Tuesday was dreary and Lou Lou’s sleepy eyes felt heavy. Her stomach was queasy from eating too much chocolate the night before, and the sight of gummy bears made her feel sick. Pea was wrong—there was such a thing as too much candy.
It was not Lou Lou’s best day at school. After waking up late, she threw on mismatched clothes and skipped breakfast to prepare last minute for a discussion about famous inventors. But when she got to class, it turned out that Mr. Anthem’s lesson was about geography. At lunch, Lou Lou realized that her dad had accidentally switched her turkey sandwich for his liverwurst. By the afternoon, she’d lost count of how many chrysanthemums she’d said to herself during the day. The only good thing was that there were no more Jeremy sightings.
When Lou Lou finally arrived back home and saw Serena smiling over the SS Lucky Alley’s front door, she breathed a sigh of relief. Pea was due any minute to work on the riddle and the Mural Mystery. Then the phone in the kitchen rang.
“Ahoy, you’ve reached the SS Lucky Alley. This is Lou Lou speaking.”
“It’s me,” replied a familiar voice. “I haven’t left my house yet. Uno rubbed against my paint palette and it’s taking me forever to get the turquoise out of his fur.”
“Drat!” said Lou Lou, who was eager to get back to riddle solving. Though she couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of Pea’s painted cat. “Can you ask your father to drop you off at If Pigs Could Fly? That way I can meet you there and we can get right to it!”
“Definitely!” said Pea. “See you in twenty minutes.”
Lou Lou stuffed the Matrix and the riddle into her satchel and grabbed her coat. She put on her sneakers, then wrote her parents a note saying she had gone for a walk with Pea and would be home before dark.
On the way to If Pigs Could Fly, Lou Lou kept an eye on the other murals and, sure enough, the Mural Mystery had struck again. On the side of a garage was a mural that Lou Lou and Pea called Cats, Hats, and Bats. It showed cats of all colors and sizes in elaborate head wear. Calicos wore hats piled high with fruit, black cats sported feathered berets, and Persian cats wore wide-brimmed hats with elaborate curlicues. Around their heads fluttered dark bats. Both Lou Lou and Pea counted this mural among their favorites. Pea liked it because she adored felines and fashion. Lou Lou loved the bats, which were a horticulturist’s friend thanks to their appetite for pests and their ability to pollinate plants and flowers.
But today at Cats, Hats, and Bats, Lou Lou stared at a new addition to the mural. Between two Himalayan cats in sombreros stood a familiar woman in glasses. The painter had used careful brushstrokes to make her look wet, adding stringy hair and clothes that hung limply and dripped water.
“Hello, Sugar Skulls Sarah,” Lou Lou said to the painting. She wasn’t surprised by the image. She’d expected to see Sarah in a mural ever since the suspicious sprinkler storm. Lou Lou pulled the Mural Mystery Matrix from her satchel. She leaned against the wall and added another row to the Matrix, printing Sugar Skulls Sarah’s Sprinkler Storm. Then she added a column for Cats, Hats, and Bats and put an X at the intersection of the two. When she was done, she stepped back to survey the mural.
“LOOK AROUND FOR THE BRIGHTEST HUE,” Lou Lou quoted from the riddle. “It’s gotta be your sweater, Sarah.” Sugar Skulls Sarah’s sweater was a bright shade of bluish purple. Lou Lou pursed her lips and thought.
“It’s indigo!” she exclaimed, pointing one finger in the air at her discovery. She didn’t need Pea’s color swatch book to confirm this. A few months ago she and Pea had tried to make indigo dye from the leaves of one of Lou Lou’s plants to color Pea’s handmade skirt. It hadn’t worked well and they’d ended up with a wet bundle of grayish cotton. But Lou Lou admired the true color of indigo.
Lou Lou carefully wrote Indigo below the new X on the Matrix and underlined the I.
“Just a few more clues to go!” she announced triumphantly to the afternoon sky.