The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt Page A

know him,” Lucas said. “We just saw him in here sometimes, that’s all.”
    â€œI have bad news for you, missies,” the guard said slowly. “Bert died Saturday, on his way home from his half-day shift. Got run over by a bus, he did.”
    â€œSaturday!” I said. “But we just saw him on Friday.” I felt like somebody had punched me. And from the look on Lucas’s face, I think she felt the same.
    â€œThat’s how these things go, my dears. Terrible shock, it was. He lived alone, did old Bert, so at least he didn’t leave behind no missus or little kiddies needin’ a dad.”
    â€œBut how did it happen?” Lucas asked. “Did he just fall, or what?”
    â€œWe-e-e-ll,” the guard began, and the way he said it, you knew he was winding up to tell us something interesting, “there’s a woman was behind him in the queue, says he was pushed.”
    Then, seeing our horrified expressions, he continued, “Oh yes, she says she saw a man push him under the oncoming bus. But others say it was an accident, and that’s what I think, too. I don’t know why anybody would want to push old Bert. He was harmless enough.
    â€œIt’s been quite a week around here, with Bert’s accident coming right after the snake incident and all.”
    â€œWhat snake incident?” I said. I knew perfectly well what snake incident.
    â€œWe-e-e-ll,” he wound himself up again, “it was last Friday, it was. About the middle of the afternoon. Suddenly this here snake starts roamin’ the galleries. Old Henry, he was the first one as seen it, over in the Impressionist section. Ted says he thought he seen somethin’ out of the corner of his eye. That’s in Eye-talian Ren-AY-zance.” He meant Italian Renaissance.
    Lucas and I looked at each other. We knew that snake had only been on the floor for approximately ninety seconds, and only in the Rembrandt room.
    â€œThen it crawled in here. Caused quite a stir, it did. Old Bert, he picked it up and carried it out, brave as you please, though he said afterward it near gave him heart failure. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Everyone bein’ so afraid of snakes and all.”
    We didn’t tell him that we weren’t the slightest bit afraid of snakes.
    â€œThe incident even made it into the Mirror.”
    â€œWhat?” Lucas was almost shouting. The Daily Mirror is a newspaper.
    â€œNot as you’d say a big article. Still, Bert got his name in it. Hope it made his last day a little happier, poor bloke.
    â€œI says to my missus, I says, ‘It’s eerie, him dying like that after just handling a snake. It’s as if that snake was a omen, like.’”
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    I don’t know when I’ve felt quite as miserable as I did after hearing about Bert dying. For one thing, just to know that someone you’d seen alive almost the day before was now dead was weird, and it made me sad, even though I didn’t much like Bert when he was alive.
    But there was something else, something totally huge that made me feel like I’d been socked in the stomach. With everything that was going on with Gallery Guy, I didn’t think Bert’s death was just an accident. Somebody had pushed him under that bus. And I kept thinking about those last words of the guard, the ones about the snake being an omen. Was there any connection between the snake incident and what happened to Bert? Because if there was, then in some way Lucas and I were responsible for his death.

19
    The Jaguar
    Tuesday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not the kind of day when you expect something terrible to happen.
    We were helping Mom with “London Looks” in a little park called Sloane Square in a busy part of town where there are lots of clothes shops and fashionable people. When we weren’t doing something for Mom, we sat in the sunshine, writing in our travel journals. I