A Dastardly Plot

by Christopher Healy

“If you mean that you knock people’s hats off as you go by, then, yes, you do.”

  “I knocked off one hat,” Molly said. “It was big and I couldn’t see past it.”

  “Why are you following me?” the boy asked again.

  Molly poked her finger into his chest. “I think a better question is, Why are you so afraid of being followed?”

  “That is not a better question,” he said, backing away. “Mine was a perfectly reasonable question. I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “And what job is that?” She cornered him against the alley wall. “Burglary?”

  “Don’t start that again.”

  “If you didn’t steal whatever’s in that box, why’ve you been so skittish?”

  “Maybe because I was being followed by a crazy girl?”

  “Don’t call me crazy.”

  “Don’t call me a burglar.”

  “Then tell me what your real job is!”

  “I told you last night!” the boy snapped back. “I’m an inventor’s assistant! I’m delivering a package for my boss. That’s a perfectly normal thing for an assistant to do. You’re the one doing all the suspicious stuff.”

  Molly shook her head. “Don’t try to turn this back on me. If what you’re doing is so innocent, why have you been looking so goosey from the moment you stepped out of the Guild Hall?”

  The boy broke eye contact and peered toward the end of the alley, then down at the package he gripped tightly. “I just . . . I don’t like being made to deliver something when I don’t know what it is,” the boy said. “That can lead to trouble.”

  “Trouble, eh?” Molly touched a fingertip to the box and the boy yanked it away. “Wow, you are extra goosey,” she said. “What’s in there? A bomb?”

  “I don’t know what’s in there!” he blurted. And he peeked down the alley again. “But it’s not a bomb. Obviously. Why would you think it was a bomb?”

  “No reason,” said Molly.

  “It’s not a bomb,” the boy repeated. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as Molly.

  “It could be a bomb,” Molly rebutted. “If you don’t know what it is, then you don’t know what it’s not.”

  “It’s not a bomb. Alexander Graham Bell doesn’t make bombs!”

  Molly practically jumped out of her skin. “You work for Bell?”

  “I told you! I’m a lab assistant, not a burglar!”

  “But if you work at the Guild, why were you so afraid of the police seeing you there?” Molly asked.

  “Because I work there. I’m not supposed to be living there.”

  Molly remembered the blankets in Bell’s workshop. One mystery solved. But if this boy was Bell’s assistant, did that mean he was involved in the World’s Fair plot? Of course, he was also keeping his own secrets from Bell, so maybe the two weren’t so buddy-buddy. Maybe he—

  The boy’s eyes darted once more toward the alley’s entryway.

  “Why do you keep looking down there?” Molly asked. “Is someone coming? Is this a trap? Aw, man, did I fall into a trap? I am going to be so ticked at myself if I walked into a trap.”

  “If anyone walked into a trap here, it’s me,” the boy said. “There’s not a person in New York who would assume you were the one to pin me back here. I’m Chinese. We don’t have the best reputation around here.”

  Molly had heard people make awful, hateful comments about Chinese immigrants, read them in newspapers even. She’d never believed the horrible generalizations or understood why people said such things, but she’d also never thought about what it would feel like to hear them if you were Chinese. She suddenly felt guilty about all her burglar comments. “Well, I’m happy to meet a Chinese person,” she said, trying to feel less guilty. “There aren’t too many of you around here.” The boy’s face flattened and she immediately regretted her words. She’d forgotten about the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that had been passed the previous year banning Chinese people from entering the United States. Chinese immigrants who were already in the country were allowed to stay, but they were in constant risk of deportation. “Anyway,” Molly said, hoping to fix the downward course this conversation had taken, “your English is better than most of the boys I know.”

  “I’ve been in America since I was two months old!” the boy snapped.

  Molly had to make this better. “Hey, come back behind these barrels,” she said. “No one will see us there. We can talk more.”

  “Why would I want to talk more with you?” the boy asked. “I have no idea who you are! Give me one good reason why I should go into a hidden nook for a secret chitchat with a girl who has attacked me, spied on me, and insulted me?”

  Molly didn’t even stop walking. “Because you may not be a criminal, but your boss is.”

  11

  The Mysterious Package

  “ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL is a criminal? That’s the craziest thing you’ve said so far,” the boy scoffed as he stepped behind the foul-smelling tar barrels with Molly.

  “If it’s so crazy, walk away.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Just tell me what you’re talking about. I can’t lose two jobs in a row this way.”

  “Two?” Perhaps this boy was more interesting than Molly thought. “You make a habit of working for criminals?”

  “Just Oogie MacDougal.”

  “Oogie MacDougal?” Molly shouted loud enough to make the boy double-check the alley again. “Sorry,” she said more softly. “You worked for Oogie MacDougal? The leader of the Green Onion Boys? The most wanted man in New York?”

  “I didn’t know he was Oogie MacDougal. The guy’s got a really thick Scottish accent—I couldn’t understand half of what he said. All I knew was I needed a job and he needed a delivery boy.”

  “Your defense for working for a known mobster is his accent?” Molly said, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a pretty nifty excuse to give the cops.”

  “If you ever meet the guy, you’ll see.”

  “That would be amazing, actually,” Molly said, envisioning herself toe-to-toe with a notorious crime lord.

  “No, it wouldn’t. Look, I only ever handled the one package for him. And as soon as I saw what was in it—”

  “Guns?” Molly asked. “Money? Opium? Ransom notes? Poisonous snakes?”

  “Um, yes,” the boy said. “Well, guns and money—not the rest. But I don’t want any part of that stuff. So when another kid told me who it was who’d handed me that bag, I peeked inside and then dumped the whole thing in the river.”

  Molly’s mouth dropped open wider than she’d thought possible. “You stole from Oogie MacDougal?”

  “It’s not stealing if I didn’t keep it.”

  Molly raised her other eyebrow.

  The boy sighed. “I know, I’m as good as dead if he ever finds me again. But people would have been hurt with those guns. I . . . I probably saved lives by dumping them.”

  Molly smirked. “So you didn’t just do it ’cause you got scared?”

  “I don’t think the reason makes a difference.”

  “Well, at least I understand why you’re so itchy about delivering another mystery package.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t have made the same mistake again. I got a job working for Alexander Graham Bell this time—I mean, he invented the telephone! He’s not going to send me on illegal errands. He’s been . . . He’s been decent to me.”

  Molly saw in the boy’s eyes how much he wanted that to be true. “Not everybody’s as decent as they might seem,” she said. “I’m gonna show you something.” She reached into the bodice of her dress and the boy immediately covered his eyes.

  “Yeesh! What’d you think I was going to do?” Molly shook her head and laid Bell’s paper on the box. “You need to relax, Goosey.”

  “Please stop calling me that,” he pleaded.

  “You got a real name?”

  “Emmett Lee.”

  “Emmett, huh?” Molly said. “Not as fun as Goosey, but we can m
ake it work.”

  “Supposedly, it means ‘whole’ or ‘universal,’” Emmett said, sounding a bit defensive. “My father said he chose it as my American name, because I was his whole world.”

  “Oh . . . that’s actually really sweet,” Molly said. “So, what’s your original Chinese name?”

  Emmett looked down. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  Molly feared she had stumbled onto a difficult topic for Emmett, so she held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Emmett Lee. I’m Molly Pepper. Now: look at the paper.”

  Emmett examined the torn parchment. “It’s the World’s Fairgrounds,” he said. “Mr. Bell has diagrams like this around the workshop.”

  “Keep reading,” Molly said.

  “Oh,” Emmett said as he read. “Oh! Oh, oh, oh. Someone is planning something very bad.”

  “Not someone—your boss,” Molly said. “This is the rolled-up paper we were fighting over last night. You really didn’t know what was on it?”

  “I don’t look at things I’m not supposed to! But you—this is what you snuck into the Guild to steal? How did you know it would be there?”

  “I didn’t. Like I said, I was going to sabotage Thaddeus Edgerton’s Fair exhibit, but I misread Edison’s nameplate and tried to break into his office by accident, and that’s when I fell into Bell’s place and found the plans.”

  Emmett blinked at her. “Maybe you need spectacles.”

  “I do not need spectacles! Look, it doesn’t matter why I was there—this paper came from Bell’s workshop.”

  “Impossible,” Emmett insisted. “Even if the map was Mr. Bell’s, anyone could have written all this stuff on it. You could have written all this stuff on it.”

  “Ha. My penmanship’s not that good. You work for Bell—is the handwriting familiar?”

  Emmett bit his lip. “It’s . . . well . . . It’s not . . . unfamiliar. But it’s not as if I’ve spent hours studying Mr. Bell’s penmanship. I couldn’t swear with complete certainty that he wrote this.”

  “But you’re pretty sure, aren’t you?” Molly didn’t want to smile at this, because Emmett was clearly distraught, but she couldn’t help feeling some pride in being right.

  “It doesn’t matter who wrote it; we have no way of knowing what this plan really shows, anyway,” Emmett said, working hard to convince himself.

  “‘Targets,’ ‘victims,’ ‘New York is mine,’” Molly quoted.

  “It’s cut off, though. Maybe it says, ‘New York is . . . minty fresh,’” Emmett said.

  “Nice try,” Molly said, wrinkling her nose. “What about ‘death machines’?” She pointed to the torn edge:

  DEA

  MAC

  “Oh, now you’re really stretching,” the boy countered. “That obviously says . . .”

  Molly waited.

  “Deals on macaroni?” Emmett finally said.

  “Yep, you nailed it,” Molly deadpanned. “These are Alexander Graham Bell’s secret plans to win over New Yorkers with bargain-priced pasta. Look, I understand why you don’t want to accept that your boss is up to something sinister, but this plot is real, and whatever’s in that box is most likely part of it.”

  “It’s probably just a stack of cogwheels or something,” Emmett said.

  “One way to find out,” Molly said, reaching for the loose end of the twine. Emmett pulled the box away again.

  “I could lose my job.”

  “Your job working for a diabolical fiend?”

  “He’s an inventor. You’ve got to understand, before Mr. Bell, I had no one. Not since my father . . .”

  “Yours too?” Molly asked after a moment. “How? Mine was tuberculosis.”

  “My father was a ferry pilot,” Emmett said. “He took people back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn. A few years ago, Alexander Graham Bell and his family were on his boat and there was a storm. The ferry started rocking and my father yelled for everyone to tie themselves down. But Mr. Bell’s wife is deaf, and in the confusion, she went overboard. And probably would’ve drowned if my father hadn’t dived in after her.”

  “Your father drowned saving her?”

  “No, but the choice he made that day still led to his death.”

  Molly waited for him to continue.

  “Mr. Bell felt he owed my father,” Emmett went on. “And in addition to inventing, Mr. Bell also loves exploring. He was always talking about discovering new lands, new peoples. He wanted to find the South Pole. Or, like a lot of rich people, have someone find it for him. So he sponsored an expedition to Antarctica—and asked my father to captain the ship.

  “I don’t need to tell you what an honor that was. Chinese folks don’t often get the chance to work side by side with men like Mr. Bell. I was never more proud. But . . . that ship never came back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said. “Was your mother—?”

  “Died when I was born, back in China. I never knew her. After I lost my father, I tried to make it on my own for a while. Lived out of an old book wagon for longer than I would’ve thought possible. But I reached a point where I needed money badly. That’s how I stumbled into working for Oogie MacDougal. And after that, I was scared to show my face on the streets, so I went to Mr. Bell. I didn’t even know if he’d agree to talk to me, but he ended up offering me a job. Said it was the least he could do.”

  “So you’re telling me Bell is some kind of saint who helps orphans.” Molly couldn’t help sounding disappointed.

  “No, I think he mostly helped me out of guilt,” Emmett replied. “But he’s been pretty nice to me since.”

  “If Bell’s such a generous guy, why not tell him you’re camping out in the office?” She hopped up to sit on a tar barrel, not caring if her dress got dirty.

  “When I first told him who my father was, he started on about getting me to an orphanage,” Emmett replied. “But a call to the Jäger Society would basically mean a one-way ticket to China for me. I had to cut off that line of thinking fast, so I told him I was living with an aunt. And when he asked me where my aunt lived, I gave him an address in the worst part of town, to make sure he never got the notion to stop by and check on me.” He hoisted himself onto another barrel, setting the box down between them. “Why am I telling you this?”

  “It’s either my irresistible charms,” Molly said, “or that you have no other friends.”

  She thought he’d laugh at that, but he didn’t. “You have an interesting definition of friend,” Emmett said. “We’ve known each other for less than twenty-four hours and have spent the majority of that time arguing.”

  “All friends have fights eventually. We’ve gotten ours out of the way early. That’s just smart planning.”

  Emmett looked down and shook his head like he was annoyed with her, but Molly could see he was smiling. “You have a lot of friends?” he asked.

  “I think this is the longest conversation I’ve had with anybody other than my mother,” Molly replied. She shifted closer. “So, the inventor thing? That’s what you wanna do with your life?”

  Emmett shrugged. “I guess. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. But honestly, you don’t spend much time thinking about the future when you’re worried about surviving day to day.”

  Molly nodded. She could relate. But at least she’d had the dream of her mother’s success to keep her motivated. A dream that was in danger of being extinguished. “Speaking of surviving,” she said, “we ready to find out if there’s a bomb in that package?”

  “No,” Emmett said, putting his hands on the box. “Things might not be perfect for me right now, but they’re the best they’ve been since my father died, and I don’t want to mess that up. Besides, I simply cannot believe Mr. Bell is up to something so sinister.”

  “You yourself said he’s acting paranoid,” Molly pointed out.

  “He is trying to hide something,” Emmett admitted, running his hands over his face. “But I figured that’s just the way it is at the Guild. Those guys are
always spying on one another, trying to steal one another’s ideas and such. But . . . oh my goodness—it’s Mr. Edison.”

  “Edison’s what? His accomplice?” This was more exciting than cake!

  “No, his motive,” Emmett said. “Mr. Bell and Mr. Edison might look like friends and co-leaders in public. But it’s all an act.”

  Molly leaned in. “Go on.”

  “Mr. Bell is always complaining about Edison hogging the spotlight and trying to outdo him. Recently he’s been even more vocal about it—behind closed doors, anyway—because Mr. Edison gets the whole opening night ceremony to himself. ‘Light bulbs, light bulbs,’ Mr. Bell says. ‘It’s just light bulbs again, but more of them.’”

  Molly snickered. “Why are you doing that odd voice for Bell?”

  “He’s Scottish. Or he was born in Scotland, anyway,” Emmett said. “Still has a little bit of an accent. But not nearly as strong as Oogie MacDougal’s. Really, you have to believe me—I couldn’t understand that guy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it—MacDougal’s got an accent,” Molly said. “But go back to Bell’s rivalry with Edison. That sounds super important. I mean, my mother and I assumed President Arthur was Bell’s main target, but what if it’s Edison? What if Bell’s tired of living in Edison’s shadow and it’s pushed him over the edge? And now he wants to ruin the biggest moment of Edison’s career in order to show him up.”

  “I don’t know. It still hard to believe.” Emmett sighed. “Or maybe I just don’t want you to be right.”

  “Then let’s prove me wrong.” Molly hopped down and grabbed the box. “You know this is the only way to eliminate doubt,” she said. “Let’s make a deal. If there’s nothing scary in here, you win and I won’t bother you anymore. If there’s some kind of doomsday device, then I win. Or, we blow up.”

  “Fine,” Emmett said. “But the package is my responsibility; I’ll do the peeking.”

  Satisfied, Molly handed the box back. Emmett lifted the corner a bit, and put his eye to the crack.

  “What is it?” Molly asked eagerly.

  “I’m not sure,” Emmett said. “I can’t . . . GAH!” He tossed the box in the air, and fell off the barrel.