The Shrunken Head, Page 5

  “Maybe he was hungry,” Thomas said.

  Pippa looked as if she wanted to strangle him. “He would have come into the kitchen. Besides, why did he lie about sleeping through the night? Why didn’t he tell the cops he was awake?”

  “Maybe he just didn’t think it was important,” Thomas argued.

  “Then answer me this.” Pippa crossed her arms. “How come he had one hundred dollars in his pocket this morning, huh? Where’d he get it?”

  To this, Thomas had no answer. Everyone at the museum was paid a wage, even the children, although Mr. Dumfrey kept the majority of their wages in a strongbox for when they were older. But no one at the museum, not even Mr. Dumfrey, was paid more than ten dollars a week.

  “Even if he did take it,” Max jumped in, “I still don’t see what that’s got to do with us.”

  “Oh? And I guess you don’t care if the museum shuts down and all of us end up on the street?” Pippa said icily.

  “I been on the street before,” Max said, lifting her chin.

  “And you’re so eager to go back?” Pippa said.

  Max hesitated. As much as she pretended to be hard, the truth was that she found living on the street practically unbearable. There was the stink and the noise, the clots of flies in summer, the driving rains in fall, and the icy grip of winter, like a small death. There was running from police and hiding in churches and getting chased out of stores. There was hunger, a foul taste in the mouth, an aching that filled you from nose to toes.

  She had spent most of her life on the streets of New York City—performing knife tricks for coins, pickpocketing when she had to—and another three in Chicago before that, and in all that time she had thought of practically nothing but a roof and a fire when she needed one and a safe place to sleep where she had no fear of getting poked, moved, or chased off.

  The museum was that, and more. In her short time there, she knew she had already started to love it: the soft whistles and creaks of the building, the constant jabbering of the other performers, the glass-enclosed exhibits, the hallways smelling of vinegar and perfume. The sunlight filtering through the window, wrapping everything in a golden haze. And then there was the way Mr. Dumfrey had looked at her—as though he’d been expecting her, almost. No one had ever expected her anywhere or cared whether she showed up.

  “I thought not,” Pippa said, when Max didn’t speak. “Look. Mr. Dumfrey took a chance on us. On all of us. Plenty of other people wouldn’t have. We’re freaks, remember? Thomas has a spine like a rubber band. I can read minds. Well, almost,” she clarified quickly. “And Sam—poor Sam. He can’t even go a day without breaking something. And you . . .” She turned to Max, frowning. “Well, who knows what’s wrong with you. You’re violent.”

  “I am not—”

  “My point is,” Pippa said, cutting her off, “we have no one else.” She turned to the others. “Well?”

  For a second, there was silence.

  “Go on, Pippa,” Sam said. “Tell us what you’re thinking.”

  Thomas should have known that when Pippa said she had a plan, what she meant was that she had a plan for him—which is why he now found himself squeezed into a shoebox-size space between an air duct and a nest of rusted iron pipes.

  It was hot, airless, and cramped; he was fighting a sneeze that had begun as a tickle in his nose but now seemed to have him by the throat. Carefully, he extended one hand through the network of pipes and found purchase on an old iron knob. Holding his breath, flattening his lungs, trying to picture himself as a pancake, he pulled himself through a narrow gap between pipes, and at last found himself pressed against the iron grille, roughly level with the floor, looking out over the forbidden, the absolutely off-limits, chambers of Potts.

  The performers all lived together in the attic, their respective sleeping spaces separated by a complex network of old junk that had drifted there over the years, like an upward-falling snow. Plaster statues, old desks, folding screens, and upturned mattresses—all were arranged for privacy in a labyrinthine formation bewildering to anyone who was a stranger to the museum.

  Only Mrs. Cobble, Miss Fitch, Potts, and Dumfrey had their own quarters. Mrs. Cobble slept on the first floor, in a room accessible from the Special Exhibits Hall and directly above the kitchen, from which she claimed to be able to keep track of the larder even while asleep (a claim disproved by frequent midnight raids on the kitchen). Miss Fitch slept in the props and costume department on the second floor, in a bed allegedly once owned by a famous murderess and still sporting a bloodstain on its wood frame. Mr. Dumfrey maintained his bedroom behind his office on the third floor.

  And Potts—the miserable, evil-smelling, bad-tempered Potts—had chosen to make his home in the basement. No one ever dared to disturb him down here, and Potts even kept his door locked, as if to double-guarantee against snoops and intruders.

  Carefully Thomas threaded his fingers through the grate and pushed until he felt it give. With a small pop, the grate released. He set it aside on the floor while he wriggled through the narrow opening, head and shoulders first, emerging from the wall like a worm emerging from damp ground.

  He was in. Thomas straightened up. All was silent, except for a quiet dripping sound. At last, Thomas’s heartbeat slowed, and the sneeze that had been crawling through his nasal passages had gone back to wherever unsneezed sneezes go.

  It was dark in the room and smelled like old tobacco and rotten milk. Thomas fumbled for a light switch on the wall. A single wire-encased bulb flickered to life in the ceiling, illuminating a narrow, windowless space, walls bubbling with moisture, and a rusted old sink in the corner, which Thomas identified as the source of the dripping. The room was heaped with clothes and junk, littered with old mugs in which suspicious liquid was developing thin films of mold, filled with all sorts of broken, useless, ugly things—a mirror so cracked it split Thomas’s reflection into a hundred tiny Thom-ases; a stool with only a single leg, overturned; a razor coated with cream and hair.

  “Now what?” Thomas said to himself in a whisper. Pippa had sworn Potts would be out of the museum for hours, but still Thomas felt the hairs on his neck standing up, as if someone were watching him, concealed in a corner. To calm down, he did calculations in his head. The perimeter of Potts’s room was 56 feet, and the area 192 feet. The density of the laundry piled at the foot of his bed was roughly 24 socks per square trouser. . . .

  Look for proof, Pippa had told him—but what kind of proof, she couldn’t say. It was extremely improbable that Potts had the shrunken head just stuffed into his bureau with his socks, especially since the money in his pocket suggested he had already sold it. But maybe there was evidence the head had been here and then moved—or maybe the payment was merely a portion of the money, like an advance, and Potts was concealing the head among his things before he deemed it safe to move.

  Thomas picked carefully through the dirty laundry strewn across the mattress, moved aside furniture, checked every corner and cubbyhole. He found several pairs of dice, one of them weighted, and a stack of well-worn playing cards.

  Every surface was littered with matchbooks from various restaurants, most of them with names like the Rusty Nail and Pig & Whistle. He found a piece of paper bearing a handwritten Brooklyn address that he initially thought might be important, until he saw that it was labeled Anderson’s Delights. He assumed it was another restaurant.

  Other than that, nothing. Not a thing to suggest that Potts had been involved in the theft. No incriminating messages, no guilty confessions.

  Thomas was just shutting the bottom drawer of the bureau when he heard heavy footsteps in the hall. He froze. The feet stopped just outside the door.

  Potts.

  A key turned in the lock.

  There was no time to make it back to the grate and into the safety of the wall. Thomas looked around frantically for a hiding place—and then just as the door began to scrape open, hurled himself into the bottom drawer of the misshapen bure
au, managing through a series of wiggles and shoves to get it closed. He squeezed himself into a ball, choking on the smell of old socks. Knees to eyeballs, feet to butt, bending, folding, an origami figure of a boy.

  Flat as a pancake. Small as a shoe.

  He heard Potts enter—smelled him, too, the stink of tobacco and unwashed denim that preceded Potts everywhere like a forward-drifting cloud. Thomas’s heart was hammering so loudly, he was sure Potts would hear it. He wished he could flatten his heart, too, and stop it from pounding like a drum.

  Potts crossed directly toward him—without hesitation. Thomas’s mouth went dry as dust.

  The bureau rattled; wood scraped on wood, as Potts began rummaging through the drawers.

  “Where’d I put the blasted thing?” Potts muttered. He closed the first drawer. Moved onto the second. Sweat pooled on Thomas’s forehead. His legs and knees were already aching. Any second now . . .

  Then Potts gave a grunt of satisfaction. Whatever he was looking for, he had found it.

  Thomas was safe.

  Potts began to cross back toward the door, and Thomas allowed himself to relax, just slightly. Then there was the bang of metal and Potts cursed.

  “What in the . . . ?”

  Thomas’s stomach dropped out through his feet. The grille. He had forgotten to replace it. Now Potts would know that Thomas had been in his room.

  Sure enough, Potts had stopped moving. The silence was still, electric, agonizing. It seemed to last forever. Then Thomas heard a sharp sniffing. Potts was trying to smell him out, the way a dog would.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Potts singsonged. “Come out, you little worm. I know you’re in here.”

  Thomas couldn’t have moved if he wanted to. He was terrified into utter stillness. Go away, he thought. Please just go away.

  Potts began shoving aside furniture. Thomas’s whole body went white-hot with fear when Potts drew close to the bureau. Potts shoved the bureau away from the wall with a cry of “Aha!” But he didn’t think of opening the bottom drawer, where Thomas hid in thick and filthy-smelling darkness, sweating against the splinters.

  And then it happened.

  The sneeze—the sneeze Thomas had repressed and swallowed until it returned to wherever unsneezed sneezes go—came roaring back. It blew up his throat and exploded into his nasal passages. It reverberated through his whole body. There was no stopping it. It was a storm, a force—and when Thomas sneezed, the whole bureau sneezed, too, and shot out its bottom drawer like a giant wooden nose expelling snot.

  And even as the echoes of the sneeze were still hanging in the air, as Thomas was wiping his nose with the back of his hand, shaken, exhausted from the force of that superhuman sneeze—even then, the looming shadow of Potts spread over him, and the stink of tobacco grew stronger.

  “There’s the little worm,” Potts said, showing off all his rotten teeth. And he bent over and plucked Thomas up with one meaty hand.

  “I’m very disappointed, Thomas,” Dumfrey said, shaking his head so that the skin underneath his chin wobbled—as though it, too, were disappointed. “Very disappointed indeed.”

  “Caught in the act!” Potts bellowed. “Snuffling and sniffling in my underthings, the little weasel. He oughta be paddled raw as an almond!”

  “That’s enough, Potts.” Dumfrey fixed him with a hard stare. His blue eyes glinted like ice. “You’ve made your grievances known. Now please leave us.”

  Potts grumbled something that sounded like “muffin” but was probably far more unpleasant, and gave Thomas a final glare before stomping out of Dumfrey’s office.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, Dumfrey’s voice softened. “What on earth were you doing?”

  Thomas opened his mouth to reply, but just then the door flew open and Pippa hurled into the room, breathless.

  “It was my fault, sir,” she said. “I told him to do it.”

  Thomas stared at Pippa. He was shocked—grateful, too. He’d never thought Pippa would take the blame for anything.

  “Is that true, Thomas?” Mr. Dumfrey asked quietly.

  Before Thomas could reply, the door once again banged open, this time with such force that an oil portrait of a young Dumfrey—looking almost exactly like an old Dumfrey, except with more hair and fewer chins—tumbled off the wall with a clatter.

  “Don’t listen to Pippa.” Sam was standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “It was my idea.” He noticed the toppled painting and winced. “Sorry, Mr. Dumfrey.”

  Dumfrey frowned and settled back in his chair. “Explain.”

  “I—I—well . . . ,” Sam stuttered.

  Pippa balled up her fists and then released them. “It’s a long story. . . .”

  Thomas jumped in. “It’s about the head, sir.”

  “The head?” Dumfrey’s eyes seemed to triple in size behind his glasses.

  Now Thomas felt himself falter. Dumfrey’s gaze was like that: it turned your knees to noodles. “It’s just that we thought . . .”

  “It seemed possible . . . ,” Pippa chimed in.

  “It seemed probable,” Thomas corrected.

  “That Potts might have . . . ,” Pippa said.

  “Or must have . . . ,” Thomas amended.

  “Stolen it,” Sam finished.

  “Eighty-two and a half percent of all store burglaries are committed by an employee,” Thomas blurted out. “I read it.”

  There was a long moment of silence, punctuated only by a loud, disapproving squawk from Cornelius. Dumfrey removed his glasses. With one end of his purple tie, he began polishing them. “Anderson was right,” he murmured. “That head has brought nothing but trouble.”

  Thomas felt a small tingle of alarm race up his back. Anderson . . . he had heard that name before. . . .

  No. He had seen it—on a piece of paper in Potts’s room.

  “Anderson, sir?” he prompted, trying not to sound too curious. Pippa shot him a puzzled glance.

  Dumfrey barely looked at him. “Arthur Anderson. Anderson’s Delights. Ever heard of it? No? He’s the one who sold me the blasted head in the first place. A good friend of mine, even though he’s an awful cheat. Once tried to pass off a yellow-painted penny as a recovered Spanish gold coin. Shameless! He warned me that the head was bad luck. I thought he was just saying that so I would sell it back to him . . . but he was right; he was right.”

  Thomas felt like exploding from excitement. “Sorry, Mr. D., it was all a big mistake,” he said quickly, plastering on a smile. He grabbed Pippa’s arm and started hauling her backward toward the door. Sam took the hint and followed them. “Won’t happen again, we promise you.”

  Mr. Dumfrey started, as though only just remembering the children were there. “Wait!” he called out. “We must discuss a suitable punish—”

  But before he could say ment, Thomas had hauled Pippa into the hall and Sam had slammed the door closed. From inside, there was another crash, as yet another painting tumbled off the wall.

  “Sorry, Mr. D.!” Sam called out, and then hurried after Pippa and Thomas.

  “You’re pinching me,” Pippa said, as Thomas dragged her forward. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re acting like a bug crawled up your—”

  “You were right,” he whispered, cutting her off. “Potts did it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Pippa said.

  “Potts went to see Anderson. At least, I think he did. He had the address of Anderson’s store written on a piece of paper in his room—133 Seventh Street, in Brooklyn.” Thomas glanced from left to right and, seeing no one, continued speaking in a rush: “It isn’t a coincidence. It can’t be.”

  Pippa was frowning, clearly deep in thought. “So . . . you think Potts is working for Anderson?”

  Thomas shrugged. “You heard what Dumfrey said, didn’t you? Anderson tried to get the head back, but Dumfrey wouldn’t sell it to him. So maybe Anderson decided to take matters into his own hands. Maybe he paid Potts to pinc
h it for him.”

  “But Dumfrey said Mr. Anderson was a friend . . . ,” Sam said doubtfully.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time Mr. D. was wrong about something,” Thomas said. “Remember when he bought those two tiger cubs for the museum and tried to train them?”

  “The magicians’ poor rabbits . . . ,” Sam murmured, shuddering a little.

  “The trainer’s poor hand,” Thomas said.

  Pippa roused herself. “All right, then. We have to talk to Mr. Anderson right away. We have to find out what he knows.”

  Thomas felt a spark of excitement in his stomach. For the first time ever, he felt like he and Pippa were on the same team. Sam, too. For the first time ever, he felt like they were doing something important—not just performing the same tricks over and over, like trained monkeys. And he had always, always, wanted to do something important.

  What was the point of being different if you couldn’t be special?

  “To Brooklyn, then?” he said.

  Pippa nodded solemnly. “To Brooklyn.”

  Anderson’s Delights was situated in a long, low brick building at the end of a narrow street slicked with oil and foul-smelling puddles, next to the sludge of the Gowanus Canal, which wound through this section of Brooklyn like an enormous, green-scaled snake. At the end of the street, a homeless man wearing a battered felt cap, a pair of aviator’s goggles, and pants shredded halfway to his knees was rummaging through a trash bin, humming.

  Pippa was glad that both Max and Sam had agreed to come. There was safety in numbers. And even though Pippa couldn’t stand Max, and tried her best to ignore her frequent complaints—(“Smells like a fart over here! What’s the big plan, anyway? You think if Anderson did steal the head he’s just gonna go ahead and cop to it?”)—she could see the sharp metal knives, sheathed in leather, glinting in the pockets of Max’s coat, and she was grateful for them. Especially as night was falling, and from the dark mouths of various doorways, men were watching them with sunken eyes.