Pippa shook her head. She thought of the exhausting morning they’d had. “All they did was shop,” she said. “Until we lost them, at least. They stopped at the dressmaker’s, the milliner’s, and Woolworth’s on Fifth Avenue. . . .”
“And where’d they get the cash for all that?” Max demanded, crossing her arms. It was a good question.
Thomas sighed and raked a hand through his hair, so it stood up practically on end.
“Tomorrow we’ll try again,” he said. “Sam and Max can follow Hugo and Phoebe. And Pip and I’ll sniff around Paulie’s again. Maybe you’ll be able to get a better read this time,” he finished, and Pippa blushed.
“Fine,” she said, trying not to seem offended.
They walked back in silence to the museum, tired, despondent, and no closer to freeing Dumfrey. But Pippa comforted herself with the thought that tomorrow they would have another shot. If there was a clue to be found in Paulie’s restaurant, she would find it.
But about this, she was wrong. Because that very same night, at exactly eleven, Paulie’s restaurant burned to the ground.
The next day the Daily Screamer trumpeted: THE CURSE STRIKES AGAIN, in letters so big they practically exploded off the page. It appeared that Evans, too, had sniffed out the site of Potts’s last meal.
Underneath the headline was a grainy picture of the blackened stretch of sidewalk on which Paulie’s restaurant had stood only yesterday. All of the other front-page news—an article about Professor Rattigan’s continued evasion of the police, rumors of conflict in Europe, and a piece about the kidnapping of a prominent politician’s baby—was crammed into a space no larger than a dollar bill.
But it was no longer just the Daily Screamer that was interested in the curse of the shrunken head. Every other paper in New York and beyond had picked up the scent.
Thomas read selections aloud in a strained voice. “‘Mystery Crime Spree Sweeps Manhattan.’
“‘House of Terrors: The Dark Side of Dumfrey’s Dime Museum.’
“‘Free Bird! Dumfrey released on lack of evidence, after a blaze only a few blocks from—’”
Thomas broke off. It took him a second to register what he’d just read.
“Wait a second,” he said, pressing a finger to the paper, as though otherwise the words might leap off the page and scurry away. “It says here Mr. Dumfrey was released.”
“Let me see,” Pippa said, snatching the paper in a very un-Pippa-like way.
At that very second, the alley door banged open as though a battering ram had collided with it from the other side. Sam jumped, spilling tea all over Max. Max screeched.
And Thomas cried out, “Mr. Dumfrey!”
“The—very—same,” Mr. Dumfrey huffed, as he attempted to squeeze through the door sideways. “More or less.” His stomach was the last thing to make it through the doorway, with a pop like the sound of a tennis ball being released from a can. He patted his stomach and beamed. “My stay as a guest of New York City’s finest has done me some good. I haven’t fit through that door in years!”
Everyone crowded around him, speaking loudly, asking questions at once.
“We thought you’d been locked up,” Danny said.
“How did you escape?” Goldini asked wonderingly, with just a hint of jealousy in his voice.
“I missed you terribly, Mr. Dumfrey!” Quinn cried, clinging to his arm.
Caroline, refusing to be outdone, grabbed his other arm. “I missed you more!”
“She did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“‘O Captain! My Captain!’” Smalls was vigorously pumping Dumfrey’s hand, his face lit up in a boyish grin. “‘Our fearful trip is done.’ Walt Whitman,” he added in a whisper, seeing Thomas’s puzzled expression.
“All in good time, my pets,” Mr. Dumfrey said, holding up a hand. “All in good time.” He sat down in the nearest chair with a little groan of satisfaction, and placed his feet up on the bench. “I don’t suppose there’s any breakfast . . . ?”
“There’s sardines,” Pippa said doubtfully. “And a little bit of toast.”
“Delightful!” Mr. Dumfrey leaned back in his chair. Pippa scurried to get him a plate. His scarlet dressing gown was ripped in one place, and he had a banana peel in his pocket. Other than that, however, he looked no worse for the wear. “It’s good to be home. Very good, indeed,” he said.
“Mr. Dumfrey?” Miss Fitch coughed delicately.
“Yes?” He turned a beaming smile on her.
She gestured primly to the banana peel sticking out of his pocket.
“Ah, yes,” he said. He plucked the peel from his pocket, sniffed it, and deposited it in the trash. “A woman tried to clobber me with a picnic basket. It’s even better than I’d hoped,” he said, his blue eyes shining. “Picnickers and busybodies, cameramen and curiosity seekers . . . it’s wonderful, truly wonderful!”
“What are you talking about?” Thomas said. “What’s wonderful?”
Mr. Dumfrey stared at him. “The crowd, my dear boy!” he said, as though it was obvious. “Haven’t you seen them? Packed in the street like, like, like—” At that point, Pippa set a plate of sardines down in front of him. Dumfrey thumped the table with his fist. “Exactly. Like sardines. Thank you, Philippa.”
“But they hate us,” Sam said. “They think we’re killers and freaks.”
“They think you’ve been slaving us,” Max said.
“Enslaving us,” Pippa corrected her.
Dumfrey waved a hand. “Who cares what they think, so long as they’re interested? When the museum opens again—”
“But zat’s just eet, sir!” Monsieur Cabillaud squeaked. “Zee museum must remain closed, by order of zee police.”
“Not for much longer, mon ami,” Mr. Dumfrey said. “The police are on the right scent. They know poor Potts was killed by accident.”
“By accident?” Miss Fitch said.
“The criminal has confessed,” Mr. Dumfrey said, munching contentedly. “Of course, he didn’t mean to kill, poor devil. The man was only following orders. But who, in these days, uses cyanide to poison rats? Arsenic is far more humane.”
Thomas exchanged a glance with the others. So the waiter had told his story to the police after all.
“But what about Paul—the restaurant,” he corrected himself quickly, afraid of appearing to know too much about it. “Why did it burn down?”
“The owner himself,” Dumfrey said, licking a finger. “Insurance money! No doubt terrified that the place would be shut down by the board of health. The police have arrested him, too.”
Thomas frowned. It was all stacking up neatly. But could Potts’s death really have been an accident? Was it unrelated to Anderson’s murder and the theft of the head?
The head—it always came back to the head.
Mr. Dumfrey was still talking. “Extraordinary. Truly extraordinary. ‘We are but playthings to the gods.’ Aristotle. Or perhaps Shakespeare. Or my old friend Harrison the Headless Wonder. He was quite philosophical. In any case, the police had no choice but to let me go, even if our good friend Hardaway was none too pleased about it. Still trying to pin Anderson’s death on me, but he has absolutely no evidence. I’m very grateful to that waiter. It’s not always easy to do the right thing. I wonder who managed to convince him?” And he gave Thomas a nearly imperceptible wink.
Thomas ducked his head, so Mr. Dumfrey wouldn’t see him blush.
Mr. Dumfrey let out a satisfied burp, then thumped his chest. “Delicious!” he exclaimed. “Nothing like sardines in the morning.” Pippa opened her mouth as though to disagree, but at a gesture from Thomas, said nothing. Mr. Dumfrey checked his pocket watch and gave a little start. “Ten o’clock already! By the handcuffs of Houdini . . . Miss Fitch, fetch me my writing paper and my ink. I plan to send a letter to our friends at the New York City police. The museum must be reopened at once, of course. Monsieur Cabillaud, prepare the ticket booth and br
ing up the jelly apples for the refreshment stand. Smalls, draw the curtains in the Hall of Worldwide Wonders and for God’s sake, make sure we have enough chairs this time! Danny, Betty—I want the exhibit halls to sparkle. The glass is so smudgy you can barely tell George Washington’s hatchet from his wooden teeth! And, Goldini, get me Bill Evans on the horn. Offices of the Daily Screamer.”
“Bill Evans?” Thomas echoed. “What’s he got to do with it?”
Mr. Dumfrey pushed back from the table. The other residents of the museum bustled around the kitchen and hurried up the stairs to fulfill Mr. Dumfrey’s wishes.
“He’s got everything to do with it,” Mr. Dumfrey said serenely. “I must thank him, of course, for keeping the museum in the spotlight.”
“He wrote lies about you in the paper!” Pippa burst out.
“He’s saying you’re a murderer, Mr. D.,” Sam said solemnly.
“Exactly!” Mr. Dumfrey beamed. “It’s wonderful for publicity. For once, I’ll be one of the attractions. An escaped criminal? A murderer who has evaded the long arm of the law? That, my children, is worth fifty cents at least!” He roared with laughter. “Now move along, move along.”
“You didn’t give us anything to do,” Pippa pointed out.
“Oh! How silly of me.” Dumfrey patted various pockets and eventually withdrew an entire dollar bill. He placed it in Pippa’s hand. “I thought you might take a day off. Go to the movies. Spoil your dinner with popcorn and Turkish taffy.” He gave another nearly imperceptible wink. “I believe I am in your debt, after all.”
Thomas exchanged a glance with the other three. So Mr. Dumfrey did know that they’d spoken to the waiter.
“Thanks, Mr. Dumfrey,” Thomas said.
Mr. Dumfrey turned stern again. “I expect you back by afternoon,” he said. “Tomorrow, it’s business as usual.”
The Viceroy Theater, on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, had seen better days. Only one of every four lights encircling the marquee was still working; the majority had burned out, been pecked apart by pigeons, or been shattered by vandals. The carpet in the lobby was threadbare, the chairs creaked awfully, and large water stains decorated the faded silk walls.
Still, it was one of Sam’s favorite places. He loved the smell of buttered popcorn that clung to the upholstery, and the old movie posters displayed on the walls, in part to conceal the water stains.
Most of all he loved the darkness. Sitting in a movie theater, he could be just anyone: a normal kid from a normal family, out to have a normal good time. For once, he was the one who got to watch and point and laugh.
Today the theater was showing a triple feature of Daughter of Frankenstein, Castle of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s Revenge. They found four seats together in the middle of the theater. Sam, who had been deliberately delaying to see if Max would catch up, was annoyed when Thomas plopped down next to him. Now she was separated by two people. Pippa took the seat to the left of Thomas, and Max settled in beside her and rested her knees on the back of the seat of the person in front of her. When the woman—her curly blond hair piled high on her head like whipped cream on a sundae—turned around to cluck her tongue, Max only grinned, showing off all the popcorn kernels in her teeth.
“She doesn’t mean to be an animal,” Pippa said apologetically.
“Yeah I do,” Max said.
Sam sighed and turned his attention to the screen. A small part of him had been hoping that Max might grab his hand during the scary bits, even though the rational part of his brain knew this was unlikely for two reasons: 1) Max didn’t get afraid; and 2) if she did grab his hand, he’d probably crush all the bones in her fingers.
“I wish they’d just get on with the movie already,” Thomas said, crunching loudly on some candy-coated almonds, as the screen flickered gray and white and a click-click-click filled the theater as the reel started to roll forward. Sam slouched further in his seat. They’d have a news report or two to get through first and the cartoons.
Thomas was speaking with his mouth full. “It’s worse than reading the paper. The whole reason you go to the movies is to escape . . .”
His sentence ended in a gurgle.
HORROR HAPPENINGS! said the words flashing across the screen.
Sam sat up, feeling as though his seat had given him an electric shock. There, on the screen, was Bill Evans.
“Not this moron again,” Max said loudly. Several people hushed her.
An enormous, black-and-white Bill Evans was sitting behind his desk at the Daily Screamer, a small brass plaque reading HEAD REPORTER prominently displayed in front of his typewriter, a cigarette clamped in his mouth.
“It’s not just the murders and the unexplainable deaths,” he was saying, to an off-screen interviewer. “The whole place is full of secrets. Take those four kids—”
Sam was so hot he felt as if he were melting, from the tips of his ears inward. He sank down in his seat, even as Thomas piped up.
“Hey, he means—!”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed. “Shut. Up.”
Several people swiveled around to stare. Sam was glad it was dark. He was sure he was the color of a radish.
“Now look.” Evans jabbed a finger on his desk to punctuate his words. “I got nothing against them personally. They never did me wrong. But the way they’re sniffing around, always in the wrong place at the right time, is suspicious.”
To Sam’s infinite mortification, the newsreel now showed a photograph taken from the museum’s recent promotional brochure. In it, Sam, Pippa, Max, and Thomas were dressed in costumes and posing on the Odditorium stage. Sam was holding an enormous block of concrete above his head. Thomas was in a back bend. Max was balancing a knife handle on the tip of one finger, and Pippa had both hands to her temples and was squinting in deep concentration.
“Something stinks at Dumfrey’s Dime Museum,” Bill Evans continued, “and I intend to get to the bottom of it.”
Fortunately, the newsreel shifted to a different subject at that moment: a segment about the escaped scientist, Professor Rattigan, who had been convicted to life in prison for unlawful experimentation on human beings.
“He could be anyone! He could be anywhere!” the announcer was saying onscreen, as images flashed of Professor Rattigan’s old underground laboratory, filled with walls of cages that had once held people. Sam’s stomach turned. The sight of the cages made pain shoot through his head. “He could be sitting next to you in the dark right now.”
“I—I don’t feel good,” Sam whispered.
Thomas’s eyes were still glued to the screen. “Movie hasn’t even started,” he said, shoveling more of the candied nuts into his mouth.
“I’m not staying,” said Sam, getting to his feet.
“Hey, kid, you’re blocking the screen,” a man grunted.
“Move it!”
“Sorry,” Sam spoke to the dark blob of faces all around him. Still blushing furiously, he ducked and began fumbling toward the aisle. Thomas groaned and Pippa whispered, “What are you doing, Sam?”
He was squeezing past Max when his toe caught on one of her shoes. Suddenly, he was pitching forward in the dark. Instinctively, he reached out to steady himself, grabbing the back of someone’s chair. There was a loud snap, as though a giant had just bitten off the world’s largest green bean, and then the chair was no longer steady, and a woman was screaming, and Sam was falling again.
The theater lights came on at once, and the screen went dark.
“Murder!” A woman was lying on her back, feet kicking the air, in the theater seat Sam had accidentally ripped free of the floor. “Murder! Theft! Help!” Her pocketbook lay beside her. It had popped open, spilling its contents across the floor.
Everything was confusion. People rushed over to help the woman to her feet. Ten people were talking at once.
“He went for my throat!” she was saying, wild-eyed. “He was after my purse!”
Sam had just climbed to his fee
t, and was about to apologize, when a man wearing wire-framed glasses swiveled in his direction.
“Hey!” the man squawked, lifting a finger to point. “It’s the kid from the news report! It’s one of them freaks from the museum!”
Sam felt time slow. He could feel the thunderous space between each of his heartbeats. One by one, as in a nightmare, the people in the theater turned to look. Sam wanted to run, but he was rooted to the ground.
Even the man’s voice seemed to have slowed, deepened, as though Sam were hearing him through a thick muffling layer of molasses. “It’s all of them!” the man said, as his finger slowly swept across the row of seats to encompass them all: Max, scowling; an irritated Pippa; and Thomas looking, amazingly, as if he were enjoying himself.
A new eruption of sound: time sped up again, and Sam was crowded from all sides. People were grabbing his shirt, firing off questions so quickly he could understand none of them.
“That’s our cue.” Max was beside him all of a sudden. She grabbed hold of his hand and he was so shocked, he forgot to squeeze back. “Out of the way!” she called, shoving and pushing. “Coming through!” She piloted him firmly toward the exit, plowing through the knot of people who had gathered, using elbows when she had to.
He was almost disappointed when they reached the street and the sunshine, and she released him. But at least there were no people pointing and yammering at him. At least he could breathe again.
“Wait for us!” Pippa burst out of the movie theater after them, and Thomas emerged a second later.
“What a waste,” Thomas muttered. “Frankenstein’s Revenge is supposed to be the scariest one.”
“You could have stayed,” Sam pointed out.
“By myself? No, thank you.” Thomas shoved his hands deep in his pockets and looked away. A little muscle flexed in his jaw, as it did when he was working a really hard trick, trying to squeeze himself into a shoebox or Chinese vase.
Sam realized, then, that Thomas was angry. “You enjoy it, don’t you?” He felt a little sick to say the words out loud. “You actually like being the center of attention.”