“Ah, children. Excellent timing, excellent. We were just having a bit of a house meeting to discuss finances.” It was rare for Mr. Dumfrey to visit the attic, where the performers slept: a vast room filled with old beds, furniture, garment racks, and even a defunct refrigerator, arranged in a mazelike formation to allow each performer a small measure of privacy.
“What finances?” Monsieur Cabillaud grumbled. Monsieur Cabillaud had a very small head, but an excellent mind for math. He was informally in charge of all of the museum’s finances.
“Well . . .” Mr. Dumfrey fiddled with his bow tie. “Perhaps if we took another advertisement out in the paper . . . ?”
Monsieur Cabillaud gripped his pin-sized head. “Non, non, and more non! We have no more money in ze cashbox!”
“There’s no need to shout, Mr. Cabillaud,” Mr. Dumfrey said. “I heard you perfectly well. We are running low on funds.”
Monsieur Cabillaud stood up, stalked over to his sleeping area, and retrieved the small metal cashbox that held the profits from the museum’s ticket sales from under his bed. It was well-known that Monsieur Cabillaud slept with one arm slung around the cashbox. Now, he opened the lock with the metal key he wore around his neck, revealing a box that was empty except for two balls of lint, an ancient stick of bubble gum, and twenty-five cents.
“We are not low on funds, Mr. Dumfrey,” he said in a trembling voice, drawing himself up to his full five foot three. “We have no more funds. Nothing. Zero!”
Mr. Dumfrey paled. “But . . . but . . . what about the secret fund?”
Thomas exchanged a look with Pippa. They’d never heard of a secret fund.
Monsieur Cabillaud hesitated. Then, with a muttered curse of “sacre bleu,” he pivoted and disappeared once again behind his bookshelf. Pippa heard the sound of rummaging and more cursing in French. When Monsieur Cabillaud reemerged, he was carrying a large, unwashed-looking striped sock, in hideous shades of chartreuse and blue.
Smalls let out an outraged cry. “My sock! It’s been missing for ages.”
“That’s your secret fund?” Howie sneered with barely concealed disdain. Thomas was beginning to understand why Sam disliked Howie so strongly.
“It’s camouflage,” Mr. Dumfrey explained. “Everyone thinks of stealing a lockbox. No one thinks of stealing a smelly sock.”
“He stole it.” Smalls pointed a large finger in Monsieur Cabillaud’s direction. “He stole it from me. And it is not smelly.”
Monsieur Cabillaud inverted the sock over the carpet and shook. A small spider dropped from within the folds of wool, and scurried quickly under the sofa. Mr. Dumfrey gasped and clutched his chest.
“I have told you once,” Monsieur Cabillaud said firmly. “And I will tell you again. We are broke.”
There was a long moment of silence. Thomas was used to the fact that the museum was often in danger of going out of business. He was used to the fact that Betty mixed water with the milk to stretch it longer, that sometimes there was porridge for dinner and canned sardines for breakfast, that he had to wear his shoes until the soles wore out completely and his toes poked through the leather. But this was worse than usual.
Andrew the Alligator Boy was the first to speak. “I’m sick of it,” he said. He thumped his cane on the floor and stood up. “We haven’t had a raise in nearly a year. I’ve got holes in my shirts and mice in my dresser.”
“Just a little more time . . .” Mr. Dumfrey wrung his hands together. “The crowds will come back. They’ll have to.”
“They better,” Andrew growled, showing his small, crooked teeth—which did, in fact, give his face the appearance of a reptile’s, as did the extreme scaly dryness of his skin. “I heard the Bolden Brothers Circus is looking for freaks. Maybe it’s time for a new gig.”
This provoked an explosion of sound. Mr. Dumfrey fell backward in his chair, as though he’d been struck by a physical blow. Pippa cried, “Shame on you,” and Caroline and Quinn squeaked with dismay. Lash poked Andrew in the backside with his broom and Smalls threatened him with a poetry reading about duty and perseverance. Only Howie looked amused.
“I’m just saying,” Andrew said, thumping his old hat farther down on his head. “Something’s gotta give.” Then he stalked out of the room, hunched over his cane.
“Don’t mind him,” Betty said. Her thick eyebrows twitched expressively. “You know what Andrew’s like. He’s always got a bee in his bonnet about something.”
“He’s right,” Dumfrey moaned. He whipped out a handkerchief and buried his face in it. Thomas was terrified he would begin to cry. “I’ve done a terrible job. . . . I’ve run this place into the ground. . . . I’m a failure.”
“You’re wonderful,” Thomas spoke up loyally. Even if Mr. Dumfrey did sometimes forget to balance the accounts for months at a time, and even if he sometimes spent too much on banners and newspaper ads and new glass for the exhibit cases, and forgot to stock up on flour and sugar—and even if he occasionally took a gamble on a big exhibit that wasn’t worth as much as he had paid for it—Mr. Dumfrey was wonderful. Probably the most wonderful man in the world.
Various other performers piped up to agree.
Then Howie said casually, “Did you ever think of selling the place?”
Mr. Dumfrey looked up. His face was white. “S—selling the place?” he whispered.
“Oh, dear,” said Betty.
Sam rounded on Howie. “What’s the matter with you?” he burst out furiously. “Why would you say something like that?” His fists were clenched.
“Sell the place?” Mr. Dumfrey repeated, gripping the arms of his chair, practically vibrating with distress. He stared, unseeing, into the air.
“This is home,” Sam spat out. “Don’t you get that? You can’t just show up and start running your mouth about things you don’t understand—”
“He just asked a question, Sam, calm down.” That was Max.
“Sell the place?” Mr. Dumfrey was by now screeching. His body went totally rigid, as though he’d been electrocuted. Then he slumped backward, in a clean faint.
“See?” Sam was shouting now. His face was purple. Thomas had never seen him look so angry. Howie, on the other hand, looked perfectly calm; he was chewing gum, and didn’t even flinch when Sam leaned over him. “See what you did?”
“It’s not his fault,” Max said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Sam fired back.
“Everybody, just calm down.” Thomas stood up and tried to put a hand on Sam’s arm.
“Lay off.” Sam wrenched away from Thomas. Thomas stumbled backward, and Smalls had to steady him. “Everyone just lay off.” Sam, too, stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him so hard the hinges popped off the walls. The door thundered to the ground, letting up a thick cloud of dust.
“Oh, dear,” Betty said again.
“What’s his problem?” Max cried, loudly enough that Sam might have heard. If he did, he didn’t answer. Thomas could hear him pounding down the stairs.
Howie laid a hand on Max’s arm, smiling his smug plastic smile. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He’s just got his wires a little crossed. Anyone would, in his position.”
Thomas felt a surge of anger. “In his position? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Pippa groaned. “Not you, too.”
“Don’t take his side,” Thomas said.
“Everyone, stop screaming!” Caroline said, covering her ears. Two spots of pink had appeared in her cheeks. Against her snow-white skin, it looked as though two gumballs had lodged there.
“Stop being a baby,” Quinn said with a toss of her white hair.
“Stop being a nag,” Caroline said.
“Both of you, be nice,” Betty said.
“Mind your own business,” both sisters said at once.
Soon everyone was squabbling. Danny stuck up for Betty, Smalls defended the albino twins, and Goldini was accused of taking no one’s side. Caroline burst into t
ears and Quinn tried to sob even louder. It was so loud Thomas’s head began to ache. When Lash attempted to restore order, Smalls inverted a flowerpot onto his head.
It was then—as soil crumbled off Lash’s shoulders, and Caroline and Quinn continued wailing, and everyone else was yelling insults and trying to be heard over the din—that there was a loud cough.
Officer Gilhooley and Sergeant Schroeder were standing in the doorway. Side by side, they looked like the number ten: Officer Gilhooley was long and lean as a withered string bean, and Sergeant Schroeder looked like he might move faster if he bounced instead of walked.
Instantly, everyone went silent. Everyone, that is, except Mr. Dumfrey, on whom Betty had just emptied a glass of ice-cold water. He sat up at that exact moment with a startled cry, water dripping from his glasses and spotting the front of his shirt.
“Horatio Dumfrey?” Sergeant Schroeder said—stupidly, since he knew very well who Dumfrey was. He had come to the museum on two separate occasions: once when Dumfrey had reported the theft of the shrunken head and again at the memorial for Potts, the former janitor, who had been poisoned because of his entanglement in the theft.
“Is something wrong?” Mr. Dumfrey said with surprising dignity, given the fact that his hair was plastered to his forehead, and there was water beading at the tip of his nose.
“Is there somewhere we can go to talk? Somewhere private?” Schroeder’s black eyes were gleaming. It was obvious that Sergeant Schroeder had been the kind of child who delighted in telling other children there was no Santa Claus.
“What’s this about?” Mr. Dumfrey heaved himself to his feet.
Schroeder sucked in a breath. It was Officer Gilhooley who blurted it out.
“It’s Siegfried Eckleberger, sir,” he said. “He’s been murdered.”
“Murdered,” Pippa whispered for the seventeenth time.
“I don’t believe it.” Max’s knees were drawn to her chest.
“Murdered,” Pippa said again.
Sam couldn’t bring himself to speak. He was utterly miserable. Freckles was dead. Freckles—who’d been like a grandfather. Who, along with Mr. Dumfrey, was the closest thing to a family that Sam had ever known.
The anger that had been boiling blackly in his stomach for days gave another hearty burp. It was Rattigan who’d made sure that Sam would never have a real family. That was the worst thing he’d done—worse than using Sam and the other children for his sick experiments, worse than changing them, growing them in his laboratory like human houseplants.
Sam knew that his parents were dead. He had once told Max that as a child he’d seen death, and this, his earliest memory, was what he meant. His mother’s eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling, his father’s mouth frozen in a shout, his parents’ hands separated by only a few inches, as if they’d died reaching for each other. The smell of blood. His hands and face sticky with it.
His whole life, he had been afraid that he, Sam, was somehow responsible for their deaths—that he had hurt them accidentally. But now he knew it couldn’t have been his fault. It seemed possible—even probable—that Rattigan was to blame for this, too.
Still, there might have been an aunt and uncle who remembered him, or even an older sister. Sam had always fantasized that one day he would be shouldering through a crowd at Times Square and hear a shout; he’d look up to see a girl barreling toward him, ready to embrace him, ready to call him brother.
But who would claim a boy like him, who’d been twisted and changed and altered? Other performers at the museum might look strange, but normal blood ran through their veins, and normal wires ran through their brains, beating normal signals back to their bodies. Their differences were nature-made, inherent. Born.
Not Sam, though, or Thomas, or Pippa, or Max.
They were well and truly freaks.
And now one of the few people who’d ever treated them kindly was gone.
The news of Eckleberger’s murder had affected the residents of the museum like a stiff, cold wind on a pile of old leaves. The performers had scattered to do their mourning in private. Even Max, who had met him only once, was stricken. Although Sam, Pippa, and Thomas had been closest to Freckles, everyone at Dumfrey’s Dime Museum had known and loved him.
Everyone, that is, except for Howie. Fortunately, he was steering clear of Sam. Sam was glad. He would never deliberately hurt another person. But for Howie, he might make an exception.
A small panel in the wall behind Pippa popped out and clattered to the ground. An opening no larger than a dinner plate, situated between the life-sized figure of Benjamin Franklin signing the Declaration of Independence and the model of Adam and Eve confronting the serpent, was now revealed. Thomas. The top of Thomas’s head came shooting out like a cork from a bottle. A moment later, after several seconds of wiggling, his shoulders emerged.
Soon he was shimmying himself entirely out of the wall, so that he closely resembled the large snake coiled around the tree in the display.
“What’s the news?” Pippa asked.
Thomas stood up. He was coated in a fine layer of plaster and dust, as he always was after he’d gone sneaking and sliding through the narrow web of air ducts and pipes behind the walls, which he used as his own private transportation—and eavesdropping—system. He rolled his shoulders, popping them back into place.
“Robbery,” he said solemnly. “At least, that’s what the cops are saying.”
“Robbery . . .” Pippa shook her head. “You saw how many locks were on the door. How’d they get in?”
“And why would anyone want to steal from Freckles?” Sam said. “His studio’s a mess. He didn’t have anything worth stealing.”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.” Thomas ran his hands through his hair, releasing a shower of dust. “The cops are bringing Dumfrey over to the studio,” he said. “They want to see if he can spot anything missing or weird or out of place.” He swiped his eyes with the back of a hand, leaving a dark streak from nose to cheekbone. “He was holed up, you know, working on those stupid heads.”
“That means we might have been the last people to see him alive,” Pippa said in a hushed voice.
“Except for his killer,” Thomas said.
There was a short moment of silence. Sam felt a chill. He stood up. “I want to go, too.”
“The cops won’t like it,” Thomas said.
“Bricks about the cops,” Max said. Max had started making up curse words since Miss Fitch had threatened to wash her mouth out with bar soap after she heard Max say a bad word. Bricks was one of her new favorites. She, too, stood up. Sam was surprised. She’d been resolutely refusing to look in his direction since his fight with Howie. “We should be allowed to go. Mr. Dumfrey never pays attention, anyway. There could be a bloody handprint on the wall and he’d zoom right by it.”
Max was right. So Pippa, Max, Sam, and Thomas descended to the first floor and intercepted Dumfrey as he was following the two cops out the door. Sam was surprised that the police gave them very little resistance when they asked to come along.
“An extra pair of eyes never hurts,” Schroeder said, working his jaw back and forth around a piece of gum. “None of you freaks—er, kids got special X-ray vision, do you?” Like half of New York City, he’d obviously followed the Case of the Shrunken Head closely. For months, the kids’ names had been splashed all over the news. The press had dubbed them freaks and unnaturals and oddities. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
“Pippa can read what’s in your pockets,” Thomas said. Pippa glared at him.
Schroeder squinted. His eyes seemed to recede into the fat pincushion of his flesh. “I don’t buy it,” he said.
“She can,” Thomas said, even though Pippa was giving him a death stare.
“Prove it.” Schroeder rocked back on his heels.
Sam felt like screaming. Freckles was dead. Dead. And the cops were playing stupid mind games instead of trying to find his killer.
Appa
rently, Pippa felt the same way. She exhaled impatiently, so hard her bangs fluttered. “A matchbook,” she said. “Four nickels and a quarter. A packet of Beech-Nut chewing gum. And a betting slip.”
Schroeder patted his pockets quickly, as though Pippa might have reached out with her mind and pickpocketed them. Next to him, Gilhooley stared openmouthed.
“See?” Thomas said. “She’s a mentalist. She reads minds.”
“Thomas,” she muttered. “Shut. Up.”
Schroeder was scowling. He didn’t like to be proven wrong. “What am I thinking now?” he barked.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Pippa said.
He snorted. “Too bad. Coulda come in handy. Not like guessing at pocket change.” Thomas opened his mouth but Pippa nodded sharply. Sam didn’t have the energy to defend her, either. He had just seen Howie’s face appear at the second-floor window; Max had looked up, waved, and then blushed when she caught Sam staring. He turned away, feeling heat creep like an itch up his neck.
Freckles was dead. Even when he repeated the words over and over, he couldn’t believe them.
“Go on, pile in,” Schroeder said, jerking his head toward the squad cars idling in the street. “The captain’s waiting. So’s Eckleberger, for that matter. But he’s likely to wait a long time.”
And Schroeder laughed at his own joke.
The street outside Eckleberger’s studio was packed with onlookers, drawn to the wooden police barricades and swirling lights like ants to a discarded muffin. Pippa saw a man snapping pictures, his battered fedora marking him as a member of the press, and felt her stomach lurch. She still had not gotten over the way it felt to be ridiculed and singled out on the front page of the newspaper. She didn’t think she would ever look at a reporter without getting that queasy feeling.
The front door was open, and a police officer was standing guard to keep the crowd away. A plant had been overturned, and dirt had been tracked across the front stoop and into the hallway.