper napkins and empty glasses, and the adults all put their heads together. Xena and Xander stood on tiptoe peering over their shoulders.
The little snippets of conversation they heard just tantalized them more. “Abner was born when, Jack?” and “But I thought their cousin Frank was older than Cedric.” Just when they thought they would burst with curiosity, the adults moved aside a little and let them see what they had been working on.
It was a family tree. Birth years of most of the relatives had been penciled in. There were no daughters, no female cousins, not even an aunt who would have been a young girl when the painting was done.
Xander studied the paper carefully. “So if Girl in a Purple Hat was painted in 1902 and Abner was born in 1885, he'd be too old to be the model.”
“Cedric was born in 1890,” Xena remarked. “That would make him twelve. That's a little too old, even if he looked young for his age. And, anyway, he had smallpox scars on his face by then.”
“But Robert,” Xander went on. “He was born in 1894.”
“That would have made him eight when the painting was made!” Xena exclaimed. “That's about the age of the model in the painting. It could be him!”
“That is so clever of you, children,” the man with the mustache said. “And just think of all the art historians who haven't been able to figure this out.”
Blushing but pleased, Xena pocketed the envelope with the Batheson family tree on it. Then they said good-bye to the Bathesons and left the room.
“So where do we go from here?” Xena asked. “How does knowing who modeled for Girl in a Purple Hat help us figure out who stole it?”
Xander didn't have a response for that. He took his coat from the hook where he had hung it on his way in. When he put it on, the picture of him in his daisy costume fell out of a pocket.
“Hey!” Xena cried. “My picture!”
Xander quickly swiped it off the floor. “It's my picture now,” he said. “I told you. You're not getting it back. I don't trust you not to show it again.”
“So you're going to carry it with you everywhere?” Xena asked. “Or will you tear it up?”
“Maybe,” Xander replied, though he knew that he wouldn't. There was something—well, something weird about tearing up his own picture. But as soon as he got back to their apartment, he'd hide it deep under his mattress.
And that's exactly what he did. Then, with his arm shoved halfway underneath his mattress, he realized something about the mystery.
Xena didn't think the identity of Batheson's model in Girl in a Purple Hat mattered. But it did matter . . . it was the key to solving the whole case!