A Dastardly Plot

by Christopher Healy

  “Ouch,” Emmett yelped as a piece of plaster fell onto him. Suddenly, debris was raining all over, coming down in larger and larger chunks.

  “Oogie, stop! You’re gonna bring the whole place down!” Molly yelled. But the red-faced gang lord wasn’t interested. He had almost torn a hole big enough for himself to fit through; he didn’t seem to care about the long, snaking cracks that had sprouted from that hole, running across the walls and up to the crumbling ceiling. With nowhere else to go, Molly and Emmett huddled against the door.

  “Say g’nicht, weans!” Oogie sneered as he stepped into the rumbling kitchen. Then a clawfoot bathtub crashed through the ceiling, and even the fury-fueled MacDougal had no choice but to leap back through the hole in the wall.

  “It’s caving in!” Emmett screamed. Molly tried to join him in his cries, but choked on the dust-thick air.

  Suddenly, the kitchen door opened.

  “Come with me if you want to live,” said a young woman in the doorway. Her own arms were raised overhead to protect herself from the hunks of ceiling that were falling even in that next room.

  “We’ll never make it out,” Emmett cried.

  But the stranger grabbed each of their hands. “Believe in yourselves,” she said. And that was the last thing Molly heard before a slab of door frame crashed onto her and she slipped into unconsciousness.

  30

  Mothers’ Little Helpers

  I DON’T KNOW if this is heaven, Molly thought as she blinked her eyes open, but at least it’s not the other place. Too cold. She reached up to the frigid spot on her head and found a dripping ice bag, which she promptly removed. That small motion caused a wave of pain to ricochet through her skull. On the bright side, that probably meant she was still alive. But where was she? There was a surprisingly comfortable cot beneath her, bare brick walls around her, and not much else. As her vision came back into focus, a door opened, and a strangely familiar face appeared—mahogany complexion, tightly pinned hair parted down the center, and a bright, beaming smile. It was the woman who’d taken her hand in the collapsing tenement, a woman she’d assumed to be a dream.

  “You’re awake,” the woman said.

  “You’re real,” Molly muttered in return.

  “I sure hope so,” she said. “My name’s Sarah, Sarah Goode.” She turned and called, “Emmett, Molly’s up.”

  Emmett! She sat up and swung her legs down, wincing from the pounding in her head, and Sarah steadied her.

  “Molly!” Emmett shouted as he burst into the room.

  “I’m happy to see you too,” she said, wincing again. “Can we be happy a little more quietly, though?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” he said, much more softly. “How do you feel? Do you feel okay? I was worried. But you look okay. Are you okay?”

  Molly nodded. She’d never heard Emmett speak this much, this fast.

  “Oh, good, because I was worried. Molly, so much has happened. Did you meet Sarah? This is Sarah, Sarah Goode. She helped me drag you from that building. She’s one of Hertha’s people. There are more of them. Five, actually. This is their workshop—not just this, there’s a bigger room out there. I know your mother didn’t trust Hertha, and you trust your mother, but these are good people. And I don’t just mean Sarah, Sarah Goode. Did you meet Sarah?”

  Sarah, standing behind him, tried to hide her amusement.

  “Emmett, are you okay?” Molly asked.

  “Hertha made me some tea,” he replied. “I’d never had tea before. It’s good! I’ve drunk a lot of it. Maybe too much. Now I feel a little—vrrrr!—like the motor in your mom’s crazy mop.”

  “Ha! Welcome to caffeine,” Molly said. Laughing made her head hurt, but she couldn’t help it. “You should’ve tried the coffee when I offered it.”

  Then Emmett surprised her with a hug. She could tell he was trying to be as gentle as possible. “Oh, but Molly, there’s so much to tell you,” he said, pulling away. “That whole building came down, you know, the entire thing. Nothing but rubble now. We were so lucky to get out alive. Thank you again, Sarah! Did you meet Sarah, Sarah Goode?”

  “Yeah. Was MacDougal still in the building?”

  Emmett shook his head. “He got out, told his men to search the debris for bodies. Sarah and I hid with you while that Tusk guy poked around, but stuff kept crumbling and he gave up pretty quickly.”

  “So the good news is that the Green Onions won’t be looking for you anymore,” Sarah said. “They think you two are rubbing shoulders with Saint Peter.”

  If Thomas Edison and the Onions really thought they were dead, that was one less thing to worry about, but it was far from the end of their problems. Molly looked Sarah over. She was young and friendly, not stuffy and proper. And her simple yellow dress was a far cry from Hertha’s feather-and-ruffle nightmare. Had her mother’s snap judgment about Hertha’s group been too hasty? Or had Emmett once again been too trusting? It was too soon to rule out the possibility that these women worked for Edison. Or that they had their own nefarious motives.

  “We were awfully lucky that you showed up in that random tenement when you did,” Molly said, making no attempt to hide her skepticism.

  “You were indeed. But it almost became incredibly unlucky for me,” Sarah replied. “When my friend Mary and I followed you from the dump on Rivington, we had no idea you were heading into a foofaraw with the Green Onions. I’d ducked into that building across the street, hoping to find a good spot to keep an eye on you. Little did I know that you would suddenly appear in that very building—or that you would bring the whole thing tumbling down!”

  “Well, that wasn’t us,” Molly said defensively. “That was Oogie with his— Wait, how did you find us at the dump?”

  “Oh, well, that came out of Mary observing your friend Jasper at the Inventors’ Guild,” Sarah said.

  “Jasper!” Molly blurted with sudden concern. “We have to—”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Molly Pepper, I’m here too,” Jasper said, poking his head into the doorway. “Sorry I did not make my presence known sooner, but I didn’t want to intrude upon your heartfelt reunion with Emmett. I figured it best I keep myself secreted outside the room here. Also, I know what part of the story’s comin’ up next and I did not want to see the critical expression on your face when you heard it.”

  Sarah grinned and continued her tale. “After hearing about what happened to your mother, we’d been on the lookout for you and Emmett for days. Then Mary overheard Mr. Bloom shouting to a Guild Hall clerk about how there were going to be two very angry children waiting for him if he did not report back to the Rivington Street landfill with information on the whereabouts of one Alexander Graham Bell. So Mary grabbed me and we followed him back to your bookmobile.”

  “Jasper!” Molly said. “Really?”

  “That’s the look I’m talkin’ about! That’s the look I did not want to see,” the ashman said, folding his arms defiantly. “But that side door Emmett wanted me to use was scary. And I thought I’d have a better shot at sweet-talkin’ my way in to see Bell. I mean, you have seen these dreamlike eyelashes of mine, right?”

  In truth, Molly was incredibly grateful to see Jasper safe. He was yet one more innocent person embroiled in this World’s Fair fiasco on her account. She didn’t know if her conscience could bear any more. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  “Likewise, Molly Pepper.” Jasper dabbed his eyes. “And I’m doubly thankful to Mrs. Mary Walton, who swooped in like Robin Hood to rescue me and my Prancey-Pie from the brutish Green Onion gangsters who’d absconded with us.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure those boys weren’t with the Onions,” a woman’s voice called from the next room. “Just a couple of random thieves, couldn’t have been more than ten years old or so.”

  “Yeah, but they were some of those extra-large ten-year-olds,” Jasper said melodramatically.

  “Come,” Sarah said, helping Molly to her feet. “If you’re up to it, I can introduce you to t
he rest of the MOI.” When Molly was on her feet, Sarah pulled a lever and the bed folded in upon itself, transforming into a fashionable cedar desk, complete with cozy chair and footrest. Whatever else these women were, Molly thought, they were inventors to be reckoned with.

  Molly exited the bedroom—or office, or closet, or whatever it was—into a large warehouse space roughly the size of the pickle shop. And like the pickle shop, it had benches and worktables, a vast array of tools and materials, and dozens of intriguing prototype gadgets sitting about. Unlike the pickle shop, however, it was astonishingly tidy. The tables were clear, not cluttered. Instead of being piled willy-nilly into crates, the hammers, pliers, wrenches, and such were hung on hooks in orderly lines. Rather than shoved into random corners, the gizmos these women had created were proudly displayed on shelves. It gave Molly the shivers.

  In the center of the big room was a large wheeled machine, obviously a work in progress. It looked like an open-top wagon, constructed almost entirely of metal and with three rows of plush seats. But there was no place to hook up a horse. And no reins—only something that resembled the captain’s wheel of a ship. Molly was about to ask what it was when something caught her eye overhead: electric lights. Six big onion-shaped bulbs gave off a warm yellow glow.

  “You’ve got electricity,” Molly said, her mind filling with the many bad things that could mean. “Are you wired into Edison’s grid? Because he—”

  “Emmett has told us all about your encounter with Mr. Edison,” Hertha said, her crisp English diction cutting off the question. “Have no fear. We are neither in league with nor reliant upon the man. We have our own electrical generator.” She gestured to a humming, vibrating machine in the corner.

  “Oh, yeah,” Molly said, recalling her previous conversation with Hertha. “Electrics are kinda your thing, right?”

  Hertha raised her eyebrows in an expression that Molly took for a smile, even though the woman’s mouth didn’t move. “Good to see you up and about, Miss Pepper.” Hertha walked to Molly, her brocaded skirt swishing as she moved, and shook her hand. “Can I interest you in some tea?”

  The mix of confusion, suspicion, and curiosity muddling Molly’s brain made it difficult to play it cool. Plus, she was really thirsty. “Got any coffee?” she asked.

  “Coffee?” Hertha scoffed, turning away melodramatically. “I’m not a heathen.”

  Another woman, with tufts of graying hair poking from beneath a flower-patterned knit cap, rolled her eyes. “Ignore her, dear. I’ll make some.”

  “Hey, I know you,” Molly said, recognizing the older woman’s wry wink. “You’re the lady from the Guild Hall—the one with the parasol who tripped those guards.”

  “Mary Walton,” the woman said. She paused her coffee bean grinding to shake Molly’s hand with a grip that was surprisingly firm for someone so grandmotherly. “Perhaps you know my work too, since you’ve grown up here in Manhattan. Do you have any recollection as to how New York’s elevated trains sounded a year or so ago?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Molly said with dawning enlightenment. “I used to cover my ears. They made me feel like my insides were gonna shake right out of my body. But the trains haven’t been that way in a while.”

  “That would be my sound-dampening system,” Mary said. “I firmly believe that technology need not spoil the world in which we use it. That’s sort of my thing.”

  “Oh, yes, where are my manners?” said another woman, seated by herself across the room. She closed the book she’d been reading—with a tasseled bookmark carefully placed between the pages—and stood to offer her hand in a way that struck Molly as very royal-ish. “Josephine Cochrane,” the woman said. This was the fancy lady who’d been spying on them by the train tracks before the parade. She was dressed just as elegantly now: satiny dress with ruched skirt and lacy cuffs, pearl necklace, white gloves, and silver-framed reading glasses on the tip of her nose. “My specialty—I have too much respect for the English language to refer to it as a thing—is internal dynamics, moving parts. I’ve put this to use mainly in the creation of a few small mechanical devices for the home, but my pièce de résistance will be a fully automated dishwashing machine. It’s certain to chip fewer wine goblets than the servants do, am I right?”

  None of this helped change Molly’s initial impression of the woman.

  “Um, Sarah, you didn’t tell Molly your thing—your specialty,” Emmett said loudly, perhaps to distract from the odd look Molly was giving Josephine Cochrane.

  “Oh, well, um . . . I design ways to fit big objects into small spaces,” Sarah said. “Like that fold-up bed. I’m from Chicago, and apartments up there aren’t very generous in elbow room. So, as they say, necessity is . . .”

  “The mother of invention,” Molly finished.

  “That would be us.” Mary Walton handed Molly a cup of coffee.

  Molly took a sip as she looked around at the various contraptions lining the shelves. “I thought there were five of you,” she said.

  At that, a fifth woman slid out from underneath the steel wagon in the center of the room. She wore crumpled, grease-smeared coveralls, multiple tool belts, and thick goggles that made her hair stick out like wings on the sides of her head. She looked like Josephine Cochrane’s worst nightmare. “Margaret Knight. Boston,” the woman said. “I make a lot of stuff. Started with the paper bag, just kept going.” And she slid back out of sight.

  “You invented those brown paper bags? With the flat bottoms?” Molly crouched to yell under the vehicle. She felt as awed as she had in the presence of Bell and Edison. “We use those in the pickle shop!”

  “Margaret is probably the most accomplished of the five of us,” Hertha said. “She already has eighty-seven patents to her name.”

  “That’s crazy,” Molly said. “Why have I never heard of her?”

  “The answer, Molly,” said Hertha, “circles right back to the conversation we had in your shop last week.”

  “So, you’re all successful?” Molly was gobsmacked by the idea. “You all have patented inventions?”

  “Not all. Not yet,” said Sarah. “But someday. Someday I will be the first black woman to get a US patent. I believe it.”

  Molly’s head was in a swirl, and not just because she’d been clobbered by a chunk of ceiling. Meeting these women—simply learning of their existence—seemed to change everything. Though Molly wasn’t sure if it gave her more hope for the world, or less. On the one hand, her mother wasn’t alone—she could be part of a community of female inventors, all of whom faced the same struggles and could support one another through it all. But on the other hand, none of these determined, accomplished, intelligent women had gotten recognition in their careers. Even the ones who’d actually managed to earn patents for their work were completely unknown. None had come anywhere close to the fame of Edison or Bell. None of them could even be members of the Inventors’ Guild.

  For so long, Molly had held on to the belief that, if her mother could just get her work seen, she would undoubtedly become a tremendous success, that Cassandra Pepper would change the world, that she would be part of history. Now Molly realized there were no guarantees. Not with the world being the way it was.

  Still, she wasn’t alone. That counted for something. Perhaps if all these women worked together . . . “So, what’s this wagon thingie you’re building?” she asked.

  “Ooh, ooh! Can I tell her?” Jasper jumped up and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I ain’t said anything in a long time and, you may not understand this, but that hurts me. It physically hurts me to be silent for more than a few minutes. Plus I’d like to show you ladies how well I paid attention when you was explainin’ it earlier.”

  “Have at it, Mr. Bloom,” Hertha said.

  “Okay, well, this here is the Marvelous Moto-Mover,” Jasper began.

  “Mr. Bloom,” Hertha scolded. “Not one sentence in and you’re already embellishing. It is simply called a motor coach.”

  “I
know that’s what you called it,” Jasper said. “But you gotta admit Marvelous Moto-Mover is a much catchier name.”

  “I’m with Jasper on this one,” Molly said. Emmett nodded in agreement.

  “It’s tacky, if you ask me,” said Mrs. Cochrane, who then went back to reading her book.

  “Anyways, the Marvelous Moto-Mover is a horseless carriage,” Jasper went on. “You understand what that means, right? No horses. So what pulls it? Nothing. Nothing pulls it. This thing moves by itself on account of they put an engine in there. And how does the engine work? I am not qualified to answer that question. Anyway, the Mothers intended the Moto-Mover to be their joint entry into the World’s Fair. But they ran into the same problem your mother had, Molly Pepper—the Guild made the Fair a no-go for lady inventors.”

  “Or as we like to call ourselves, inventors,” said Mary.

  “And we weren’t going to let a little thing like the lack of an invitation stop us,” said Hertha.

  Sarah nodded. “Cinderella didn’t have an invitation to the ball either.”

  “Yes, but we were going to be our own fairy godmothers, make our own magic,” Hertha continued. “We reckoned we’d drive our motor coach all around the fairgrounds and let the people gawk.”

  “Tacky, if you ask me,” said Mrs. Cochrane.

  The others stared at her.

  “I didn’t say no, I said tacky.” And she went back to her book.

  “My mother and I thought about doing the same thing with her Icarus Chariot,” Molly said. “Only flying, not driving.” She was growing fonder of these women by the moment. (Except maybe Mrs. Cochrane.)

  “Your mother made a flying coach?” Sarah asked.

  “More like a flying boat,” Molly said.

  Emmett nodded. “She really did. I saw it. Well, I didn’t see it fly, but I saw it in her shop.”

  Molly felt a warm surge of optimism she hadn’t felt in days. It might take some convincing, Molly thought, but Cassandra Pepper belonged in the Mothers of Invention. These fun, exciting, brilliant ladies could be more than partners to her; they could be friends. Molly closed her eyes and envisioned her mother joshing around with Hertha and Sarah, trading tricks with Mary and Margaret, poking fun at stuffy Mrs. Cochrane. For the first time in a long time, Molly was able to imagine her mother happy about something beyond their little two-person family. And that thought elated Molly. Because, no matter how much she liked putting a smile on her mother’s face, being entirely responsible for another person’s happiness can be exhausting.