Stinky is in fifth grade, which means he’s always hungry. I guess Boris is used to that, because he had some granola bars in one of his pockets and he gave them to us. They weren’t even the store-bought kind; they were homemade. Stinky said there were lentils in there, because they’re Boris’s trademark, but I couldn’t taste them. Howard’s snack was another banana from Nanny X. It was a little squished from being in the diaper bag, but Howard didn’t mind.
Boris volunteered to stay outside the museum with the animals and the stroller. “I want to help them search the van for clues,” he said. “You never know what they’ll miss.”
The rest of us went through the museum doors.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” a guard said to Nanny X. “You’ll have to check that.” He pointed at the diaper bag. I don’t think he was worried about weapons like they were at the White House; he was just afraid she’d knock it into a piece of artwork. I could see where just having a bunch of pockets was handier.
Nanny X handed me a pacifier. “Don’t pull on it,” she said. She handed Ali a copy of Hop, Sweet Bunny, which I guess was the sequel to Moo, Sweet Cow. “Don’t open it,” she said.
Then she took her bag to the coat-and-bag check. She came back with a ticket that said No. 27, which was easy to remember because that’s the number on the back of my baseball jersey.
“This way,” she said, walking at Nanny X speed down one of the hallways. I guess she knew exactly where the portrait of George Washington should have been hanging.
As we walked, we played a speed version of our favorite art-museum game, where you try to name the art before you get close enough to see what it’s really called. It was more fun to guess than it was to look at the actual art. You could win if you kept guessing Untitled, but that was cheating. I wished The Angler had gone after a treasure from the Air and Space Museum; that would have been a better place to search.
Finally we reached the room where Salvador Dali’s portrait of George Washington had been hanging. There was a gold frame on the wall. Inside the frame there was nothing at all.
Some metal poles and police tape made a square fence around the area in front of the frame. Next to it was a small black plate that explained where the painting had been found, and that Salvador Dali was a surrealist, which, according to Nanny X, meant that George Washington had cherry blossoms growing out of his ears. Plus, his nose was melting.
After we stared at the empty frame for a while, Ali looked down and did a little sucky thing with her breath.
“What?” said Stinky.
She looked like she couldn’t decide whether or not to tell us. But Nanny X nodded her head. “Go ahead, Alison,” she said, which made me think that Nanny X had noticed the thing, too.
Ali squatted on the floor to look more closely, so we all squatted down. “Well, it’s sawdust,” she said. “Or maybe something-else dust. It was in the van, too, only in the van it was silver.”
My powers of observation needed more training, because I had missed that dust. I wished I had a magnifying glass, but all I had were my regular eyes. Still, I could see that the dust was not just brown or white, but lots of other colors. A little red. A little pink. A little green.
Eliza got down on her stomach. She didn’t seem interested in Ali’s sawdust, but she reached under the yellow tape and grabbed something with her fingers. I wasn’t sure how she even saw it: a screw, like the kind my dad is always replacing in his glasses. Only this one was emerald-colored.
“Achy!” she said, which is her name for me. “Coo!” She sounded like a little bird—a little bird that was saying “clue.”
Nanny X put it in one of her evidence bags.
I looked around the floor of the gallery, but didn’t see anything else. We walked back toward the exit in the East Building, and I kept looking down. That’s why I saw a wadded-up piece of paper on the floor. I picked it up, hoping it wasn’t somebody’s old gum, and uncrumpled it. Inside was a poem, like the one we’d seen at the White House.
With Sal and Paul
But the next one’s tall.
Install my fish
Or you will wish
That you people had listened to me
when you got my first note.
I showed it to Nanny X as we stood underneath the Calder mobile. I hoped it wouldn’t fall on her, like Montauban’s thumb.
While we were reading, Eliza pointed at the exit. I followed her finger to the dark squirrel that seemed to be looking into the museum from the outside. Ali came up behind me.
“No way,” she said.
“Way.”
“That rogue!” said Nanny X. She moved her arms in a karate pose—“Kee-yah!” she yelled—and charged toward the revolving doors. We followed her, but even though we exited, Nanny X kept revolving. She stopped when she got back inside the museum. I could see her waving her slip with the “27” on it in her karate-chop hand as she headed back to find the coat check.