Chasing Vermeer

Later that night, Petra dismisses her hunch on the staircase as fanciful. She talks herself out of suspecting Mrs. Sharpe and Ms. Hussey of any wrongdoing. When she asks the Lady in the painting for help, she receives no answer. All she can see in her mind’s eye is a rectangle inside a triangle.

The next morning, Petra’s parents anxiously discuss the thief’s latest announcement in the paper. He says that if authorities don’t correct the attributions on the questionable Vermeer paintings by January 11, he will destroy A Lady Writing.

The next day, Calder and Petra debate whether to tell the police about their private investigation. They decide to keep quiet. On impulse, they call Mrs. Sharpe at the hospital to see if she knows anything that might help guide their search at Delia Dell. She offers no additional clues but says, “Just be careful. Looking and seeing are two very different things” (208).

After their call, Petra and Calder return to the school building to continue their investigation. Petra skids on the wet floor and slams into a man with bushy eyebrows and a foreign accent. This is the same man who intercepted Mrs. Sharpe’s letter and slipped it into the mail slot. Petra worries that he might be watching them. To avoid scrutiny, the children go outside and find a basement entrance. As they walk through its confusing corridors, Petra spies her father up ahead of them carrying a rectangular parcel. He doesn’t work in this building, and she doesn’t know why he would be here.

Petra and Calder make their way upstairs and start tapping the wainscoting for secret panels. If anyone asks, they say that they’re working on a mapping project. Calder complains that he’s tired of suspecting everyone they know of having sinister motives. From one of the upstairs windows, Petra sees her father outside crossing the parking lot accompanied by the man with bushy eyebrows. Her father is no longer carrying the parcel.

Once the children get outside, the adults have already left, and there are no tracks to follow. Petra and Calder decide to return later that evening to continue their search in Delia Dell Hall. Petra says it will be an early birthday adventure. Calder realizes, with a shock, that he and Petra were both born on December 12, and that they will both turn 12 on the 12th day of the month in the 12th month of the year. Calder concludes that their whole mystery hinges on the number 12.

When they come back to the hall around seven o’clock, they see the man with bushy eyebrows leaving. They enter through the basement and find their way upstairs to the foyer. Calder has a brainstorm and climbs to the 12th stair. He and Petra probe the wall around the 12th rectangle in the paneling. The rectangle gives way to reveal a secret hiding place. Inside, they find the missing painting:

It was a moment they would remember with perfect clarity for the rest of their lives. The flashlight picked up an answering glimmer from the pearls, from the satiny hair ribbons, from the woman’s eyes: The image was finer and more delicate than either of them had imagined. Hot tears began running down Petra’s cheeks, blurring her vision of the woman’s familiar face (222-23).

As they get ready to leave the building, Calder and Petra realize all the exits have alarms set for the night. Calder wraps a dummy package as a decoy, and the two children run outside, triggering an alarm.

As the children make their escape toward the school playground, a man in a dark jacket pursues them, but he isn’t a security guard. Calder climbs the playground slide and tells the man he will destroy the painting if the man comes any closer. Calder urges Petra to keep going. She flags down a campus policeman several blocks away and tells him a man is chasing her friend. He drives Petra back to the playground in his patrol car. The cop and Petra jump out to search for Calder, leaving the painting in the back seat of the car. When they arrive at the slide, Calder and the man are gone, but Petra finds Calder’s sweatshirt with bloodstains on it.

Petra turns just in time to see the man who chased them. He’s climbing out of the patrol car with the painting under his arm. The cop calls in a report about Calder and the man before taking Petra home. Both Calder’s and Petra’s parents go out searching for the boy. While they’re away, Petra has an idea about where the thief might have stashed the Lady.

The next-door neighbors have a treehouse in their backyard, and Petra notices footprints in the snow leading up to it. When she climbs the ladder and peeks inside, she finds Calder unconscious with the painting in his arms. She wakes him, and he explains that he bumped his head when he fell off the slide. Since Calder might have a head injury, Petra runs to get help.

The next morning, Calder tells Petra what happened. He bumped his head when the thief knocked him off the slide. Pretending to be unconscious, Calder waited until the thief left with the painting, and then he followed the man. After seeing the man stash the painting in the treehouse, Calder climbed inside. He blacked out because he’d suffered a concussion. Luckily, Petra found him before he froze.

Authorities later discover the thief on a train—dead from a heart attack. He turns out to be Old Fred, Tommy’s missing stepfather. Old Fred’s real name is Xavier Glitts, also known as Glitter Man. Glitts is the head of an international crime ring. Later, authorities find Glitts’s journal detailing the theft in his Swiss bank vault.

Glitts writes in his journal that a customer was willing to pay him $60,000 for A Lady Writing if the theft could remain untraceable. Glitts planned a long con that included marrying Tommy’s mother so he could embed himself in the Hyde Park community. He mined local contacts who were knowledgeable about art, Vermeer, and university architecture. Then, he sent the three letters so he would have a ready list of suspects to blame for the crime.

The other characters in the story later compare notes and tie up all the loose ends of the mystery. Mrs. Sharpe supplied an anonymous donation for the publication of The Vermeer Dilemma, Mrs. Sharpe’s letter to Ms. Hussey was simply an invitation to connect with another Nantucket resident, and Petra’s father had switched departments at the university, which was the reason for his presence in Delia Dell; he was working on a project with the bushy-browed man, who was a PR consultant. Tommy’s mother had no idea she was married to a master criminal. The two letters that Petra found both belonged to Mr. Watch; one was a copy and the other he’d dropped accidentally on his way to Mrs. Sharpe’s.

After things calm down, Mrs. Sharpe invites the children over for tea and congratulates them on their success. Calder reveals his discovery of the pattern of 12s, and Petra admits that the Lady spoke to her. Mrs. Sharpe takes their revelations seriously. She, too, has received messages from the painting. The old woman concludes that something much bigger than all of them managed to send messages in forms that each individual would understand. This entity chose them to receive these communications because they were open to seeing patterns that other people ignored.

Petra and Calder become celebrities after they solve the mystery. In their interviews with the press, they leave out a few details:

They never mentioned Petra’s dream, Calder’s problem-solving, Charles Fort, the twelves, or the blue ones. They didn’t know if the world was ready for it. And they still weren’t entirely sure what had been real and what had not (254).