REAL | Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring

ANGELA CERVANTES

GOLD

ALSO BY ANGELA CERVANTES Allie, First at Last Gaby, Lost and Found

ANGELA CERVANTES

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ISBN 978-1-338-27766-1

10 9 8 7 6

21 22 23

Printed in the U.S.A. 40 First printing 2018

Book design by Nina Goffi

To Carlos, mi cielo

Chapter 1 Adiós, Kansas

Whether she liked it or not, Paloma Marquez was in Mexico City for a whole month. She lifted her purple sleep mask and raised the plane’s small window shade, letting a stream of sunlight pour in and light up the two books balanced on her lap. One was the newest book in her favorite mystery series featuring the superb teen sleuth Lulu Pennywhistle. Paloma finished it during the two-hour flight from Kansas City to Houston, where she and her mom made their connection flight to Mexico. Now Paloma had only the other book to entertain her during the rest of her time in Mexico. The small Spanish vocabulary book she had bought for the trip featured a yellow cartoon cat wearing a black Zorro mask and hat on the cover. Somewhere up in the sky between

Houston and Mexico City, she had opened it and studied a bunch of unfamiliar Spanish words until they blurred together like the passing clouds and put her to sleep like a Spanish lullaby. “We’re here!” her mom said. Seated next to her, she play- fully tugged Paloma’s arm. “Are you excited to be on your first trip out of the country? And in Mexico, no less! Did you ever think we would be traveling for the summer? Isn’t it awesome?” Paloma wasn’t sure which question she should answer first, so she shut the window blind and tried out some Spanish. “No quiero México . Tengo miedo de camarón.” Her mother gave her a puzzled look. “I got the ‘you don’t want Mexico’ part, but why are you scared of shrimp?” Paloma frowned. “I meant ‘change.’ I don’t like change.” “That would be ‘ cambio ’ not ‘ camarón ,’ but you get an A for effort.” Her mom smiled. “C’mon, Paloma. Think of the adventure!” “ Aventura is overrated,” Paloma answered. Her mom shook her head, and Paloma felt a shot of guilt straight through her heart. Paloma wanted to be as pumped up as her mom was about this trip. She really did. After all, her mom had worked hard for this opportunity. It wasn’t every day that a literature professor received a four-week fellowship to study abroad. For as long as Paloma could remember, her mom had been applying for fellowships in Mexico with no success. Still,

after traveling almost seven hours to get to Mexico City, Paloma couldn’t muster the energy for fake excitement. Did it make her a bad daughter to just want to spend a normal summer at home in Kansas reading her favorite mystery series at the pool and going to the mall with her friends Kate and Isha? “Seriously, Paloma,” her mom said. “You’re the only one I know who complains about a free trip to Mexico.” Her mom stood in the aisle to remove her backpack from the overhead compartment. “I thought that at least visiting your dad’s old stomping grounds would fire you up.” She has a point , Paloma thought. But four weeks? Paloma’s stomach twisted. She was losing most of her sum- mer. What about the Fourth of July? Paloma, Kate, and Isha had been plotting a massive fireworks display at the lake. Every boom, pop, pow would be synchronized to their favor- ite songs, and they were going to come up with a sparkler routine. But because of this trip to Mexico, Paloma’s sum- mer plans had fizzled out. The passengers began grabbing their bags and making their way into the aisle to exit the plane. Her mom stood aside to let Paloma slip ahead of her. “Let’s go, or as they say here in Mexico, Vámonos .” Paloma tucked the books and eye mask into her bag and stepped off the plane with her mom into the crowded Jetway. She practiced a few Spanish phrases she thought would be useful during the four-week trip.

“No, gracias. No me gusta . No hablo español.” As she and her mom got into a long line behind the other passengers to show their passports, she continued. “No qui- ero . No puedo . No me gusta . ” “Your Spanish sounds good, Paloma. You’re a quick learner, but I think it’s interesting that you’ve picked up all the negative expressions.” “I’m not negative.” Paloma scowled. “C’mon, Paloma. ‘ No me gusta. ’ ‘ No quiero. ’ You don’t like it. You don’t want it. Tell me that’s not all negativo .” Her mom put her arm around Paloma’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “I want you to have a positive experience here in Mexico. Try saying ‘ Me gusta ’ instead.” Paloma let out a long sigh. “Fine. I don’t know how to say ‘I will try’ in Spanish yet, but I will try to see this as one super-mega-positive experience that will forever change my life! I also want world peace, fluffy kittens, and unicorns!” Paloma forced a wide Miss America smile that showed all her teeth and lasted so long she felt like her cheeks would explode. “Much better.” “Mom, why didn’t you and Dad just raise me speaking Spanish? This whole trip would be so much easier, you know?” Paloma asked. “I mean, Dad was from Mexico, so he spoke Spanish like a pro, right? Did he ever try to teach me to speak it?” “He did have a couple of cute Spanish nicknames for you,” Paloma’s mom said. A soft smile curved her lips as they

took a few more steps in line. “Sometimes, he’d hold you and call you ‘little bird’ in Spanish. I don’t remember the exact word anymore, but if I heard it, I’d know it.” “Lucky for you, I have a Spanish dictionary with a silly Zorro cat on the cover,” Paloma quipped. “Surely el gato will know the answer.” She opened the book and looked up the translation of “bird.” Looking up the right word made Paloma feel like a detective searching for clues. But that was nothing new. She often hunted clues about her own life. Clues that proved, once upon a time, she had a dad. A dad who was originally from Mexico. A dad whose name was Juan Carlos. A dad who studied architecture. A dad who her mom fell in love with at first sight when she met him at the university. A dad who stopped to help some- one on the highway and never came home again. Those were the cold, hard facts. Paloma had been only three years old when he died, and she depended on her mom to fill in the memory blanks. Luckily, her mom had plenty of memories to share: Halloween parties, college days, birth- days, Christmas . . . Every time her mom shared a memory, Paloma wrote it down on a note card and added it to her “memory box,” a gift from her mom. It was just a regular craft box made of thick cardboard, no bigger than a pencil case. Paloma painted it purple and decorated it with butter- flies. Along with the note cards, she filled it with photographs of her father and other small, sentimental trinkets. Separately, each item was a clue that told her something about her father.

Paloma hoped that if she could gather enough of them, she’d be able to finally understand the man he had been. She always kept the box by her bedside, and sometimes before falling asleep, she’d stare at the photographs of her

handsome, dark-haired dad holding her in front of her birth- day cake or pushing her in a stroller. She often hoped that if she stared long enough at a photograph, maybe the memory of that exact moment would rise up above all the others in her head the way their plane had risen high above the clouds. Then she’d have something real to hold. But it never hap- pened. She always ended up right where she started, with no memories of her own. Perhaps she’d find a clue in Mexico that would finally reveal a real memory of her father that was all her own.

In the meantime, Paloma found the word she’d been looking for. “Pájaro,” she said. “Is that the word he used to call me? Little bird?” Her mom tilted her head. “Yes, that sounds about right.” Paloma pulled out a note card from her bag, wrote down “pájaro . ” An immigration officer called them forward to review their passports. Her mom gave her a quick kiss on the forehead. “Let’s go, my little bird.” When they had gotten through customs, Paloma studied the stamp on her passport: Migración. La República de México. In the mystery books she read at home, Lulu Pennywhistle had already filled her passport with stamps from Dubai, London, and Berlin several times, but Paloma was pretty sure Lulu had never traveled to Mexico. Paloma liked that Mexico, the place where her dad was born, was her first out- of-the-USA trip. She glided her hand over the page with the fresh stamp. “Me gusta mucho,” Paloma said quietly.

Chapter 2 A Hairy Four Weeks

“Mom, is someone picking us up?” Paloma asked. Her eyes darted over the crowd of people waiting for passengers out- side the baggage claim area. “The university is sending folks,” her mom said, securing her backpack on her shoulder. “They said to meet near the exit, but is this the exit? Or do they mean outside?” “How will we know who they are?” Paloma clutched her bag against her chest and followed her mom through the crowd. “What if we get into the wrong car and get kidnapped?” “That’s not going to happen.” “It could happen. Last night, Kate emailed me an article about all these kidnappings going on in Mexico.”

“Such a nice friend,” her mom said with a smirk. “And Isha told me that there is this drug trafficking kingpin dude that will take us to a desert and demand ran- som for us and—” “No more nonsense, Paloma,” her mom said in a stern voice. “Let’s just wait over there by that little store.” As Paloma followed her mom, she scanned the crowd, looking for anyone holding a sign with her mom’s name on it. But there were so many people. All of them hurried by, dragging luggage and speaking rapid-fire Spanish on cell phones. Paloma frowned. She felt stranded in a strange place. “Maybe they forgot us. Can you call someone?” Paloma said just as a man walked by, slowing down to glance at Paloma and her mom. Paloma tugged on her mom’s sleeve, but her mom was checking messages on her phone and didn’t notice. “Mom, there’s a guy staring at—” “Give me a minute, Paloma. The university left a voice mail.” The man looked back at Paloma before walking farther into the crowd. She felt her heart thump harder. Why had he looked back at her? Just like Lulu Pennywhistle, Paloma started making mental notes of the man’s appearance in case she needed to report him to the police. He was medium height, had black hair and a brownish complexion, and wore khaki pants, tan loafers, a green polo shirt, and a brown leather messenger bag. Suddenly, he turned to look at Paloma once again, and their eyes met. Paloma turned away quickly,

and found herself face-to-face with a large poster featuring a painting of a woman who had a faint mustache and thick dark eyebrows that stretched straight over her eyes and touched in the middle. Paloma thought it was called a unibrow. “Whoa! Call the salon,” she exclaimed. Paloma didn’t know what was scarier: the man who kept staring at her or the woman in the poster. In it, a black cat lurked over the woman’s left shoulder like it was ready to pounce. Over the other shoulder, a monkey picked at a necklace of tangled sticks that hung around the woman’s neck. Dangling from the stick necklace was a black hummingbird. “Call animal control, too!” “What, honey?” her mom asked. She took her eyes off her phone just long enough to see what Paloma was talking about. “Oh, it’s a poster for Frida Kahlo’s home! We’re going to live nearby, I think.” “What do you mean?” Paloma glanced at the black cat and monkey in the painting. “At the circus?” “Don’t be silly,” she answered, shaking her head. “It’s an advertisement for the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán.” She pointed at the words at the bottom of the poster.

La Casa Azul, Coyoacán, México

“Professor Emma Marquez?” said a man’s voice from behind them. Paloma and her mom spun around. It was the

A locked room. A stolen treasure. A mysterious challenge. Paloma Marquez is traveling to Mexico City, birthplace of her deceased father, for the very first time. She’s hoping that spending time in Mexico will help her unlock memories of the too-brief time they spent together. While in Mexico, Paloma meets Lizzie and Gael, who present her with an irresistible challenge: The siblings want her to help them find a valuable ring that once belonged to beloved Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Finding the ring means a big reward—and the thanks of all Mexico. What better way to honor her father than returning a priceless piece of jewelry that once belonged to his favorite artist! But the brother and sister have a secret. Do they really want to return the ring, or are they after something else entirely?

Praise for

“A well-paced mystery plot and a rich exploration of the art of Frida Kahlo.” — School Library Journal “A fun read for any sleuths-in-training.” — Kirkus Reviews A Junior Library Guild Selection

SCHOLASTIC GOLD includes After Words ™ : Bonus content, interviews, and interactivity inside

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