The boy picked up a thin cord running past the doorway. “And you set it off. So who’s the burglar now?”
“Yeah, well . . .” Molly abandoned her snappy comeback as panic suddenly set in. Based on the boy’s frozen, wide-eyed stare, he’d just had the same realization. There was an alarm going off.
“This is the police!” came a cry from downstairs. “Nobody move!”
“I can’t be found here,” the boy blurted.
“Aha! I was right!” Molly crowed. “You don’t belong here!”
The boy attempted to open the nearest window, but it didn’t budge.
“The one at the end of the hall!” Molly said, taking him by the arm. She didn’t owe this boy anything, but whatever his reason for breaking into the Guild Hall, he was probably just as desperate as she was. Plus, she was a thief now, and Molly distinctly remembered reading something somewhere about honor among thieves. “C’mon, my mother will help us!”
“We’re us now?” the boy asked as Molly dragged him from the office. But as soon as they heard pounding footsteps on the stairs, the pair ducked back in. They frantically scanned the wrecked workshop. The boy slapped on a pair of safety goggles and tossed a second set to Molly. “Disguises,” he whispered. Molly put hers on and grabbed an electric lamp that sat on a small table by the door. “Weapon,” she said.
Making sure the cord was long enough, she stepped back into the hall, raised the lamp to adult eye level, and waited at the top of the dark stairwell.
“I hear someone up there,” they heard a police officer say. As soon as the silhouette of his head came into view, Molly flicked on the lamp. The bulb burst to life an inch from the man’s nose. “Aagh!”
As the startled cop tumbled to the next landing, the masked children sprinted for the window. On the way, Molly spotted a torn shred of curled paper. Bell’s blueprints! She slipped it up her sleeve as her mother’s head popped up outside the window. “I think it’s time to leave,” Cassandra said.
“No argument from me,” Molly replied as she realized her mother was standing on a ladder. “Where’d this come from?”
“I built it,” Cassandra said. “From those crates.”
“You didn’t have any tools,” Molly said as she climbed out and scrambled to the alley floor.
“Oh, look,” said Cassandra, “there’s a boy here.”
“Yeah, it’s basically his fault we’re in this mess,” Molly called up. “We should help him.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” the boy said, and gestured for Cassandra to descend first. Their feet hit the cobblestones and a scowling policeman appeared in the window above. “Burglars in dresses?” he wondered aloud.
“He’ll follow us!” Molly said.
“I think not.” Cassandra slid one slat out of a notch near the bottom rung and the entire ladder collapsed into pieces. Fuming, the policeman ducked back inside. Molly and Cassandra took off down the alley toward Broadway. Molly glanced back long enough to see the boy watch them for a moment, then flee in the opposite direction.
She considered going after him, but decided she’d already pursued enough bad ideas for one night.
6
The Dastardly Plot
“SO AFTER ALL that, you didn’t destroy anything?” Cassandra said as she locked the pickle shop door behind them.
“Oh, we wrecked a whole bunch of stuff,” Molly replied as she lit a lamp. “Just none of it was Hoity-Toity Boy’s.”
“Because you couldn’t read the doorplates? I should make you a pair of spectacles.”
“It was dark, Mother! I do not need spectacles.” In adventure books, the heroes never wore eyeglasses. Only professors and old people wore eyeglasses. And Molly was neither.
Cassandra grabbed a full jar of pickles from the counter. “It’s all right,” she said. “It was still a cracking good plan.”
Molly held her tongue. She had let herself get carried away by her anger, and now look what she’d gotten them into. The best outcome they could hope for from this escapade was that the crime would not be traced back to them. Molly needed to remember: her mother was unmatched when it came to book smarts, but the nuts and bolts of daily survival were not Cassandra Pepper’s strong suit. Making good choices was Molly’s responsibility.
“We have more than a week,” Cassandra said, crunching into a pickle. “I’m sure I can think up a new way to get into the Fair. I can invent some sort of . . . mind-control machine and . . . persuade . . . some . . . I’m ready for bed.” Cassandra flopped onto her mattress, fully dressed. She pulled the blanket up to her neck and took another bite of her pickle.
“No bed pickles,” Molly scolded.
“What’s wrong with bed pickles?”
“They mean you’re giving up. And Peppers don’t give up.” As Molly reached for the pickle, she felt a crinkle along her arm and remembered what was up her sleeve. She pulled the torn piece of paper from her cuff. “I almost forgot,” she said hesitantly. “I don’t really know why I took this; I wish I hadn’t. It’s just gonna be more trouble for us. It’s part of Alexander Graham Bell’s plans for the World’s Fair and—”
Cassandra tossed back the covers and grabbed the paper. “Well, damage is done, right?” she said. She stepped the six inches from her bed to the worktable and unrolled the paper. “I mean, stealing is wrong, don’t do it again, et cetera, et cetera—but having this here in our hands, it feels foolish not to take a gander, no?”
By flickering lantern light, mother and daughter examined the stolen plans—or at least the corner they had in their possession. Most of the paper was covered by a map—a winding maze of paths, running between dozens of oddly shaped buildings, with a large plaza in the center.
“That’s the World’s Fairgrounds,” Molly said. “Just like in the article.” She looked up and pointed to the big window but saw only gooey splotches of gray gum. “Wherever it blew to.”
“But what has Bell added to it?” Cassandra asked. She grabbed a magnifying glass from a tool pile and bent closer, her nose nearly touching the paper.
There were handwritten notes all over the diagram. The first few were labels: electric lines, generator, ignition switch. Or notations on timing: 12:00—gates open, 3:30—assistants in place. But the more the Peppers read, the more troubling the notes became:
4:30—take out guards. Take them out to dinner? Probably not. But “take out” could mean so many things.
5:30—block exits. Maybe “block” was being used as a noun, like the exits were made of colorful children’s blocks. That sounded like the kind of whimsical thing they would do at a World’s Fair.
5:45—top targets take stage. Okay, hard to put a good spin on “targets.”
6:00—switch is flipped, NY is mi— The rest of the word disappeared off the jagged edge of the paper, but Molly had seen all she needed. Molly knew from news articles that 6:00 on opening night of the World’s Fair was when Thomas Edison was to make history by powering on the first citywide electrical grid. And the “targets” scheduled to be onstage for that ceremony included New York governor Grover Cleveland, President Chester A. Arthur, former president Ulysses S. Grant, and, of course, Edison himself.
But Bell was apparently choosing that moment to do something big of his own.
Sweat beaded on Molly’s brow as she scanned down to the crowd of figures sketched into the plaza around the stage, and saw a disturbing bit of editing: audience crossed out and replaced with victims. What was Bell planning to do to all those people at the Fair?
Only two more partial words were visible by the diagonally ripped bottom of the page:
DEA
MAC
Molly’s mind raced through combinations that might fit. “Dealing mackerels . . . deacon’s macaroons . . . death—”
“Death machine!” Cassandra leapt to her feet. “That’s it! Bell has built a death machine. I bet you anything it’s electric. That’s probably why he’s timed it to the moment Edison’s system gets turned on
. He’s going to trick Edison into triggering his own demise!”
“Mother, you sound almost . . . impressed,” said Molly. “You do realize this is bad, right? Very, very bad?”
“Oh, well, naturally, a death machine is bad,” Cassandra said. “Bad for Edison and President Arthur, obviously. And terribly bad for those poor people at the Fair. But potentially good for us.”
Molly looked at her askance. “How can Alexander Graham Bell attacking the World’s Fair with a death machine possibly be good for us?”
“Because we have the chance to stop him,” Cassandra said, an arch gleam in her eye. “And that is going to earn us a spot at the World’s Fair.”
7
Peppers in a Pickle
“COFFEE’S ON, MOLLS,” Cassandra shouted as her Brew-Master 1900 rattled, gurgled, and puffed steam from its forest of copper pipes. She held a tin cup by the contraption’s spout to catch the gush of aromatic coffee that spewed forth.
Molly sat up on her bed and shielded her eyes from the sunlight that streamed in through the storefront windows. A small boy stared in, his face smushed against the window, until his mother finally yanked him away. “We forgot to put the screen up last night,” Molly mumbled.
“We had more important things on our minds,” Cassandra said, handing her daughter a mug. “Now fire up the secretary, my darling. We need to get all our thoughts down on paper.”
Molly sipped coffee between yawns, and pulled shut the folding screen. “I can just write them down myself, you know.”
“If you’re going to write things down yourself,” Cassandra said, “what’s the point in having an Astounding Automated Secretary?”
With a sigh, Molly stepped over the Self-Propelled Mop and squeezed past the Rotating Shoe Tree to the steam-powered secretary, one of her mother’s newest inventions: a mostly unrusted barrel with a wide-mouthed cone protruding from one side and a mechanical arm from the other. She scooped some coal into a hatch on the back and used a long match to ignite it—more of her annoying little “assistant” duties. But today it was all in the service of thwarting the secret schemes of a diabolical genius. Which, danger aside, sounded like a grand adventure.
In books, it was always orphans who got to go on adventures. And if Molly were to find any sort of meaning in her father’s passing, perhaps it was this. Perhaps his final gift to her was the chance to have an honest-to-goodness adventure. Or at least half of one. Since she was, thankfully, only half an orphan. And she wanted to keep it that way. Because the only thing Molly could imagine worse than failing her mother would be losing her altogether.
“Do you think the boy has anything to do with Bell’s plan?” Molly asked.
“What boy?” Cassandra replied.
“The boy from last night. The one I fought with in Bell’s office? We helped him escape from the police?”
“Oh, that boy! Yes, he’s most probably involved,” Cassandra said, stirring her coffee with a screwdriver.
Molly slipped a pencil between the tin-tube fingers of the automated secretary and positioned its hand over a piece of blank paper atop the barrel. She flipped several switches, and with a cough of black smoke, the machine rumbled to life.
Coffee sloshing from her cup, Cassandra climbed over her worktable and sat down next to the secretary. She cleared her throat and spoke into the cone. “Begin dictation. The Pepper Ladies and the Dastardly Plot of One Mr. Alexander Graham Bell. Option A . . .”
The mechanical arm slowly jerked back and forth as shaky but legible letters began to appear on the paper. Three minutes later, they had a full sentence. Of sorts.
BEGIN DIKTASHUN THA PEPER LADEEZ END THA DASTERDLEE PLOT OV WUN MISTER ALEKZANDER GRAM BEL OPSHUN AY
“Takes a while, doesn’t it?” Cassandra said, squinching up her nose.
“Don’t be hard on yourself, Mother.” Molly peeked inside the secretary at the complex collage of churning gears and wires. “You taught a machine to write!”
“And now I need to teach it to spell.” The machine had just finished writing:
TAKS A WYL DUZINT IT
“Some punctuation wouldn’t hurt either,” Molly said with a shrug. She powered down the secretary and grabbed the pencil herself. “Okay, Mother, what’ve we got?”
“Option A,” Cassandra repeated as she rose and began the long, arduous process of dressing for the day. “We take this torn portion of Bell’s plan to the police. Option B, we go to Bell himself, tell him what we know, and use that leverage to get ourselves a space at the Fair. Or C, we figure out where Bell’s keeping his death ray or whatever it is and we destroy it.
“A is out,” Cassandra continued, “because what would we tell the police when they ask how the evidence came into our possession?”
“And B is out because that would be a completely bad-guy thing to do,” Molly said. “And we’re the good guys.”
“Right. Which leaves—errk! Give me a hand with these laces, Molls? Which leaves us being saboteurs again.”
“Except we don’t even know if it’s safe for us to leave the shop,” Molly said. “What if that cop saw your face last night? What if the entire New York Police Department is scouring the streets for the five-foot-ten, brown-haired, hazel-eyed Guild Hall Bandit and her slightly-large-eared-but-otherwise-appealing miniature sidekick?”
“Hmm.” Cassandra tapped her lips. “I am rather memorable.”
“We need to find out. Time to visit the Sun again.” Molly threw her father’s old overcoat on over her nightgown, popped a piece of licorice gum into her mouth, and headed for the door. “If I’m not back in five minutes, devote the rest of your life to avenging me.”
Cassandra sipped her coffee. “Naturally, dear.”
8
Extra! Extra!
“I NEED A paper, Skiff.”
The newsboy, standing on his crate with a fresh stack of morning editions, scoffed at Molly. “I knew I never shoulda gave you that copy last night. Now you come here thinkin’ you can get a same-day paper in the morning? Ain’t gonna happen, Mittsy.”
“I got something better than pickles today,” she said. “Chewing gum.”
Skiff absentmindedly rubbed an ink beard onto his chin as he considered her proposal. “What kind?”
“Licorice.”
“Ewww, licorice is gross.”
“I know,” said Molly, chewing loudly. “But it’s still gum.”
Skiff rubbed his chin again. “Okay, but you gotta read it here and give it back so’s I can still sell it after.”
“Deal.” Molly handed him the wad of gum from her mouth and took a paper. The newsboy shrugged, tossed the gum into his own mouth, and continued hawking his wares to passersby while Molly scanned the day’s headlines.
PRESIDENT ARTHUR ARRIVES FOR BRIDGE GALA
“ORPHAN TRAINS” PROVIDE NEW HOPE FOR CITY’S TROUBLED YOUTH
VITTORINI’S NEW SHOW EARNS RAVES
She flipped furiously through the pages for anything about the Guild. Not a word about last night. Molly felt she should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. The Guild Hall was one of the most famous buildings in New York; how could a break-in there not make news? Was the Guild trying to hide something? Were some of the other inventors in on Bell’s plan? Was the whole Guild?
“Cheese it, Mittsy! We got a badge comin’!”
The newsboy fled, leaving a trail of flying pages behind him. Molly turned to see a man in a black derby heading her way. The shield pinned to his long coat glinted in the sun. He wasn’t a cop, but he was trouble—a Jägerman. An agent of the Jäger Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. And while the organization’s stated mission was to keep orphaned and neglected children off dangerous city streets, lots of Jägermen were known to get overzealous in their work, harassing and punishing kids for even the slightest offenses. Any New Yorker under sixteen knew to avoid Jägermen at all costs.
“Don’t even think about running!” the Jägerman shouted.
“
Too late! I’ve already thought about it!” Molly was so pleased with her comeback that she didn’t look when she turned to flee and slipped on a discarded newspaper. Thick fingers clamped around her wrist.
“You all right, lass?” the agent asked as he pulled her to her feet. But Molly thought he should be more worried about himself. This man was not a runner. From that little sprint alone, his face had turned redder than his ginger mustache. “It’s best you come with me,” the Jägerman said. “There are men in this town’ll take advantage of poor orphans like yourself.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Molly said, trying to pull her arm free.
“Not an orphan, eh?” The Jägerman held her wrist tight. “You’re on a street corner by yourself, on a school day, wearing nothing but a nightshirt and an old man’s coat. You got bare feet and your hair looks like you brushed it with an eggbeater. Also, you smell like coffee and pickles.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Molly repeated. She considered simply taking the man to meet her mother, but knowing Cassandra’s parenting style, that could potentially make things worse. Instead, she coughed. “I’m . . . I’m not in school today because I’m sick,” she said in her feeblest voice. “I threw on my father’s coat to go get medicine. I think it’s—cough! cough!—the typhoid.”
The Jägerman held firm, but Molly could see a glint of concern in his eye.
“My parents have it too,” she wheezed. “It’s incredibly—cough!—contagious.”
The Jägerman pulled his hand from the flecks of licorice-tinted spittle. “Pigs and whistles! Your tongue’s gone black!”
The moment she was free, Molly ran as fast as her legs could carry her. She dodged street vendors, ducked between the legs of a tall grocer carrying a crate of apples, and leapt over a small dog before pivoting onto Thompson Street and jogging until she reached that familiar sign: PICK A PECK OF PEPPER’S PICKLES!
“I’m back,” she called as she opened the front door of the shop.