The Red Blazer Girls (13 page)

He laughs. “I only danced a couple of times. The music mostly blew, so me and my friends just hung out. Some of
your
friends, though, whoa! They were going wild in there.”

“Like whom?” Margaret asks. “No, wait. Don't tell me. I don't want to know. Okay, tell me. Was it
Leigh Ann?” I knew Margaret would figure out a way to bring her up.

“No, she was pretty cool. This other girl, though—long blond hair, kinda tall—
she
was totally out of control.”

“Oh my God. Bridget. It has to be,” I say.

“It was like she'd just been let out of an all-female prison after a looonnnnng stretch.”

I hold up my hand. “Oy. Stop. Let's change the subject while I still have a tiny morsel of respect for my lesser friend.”

Margaret sets the copy of the letter on the table. “Number three. Ms. Sophie, this one's all yours.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you, my dear, are our resident math whiz. We got the religion clue and the classical language clue.”

“Okay. Let me see. 612 divided by D, which is the distance between the centers of the south and west rose windows. What am I missing?”

“What's a rose window?” Raf asks.

“Oh, come on,” says Margaret. “The big round windows on the ends of the church? They look like flowers, hence the name
rose
window. There are three in St. Veronica's.” She opens her notebook up to a blank page and (using a ruler, naturally) draws the church in outline form:

“Okay, the church looks like a big cross, right? The two rose windows we're concerned with are here and here.” She marks Xs on the south and west walls. “Are you with me so far, Raf?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Well, to find this distance he calls D, all we have to do is measure from here to here.”

“But those windows are like a hundred feet off the ground, and there are two walls in the way.” I take the pen and draw a (more or less) straight line from the center of the south façade to the center of the west façade, thinking I am about to prove to Margaret how utterly
impossible it is. And then it hits me. Pythagoras!

“This is easy!” I rave. “God, I'm an idiot.”

Margaret looks at me proudly. “Pythagoras, right?”

“Exactly. Do you see it yet?” I ask Raf, who stares blankly at the page.

I add two lines to the drawing:

“It's a triangle.
A right
triangle.”

Raf can only shake his head. “No idea what you're talking about.”

“Sophie, kindly explain the Pythagorean theorem to our dimmish friend here.”

Boy, am I smart.

“Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician, and here's what he figured out. See, here's a right triangle. We'll call the sides A, B, and C.

“This corner down here between the A and B is our right angle, okay? The long side, side C, is called the hypotenuse. It's always opposite, or across from, the right angle. In other words, the side that is the hypotenuse is never a part of the right angle. With me? Good. Our
friend Pythagoras figured out this rule that's always true about right triangles. Any right triangle. Doesn't matter how big or what the other two angles are, as long as one angle in the triangle is ninety degrees. Let's say that side A is three feet long, and side B is four feet, okay, and what we want to know is, how long is side C, our hypotenuse? Well, we don't have to measure, because the Pythagorean theorem says that A squared plus B squared equals C squared. It's easy.”

Raf
does not
look convinced.

“What's A squared?” Margaret quizzes.

“A squared? A is three, so, um, nine.”

“That's right. A squared is nine. And B squared?”

“Sixteen.”

“Right.” I urge him on. “So, remember the formula. A squared plus B squared—”

“So, nine plus sixteen is twenty-five. So side C is twenty-five feet?” Raf looks with disbelief at the drawing. “That can't be right.”

“It's not. C
squared
equals twenty-five,” I say.

“Yes?” he guesses.

I giggle. “That's not a question. I'm telling you that C
squared
is twenty-five. If you want to know what C is, you need the square root of twenty-five. Which is …” I wait. And wait.

“Five?”

“Yes!”

“You can measure it if you want to,” Margaret adds,
“but trust me, it works. It's been around for
thousands
of years. The three-four-five right triangle is the easiest, but you can use the same principle for
any
right triangle. If one of the angles is ninety degrees, and you know the lengths of the two short sides, you can always figure out the length of the third—the hypotenuse.”

“Yeah, so look at the drawing of the church again.” I push it under his nose.

Raf examines the drawing carefully. “So what you're saying is, if we measure from here to here, and here to here, we can figure out, using this Pyth—this formula of yours, how far it is from here to here, even though there are walls in the way.”

“That's
exactly
what we're saying. Pretty cool, huh?” Margaret gives him a little shove.

“What about the fact that the windows are forty feet up?” He looks smug, certain that he has discovered the flaw in our reasoning.

“It doesn't matter, O simple one,” I say. “The distance is the same, whether we're measuring at the bottom of the wall or the top. I think it's safe to assume that the walls are vertical and that the windows are the same height. So, do you believe me now?”

“Do I
believe
you?” Raf asks. “About what?”

“About whether we can solve this clue using Pythagoras.”

“Um. Sure. Why not?”

“Good, because it's all up to you now. While you two
were getting pizza, I did a little measuring in the church.” Margaret flips to a new page in her notebook and starts writing. She sets up the whole problem for Raf and spins the notebook for him to see. “Here are the dimensions for your side A and your side B. It's all yours, sport.”

The floor of the church, it turns out, is covered with stone tiles that are
exactly
twelve inches by twelve inches, with virtually no space between them. Who knew? Besides Margaret, that is. She told me later that she noticed the floor tiles on our way out of the church, so, while she sent Raf and me off to Ray's, she made certain they really were twelve-inch tiles and then counted them. From the back wall of the church, directly under the rose window, to the center line of the transept is exactly ninety-one feet, and from the center point of the transept to the south wall is exactly forty-six feet.

Margaret and I watch and say nothing as Raf does the calculations.

“Okay, we have one side of the triangle that is 91
feet. 91 times 91 equals 8,281. The other side is 46 feet. 46 squared is 2,116,” he says, punching it all in on Margaret's cell phone.

“That's A squared and B squared, right?” says Raf, mastering his Pythagoras after all. “So now what? Wait, don't tell me! I remember this part. Add them together, right? A squared plus B squared.”

“So far, so good,” says Margaret. “You're on a roll, pretty boy.”

Raf grins and plunges right in. “8,281 plus 2,116, that's 10,397.” He looks up triumphantly. “AHA!”

“You're not done yet,” I say.

He frowns. “Square root of that?”

“Yep.”

He punches it in. “The square root of 10,397 is 101.96568.”

Margaret takes a look at the screen. “Which, rounded to the nearest foot, is 102.”

“So that's it? It's 102 feet from this window to that one.” Raf points at the diagram. “Are you sure? It seems almost
too
easy.”

“It
is
easy if you know the secret formula,” Margaret teases. “But you're
still
not quite done.”

“That's right,” I say. “You've got the answer for D, which is the
distance
between the windows, but there's still one more step to find the clue.”

As Raf examines the paper, a cloud of confusion comes over his face. “What are you talking about? You said—oh, wait. I get it. To get the final answer, it's 612
divided by
102. Give me the phone.” He punches in the numbers and holds up the answer for us to see.