“Pippa!” she called out, waving. “Thomas!”
They looked just as tired and discouraged as she felt. Thomas had a dusting of white plaster in his hair, which made him look like an old man. Pippa’s dress, normally stiff and starched and perfect, was splattered with mud and torn at the hem.
“What happened to you?” Max and Pippa asked, at the exact same time.
“I asked first,” they said again, together.
“We lost them,” Thomas said. “We followed them halfway across the city and back again, in and out of shops, then down to Fourteenth Street, and—poof! They disappeared.”
“Disappeared where?” Max asked.
“If we knew that—” Thomas started to say. But by that point the woman with the fliers had advanced even farther down the street, and Max made out, finally, what she was saying.
“These poor, helpless children,” she wailed as she shoved pamphlets in the hands of passersby. “Extraordinary and underappreciated! Uneducated! Underfed! Overexploited and worked half to death, like plow mules. It’s an outrage, and Mr. Dumfrey must be held accountable. . . .”
“Uh-oh,” Max muttered. She felt like she was frozen and watching a steam engine bear down on her. But before she could squeak out a single word of warning, the woman’s eyes pivoted in her direction—small, beady eyes set deep in a face as pink as a baby’s scrubbed bottom.
“You!” she cried, her eyes gleaming as she took in Thomas and his dusty hair, Max’s ragged coat, Sam with one shoe untied, and Pippa’s torn and ragged dress. “How remarkable! How extraordinary! Which one of you is Sam? Aha—the little one is Thomas! And this must be Philippa, and Mackenzie.”
“Max,” Max said, but the woman ignored her.
“It’s really an incredible coincidence,” the woman said. “I’ve just been talking about all of you—you poor, poor things. Are you cold? Or too hot? Can I get you anything to eat?”
Max was hungry, actually, but she kept her mouth shut.
“Who are you?” Thomas said.
The woman laughed, a laugh as shrill as the whistle from a steam pipe. “How silly. Of course. I haven’t introduced myself. It’s just as though I feel we know each other . . . My name is Andrea von Stikk.” She paused, as if waiting for her words to take effect. “Of the Von Stikk Society for Children’s Welfare? Of Von Stikk’s Home for Extraordinary Children?” She looked at them expectantly, and, when no one said a word, shook her head and sighed. “Poor creatures. You really have been terribly undereducated. But all that will be sorted out quickly when we get you into our home. We have a wonderful school, of course, and programs for educating young boys and girls in over a dozen fields of work. . . .”
Max heard several words she disliked strongly: for example, work and school.
“Now, come along,” the woman said, and spread her arms as though she intended to wrap them in a hug—another thing Max hated. “Let’s find somewhere decent to sit and talk.”
As she said the word decent, she cast a disapproving glance at Paulie’s restaurant, and it gave Max an idea.
“Sorry,” Max blurted. “We’re in a rush. Important business.”
“Business?” Andrea chirped primly, as if she’d never heard the word.
“Places to go, people to see, bodies to bury—you know, the usual. Anyways, nice to meet you, see you never, and thanks for the chat.” As Max spoke, she took Pippa by the arm and hauled her into Paulie’s. Thomas and Sam hurried after them.
“But wait!” Andrea shrieked. “You can’t go in there! It simply isn’t suitable for childr—”
The door swung shut behind them, blocking out the sound of her outraged voice. And, as Max had expected, she didn’t follow them into Paulie’s. She wouldn’t dare.
“If she called me poor dear one more time . . . ,” Pippa said, shaking her head and making a vaguely threatening gesture with her fist. Max felt a brief flicker of admiration for her. But it was quickly snuffed out. “Ew,” Pippa said, looking around them. “What is this place?”
The air in Paulie’s was thick with the smell of boiled cabbage, cigarette smoke, and rancid meat. Behind the counter, a mammoth man wearing a blood-caked apron was frying up bacon. A waiter with the guilty look of an escaped convict was hurrying among the rickety tables, which were covered not with tablecloths but old, grease-spotted newspapers. In one booth, a man with dirt-encrusted fingers was noisily slurping coffee as black as tar; at the counter, two toothless women were dealing cards. The other patrons of Paulie’s looked as sad, scared, and pathetic as any Max had ever seen.
“What’re you doing in here?” The man in the butcher’s apron—Max assumed he was the owner—came bellying out from behind the counter. “We’re not buying nothing, so you can take whatever you’re sellin’ and get going.”
They needed to stall. Max wasn’t ready to risk another run-in with Angela von Stuck-up, or whatever her name was.
“We’re looking for our uncle,” she said quickly. Pippa and Thomas gave her a confused look, but Sam picked up on the game right away.
“That’s right,” he chimed in. They had practiced their parts all day long. “He wanders off sometimes. Gets confused.” Sam lowered his voice conspiratorially. “He’s not all there in the head.”
The man in the butcher’s uniform smiled. Half his teeth were rotting. “Sounds like one of our customers, all right,” he said, and then let out a booming laugh. Max was blasted by the smell of his breath and did her best not to flinch. “The name’s Paulie,” the man in the apron said. “This is my joint. I’m here all day, every day. I remember everybody who walks through those doors. What’s he look like, this uncle of yours?”
“Dark hair,” Sam said. “Tall—even taller than me. Wears a gray cap, pulled low, and has scars on his cheeks.”
It was the same description they had given to twenty other restaurant and pub owners that morning. But this time, Paulie began nodding slowly, so his many chins wobbled like a turkey’s neck.
“Yeah,” Paulie said thoughtfully, wiping his hands across his apron. “Yeah. Sounds familiar. This would have been . . . Wednesday, right?”
Max swallowed back a little cry of excitement. Thomas and Pippa exchanged a glance. Wednesday was the night Potts had been poisoned.
“Exactly,” Max said eagerly. “Wednesday.”
Paulie stepped aside as the waiter skirted by them, holding a stack of dirty plates. “Yeah, he was here,” Paulie said. “They sat right over there.”
This time, Max couldn’t conceal her excitement.
“They?” she asked. “He was here with somebody?”
“Sure was. Didn’t get a good look at the other guy. He was wearing a hat. Your uncle seemed worked up about something, though.”
The waiter was still hovering nearby. He had deposited the stack of plates and was now pretending to wash the counter, although Max felt sure that he had never washed a single surface in Paulie’s in his life. He was eavesdropping. She gave Sam a nudge.
“And you don’t remember anything about the—the other guy?” Thomas asked.
Paulie turned to him. “He your uncle, too?” He gave a mean smile. “Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at the other guy. All’s I know is your uncle was nervous.”
Thomas nodded, frowning a little. Pippa had closed her eyes and her face was very pale. Max realized, with a little start, that she was trying to read. She was trying to think her way into the folds of Paulie’s brain.
“Look,” Sam spoke up suddenly. “We’re going to be honest with you.”
Max shot him a look. This was not part of the script they had agreed on.
“It’s really important we find out who our, um, uncle was with on Wednesday,” Sam said. “The truth is he was poisoned, and—”
Sam did not get any further. Because the waiter, with a short, anguished cry, vaulted over the counter, knocking over the entire stack of dirty dishes, and sprinted for the door.
Sam was the first to move. He reach
ed for the waiter but succeeded only in getting his apron, which promptly tore off in his hand.
The waiter ricocheted off a table, upsetting a bowl of soup and sending a chair crashing to the ground, where it promptly splintered. Everyone was shouting, and the women at the bar began to shriek.
The waiter made it to the door and tore off down Forty-Fourth Street.
The kids sprinted after him. Thomas was next out the door, and then Sam. Max followed them and Pippa came last, her breath high in her throat, her head pounding. Trying to read Paulie had left her exhausted and frustrated.
What good was being a mentalist if you couldn’t read minds?
When Pippa emerged onto the street, the waiter was already crossing Ninth Avenue. Thomas was fifteen feet behind him and gaining fast. Pippa tore after them, forgetting entirely to look both ways for traffic and throwing herself into the street. Several horns blared; an ice-cream truck swerved to avoid her, and she passed practically underneath a horse pulling a coal wagon, provoking an outraged whinny and a string of curses from the driver.
Thomas was gaining on the waiter. Ten feet, then seven . . . Pippa watched with her heart in her mouth as Thomas swung himself up onto a parked car and then vaulted like a gymnast into the air. . . .
At the last second, the waiter swerved, and Thomas landed hard, directly where the waiter had been a second before. He tumbled, did a somersault, and scrambled to his feet. But by then, the waiter had regained an advantage.
“Stop him!” Sam cried. “Somebody stop him!”
Two young men in sailor uniforms were approaching from the opposite direction. Hearing Sam shout, they braced themselves, intending to block the waiter’s progress. But he barreled through them at such speed that they tumbled backward, landing in a tangled heap on the sidewalk. Sam, bolting toward them, caught a foot on one of their knees and went sprawling down to the pavement, landing with a gigantic crack where the sidewalk split underneath his palms.
Ahead of Pippa, Max suddenly stopped and began rummaging in her pockets. Pippa just managed to swerve to avoid her.
“What are you doing?” she called over her shoulder. Max was crossing the street and didn’t seem to hear. “Come on!”
The waiter was nearly at Eighth Avenue, close to a big corner magazine stand. Once he reached Broadway, he could easily lose himself in the crowd or duck into any one of the theaters. It was up to her. . . . But she couldn’t run any faster . . . she was losing him.
Suddenly, there was a whistling in her ears, and she felt a hard breeze blow by her. Before she could register what had happened, the waiter was pinned against the side of a building, his shirt at his ears, struggling like a fish on a line. Pippa approached him at a trot.
Then she saw the knives—one on each side of his neck—keeping his shirt tacked to the wooden wall of the magazine stand.
Winded and panting, Sam and Thomas joined her. Max came last, darting out across the traffic from the other side of the street, where she must have planted herself to aim.
“Nice . . . going,” Sam said, gulping for air.
“Nothing to it.” Max shrugged.
“P-please.” The waiter was wiggling and squirming, desperately trying to pull himself free of the knives that had him pinned to the wall like a bug on a display board. “P-please. Let me go. I didn’t do nothing. I swear, I swear. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“Yeah?” Sam reached up and withdrew the knives. The waiter collapsed in a heap, moaning a little. “Then why’d you run?”
The waiter cowered, holding up both arms to shield himself as if worried that Sam might use the two knives to gouge out his eyes. His thin bottom lip was quivering. “You gotta believe me,” he said, and Pippa thought he might start to cry. “I didn’t mean nuthin’ by it. I was just doing my job, see?”
“Didn’t mean nothing by what?” Thomas said.
“The rats.” Now the waiter did start to sniffle. He ran a hand under his nose and Pippa was disgusted to see that it left a trail like that of a slug. She could only pray he would wash before returning to work.
Thomas and Sam exchanged a bewildered look. “What rats?”
“It’s part of my job, see?” the man continued. “When the rats start to get bad, I’m supposed to take the tin from the back and spread the poison around in the corners and the kitchen.” The waiter choked back a sob. “The rats was so bad on Wednesday I put extra out. Sprinkled it even in the shelves and under the tables. But I musta—I guess I musta accidentally got some in your uncle’s grub. See? But I swear—I swear!—I didn’t mean to!”
The waiter began to wail so loudly, several people on the opposite side of the street turned to stare.
“Shhh.” Max hushed him harshly. “Calm down, all right? No need to blubber like a baby.” But this just made the man wail even louder.
“What kind of poison do you use on the rats?” Thomas asked patiently.
“Cy—cy—cy—” the waiter blubbered.
“Cyanide,” Pippa breathed, and the waiter nodded. Thomas glanced meaningfully at the other three. Potts had been killed with cyanide. Could it have been an accident after all?
Thomas put a hand on the waiter’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said. “We’re not blaming you. We know you were just doing your job. But the police have to know, too. You have to—”
“WHAT IN THE DEVIL’S NAME IS GOING ON HERE?”
The four children turned all at once. Paulie had just appeared behind them, red-faced and panting, carrying a wooden spoon the size of a shovel. In between short gasps of breath, he continued bellowing.
“CRIMINALS—TERRORIZING MY STAFF—FALSE INFORMATION—OUGHT TO BE—THROWN IN THE CLINKER—”
“Let us explain,” Sam said, but Paulie paid him no attention. He rounded on the waiter, who was still cowering on the street and making himself as small as possible.
“And YOU!” Paulie roared, pointing his spoon at the waiter’s head as though he meant to begin beating him with it. “IDIOT! COURAGE OF A COCKROACH! BRAINS OF A BEETLE!”
“I’m sorry!” the waiter cried out. “I got scared. It was the poison that did it, Mr. Paulie, sir. When I heard their uncle got bumped off on the day I put out the p-poison for the rats . . .”
Paulie had at last regained his breath. Now he turned back to the four children. Pippa had to draw back as the spoon came dangerously close to her nose.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, leaning in close with his foul breath. “I see what you hooligans are playing at. Trying to pin this one on me and my restaurant. You’ll have me ruined. Ruined!”
“We ain’t trying to pin nothing on nobody,” Max said.
“Or anything on anybody,” Pippa corrected her.
“The fact is,” Sam said, “the police have the wrong guy. They need to know—”
“They don’t need to know a noodle! And they won’t, either.” Now Paulie spun back around to face the waiter, who had finally managed to stand up but shrank back as soon as Paulie’s gaze fell on him. “If I hear you so much as made a peep in the direction of the cops, I’ll have your head mounted on my wall for a hat rack. I’ll have you chopped up and served as stew! You understand me?”
The waiter’s eyes moved nervously back and forth. He pointed a finger at the children. “But—but—but they said—”
“I don’t give a rat’s tail what they said!” Paulie screamed so loudly, it looked as if all the veins in his neck would burst. On the corner, a woman and her poodle both gave an alarmed yelp. “I’ll ask you again: DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
The waiter hung his head, so a curtain of hair swung down over his face. “Yes, Mr. Paulie, sir. I do, Mr. Paulie, sir.”
Paulie turned to the kids. “Now get out of here before I paddle you back into next Tuesday.”
Max smiled, showing all her teeth. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Come on, Max.” Sam put a hand on her arm. “We’re going,” he said to Paulie.
Paulie’s eyes followed them
all the way down the street. Pippa could feel his stare like a beam of light boring into the skin on the back of her neck.
And suddenly, in one flash, she had him. She was traveling his gaze like a path, tunneling back through his eyes, parting the dark curtain of his mind. She was there, in, sifting through images . . .
She stopped short, crying out.
“What is it?” Thomas turned to her, alarmed.
Just as quickly, the images faded. She was shoved rudely out of Paulie’s mind and found herself blinking, stunned, on Forty-Fourth Street. It was the very first time she’d read a mind and not just the contents of someone’s purse or pocket. Her heart was beating very fast, and though the effort had exhausted her, she felt like bursting into song.
“I—I did it,” she said in a whisper. “I read his mind. It was quick and I didn’t get much, but I was in.”
“Did you get anything?” Sam asked gently.
Pippa shut her eyes, thinking. “I saw Potts at the table,” she said. “He was nervous.”
“We already knew that,” Max said. Pippa opened her eyes and frowned.
“What about the man he was with?” Thomas asked. “Think, Pip. Did you get anything on him?”
Pippa licked her lips and closed her eyes again. “I . . .” The image she’d seen in Paulie’s mind was there, clear as anything, but it made no sense at all. All of the energy drained out of her at once. “I . . . I saw a fish.”
“A fish?” Max practically screeched.
Pippa nodded miserably. Thomas sighed.
“That’s all right, Pip,” Sam said. “You did your best.”
“It was a green fish,” she offered.
“Probably because the whole thing stinks!” Max said. “I don’t believe for a second Potts died because of some rat poison.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s always possible . . .” But he sounded unconvinced.
“And what about Hugo and Phoebe?” Max was getting worked up. “I bet they’re in this mess from their elbows to their eyebrows.”
The Shrunken Head Page 13