But Sam was already heading toward Twenty-Eighth Street and the entrance to Bellevue.
“Where are you going?” Thomas said, hurrying after him. With a groan of protest, Pippa followed.
“To find Max,” Sam responded.
“You can’t just charge in there,” Thomas said. “What excuse will you give?”
There was a girl tottering up the street, her hair in pigtails and wearing makeup, as though she had just stepped off the stage. Thomas noticed, vaguely, that her face looked sort of like a pickle: miserable and sour.
“Sam, wait,” Thomas said, and in the process accidentally jostled the girl on the street. “Sorry,” he mumbled, barely looking at her.
“Sorry!” the girl exploded. “Sorry? Is that all you’ve got to say to me, you giant nitwit?”
Thomas stopped, startled by the girl’s outburst. Sam and Pippa stopped with him.
“I’m . . . very sorry?” Thomas said cautiously. It occurred to him that the girl might be one of the patients from Bellevue.
“Are you serious?” It was the girl’s voice—familiar, abrasive, like the hard strike of steel against stone—that struck Thomas as suddenly familiar. “You ought to be licking my boots right now—all of you—you ought to be down on your knees and kissing my toenails—”
“Max!” Thomas cried out, just as she jutted her face further into the streetlight, and the familiar point of her chin and hard little nose and white scar were revealed beneath the thick coat of makeup.
Sam’s jaw was nearly on the ground. “Is it—is it really you?”
“Who else would it be, you twerp?” Max nearly screamed, and gave Sam a hard whap on his arm. Thomas was sure it couldn’t have hurt him, but Sam flinched and drew back several inches. Pippa stifled a laugh.
“Left me to the wolves . . .” As she spoke, Max began scrubbing at her face with the sleeve of a coat. Up close, the makeup was even more hideous than Thomas had judged it from a distance. Thick mascara clumped her lashes, and bright circles of rouge bloomed on her cheeks like a rash. Her lipstick was a hideous red and smudged around her lips. No wonder Max looked so upset.
“Calm down, Max,” Thomas said. “Tell us what happened.”
Max paused long enough to glare at him. “How do you expect me to calm down when I just spent the past hour playing Little Miss Muffet with a bunch of loonies?” she demanded, and then resumed her furious scrubbing. She yanked her hair out of the pigtails and threw down the hair ribbons, hard, in the gutter. “I look like a class-A idiot!”
“I think you look kind of . . . pretty,” Sam ventured, in a small voice. For a moment, Thomas thought she would hit him again.
“Come on,” he said, before Pippa could dissolve into giggles and make everything worse. “Let’s get out of here.”
By Thirty-Third Street, where they got into the subway, Max had calmed down—although she still refused to look at Sam, whom she inexplicably blamed for the whole episode. By vigorously raking her fingers through her hair, she had restored it to its normal state of wildness.
She told them how she had been hauled upstairs by the nurse and presented at the registration desk.
“And before I know it, some wacko in a nightgown comes barreling over, practically throws herself at me, and starts calling me sweetie pie,” Max said, outraged. The makeup had mostly come off, except for thick smudges of mascara, which gave her the look of a raccoon. “Well, what was I supposed to do? She painted me up like a clown and made me play cards. I only got out of there when she nodded off.”
Except for a homeless man dressed in toeless boots, a long overcoat, and a pair of aviator’s goggles, the children were alone on the subway car as it lurched through the tunnels. Thomas, seeking once again to make peace, at last extracted the medical report from his pocket, smoothed it down on one thigh, and began to read.
“What about . . . ?” Pippa nodded toward the homeless man, whose chin was nodding on his chest.
“It’s all right,” Thomas said. He couldn’t wait any longer. He scanned the page and its densely packed writing.
“Well?” Max said irritably. “What’s it say?”
“Give me a second,” Thomas said, frowning. Some of the words were unknown to him; others were illegible. Under Cause of Death, the medical examiner had printed poisoning by cyanide. That they already knew.
“Here,” he burst out, and read, “‘Subject’—that’s Potts—‘died between the hours of midnight and two in the morning on Thursday, April twenty-fifth.’”
Pippa shivered. “How awful.”
Thomas kept on reading. “‘Judging from the contents of the subject’s stomach—’”
“Eww!” Max and Pippa burst out together and then glared at each other. Thomas ignored them.
“‘—and also from the time of death, the poison was likely administered with the subject’s dinner at around eight p.m. on Wednesday. Stomach contents—’”
“Thomas!” Max and Pippa shrieked.
“‘—show dinner of roast beef, pickled onions, and”—Thomas grimaced—“prune juice.”
“Roast beef?” Max frowned. “We had canned tuna and old bread that night.”
Pippa shook her head. “Potts didn’t eat at the museum on Wednesday night. I remember—Goldini broke a cup and no one could find the broom and I thought Miss Fitch would burst into flame. Potts came home later.”
Thomas had reached the end of the report. He stared at it for a moment longer, as though the words would float off the page and reveal something further to him. The subway screeched and jerked to a halt, and Thomas suddenly realized the train had arrived at their stop. But as Thomas and the others pushed onto the platform, he had the strangest sensation that they were being watched. He turned around as the doors slid closed and the train began to chug forward. The homeless man was awake now, staring at him with an amused expression. Thomas felt a small shock, as though he’d accidentally touched a socket without drying his hands. He had the strangest feeling he’d seen the man before.
But then the train was gone, swallowed up by the black tunnel, and Thomas pushed the thought out of his mind. It was late. He was probably imagining things.
“Thomas?” Sam, Max, and Pippa were already halfway down the platform, waiting for him.
“Sorry,” he said, and hurried to catch up.
“We were talking about Potts’s dinner,” Pippa prompted.
Sam shoved his hands in his pockets as they moved down the empty platform toward the stairs that led to the street. “I guess the question is, where on earth did he eat?”
It was nearly ten o’clock at night and far too late to continue their investigation. They headed directly back to the museum. A fog had rolled in from the river and snuck between the buildings like some vast, yellow-furred animal. Even after Thomas had slipped beneath his thick woolen blanket in the attic and Sam was snoring peacefully next to him, he couldn’t get warm—as though the fog had followed him up into the room and was tickling the soles of his feet.
His mind was turning restlessly. Potts had been murdered—why? Had he perhaps gone to see Mr. Anderson? But for what purpose? Thomas rolled over, pounding a lump from his pillow with a fist. Mr. Anderson couldn’t help, either; he, too, had been killed. All after the disappearance of that stupid head . . .
Thomas remembered the gasp from the ancient lady—Mrs. Weathersby—in the front row the day the head had been revealed. She, too, was dead. What was the connection? Could the head really be cursed?
He dismissed the idea immediately. He had read every single book in the museum’s library, many of them multiple times. He knew all about ghosts and witches, spell casting and ancient curses from the battered books Phoebe the Fat Lady brought home.
But he was very practical. He had been orphaned at a young age. He knew in all probability his real parents were dead. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe they just hadn’t wanted him, because he was different, because he could make his joints bend backward and his heels touc
h his head.
He wasn’t troubled by this idea—at least, he was not troubled by it very much. That was real life. He knew that people were afraid, and they disliked difference, and they sometimes acted cowardly.
He knew, too, that in real life, curses did not kill people. People killed people.
But why?
He got up. He would never sleep this way—not until he warmed up. He decided to go down to the kitchen and search for some milk in the icebox. Mrs. Cobble had sometimes heated it on the stove for him, with a little cinnamon and honey, to help him sleep.
It was very dark, and moonlight filtering through the high windows cast enormous shadows everywhere. He moved silently down the stairs, and had almost reached the ground floor when he heard muffled sounds of weeping. He froze, then inched forward, around the bend, holding his breath.
It was Phoebe.
She was crouched in the middle of the Hall of Wax, her bulging back and shoulders touched with silvery light. Her long hair was loose and she was cradling her head in her hands. Hugo was crouching next to her. He kept one hand several inches from her back, as though he wanted to touch her but was afraid that, for all her bulk, she would shatter.
“Shhh,” he was saying. “It’ll be all right.”
“It won’t be all right,” she whispered fiercely, snapping up her head to glare at him. “How can you say that?” She let out another low moan, an animal sound, and covered her face again. “Poor Mr. Dumfrey! After everything he did for us . . . and now he’s in jail! I’ll never live it down. I won’t.”
“Bee,” Hugo said—a nickname Thomas had never heard. “Bee, please. We’re only doing what we must. To be happy. We deserve to be happy, don’t we?”
Phoebe only responded by sobbing harder.
Thomas drew back and retreated up the stairs, abandoning his plan for warm milk. He would never be able to sleep tonight, anyway, even if he were bathed in a tub of it.
There was no longer any doubt. Phoebe and Hugo were involved, somehow, in some way, in this mess.
It was up to him to prove it.
Breakfast was getting worse and worse. When Max made it downstairs the following morning, she found Thomas, Pippa, and Sam sharing a plate of hard cheese and saltine crackers.
Sam slid over as soon as he saw her to make room for her on the bench. Ignoring him completely—she was still angry at him, mostly because he had told her she looked pretty with her hair tugged and pulled like a poodle’s—she elbowed in next to Pippa.
Thomas was bent over a newspaper and every so often he groaned.
“What’s the matter?” Max asked, popping a saltine in her mouth.
“What do you think’s the matter?” Pippa said, and, whipping the newspaper out of Thomas’s hands, slammed it down in front of Max.
Max was not a strong reader, but she recognized the name of the paper, The Daily Screamer, and could just spell out the headline that dominated the front page.
VILLAINS OR VICTIMS?
DUMFREY’S HORROR-HOUSE—A DANGER FOR OUR YOUTH
“So what’s it all about?” Max said, shoving the paper back, so she wouldn’t have to read the whole article herself. She didn’t actually know how to read—at least, nothing more than a few street signs—though Monsieur Cabillaud was threatening to teach her.
“It’s about us,” Thomas said. He read: “‘Dressed in foul-smelling rags, the children of Mr. Dumfrey’s Dime Museum have been so systematically abused, they do not appear to know how pathetic they appear. . . .’”
“Pathetic?” Max screeched. “Smelly?” True, she did not often wash her hair. And true, she liked to wear her lucky jacket on a daily basis, the one with several pockets for her knives. But she was positive she didn’t smell.
“‘Isolated from children their own age, forced into the most despicable tasks, like cleaning the museum of spiders’—I never said he forced us to, did I? Just that he liked them released outside—”
“Go on, Thomas,” Pippa said.
Thomas continued, “‘and denied a basic education’”—Thomas frowned and lowered his voice, since Monsieur Cabillaud was sitting nearby—“‘the children confuse major European countries and are unable to complete the most basic arithmetic’—he’s twisted everything around, you see?—‘and defend Mr. Dumfrey as if he were a father and not the man who has kept them in captivity all these years.’”
Max slammed a fist against the table, causing the cheese to levitate temporarily off its crackers. “I’ll have him skinned!” she said. Then: “What’s captivity mean?”
“It means,” Pippa said, with a superior-sounding sniff, “that Mr. Dumfrey’s been keeping us prisoner.”
“That’s bunk,” Max said. “Mr. Dumfrey saved us.” She watched Danny drift into the kitchen, his worried face barely level with the table; and Smalls, gripping a coffee mug, which in his enormous hand looked like a doll’s teacup; and Monsieur Cabillaud with his scarf carelessly arranged around his tiny head. They belonged here, all of them. It was probably the first place they had ever belonged in their whole lives.
She, Max, belonged here, too.
“Listen.” Thomas dropped his voice to a whisper. “Something happened last night.” Gesturing for them all to lean in, he explained what he had seen and overheard the night before. Then, leaning back, he said, “I have a plan.”
“Big surprise,” Max grumbled.
He acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “We’re going to have to split up. Max and I will follow Hugo and Phoebe. Sam and Pippa can try and figure out where Potts was on Wednesday night and who he was with.”
“I think Max should come with me,” Sam said immediately. “In case we need to, um, interrogate someone. Or intimidate someone. Or both.”
Max rolled her eyes, even though secretly, she was pleased that Sam thought she was intimidating.
“Fine,” Thomas said smoothly. “Pip and I’ll follow Hugo and Phoebe, then. We’ll meet back here later. Everyone got it?”
Pippa sighed. “Got it.”
Sam smiled. “Got it.”
“Got it.” Max popped a saltine into her mouth and pocketed another for the road.
There were over two dozen bars, pubs, restaurants, and luncheonettes in the area immediately surrounding the museum, ranging from the decent to the disreputable to the disgusting, and it turned out Potts had, at some point or another, eaten, drunk, or gambled in nearly all of them.
Max had cooked up their cover story: they would pretend to be looking to track down their uncle and would give a description of Potts when asked what their uncle looked like. This required that they pose as brother and sister, an idea Sam initially resisted. But people would be more likely to talk, Max argued, if there was no question of murder, feeling proud of herself for thinking of it. Thomas wasn’t the only brainy one in the group.
“I still don’t see why we have to be related,” Sam grumbled, after leaving Momma Maroon’s Luncheonette, where the proprietor, an enormously fat woman with a face as red as an apple and thick eyeglasses, had said she could see the family resemblance perfectly.
Up and down the streets, into bars where the air was vibrating with smoke and foul smells, and restaurants where grubby-looking men were bent over thick bowls of soup and the floors were covered in peanut shells; hour after hour of the same response. Yeah, sure. He sounds familiar. But haven’t seen him in a few weeks at least. Sorry, kids. Better luck next time.
“I’m starting to hate that word,” Sam said on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street, after their latest failure. “Luck.”
Max kicked a trash can in frustration, and a stray cat leaped out from its depths and bared its teeth before slinking away. “This is crazy,” she said. She had been excited to set out. But that was hours ago, and her saltine and cheese had long since been digested. She was hungry, and her feet hurt, and her jacket was making her hot. “He could have gone anywhere, with anyone, in the whole stupid city.”
“We can’t give up now,” Sam s
aid, but he sounded just as tired as she felt.
“What are we supposed to do?” Max said. “We’ve been at it for hours already.” Max shoved her hands in her pockets. She was enraged and she didn’t know why. She tried to direct her anger at Sam, but it didn’t work. He looked tall and saggy and exhausted, like a piece of taffy that has been overstretched, and she could only feel bad for him.
Instead, she pushed her anger outward, onto the whole world, expanding it until it grew like a mist to cover everything around her. The world, Max felt, was an evil, rotten, pit of a place. Exhibit 1: She’d been dumped like a discarded banana peel by her own parents. Exhibit 2: She barely remembered the orphanage where she’d landed, but she did remember cages, like for animals, and people inside them, and darkness. Exhibit 3: Her foster mother took her in just to have someone to scrub her linens and wash out her toilet bowl, and Max had run away. Exhibits 4 through 87: She had lived on the streets and raised herself, learned to pickpocket and steal, memorized the best places to sleep so she wouldn’t get chased off by the cops, made friends with the rats.
And the last, final proof: she had finally found a place where she was safe, and that, too, was in danger.
“All right,” Sam said with a sigh, looking more like a sad stretched piece of taffy than ever. “Let’s go home.”
On the corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, Sam stopped to tie his shoes for at least the third time that day. Max waited for him impatiently, shifting her weight, both dreading what they would have to say to Pippa and Thomas and eager to get it over with.
They had paused in front of Paulie’s—a restaurant so grubby that they had skipped over it entirely. Even Potts couldn’t have been tempted to eat there. Through grease-streaked windowpanes, Max saw a dozen people huddled like refugees over their plates.
Down the street, Max noticed a woman wearing an enormous hat and a fur collar, despite the sunny April weather. She was distributing fliers and jabbering at a high volume to everyone who passed, although Max could not make out what she said. And on the opposite side of the street, coming from the direction of Eighth Avenue—
The Shrunken Head Page 12