The Fearsome Firebird

  Could Sam ever forget what Rattigan had done to them? Could he forgive? And would things ever return to normal?

  But even as Sam thought the question, he knew that there had never been a normal—not for him, not for anyone at the museum, maybe not for anyone in the world. And he thought again about what Mr. Dumfrey had said: that change always came, that it was bound to come. That Thomas, Max, Sam, and Pippa would someday have to look out for one another.

  And maybe, just maybe, they were ready.

  As soon as they entered Rosie’s office, Sam knew it was a mistake to have come—especially when they almost immediately had to dodge an enormous blizzard of papers that came flying at their heads.

  “I told you to stay out!” Rosie was bellowing from an unseen portion of her office—a sentence presumably uttered at the young man they’d once again seen fleeing down the stairs—while her harried assistant once again did her best to melt into her desk. A moment later, Rosie’s head appeared around the corner and Sam accidentally let out a cry of alarm. Her hair was an enormous frizzled mass around her head, kind of like a giant sea anemone that had become stuck to her forehead and was frantically waving to be let off.

  “Oh, it’s the kid wonders,” she said. She didn’t sound exactly upset to see them, but she didn’t sound exactly happy, either. She patted down her hair, which had the effect of doing absolutely nothing. “Come in, come in. Sorry for the mess. Busy week. Had a little tiff with the opposing counsel on one of my cases. You might have seen him on his way out. Last time he’ll expect me to settle.”

  Sam had not thought that Rosie’s office could have grown messier since the last time they’d seen it. But the piles had definitely multiplied. It looked as if someone were making a miniature of the Manhattan skyline in paper.

  “How do you find anything in here?” Pippa said, wrinkling her nose. Sam knew how much Pippa hated disorder—she color-coded all her clothing and often sneaked into the exhibits late at night to reorder any objects that had been slightly disarranged.

  “Oh, I have a system.” Rosie waved a hand vaguely and took a seat on top of the radiator, which was one of the only clear surfaces in the place. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Thomas, Sam, and Pippa exchanged a look. Max was staring resolutely at the floor, scowling.

  “Well,” Thomas said. “It’s kind of a long story.” He took a deep breath and started in. He reminded Rosie about how they’d gone to Erskine’s workshop and found the letter to Benny Mallett. He told her about the visit to Mallett, and about the photograph in the newspaper, and that it proved Mallett couldn’t have killed himself. He even told her about the mysterious Sir Barrensworth and his habit of leaving gum wrappers everywhere.

  “So you see,” Thomas finished, “General Farnum couldn’t have done it—couldn’t have done any of it.”

  For a long moment, Rosie said nothing. Then she stood up. “I see,” she said. “I see holes. More holes than in a grandmother’s pincushion.”

  “But—” Thomas started to protest. Rosie held up a hand to silence him.

  “Listen to me.” She shook her head. “I’m on your side. Farnum didn’t do it—I know that. But I’ve got to be realistic. I’ve got to look at it the way a jury’s going to look at it. The connection between Erskine and Mallett? Could be a coincidence. And if the police are saying suicide, that’s what most people are going to believe. As for Sir Barrensworth . . .” She shook her head. “A gum wrapper isn’t exactly a smoking gun.”

  “But—” This time, Pippa tried to speak.

  “I said listen,” Rosie said. But then, for at least a minute, she didn’t say anything. She turned her back on them and instead stared out the window, where Sam could see cranes and construction, buildings half-finished, stretching for the sky. When she finally spoke again, it was in a totally different voice—hesitating, soft. “You kids are special,” she said. “I get that. But what you don’t get is how lucky you are.” She turned back to face them. “Dumfrey’s done his best to keep you protected. Maybe he went about it differently than most people would have, but there you have it. So you’re smart and you’re different and you’re strong, and you think you can take on the whole world.” She looked at each of them in turn—even Max, who’d finally unglued her gaze from the floor. When her eyes landed on Sam he understood why she could win hopeless cases, why she was one of the most famous lawyers in New York City. He believed her. He knew that everything she said would be the truth. “You grew up a little and you learned about evil. Well, now you’re going to grow up a little bit more. Evil isn’t always obvious. It’s not always the people who make headlines. Evil is sometimes in the failure of people to do the right thing. The brave thing. Evil sometimes just looks like going along with the crowd. And you know what? In that way, we’re all a little bit evil.”

  And Sam knew then that somehow she had seen. Not like Pippa could see, but with a kind of understanding that was almost like magic. She understood them, and she understood that the world would never consider them normal. And she also understood that their difference was a strength and not a weakness or an excuse.

  As always, Sam felt the strength running through him like a current. But for the first time in his life, he wasn’t ashamed.

  “That’s why I like the hopeless cases, you know.” For a split second Rosie Bickers, in her fuchsia suit, with her hair sticking out straight from her head, looked beautiful. “I like to go against the crowd. Somebody’s got to. And it’s a reminder that we can.”

  For a moment, there was silence. Even Max was staring at Rosie with newfound respect. Then Rosie cleared her throat. Suddenly, she was all business again.

  “I want to help you,” she said in her usual brisk tone, turning her attention to a stack of papers on her desk. “I do. So I’m going to do my best for General Farnum. As for the rest of it—the theories and the this-and-that . . .” She shook her head. “Sorry, kiddos. You’re on your own.”

  “I knew it.” They’d barely reached the street when Max allowed her rage to bubble up. “I told you seeing that old crow was a waste of our time.”

  “Come on, Max,” Sam said, toeing the sidewalk with a scuffed-up shoe. “Rosie’s not that bad, is she? She’s just trying to be realistic. She’s right. No jury’s going to believe us.”

  Max opened her mouth, then shut it again. It was so like Sam to disagree with her. Every time she turned around, he was still needling her about Howie, or telling her to calm down, be reasonable, don’t be so angry. What on earth, she wondered, was his problem?

  So now she didn’t bother answering. She just spun around and plunged back into the crowd heading south.

  “Wait!” Thomas quickly caught up to her, and the others hurried behind him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “You said Sir Bottomsworth, or whatever his name is, might be wrapped up in this mess, didn’t you?” Max said, tossing her hair. For once, it was her turn to take the lead. “Well, I’m going to ask him.”

  What she couldn’t admit, of course, was that she had no idea what she would actually say. She guessed that Sir Butterswhat wasn’t very likely to roll and ’fess up to murdering two people, just as a by the way—especially not a soggy toast like that, with a Sir at the front of a name that sounded like something you’d cough out when you had the flu. He probably thought he was smarter than everybody else. Still, no one objected to the plan—not even Sam, Max was pleased to see.

  They hadn’t gone half a block when a tall, skinny man with the look of a frightened jackrabbit burst out of the post office, nearly colliding with Max and forcing her to take a quick step backward.

  “There you are,” he said, and it took Max a second to realize he was deliberately addressing her. “Been waiting for the past forty-five minutes for you lot. Began to think someone was pulling my leg, on account of my being new.” He was wearing the uniform of a postal worker. His nose twitched agitatedly as he spoke. “Had my face practically squashed to the window,
worried I would miss you.”

  “Worried you would miss us?” Pippa stared up at him.

  He seemed not to have heard her. He rummaged in his pockets and produced a small folded slip of paper that Max recognized as a telegram. She’d never received a telegram before and for a moment after she unfolded the slip of paper she stood there blinking, trying to unpuzzle the message, which was written entirely in capital letters and totally without punctuation. Next to her, Pippa gasped and Thomas let out a little strangled sound.

  “What is it?” Sam’s voice was a low and urgent whisper. “What does it say?”

  Max blinked, forcing the words to come into focus.

  HELLO DEAR CHILDREN STOP HAVE YOU MISSED ME STOP I’VE MISSED YOU STOP DON’T WORRY I WILL SOON RISE LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES AND MAKE BEAUTIFUL FIRE

  Chop-chop-chop. Her brain churned slowly across the lines of text, chopping the message into phrases that made sense. Hello, dear children. Have you missed me? I’ve missed you. Don’t worry, I will soon rise like a phoenix from the ashes and make beautiful fire.

  “No.” Sam was reading over Max’s shoulder. “No, it’s impossible.”

  “Where did you get this?” Max demanded. Suddenly she felt exposed, as if she’d been turned inside out. Hiding in plain sight. The phrase came to her abruptly—she didn’t know where she had heard it. But that’s what Rattigan was doing, and had been doing all along. He wasn’t skulking around in the shadows or living under subway tunnels or abandoned apartment buildings, as the police imagined. He was strolling around in the sunshine, smiling, tipping his hat to passing ladies, blending in, doing what was least expected of him.

  The man sniffed, as if he was offended by her attitude and had instead been expecting thanks. “Telegram came through direct to me about an hour ago. Short message—just said for me to give the very next telegram to four kids who would be coming out of that building.” And he pointed to Rosie’s office. The hairs on the back of Max’s neck stood up. “A minute later, another telegram came through, so I waited and watched and delivered it like I was told. Just doing my job.” And he turned around with another injured sniff and retreated into the post office.

  Max crumpled the telegram in her hand, filled with a sudden fury, and took aim at a corner trash bin. Thomas grabbed her wrist before she could throw.

  “Don’t,” he said, gently removing the balled-up paper from her hand.

  “He’s watching us,” Max said. “He’s following us.”

  “It’s more than that,” Thomas said. He unfolded the telegram and read it over, frowning. Even his freckles had gone white. “See this part—about the phoenix? Emily mentioned a phoenix only this morning. Lash was squawking about it to anyone who would listen. It can’t be coincidence. Rattigan doesn’t do coincidences.”

  “What are you saying?” Pippa crossed her arms, shivering.

  Thomas took a deep breath. “I’m saying he’s got a spy,” he said. “He’s got a spy in the museum.”

  “No,” Pippa said quickly. Sam stared at Thomas, openmouthed.

  “Think about it,” he said, and began ticking off evidence on his fingers. “He knew we were going to Rosie’s office before we even showed up—that’s how he knew to call in a telegram across the street. He’s been listening in to our conversations—he knows what we’re planning just as soon as we do.” The more agitated he became, the more quickly he talked. “Haven’t you all felt it? As if he’s there, breathing on our necks, looking over our shoulders, just laughing at us?”

  Max shoved her hands into her coat pockets, comforted by the feel of her knives there. She didn’t want to believe it. But Thomas was right. She had felt it.

  “Emily must be reporting back to him,” Thomas finished.

  “Emily?” Sam shoved a hand through his hair, which immediately swung back over his eyes, curtain-like. “You think Emily’s the spy?”

  “Who else would it be?” Thomas frowned. “She popped up out of nowhere the moment this trouble started. She’s the one who told us the story of the phoenix. She could have easily overheard us talking about going to see Rosie.”

  Max had to admit it made sense. But she liked Emily—liked her far better than those drippy twins who were always squabbling about a borrowed hairpin or lost eyeliner.

  “Poor Kestrel,” Pippa said, sighing. “I feel so bad for him.”

  Max frowned. “What’s Kestrel got to do with it?”

  Pippa stared at her. “Really?” She threw up her hands. “Really? Am I the only one who sees anything?” And then, turning away, she muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like blind and idiots and wouldn’t know love if it smacked them in the face with a baseball bat.

  “All right.” Sam sighed. Max could tell that he, too, was struggling with the idea of Emily as a spy. “What do you want to do about it?”

  Thomas gnawed on his lower lip. “Let’s stick to Max’s plan,” he said finally. “We’ll sort out Sir Barrensworth first, and see if he has any connection to Mallett and Erskine. We can deal with Emily later.”

  They set out again, entering the subway at Thirty-Third Street and heading uptown, a portion of the city Max rarely visited. As soon as they exited at Ninety-Sixth Street, she remembered why.

  This wasn’t the New York she loved, the New York of trolleys and taxis blasting their horns and the rattle of subways beneath the grates; of crowds and tourists and pretzel vendors and shopkeepers shouting out to one another across the street; of everything crammed together, a mishmash of people and accents and buildings standing stiff-shouldered and narrow next to their neighbors, as if doing their best to take up as little space as possible.

  Here, the buildings were enormous, with fancy scrolled stonework and white-gloved doormen standing at every entrance. They were the kind of buildings that didn’t say please come in or thanks for noticing me but instead wipe your feet and mind your manners. Instead of the usual clamor of voices and traffic, it was strangely quiet, as if the whole neighborhood were holding its breath, worried about offending. And everyone they passed gave them a dirty look, as if they were something rotten that had accidentally been carried uptown on the sole of a shoe.

  Thomas remembered that Sir Barrensworth’s card had listed his address as 1270 Park Avenue. But when they arrived at the correct block, they found that number 1270 didn’t exist. There were only two apartment buildings on the street, both of them enormous, with identical green awnings and identically snooty-looking doormen.

  “Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake?” Pippa asked, staring up doubtfully at the ornate iron numbers, which jumped straight from 1260 to 1280.

  “I’m positive,” Thomas said firmly. “His card said 1270 Park Avenue. I’d swear to it.”

  “Maybe we should double-check,” Sam suggested gently. “Just to be sure.”

  “You go, Pippa,” Max said cheerfully. “You look like the kind of priss who’d live up here.”

  Pippa scowled. In Max’s opinion, this only completed the effect. “Fine,” she said. “Wait here. I don’t want you ruining anything.” With a toss of her dark hair, she disappeared into the first building, her white shoes slapping loudly on the pavement. She reappeared a minute later, shaking her head.

  “No Sir Barrensworth,” she said. She tried next at number 1280, with the same result. No Sir Barrensworth had lived at any time at either address. Just to be safe, they crossed the street and tried the apartment buildings there. But no one, it seemed, had ever heard of a Sir Barrensworth.

  “What now?” Pippa was growing so impatient she was practically dancing in place.

  Thomas’s mood had also plummeted. “Nothing now,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “That’s it. No more. It’s a dead end.”

  “What about the Staten Island connection?” Sam said.

  “Do you know how big Staten Island is?” Thomas shook his head. “Forget it. Let’s go home. Sir Barrensworth’s bound to turn up sometime. He’s supposed to be traini
ng that stupid Firebird, isn’t he?”

  “I still don’t understand what’s in it for Barleyhorn,” Max said as they started back toward the subway. “Why’d he do it? Why’d he do any of it?”

  Thomas shoved his hands in his pocket. “Barrensworth, Erskine, and Mallett. Emily and Rattigan.” He fell into a moody silence. Max tried to put herself in Thomas’s shoes, to see what he was seeing. She wished, in that moment, she had Pippa’s ability to slip into another person’s mind at will. All she saw was a series of disconnected images: Mallett, red-eyed and miserable, complaining that he was ruined; Emily tracing the outlines of her phoenix tattoo; poor Farnum siphoning his dead fleas into a matchbox.

  “And don’t forget about the bank robberies,” Pippa said. “Rattigan’s got to be wrapped up in that, too.”

  Still, Thomas said nothing. Max held her breath, waiting for the moment that he would figure it all out, when he would give a cry of “I know!” and make sense of everything that had happened, when he would complete the whole puzzle.

  But Thomas just sighed and shook his head. “Missing piece,” was all he said.

  Pippa felt as if she’d just been forced to eat one of Goldini’s awful dinners: there was a hard knot at the bottom of her stomach that simply wouldn’t go away. Rattigan-Emily-Erskine-Mallett-Barrensworth. Erskine-Rattigan-Barrensworth-Mallett-Emily. The names chased themselves around and around in her head, like bees circling endlessly around the same flower. Was Sir Barrensworth in fact responsible for killing Mallett and Erskine? If so, why? And why had Rattigan sent Emily to spy on them? Was it just for fun, to make them feel unsafe? Or was he trying to keep them from discovering some truth, from stumbling onto the connection that, even now, was floating just out of reach?