“What about the note I found?” Max said, frowning. “Soon, my children. Remember?”
Thomas shrugged. “Coincidence. Or some kind of prank. Maybe it wasn’t even meant for us.”
Sam felt a quick flicker of unease, but he forced his doubts aside. Rattigan was a thousand miles away. By now, he was probably locked up behind steel bars and wearing prison stripes. It was like Thomas said: the note meant nothing.
“Come on.” Pippa was smiling one of her rare smiles; it lit up her whole face. “Let’s go tell Mr. Dumfrey the good news.”
But as they took the spiral staircase and descended toward the main floor, they heard a sound that was by this point becoming familiar: an earsplitting howl, followed by a string of curses.
“What now?” Sam groaned. It seemed a long time that even a day had passed without bringing some new disaster.
As soon as they entered the Hall of Wax, they had their answer: Mr. Dumfrey was standing in front of the shattered shards of what had once been Rachel Richstone’s face. Two of the dummies had been toppled. A beady eye Sam recognized as Manfred Richstone’s stared up at him from the floor; he saw, further, Richstone’s mustache, now detached from the lip and plastered to the heel of Mr. Dumfrey’s shoe.
Mr. Dumfrey was white-faced, and shaking like a sail in a strong wind. Behind him, Miss Fitch brought a hand to her chest, quickly making the sign of the cross, as if the dummies had been real people and she had found them dead.
“Who—who could have done this?” Mr. Dumfrey gasped. He lowered himself to his knees and began sifting the shattered remains of Freckles’s last work between his fingers. “Monstrous . . . cruel . . . reprehensible . . . all of dear Eckleberger’s work, gone. All of our hopes, shattered.”
“Come now, Mr. Dumfrey.” Miss Fitch placed a hand on Mr. Dumfrey’s shoulder, and attempted to draw him to his feet. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Some glue.” Mr. Dumfrey’s eyes were wild. “That’s what I need. Just a bit of glue. We can patch it back together. It’ll be as good as new . . . right as rain . . .”
Miss Fitch rounded on the children. “What are you doing, standing around gaping like a bunch of monkfish?” she snapped. “Make yourself useful. Thomas—go and fetch Mr. Dumfrey some water. Pippa—find Lash and tell him to clean up this mess. Sam—help get Mr. Dumfrey back to his rooms. Max—you go along with Sam, in case he needs your help.”
They did as they were told. Sam kneeled down and wrapped an arm around Dumfrey’s waist, which felt a little bit like a large sack filled with bread dough. Carefully, gently, Sam helped Dumfrey to his feet.
“Come on, Mr. D,” he said quietly. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Sam guided Mr. Dumfrey toward the stairs. If anyone had seen them, Sam thought, they would have had quite the laugh: Mr. Dumfrey, round as a wrecking ball, listing against the scrawny Sam like a ship during a squall. Luckily to Sam, Mr. Dumfrey felt no heavier than a child, and he soon got Mr. Dumfrey back to his chambers.
“Go on, Mr. Dumfrey. Lie down. Put your feet up for a while.”
Mr. Dumfrey said nothing, just made a few unintelligible noises of distress. But he allowed Sam to ease him down onto the long velvet daybed crammed into one corner of his cluttered office.
The heating vent at Sam’s feet wiggled, and then jumped. He stumbled back just as Thomas’s head emerged from the floor.
“The stairs were crowded,” he explained, panting a bit as he shimmied out of the air duct one-handed, gripping a glass of water. Sam was impressed that not even a drop seemed to have been spilled. “Everyone’s heard about what happened by now.”
But before they could convince Dumfey to drink, the phone on his desk began to ring.
“Mr. Dumfrey?” Sam called. No response. The phone kept ringing harshly in the silence. “Mr. Dumfrey, you want to get that?”
Mr. Dumfrey groaned and rolled over, so he was facing the wall.
“I guess that’s a no,” Max muttered.
Sam swallowed a sigh and reached for the phone himself, holding the receiver carefully between only two fingers. The last telephone he had crushed like a paper cup in his palm the only time he had used it.
“Dumfrey’s Dime Museum of Freaks, Oddities, and Wonders,” he said politely as he had heard Mr. Dumfrey do a hundred times.
There was a pause. Sam could hear crackling on the other end, and the faint rush of distant traffic.
“This is Wolfgang’s Deli,” said a man’s voice eventually. “Someone order ham on rye sandwiches for delivery?”
“No.” Sam frowned. “Sorry. I think you have the wrong number.”
He was about to hang up when the man burst out, “Wait, Sam. Don’t hang up. It is Sam, isn’t it? Or is this Thomas?”
“It’s Sam,” Sam said cautiously, increasingly bewildered. In all his time in the museum, he’d never received a phone call. Everyone he knew was in the museum.
“Who is it?” whispered Max.
“Good stuff. I was hoping one of you would pick up. Just had to be sure. I got some news for you. Can you meet me in the projection booth in ten minutes?”
Sam was flooded, suddenly, with understanding.
“Who is it?” Max whispered again, growing irritated.
Sam cupped a hand over the receiver, and checked to see that Dumfrey was still facing the other direction.
It’s Ned Spode, Sam mouthed. The detective.
They once again met Spode in the abandoned projection booth of the old theater, squeezing in between the clutter of old film spools and dusty equipment. Spode looked as though he hadn’t slept since the last time they’d seen him. His face was shadowed with stubble; there were pouches, dark as bruises, underneath his eyes; and he was still wearing the same suit, now further creased and stained with evidence of various meals.
“Bad news about Mark Haskell and his wife, Jennifer Clayton,” Spode said as soon as they were all settled in. Max liked Spode. She particularly liked that he always got directly to the point.
“Did you track them down?” Thomas asked.
“Sure did.” Spode turned his head and spat on the cement floor. Pippa made a face. “But I tracked ’em down too late. They’re dead.”
Pippa sucked in a quick breath.
“Bricks,” muttered Max.
“How?” Thomas looked stunned, as if someone had just driven an elbow into his chest. “When?”
“Just last week. They were on their way to their country place when—bam!—brakes failed on their car. They plowed straight into a telephone pole doing sixty-five. Mark was killed instantly. Jennifer died a few hours later.”
There was a long second of silence. Max did the math. All four people in that mysterious photograph were now dead. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.
“You said the brakes failed,” Thomas said slowly. “Could they have been cut?”
Spode’s eyes were a stormy color. A muscle flexed in his jaw. “There’s no doubt that they were,” he said. “I spoke to the mechanic who looked at the wreck.”
“First Rachel,” Thomas said, frowning. “And now Jennifer Clayton. And her husband.”
“Don’t forget Freckles,” Sam said, pushing his long hair out of his eyes.
“And Ian Grantt, Rachel’s first boyfriend,” Pippa said.
“He died in the war, though,” Max pointed out.
“About that.” Spode loosened his tie, exposing more of his splotchy red neck. “I did a little digging into Grantt’s background, thinking there might be something to it.”
“What did you find out?” Thomas asked.
“Not much, strangely enough. No birth records. Nothing before the age of twenty, when he showed up in New York, met Rachel, and then enlisted. He died at the Marne in 1918. Half his battalion was blown to smithereens on the battlefield. They couldn’t even put the bodies back together, they were in so many parts.”
Max thought of a bunch of human jigsaw puzzle pieces and felt queasy.
“Sounds
like a straight story,” Sam said.
“Sure does,” Spode said. He stood up, dusting off his pants, which had the effect of doing nothing whatsoever, since his hands were filthy. “Still, facts are facts. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that everyone in that photograph is six feet under. You know what they say. Dead men can’t tell tales.”
“But what tales would they have told?” Thomas mused.
“That,” Spode said darkly, “is the question.”
They exited the old theater in a somber mood, and said good-bye to Spode on the corner.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, tipping his hat, and then merged with the crowd flowing down to Times Square. Max noticed he was limping slightly and wondered about all the things he must have seen, the mobsters and gangsters, gunrunners and punks. Maybe, she thought, Spode would take her on one day as a partner. He might need a girl who was good with knives.
Then he was gone. He vanished into the stream of people so quickly it was like a magic trick. For some reason, she thought of Professor Rattigan, the way he’d tailed them earlier in the year without their knowledge, and she shivered. But Rattigan was locked away by now. They were safe.
They walked back to the museum in silence, Max sweating in the jacket she always wore, which had plenty of pockets for her knives. Turning the corner on Forty-Third Street, Pippa stopped and gasped. Max stumbled into her.
“What’s your prob—?” she started to ask, but the words dried up in her throat.
Two police cars and an ambulance had pulled up directly in front of the museum.
“Dumfrey,” Sam said, his face losing all color.
Instantly, they were sprinting down the block. Max wished she were as fast as Thomas; he was a dozen yards ahead of them within a few seconds. Her heart was hopscotching in her throat. She saw the police loading a stretcher into the back of the ambulance . . . a thin form draped in a spotless white sheet . . .
A thin form. She was nearly at the steps of the museum when she realized that the body on the stretcher could not possibly have been Mr. Dumfrey’s. At the same time, she noticed several things that, in her panic, she had failed to spot earlier. The ambulance was actually drawn up slightly closer to the neighboring building, number 346. Frank DeSalvo, the owner of the hardware store that leased the first floor, had emerged from his store and was watching the proceedings with interest, chomping on one end of a cigar as if it were a piece of celery. Standing on the front stoop, gripping a cane with one trembling hand, was the frail, paper-white man who Max recognized as Eli Sadowski, whom they had saved a few weeks earlier from a coating of egg wash. He was wearing the exact same outfit in which she had last seen him; she even thought she detected traces of egg on his lapel.
“Out of the way, kid. Give us room.” One of the policemen—Max recognized him, too, as one of the meatheads who’d been at Freckles’s studio after his death—shoved Max out of the way as he loaded his girth into a squad car, squeezing his stomach in behind the steering wheel. Now that Max was closer, she could see an impossibly thin, liver-spotted hand hanging off the stretcher, and a pair of shining, wing tip shoes identical to the ones Eli Sadowski was wearing.
“My brother,” Eli Sadowski said in a moan. “My poor brother. What will they do with him? Hospitals are very bad, very bad. Full of germs and sick people. My mother always said you should never trust a hospital.”
Nobody spoke. Thomas, Sam, Pippa, and Max stood in a knot, watching as two beefy emergency workers swung closed the ambulance doors. Eli Sadowski didn’t yet seem to realize that his brother wasn’t going to the hospital, but somewhere far more permanent. Max thought of the night, months ago, when they’d sneaked into Bellevue Hospital, that hulking beast crouched over the East River. She wondered whether Mr. Sadowski’s brother would find his way to the basement morgue.
“Come on, Mr. Sadowski. Let’s go inside.” Detective Hardaway emerged from number 346, his lips curled into his trademark sneer even as he placed a hand on Eli Sadowski’s elbow and tried to pilot him inside. “How about a cup of coffee?”
“Oh, no coffee. No, thank you. They put turpentine in the coffee nowadays . . . very dangerous . . . very bad for the stomach. . . . It’s milk tea and mint water for me. . . .”
The door slammed behind Mr. Sadowski and Hardaway just as the police vehicles and the ambulance pulled away from the curb, sirens quiet and dark. Max called up an image of Detective Hardaway trying to force down some milk tea—whatever that was—and couldn’t help but feel a little bit better.
“Poor Mr. Sadowski,” Pippa said, sighing.
But Max knew they were all relieved. For today, no disaster had come to the museum.
About this, however, they were wrong; as soon as they heaved open the doors to the museum, Lash came barreling through them, clutching the battered leather duffel bag that contained all his worldly belongings. His eyes were red-rimmed and his lean, weathered face so pale it looked as if he’d been submerged in bleach. It looked as though he’d been crying.
“Lash!” Thomas cried out. “Where are you going?”
“It’s over,” Lash said in a moan. “It’s all my fault, too. I’ve gone and made a goldanged mess of things. And after Dumfrey was so decent about giving me a chance . . .” His jaw began to quiver.
“What are you talking about?” Max said, horrified by the sight of the once world-famous William “Lash” Langtry on the verge of tears.
“Those heads!” Lash whipped off his hat, revealing a thatch of blond hair that was starting to thin. He raked his fingers through his hair. “The Richstone exhibit. I’m the one who ruined them. I’m the one who shattered them to pieces.”
Pippa’s mouth fell open. “But . . . why?”
“It was an accident.” Lash turned his mournful eyes on Pippa. “I knew the museum was in trouble, see? I thought I could help out. Draw in the crowds with the old bullwhip routine.” He patted his leather bag, where Max knew he kept his bullwhip carefully oiled, curled up like a snake. “I used to do a fine trick knocking a grape from a volunteer’s head. It got ’em rolling every time. I thought I’d just get in a little practice. . . .”
The realization settled in Max’s stomach like a heavy weight. “So you used the Richstone statues as your volunteers.”
Lash nodded miserably. “I never used to have any trouble. Never even nicked an earlobe before. But I guess . . . well, I guess ol’ Horatio was right. I’m not as steady as I used to be.” As though to reaffirm this, he fished a flask from his waistband and took an eager sip. When he finished, the shaking of his hands had only just subsided. “I ’fessed up to Horatio. He had the right to know.”
“We can talk to him,” Pippa said loyally. “He’ll listen to us.”
“Sure he will,” said Sam. “He’ll hire you back in no time.”
Lash held up a hand. “Mr. Dumfrey didn’t fire me,” Lash said. “I offered to quit.”
“What?” Now all four kids spoke together.
“Don’t you see? I’ve been screwing things up since the start. Because of me, Thomas almost got skewered like a pig. And Max might have carved out Betty’s eye! And now this. No. It’s better that I go.”
There was nothing they could do except stand in dumb silence and watch as Lash shouldered his bag. Max wanted to say something—it wasn’t your fault or you’ll be okay or you’ll always have a home here—but she knew none of those things were true, so she said nothing.
When he was halfway down the stairs, he turned and stopped, his drooping eyes hangdog-sad and his beaten leather bag slung over one shoulder.
“You gotta promise me something,” Lash said.
“Anything,” Sam said.
For a second, Lash hesitated. And for just that second, Max saw a shift in his expression, a tenseness, a watchfulness, and she felt she was looking back at the same Lash who had once entertained crowds of thousands of people, who had once correctly judged a whip’s arc to the space of a millimeter.
“
You just promise me to be careful, that’s all,” he said, and then he lumbered off, and was gone.
The alligator boy’s departure had been unfortunate, but not unexpected. Moreover, it was something of a relief: he had been unhappy for years, and had made his grievances known at every occasion, loudly and with the greatest possible degree of unpleasantness.
When Caroline left for Hollywood, it had caused a much greater disturbance. She complained, she whined, she hogged the bathrooms and the medieval wall mirror with the winged dragon frame in the Hall of Worldwide Wonders. But she had been one half of Caroline-and-Quinn, and not only had the museum lost one of its more popular acts, but Quinn was left grieving, miserable, and prone to loud fits of sobbing that kept the others up at night, even though at no point before Caroline’s sudden departure had Quinn seemed to feel anything for her but constant irritation and jealousy.
But Lash was different. His absence left a vacuum, and seemed less like a sign of bad things to come than the announcement of bad things already arrived. In the two days that had followed since he took his leave, a peculiar silence reigned in the museum. All performances had been suspended—not that anyone was clamoring for them to go on. Even Dumfrey was quiet, grim-faced, and subdued, like a person at a funeral.
Artifacts and objects were disappearing from the museum—taken out by either Dumfrey, Miss Fitch, or a resolute Cabillaud for sale. One morning, there was a small ring of dust in the entryway, marking the place the stuffed bear had once stood proudly, claws outstretched. By afternoon, the moccasins owned by Davy Crockett, which Dumfrey occasionally still wore on special occasions, had been quietly removed from their case. Pippa felt as if she were watching some great, ancient animal slowly succumb to an illness.
As if she were watching the museum die.
As much as possible, she avoided Howie, whom she could no longer look at without feeling revulsion. It proved harder than she thought. He was suddenly everywhere: lounging in the kitchens chatting with Quinn, telling her how much better she was without her twin sister; volunteering to help Miss Fitch sort through the inventory of tarnished silverware to see whether there was anything worth selling; listening to Smalls recite his newest poems, which grew more and more depressing by the day; or humming along while Danny plucked at his violin. Pippa suspected him of something—he had never been quite so friendly or cheerful—but she didn’t know what. At least Max seemed, at last, to be keeping her distance from him, although Pippa caught them once whispering in the stairwell. Max scurried off, cheeks flaming, when Pippa glared at her.