“Don’t be an idiot, Chubby,” Pippa said, losing patience. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Is too,” he said. “My friend Alan’s got a ghost. Eats the sugar right out of the tin in the middle of the night when no one’s looking.”
“He’s probably eating it himself,” Pippa said.
“It was stupid of you to run, Chubby,” Thomas said sternly.
Chubby moaned and sank down onto a bench. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I said I’m in trouble. Big trouble. The cops think I killed Eckleberger!”
“What?” Thomas and Pippa cried together.
Chubby nodded miserably. “They got it in for me,” he said. “Just because I once lifted a bottle of soda or two from a store when no one would miss it. It was wrong!” he added quickly, when Pippa glared at him. “But now they want to pin me with murder. The fat-headed one”—Thomas assumed he meant Sergeant Schroeder—“tracked me down to the Bowery. I got a place to crash down there with a couple of boys. Nice and warm in winter. Cozy, really.”
“Focus, Chubby,” Thomas said.
“Right, right.” Chubby blushed. “So Fat Head tracked me down and tossed my stuff when I wasn’t around. He found that medallion I showed you, the one Eckleberger gave me for a present. But he thinks I stole it. Bumped Eckleberger off, just to steal a stupid pin. As soon as he gets his fat hands on me, he’s gonna chuck me in a jail cell and leave me to rot.”
No wonder Chubby looked so sad and straggly and pathetic, like a boiled noodle left too long at the bottom of the pot. He probably hadn’t seen daylight since he’d bolted from Eckleberger’s studio. Thomas felt sorry for him.
Pippa obviously didn’t. “What do you expect us to do about it?” she said.
Chubby stared at her, wide-eyed, as if it were obvious. “You gotta help me,” he said. “You gotta prove I didn’t do it.”
“How on earth do you expect us to do that?” Pippa said.
Chubby looked stricken. He worked the hem of his shirt harder than ever. “I thought maybe . . . I don’t know . . . after the whole mess with the shrunken head. You guys sorted that out, didn’t you? The police locked Dumfrey up and you sprung him.”
“That was different,” Pippa said, flustered. “We were lucky—and besides, we had no choice; the museum was in danger, we were all going to land on the street—”
Much to Thomas’s alarm, Chubby thudded down onto his knees, clasping his hands together. “Please,” he wailed. “You gotta help me. I’ll do anything. Anything! I’ll cart your garbage for a month, I’ll do your laundry for a year, I’ll carry you on my back all the way to Brooklyn—”
“All right, Chubby,” Thomas said quickly, if only to get Chubby off his knees. He helped Chubby stand. “We’ll help you. On your feet.” Chubby obeyed, dragging a hand underneath his nose, leaving a slimy trail from wrist to forefinger.
Pippa stood in stony silence while Thomas and Chubby worked out a plan. Chubby would return to hiding and do his best to stay out of sight while Thomas poked around. Should Thomas need to speak to him, he would hang a pair of red trousers just outside his attic window, and Chubby would knock on the kitchen door at exactly midnight. This precaution was necessary, since they had no other method of communicating; Chubby refused to tell even Pippa and Thomas where he might be heading, and referred shiftily to going “underground.”
Finally, Chubby had sufficiently calmed down, and they could tell him goodnight. Thomas watched as Chubby slipped past the garbage bins and was swallowed by the darkness of the street. He closed and locked the door. His eyes were burning. It had been a long night.
Pippa was glaring at him, arms crossed, doing an alarmingly good impression of Miss Fitch.
“You shouldn’t have lied to him,” she said. “It isn’t right.”
“I wasn’t lying,” Thomas said carefully, avoiding her gaze. Even though he knew Pippa’s gift was unreliable, when she fixed her dark eyes on him, he sometimes felt as if she was reading the very darkest corners of his mind. “Chubby didn’t kill Eckleberger.”
Pippa rolled her eyes. “Of course he didn’t,” she said. “He wouldn’t have the brains or the spine for it. But if the police think so, what can we do about it? Nothing.” There was a pleading tone to her voice, as if she were trying to convince him. “We’ve hit a dead end. Anyone in the whole city could have killed Freckles. We’ve got nothing to go on.”
“Look, the same person who took that photograph of Rachel Richstone killed Eckleberger,” Thomas said. “I’m sure of it. So what if he also killed Rachel Richstone? What if the photograph was a clue to Rachel’s murder?”
Pippa looked at Thomas as if he’d gone crazy. “Rachel Richstone was murdered by her husband. He caught her having an affair with Edmund Snyder. Everybody knows he did it.”
“Mr. Richstone says he didn’t,” Thomas said.
“Of course he does,” she said. “He isn’t likely to confess, is he?”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t see why not. He’s getting the chair either way.” They were coming up to the second-floor landing. Thomas stopped and put his hands on Pippa’s shoulder, lowering his voice so Miss Fitch, sleeping in the costume department not fifteen feet away, wouldn’t hear. “What if he didn’t do it, Pippa? What if someone else did—the same person who killed Eckleberger, and stole the photograph so he wouldn’t be found out? And what if Mr. Richstone’s going to get fried for nothing?”
“What if pigs sprouted wings and started parachuting?” Pippa said.
“I’m serious, Pip.” Thomas felt a rising frustration, as if his insides were in a tangle and he couldn’t figure out how to unwind them. He’d promised to help Chubby. And he wanted to find out who had killed Eckleberger, and see him punished.
But it was more than that. Ever since he’d come face-to-face with Rattigan and learned the truth of his origins, Thomas had felt a constant, needling sense of shame, like a splinter lodged somewhere deep in his chest. He had always known he was different, but now he knew he’d been made that way, engineered in a laboratory—he’d been tweaked and adjusted and turned into a freak. He knew Pippa had recently become obsessed with the idea of a family that had come before, but for Thomas the opposite was true. The past was another thing Rattigan had killed. He needed to prove that there was a reason for it; that he could do something good; that he was not like the monster who had created him.
“We need to talk to Richstone—before it’s too late.”
“You’re hurting me,” Pippa said, and Thomas realized that he was gripping her tightly. He let her go. She took a step backward. Her eyes were shadowed by the dark curtain of her bangs. In the small patch of moonlight, he could just see her frown.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” she said quietly. “But you’re on your own on this one.”
Then she turned and fled up the stairs, leaving Thomas alone, in the dark.
Morning brought further trouble: Caroline, insisting that her twin sister was holding her back from fame, had packed a bag and departed for Hollywood. Despite the fact that Caroline and Quinn never did anything but bicker, Quinn was inconsolable, and spent the morning sobbing into her pillow and refusing to speak to anyone.
As the day progressed, everyone’s mood only got fouler, as though there were some invisible chemical in the air, turning the residents of the museum against one another. Almost every hour, a new quarrel broke out. Someone was stealing food from the kitchen. A hairbrush had gone missing. A costume was mysteriously stained. Someone had used up the last of the toilet paper. Throughout the day, Lash was forced to abandon his work to break up an argument in the stairwell or the exhibition halls.
There was at least one benefit to all the fighting: Thomas was able to move about freely, without any interference. It was easy for him to nick a piece of paper and a pen from Mr. Dumfrey’s desk, since Mr. Dumfrey was busy trying to mollify Miss Fitch, who believed someone had shrunk her undergarments as a joke. It was easy for him to string a pair of red trou
sers out of the attic window, since Sam was deliberately ignoring him and Howie was too busy complaining about the meager dinner to notice. It was equally easy for him to slip out of bed just before midnight and go down to the kitchens with his letter, now sealed and carefully addressed to Manfred Richstone, care of Sing Sing prison. As he had hoped, Chubby showed up right on time, and promised to deliver the letter into the hands of someone who would deliver it into the hands of someone else who would deliver it directly into the hands of Mr. Richstone in his jail cell.
The wait, he knew, would be the hardest part.
Pippa had never believed it would be possible, but she almost missed Bill Evans, the reporter who had made their lives so difficult in the early spring with his constant reports about the museum and the children who lived there. But at least—at least—he’d brought in some business for the museum. Pippa was getting tired of suiting up in her long velvet dress, which itched and pinched at the same time, only to perform for a single person—most often someone who had come in to escape the heat and take advantage of the Odditorium’s many fans. At least the old man who’d been stealing peanut brittle from the refreshment stand hadn’t returned. They were running low on candy and couldn’t afford to replace it.
And Mr. Dumfrey and Miss Fitch insisted the show would, must, did go on—and so, the morning after Chubby’s nighttime visit to the museum, Pippa was stitched into her costume and waiting backstage for her cue.
At last, things seemed to be going smoothly. Max had quartered an apple midair and distributed the pieces to the remaining audience members: two old ladies, who sat fanning themselves in the dark, a vastly fat man whose shirtfront was covered with caramel popcorn, and a prim middle-aged woman clutching her purse on her lap as though worried one of the performers might reach off the stage and snatch it. Goldini had performed remarkably well—he had not stuttered, dropped a rabbit, or fumbled a card even once—and was almost finished with his act. It was time for his final trick, the Box of Death, in which Thomas, dressed up like the magician’s female assistant, folded himself into a tiny box and was neatly impaled by a dozen swords. It was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser—at least it would have been, had there been any kind of crowd—and even Pippa never got tired of the moment when Thomas sprang, unharmed, from the skewered box. The trick was in the exact positioning of the swords: Thomas had memorized the position he must assume in order to avoid getting even a nick.
Thomas squeezed himself into the box, which was hardly bigger than a child’s-sized suitcase. Only his head remained visible, although he was nearly unrecognizable in his costume, which included a blond wig and vivid red lipstick. Each time Goldini produced a sword and, with a flourish, slid it directly through the box—and, to all appearances, directly through Thomas’s body—the audience gasped and broke into applause. Goldini’s narrow face was flushed with happiness. Only one sword remained; soon, he would be finished with a near-perfect performance.
“So you see,” he trumpeted as he raised the final sword so that the blade glittered in the light, “only with magic can the impossible become—”
He didn’t finish his sentence. As he shoved the final sword into its position, Pippa had a sudden jolt, a flash of vision: his angle was all wrong. Before she could shout out a warning, she saw the sword plunge between Thomas’s ribs. Thomas let out a high-pitched screech and Goldini sprang backward, trembling. In her shock, Pippa wondered at first whether this was part of the act—whether the sword had a trick blade, whether her vision was wrong. Then she saw Goldini’s face—white, drawn, terrified—and noticed to her horror several drops of blood spatter to the stage. Thomas’s face was contorted in pain. The middle-aged woman in the audience screamed.
“Pull the curtain!” Mr. Dumfrey plunged backstage, panting. “Pull the curtain, for God’s sake, and get the boy offstage!”
Lash sprang for the curtain-pull, and a minute too late, the heavy velvet curtains swooshed together, concealing Thomas from the audience’s view. But the damage had been done. There were cries and boos from the audience; someone screeched that the price of admission should be refunded. Pippa hurried onstage, where Goldini was frantically trying to free Thomas from the skewered box.
“Don’t move”—he gasped, removing blades as fast as he could, while Thomas moaned, his forehead beaded with sweat—“just another minute.”
“Thomas!” She dropped to her knees beside the wooden box, wishing that Thomas had at least a hand free so she could squeeze it. “Are you all right?”
“Sure,” he said, and winced. “Never been better.”
Suddenly, they were surrounded: Danny and Miss Fitch, Betty and Smalls, Sam and Max; all were clustered around the wooden box, shouting out instructions and speaking over one another, so that Pippa could make out only snippets of phrases.
“Hold still . . .”
“. . . That’s right, give it a good old heave!”
“. . . Deep breath . . .”
“. . . Almost there now!”
At last, Thomas was free, and Miss Fitch rushed forward to administer a compress to his wound—which was not, in the end, very deep, though it still looked extremely painful and was bleeding freely. Smalls hefted Thomas in his arms, as if Thomas were still a toddler, and Miss Fitch ushered them directly through the concealed door to the costume department, which also served as the museum’s sickroom.
Goldini bent down to inspect the position of the final sword—the one that had punctured Thomas in the chest—and straightened up again almost immediately, as if a volt of electricity had gone through him.
“Someone’s been tinkering with the equipment,” he said gravely. “I might have turned poor Thomas into shish kebab.”
Everyone began speaking again at once.
“Quel horreur! He could have been killed!”
“Don’t look at me, Cabillaud, I never touched the blasted thing. Maybe it’s you who got mixed up.”
“Surely you can’t think zat I, who once performed great service for ze Belgian government, am to blame!”
“Everybody calm down,” Pippa said, before the argument could escalate. She was sick of the squabbling; a sharp headache was crystallizing directly between her eyebrows. “Let’s think logically. Who was the last person to touch Goldini’s swords?”
“It must have been Lash,” Goldini said thoughtfully. “He’s responsible for keeping the props in order.”
A half dozen faces turned in Lash’s direction. He stood a short distance away, trembling, his face the mottled gray of old porridge.
“It’s true,” he said miserably. “I took the thing apart to give it a good scrubbing. I reckoned I put it back together just fine. But I’ll be danged if I didn’t make a fine old mess out of things.”
“It’s all right, Lash,” Pippa jumped in quickly, before anyone could begin to lecture him. “It was an honest mistake. Wasn’t it?” There was a long pause. Pippa glared at the assembled group until she felt her eyeballs might combust. “Wasn’t it?” she repeated.
“Of course, of course,” Goldini said at last. “No one blames you, Lash. And at least there was no great harm done.” The others mumbled their agreement, and Lash looked enormously relieved, and swore up and down to be more careful next time.
But Pippa was left with a sense of unease. Everything, it seemed, was going wrong.
On her way up to the attic to retrieve some books for Thomas to read while Miss Fitch tended to him, she passed Howie on the stairwell. He had removed only a portion of his stage makeup, and his face looked especially pale against the deep hollows Miss Fitch had painted under his eyes to give him a slightly more owlish appearance.
“What’s all the fuss about?” he said. “I heard everybody shouting.”
“The fuss is about the fact that Thomas almost got chopped in two,” she snapped, unreasonably irritated that Howie hadn’t been there.
“Chopped in two?” Howie quirked an eyebrow. Even his eyebrows were perfect. Pippa suspected he trimmed, shap
ed, and perhaps even watered them, like miniature lawns. She had more than once seen a pair of tiny scissors and miniature gold tweezers in his shirt pocket. “What do you mean? What happened?”
“It was during the magic act,” Pippa said. “The last trick got botched.”
“That’s awful,” Howie said, but he didn’t seem too concerned. He had not, Pippa noticed, asked whether Thomas was okay. Instead, he turned and started up the stairs again. “I guess magic comes more naturally for some people than for others.”
“Goldini’s a good magician,” Pippa protested, even though he wasn’t—not really. He tried his best, but he was plagued by nerves, and he often forgot where he had left his props, so that the other performers were always finding playing cards in their dinner rolls and coins wedged between seat cushions, and yet Goldini never had an ace of spades when he needed one. Still, he was a part of their family, much more so than Howie was, and Pippa felt like defending him.
Howie swiveled his head around on his shoulder blades, blinking, as though surprised to see her still behind him. “I wasn’t talking about Goldini,” he said casually.
Pippa felt a rush of heat to her face as she realized what he meant. “It wasn’t Thomas’s fault.”
Howie shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
It was obvious he didn’t believe her. She gripped the banister. If she’d had half of Sam’s strength, the wood would have splintered in her hand. “You weren’t even there,” she said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“No need to get agitated,” he said, which only agitated her further. “I just meant that some people are born with a kind of talent. And other people aren’t.”
Pippa had not missed the slight way he emphasized the word born. She was sure of it. Could Howie possibly know about Rattigan, and what he had done? The idea made her feel nauseous and cold all over, the same way she had once felt after learning that Miss Fitch had thrown out a trunk containing several of her journals, believing it was empty: as though her insides had been laid bare only to evaporate suddenly into nothing.