The Vanishing Statue by Carolyn Keene

Author:Carolyn Keene
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Empty Pedestal

THE OFF-LIMITS DOOR LED TO a long hallway, its walls lined with pale green patterned wallpaper. Unlike the main gallery and ballroom, the walls of this hallway were not crammed with gold-framed paintings. In fact, the only things hanging along the hallway’s entire length were five small oval-shaped portraits with modest wooden frames. The first portrait showed a pretty black woman in a simple green dress sitting before an easel and holding a paintbrush. Next was a shoulders-up portrait of a man with a prominent nose and tired, kind eyes, with just a touch of gray at his temples. Then came the profile of a teenage girl in a head scarf, and finally, two small portraits of toddlers, one with a huge floppy white bow on her head, the other dressed in a miniature sailor suit.

You could see that all the subjects were related; the sailor-suited child had the same nose as the older gentleman, and the girl with the bow had the same wide honey-brown eyes as the woman with the paintbrush. Though they weren’t as showy as the paintings in the ballroom, these portraits looked important hanging there all alone. The Duchess probably looked at them every time she walked up and down this hallway. This could be her family, I thought. I squinted at the little toddler with the floppy bow, trying to imagine what she would look like as an adult. Was her hair parted straight down the middle? And who was that boy in the sailor suit?

The hallway came to an end at a wooden sliding door decorated with intricate carvings of leaves and blossoms. I slid the door back as quietly as I could and tiptoed inside.

Diana Yip stood with her back to me in a cozy drawing room. The walls were lined with bookshelves and decorated with medieval tapestries of unicorns that glowed ghostly white in the dim room, which seemed to have no windows to speak of. Four tufted armchairs and two love seats were arranged around a cold fireplace. The only light came from a spotlight, positioned directly above an empty white pedestal in the center of the room. That had to be the place where the statue of the goddess Diana had once stood. Rufus Le Crous had called it a child’s toy, but the Duchess clearly thought differently, since the pedestal was in a place of prominence, just like the oval portraits in the hallway. It must have held something the Duchess valued immensely.

Moving as silently as I could, I hid behind one of the tapestries. Diana leaned close to the pedestal but didn’t touch it. After a few seconds, she straightened up and walked very slowly around to the back, squinting as if she were trying to see some hidden detail from the right angle.

For a moment I imagined Diana Yip climbing up on that pedestal, striking a pose, and turning into a statue herself.

Don’t be silly, I scolded myself. Women don’t just turn to stone.

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