Seeing Stars and Finding Flowers
Outside the studio, Lou Lou and Pea huddled together to escape the rain and talk in secret as they walked.
“See! He knows about Helado!” Lou Lou said. “I’d bet you five cupcakes something bad happened to that bunny. That’s why Helado is in a mural, just like Magdalena’s dress!”
“You’re right, he probably does know,” said Pea. “White bunnies with amber eyes are not exactly popping up around the neighborhood every day like tabby cats and black Labradors.”
“This stuff has to be related, and Jeremy must be behind it all!” replied Lou Lou. “He did something to Helado, ruined Magdalena’s dress, and killed Pinky. I just know it! He probably stole Danielle’s necklace, too.”
“But there’s no connection between Jeremy and Danielle or Magdalena—”
“No connection that we know of yet,” Lou Lou interrupted. “We need to put all the pieces together and stop these crimes so no one else gets hurt!”
They continued walking the short distance to the SS Lucky Alley in the rain. The sky was dark with clouds and the street lamps came on early, bathing sections of their route in pools of light. Halloween decorations were up all over the neighborhood and witches on broomsticks cackled silently, while plastic-bag ghosts swayed in trees. Lou Lou watched flickers of orange through the eyes of a spooky jack-o’-lantern. If it could speak, she thought, it would be saying, Trouble is a-brewing, Lou Lou Bombay.
Suddenly, Pea gasped and stopped.
“What is it?” asked Lou Lou. She followed Pea’s gaze to the last house on their left. A mural, partially illuminated by a streetlight, covered the doorway and the front wall. A Lovely Day for a Parade showed a festive spectacle of children prancing with balloons and women carrying baskets of fruit. People leaned out of windows waving blue-and-yellow flags. Lou Lou scanned the mural to see what had caught Pea’s eye.
“Look,” said Pea. “That woman’s basket had peaches in it before.” Here was Lou Lou’s turn to gasp. The peaches were gone and the basket was now painted full of brownish-green leaves, branches, and shriveling flowers. Not just any flowers, but magenta autumn queen camellia blooms.
“Pinky!” Lou Lou cried. “Pinky is in the mural!”
“There’s something else!” Pea exclaimed. She was looking at another mural on the next building. Lou Lou and Pea called this one Dancing in Space because rings of dancers frolicked on different planets in the solar system. A circle of people twirled and kicked up their legs on Earth, a group of white-and-black dogs danced paw to paw on Mars, turtles sashayed around Saturn’s rings, and kangaroos pranced on Venus. The space above the dancers had been a blank expanse of black. But now there were four huge rose-gold stars in a row linked with a painted chain. It only took Lou Lou a second to tie the stars to the day’s events.
“Danielle Desserts! That’s her best-friends shining-star necklace,” Lou Lou said. “I knew it! Helado, Magdalena, Pinky, and even Danielle Desserts are for sure connected. It’s mural mischief. No, it’s a Mural Mystery. And Jeremy must be the culprit!”
“But other people know about Pinky’s planticide and could have changed the mural, right?” Pea asked. “I’m not saying it’s not Jeremy, just that we should keep an open mind. Who else did you tell about the planticide? And who knows about Danielle’s necklace? We need a complete list of suspects before we can be certain about anything.”
Lou Lou counted off the people she’d told about Pinky’s death. Besides Jeremy, there were her parents and Pea, but naturally they could be eliminated as suspects. Then there was Juan at Green Thumb, everyone who worked at Cupcake Cabana, Elmira, Magdalena, the mail lady, Lou Lou’s English class, the old man who fed the ducks in Limonero Park, Lou Lou’s bus driver … The list was long, and Lou Lou was sure she was forgetting people. As for Danielle’s best-friends shining-star necklace, everyone at school knew it had gone missing. Danielle had complained and cried about it all afternoon.
“I guess it could have been someone else,” Lou Lou said. Pea was right—she couldn’t completely rule out other people. “What do you think the murals mean and why is Jeremy—I mean, someone from our list of suspects—changing them? Is the villain just bragging about his own crimes?” She looked at Pinky’s withered painted image again and felt a pang of sadness.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. Most criminals would want to keep their crimes a secret,” Pea replied. They thought about this silently for a moment. “We better get going, Lou Lou. It’s almost five o’clock,” added Pea.
“Okay,” said Lou Lou reluctantly. She wanted to examine the murals more carefully, but Henry Pearl was due at the SS Lucky Alley and Lou Lou couldn’t miss her dad’s famous landlubber lasagna. She took one last look at the painted camellia and vowed to herself that they would solve the Mural Mystery. They’d find the person who had killed poor Pinky and stolen Lou Lou’s blue-ribbon dreams.