Me, Frida, and the Secret of the Peacock Ring Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Adiós, Kansas

  Chapter 2: A Hairy Four Weeks

  Chapter 3: Selfie Overload

  Chapter 4: Tell No One

  Chapter 5: Mighty High Jinks

  Chapter 6: The Tale of the Missing Peacock Ring

  Chapter 7: Courage

  Chapter 8: The Fortune-Teller

  Chapter 9: Portrait of a Father

  Chapter 10: The Secret Room

  Chapter 11: Too Early for Trumpets

  Chapter 12: Mystery for Dinner

  Chapter 13: Midnight at Casa Azul

  Chapter 14: The Trench Coat Man

  Chapter 15: Keeping a Secret

  Chapter 16: The Black Car

  Chapter 17: I See You!

  Chapter 18: Self-Portrait with a Braid

  Chapter 19: Self-Portrait of a Clueless Paloma

  Chapter 20: A Big Fat Mentira

  Chapter 21: What Is the Truth?

  Chapter 22: The Gold Cuff Link

  Chapter 23: Supersleuth Paloma

  Chapter 24: Fridanistas Unite!

  Chapter 25: How to Catch a Thief

  Chapter 26: Happy Birthday, Frida!

  Chapter 27: The Troublemakers

  Chapter 28: The Lost Boy

  Chapter 29: Finders of Lost Things

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Angela Cervantes

  Copyright

  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 playfully 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 summer. 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 favorite songs, and they were going to come up with a sparkler routine. But because of this trip to Mexico, Paloma’s summer 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 quiero. 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 someone 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, birthdays, 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 butterflies. 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 birthday 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 happened. 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.

  “Mom, is someone picking us up?” Paloma asked. Her eyes darted over the crowd of people waiting for passengers outside 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 ransom 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 man who had been staring at her. Paloma clutched her mom’s arm.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Paloma’s mom. “I’m Emma.”

  The man held out his hand. “I’m Professor Julian Breton from the university.” Paloma’s chest loosened. She was relieved he wasn’t a kidnapper. “If you’re ready, we can go. I hope you and your daughter weren’t waiting too long.”

  “We just arrived and we’re admiring the poster for Casa Azul,” Paloma’s mom said. “Is it close to the house we’ll be staying in?”

  “Your house is a few blocks from it. You’ll be on Paris Street, and Casa Azul is on Londres Street. No more than a five-minute walk. We’re going there tonight for an art reception.”

  “That’s right,” Paloma’s mom gushed. “The reception is tonight! Thanks for the reminder. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Farill will be there. They’re eager to meet you.”

  “Who are they?” Paloma asked.

  “The family that funded our trip here,” Paloma’s mom said. “They’re wealthy patrons of the university. Is that right?” Paloma’s mom looked over at Professor Breton for confirmation. He nodded and smiled. “Without their generosity, we’d be spending the summer back in Kansas City.”

  So they’re to blame for dragging me away from my friends, Paloma thought. “Do I have to go?”

  “Of course you’re going,” Paloma’s mom said, narrowing her eyes at Paloma. “We’ll get to see the home of the famous artist Frida Kahlo!”

  “Do we have to wear our eyebrows like that?” Paloma said, pointing at the poster. “And I sort of left my bird necklaces at home. My bad.”

  Professor Breton laughed. “No bird necklace required.”

  “Don’t be a goofball, Paloma,” her mom said. “Frida was famous for her self-portraits. She once said she painted self-portraits because she knew herself best.”

  Paloma shrugged. “I know myself best, too, but I don’t go around painting myself all day.”

  “Maybe you’re not painting yourself, but I’ve seen you, Kate, and Isha run around taking selfies every second of the day, so don’t be so quick to judge,” her mom sassed back. “Plus, Frida Kahlo was one of your dad’s favorite artists. Don’t you want to find out why?”

  Paloma gazed back at the poster. This woman with the black hummingbird necklace was one of her dad’s favorite artists? Paloma pulled out a pen and note card and started writing.

  “Is she still alive?” Paloma asked, copying Frida’s name from the poster. “Does she still live in Mexico?”

  “Frida died a long time ago, but her art is still highly revered in Mexico,” Professor Breton said. “All around the world actually. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of her before.”

  “That’s my faul
t,” her mom said. “Paloma’s father was from Mexico, but I haven’t done a good job of exposing her to her Mexican heritage. That’s why I brought her on this trip. I’ve enrolled her in your summer class, Introduction to Mexican Art and Culture.” Paloma looked up from her note card. She didn’t like to hear her mom mention the regrets she had about raising Paloma alone. Plus, Paloma was dreading summer school.

  “I can’t believe you’ve enrolled me in summer school,” Paloma whined. “It’s June, for summer’s sake!”

  “Don’t worry, Paloma,” Professor Breton said. “It’s not as structured as regular school. We have fun. You’ll enjoy it. And between my class and living in Coyoacán, you’ll learn everything there is to know about Frida Kahlo.”

  Perfect, Paloma thought. If this unibrowed artist was the best thing Coyoacán had to offer, it was going to be a very hairy four weeks.

  Paloma lifted her suitcase onto the bed in her new room, which was painted a bright, cheerful yellow. She felt like a sunflower had swallowed her up, and she liked it. In Kansas, her walls were “barely beige.” Paloma’s mom had called it a “nice neutral color” that would match everything, but Paloma argued that “barely beige” was a crayon box reject and an insult to flowers and rainbows. At home, she covered the barely beige walls with as many posters as she could.

  Paloma opened her suitcase and spread out jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, and a few colorful scarves. As much as she wanted to slip on her favorite comfy jeans, tonight’s reception called for something a bit nicer, so she pulled out a black skirt and a cream-colored knit top. She had never been to a swanky reception where people drank wine and blabbered on about art. She’d only read about these kinds of parties in Lulu Pennywhistle novels. In one book, Lulu disguised herself as a coat-check assistant to spy on a prime suspect. She was clever like that, and of course, Lulu always caught the bad guy. If Paloma could find a mystery to investigate tonight, maybe the evening wouldn’t be half bad.

  An hour later, Professor Breton and her mom waited while Paloma finished pinning a purple flower, which she had picked from the garden, in her hair. They walked two blocks along Paris Street and took a left on Allende. They walked two more blocks, until they came upon a huge blue house.