Sam thought of Freckles’s liver-spotted hands and quick fingers. He thought of the smell of Freckles’s home, like old paper and melting butter and sunlight. Freckles had never forgotten a single one of Sam’s birthdays, and once, when Sam was only six and had accidentally broken the model train Mr. Dumfrey had bought him, it was Freckles who painstakingly glued it back together.
Sam slipped a hand behind his back and crossed his fingers. “Promise,” he said with the biggest smile he could muster.
Later that night, long after the other residents of the museum had gone to bed, Sam realized he would never be able to sleep. He had dozed temporarily only to find himself back in Freckles’s apartment, in even worse disorder than it had been that afternoon, papers and photographs swirling down from the sky through a hole in the ceiling.
“I can’t find der cat!” Freckles shrieked. And it was obvious why: he could hardly look for the cat when he was busy baking cookies.
Sam sprang to search for the fluffy cat, only to find his legs paralyzed. When he turned, he saw a gorilla had locked on to his ankles, and he understood that all along it had been a trap . . . that the gorilla had come to kill them both . . .
He came awake gasping, pressing a hand to his heart. Turning to Thomas’s cot, he saw the familiar lumps under the covers that indicated he, at least, was sleeping soundly. Next to Thomas, Howie was so still in his bed he hardly looked alive. Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Easing out of bed, he tiptoed down the performers’ staircase—careful not to hold on to the banister, lest he squeeze too hard and crack apart the wood—to the first floor. He went through the Hall of Worldwide Wonders, where the exhibits glinted dully in the moonlight in their dusty glass cases, and the marble floors shone silver, and into the special exhibits room. One of the few benefits of having lost their cook was that they no longer had to be so careful sneaking in and out of the kitchen at night, and as soon as Sam was on the stairs leading into the kitchen, he flicked on the lights.
Instantly, he heard a muffled yelp. Someone, it seemed, had beaten him there.
In the kitchen, Max was standing, holding a butter knife in both hands as if it were a sword.
“Oh,” she said, lowering the butter knife. “It’s just you.”
“Hi to you, too,” Sam said, feeling vaguely offended. He had the unhappy feeling that had Howie come down the stairs, she wouldn’t try to stick him with a utensil. He moved beyond her to the icebox and reached for the milk, disappointed to find only half an inch left. Not nearly enough for hot chocolate. “Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
Max shrugged. “I could sleep,” she said. “I just didn’t feel like it.” But she looked away, biting her lip, and Sam knew she was as upset as any of them about what had happened to Freckles. Unexpectedly, she turned back to him. “Listen, can I ask you a question? Do you think it’s still stealing if nobody’s gonna know what went missing?”
Sam frowned. “What are you talking about?”
But before she could answer, they heard a muffled sound from deeper in the basement. Max started to speak but he put a finger to his lips. It came again: a thud, a scuffle, a curse.
Someone was with them in the basement.
From the kitchen a narrow door, normally shut, gave access to a vast and gloomy crawl space crowded with things too old and broken even to have made their way to the attic. Dim, musty and damp, this part of the basement was inhabited by nothing but spiders, mice, and, when he was alive, the equally gloomy Potts, who’d kept a room tucked at the very end of the cluttered space.
Max eased open the door. Sam’s hands were shaking so badly, he was likely to have simply yanked it from its hinges. Together they slipped into the crawl space, ducking slightly where the ceiling was sloped, waiting in the darkness while their eyes adjusted. They heard no more sounds, not a single twitch of movement, but Sam knew that there was someone else with them in the darkness—someone else frozen, trying not to move, trying not even to breathe. He could feel them, feel their otherness, like something heavy riding on his shoulders. He wondered whether this was how Pippa felt when she tried to read minds.
Suddenly, there was a yelp, a crash, and a whimper.
“What are you—?”
“It’s all right, Tom. It’s just Sam and Max.”
A second later, two flashlights came on, temporarily dazzling Sam’s eyes. Then Pippa and Thomas were illumined from the chin up, so that their eyes looked like hollows.
“Sorry,” Thomas said. When he grinned, his teeth gleamed.
“Crill,” Max cursed. “You scared us.”
“Yeah.” Sam shivered as he felt something brush his neck. A spider, probably. “We thought you might be a robber.”
“Unlikely,” Pippa said, sniffing. “Who’d want to steal any of this stuff?” And she cast her light onto an enormous wig, which looked like a huge pile of overcooked spaghetti mixed with rotting seaweed.
“So what are you doing down here?” Sam asked.
“Mr. Dumfrey said that the museum used to keep a bust of Solly Bumstead—Sticky Fingers Solly,” Pippa said. “He was a bank robber who got sent to prison and vowed revenge on Freckles. But what if he’s out now? What if he got his revenge?”
“Wait, wait.” Sam felt the anger that recently seemed so close to the surface give another thrash. “You’re trying to track down who killed Freckles—and you didn’t tell us?”
“C’mon, Sam,” Pippa said. “We would have told you if we found anything. You were sleeping like a baby.”
“You were snoring like a baby,” Thomas corrected her. “You didn’t even roll over when I took one of your pillows. Sorry about that, by the way. I was trying to make it look like I was still in bed. Miss Fitch has been after me ever since she caught me scaling the Great Siberian Woolly Mammoth skeleton after dark.”
So that explained the lumpy figure that Sam had mistaken for Thomas. His anger gave a little twitch and then fizzled.
“But if you want to help . . .” Pippa lobbed him an extra flashlight. Sam caught it and felt the handle crack in his palm. Although it was too dark to see her, Sam could feel Pippa rolling her eyes. “Sorry. That was stupid.”
“Here, Sam. Share mine,” Thomas said.
“No need.” Max spoke up suddenly from behind them. She had ventured off a little way into the piles of old junk, so that her voice sounded muffled. Sam remembered then that until only recently she had lived on the streets, making her way in the darkness, living wherever she had to. It seemed impossible to imagine a time when she hadn’t been here at the museum. “Can I get a little light, please?”
Pippa swung her flashlight in Max’s direction. Max was caught in the glare, holding the large plaster bust of an extremely ugly and very lopsided face. His left eye drooped. His eyebrows bristled. His mouth was thin as a line. At the bottom of a stand a neatly labeled sign read simply SOLOMON “STICKY FINGERS” BUMSTEAD—THIEF AND SAFECRACKER in very large letters.
“Hmmm,” Thomas said. “Not much of a looker, is he?”
Pippa gasped. “I know him,” she said. Sam swung around to look at her. Unfortunately, she’d lowered her flashlight, so he could only make out her silhouette.
“You know him?” Sam repeated.
“I mean—I’ve seen him,” she stuttered. “At the zoo in Central Park. He was standing right behind me. Max mentioned Freckles and then . . .”
“What?” Thomas prompted, turning his flashlight on her. “What is it?”
In the sudden glare, Pippa’s face looked totally unfamiliar.
“I felt hate,” she said in a whisper. “Max mentioned Freckles’s name, and I felt a wave of hate.”
It made sense, Thomas reasoned, that if Solly Bumstead had gotten out of prison early he would have had trouble finding work—or, possibly, his next target, if he was still in the business of looting banks and private houses. In recent years hundreds of down-and-out people had gravitated to Central Park, building makeshift homes out of tents and plywood, so that
seen from a distance the long field resembled a patch of misshapen mushrooms sprouting from the ground.
And that, of course, was precisely where Sam, Pippa, Max, and Tom were headed.
They could have waited until morning—they should have waited until morning, in Sam’s opinion—but Pippa thought that if Solly Bumstead was living in the park, their best chance of finding him was at night. None of them had wanted to risk going upstairs for clothing, but they couldn’t exactly go around in pajamas without attracting attention from the police (except for Max, who always slept in her clothing, and she said in a slightly superior voice that it was always for this reason, as though it were common practice to have to sneak out in the middle of the night to track down a possible killer). So they’d all rooted around the basement until they found a trunk filled with moldering clothing and old costumes. Sam was wearing mothball-scented suit pants and a jacket far too small for him. Thomas looked as if he was swimming in a button-down shirt and trousers hitched to his waist with a length of rope, and Pippa had on a shapeless dress she kept tripping over.
Sam did not like the city at night. He didn’t like the empty feel of the streets, the way the landscape so familiar to him felt suddenly cloaked and secretive, like a person in a mask. He didn’t like the people who slunk through the shadows, heads down as though they were hiding something, or even the dazzle of Broadway, the flash and glare of the theaters, which in the day seemed so cheerful but after dark seemed to be trying too hard to prove something.
But he especially, especially, did not like Central Park.
The trees, like hobbled people. The grass shushing you every time you took a step. Fires flickering in garbage cans like distant, drowned stars.
And the people, hundreds and hundreds of people, clinging to the earth as if they were in danger of being thrown off into space. It all made him feel as if something huge and heavy were squeezing him.
“This is stupid,” he whispered, although there was no reason to be quiet—not when they were already moving into a field of makeshift houses, blankets tacked to rags tacked to cardboard, and the night was alive with babies crying and murmured conversation and the occasional shout. “There must be a thousand people living out here. How are we supposed to find Bumstead?”
Even Pippa looked worried. “We’ll have to split up. You’ve all seen what he looks like now. Believe me, he’s as ugly as he was ten years ago.”
“Even so, it’ll take hours,” Sam said.
Pippa huffed a little. “Do you have anything better to do?”
Sam nearly said sleeping but closed his mouth when he saw Pippa’s face.
“Let’s start at the center of the long field,” Thomas suggested. “Then I’ll go north, Sam will go south, and Pippa and Max can go east and west.”
This, however, proved to be unnecessary. No sooner had they begun navigating the clutter of tents and temporary shelters toward the center of the long field than they heard a commotion from nearby. Sleeping babies came awake and started howling. Several men staggered clumsily to their feet before shouting for everyone to shut up. An alarm clock went off and was quickly silenced. And a man’s enraged voice rose above the din.
“He stole my frying pan! That Sticky Fingers stole my frying pan!”
Thomas, Pippa, Sam, and Max froze.
“Do you think . . . ?” Pippa breathed.
“This way,” Max said, already cutting left and disappearing behind a nest of cardboard boxes hung with laundry. They followed her, weaving between the sorry, soggy little homes, many of them already half collapsing, as the argument only grew louder and more heated.
“I didn’t take nothing, you sorry sack of monkey snot,” another man said. His voice was a low growl. “Now step off before I make ya.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Max, Thomas, Pippa, and Sam burst into a small clearing littered with old metal cans and trash. A single, ragged tent was tied up to a nearby tree, and Sam noticed an overturned bucket holding a filthy bar of soap and a toothbrush. A man Sam immediately recognized as Solly Bumstead was standing next to a smoking campfire, gripping a heavy frying pan. Whatever he’d been cooking smelled roughly like old socks dipped in tuna fish, and Sam had to stop himself from covering his nose.
A second man, this one bucktoothed and bald, was circling Bumstead. “You’re telling me,” he said, his voice now low and dangerous, “that there frying pan in your hands didn’t come straight outta my kit. You’re telling me you didn’t sneak it off me last night when I invited you to share a drink.” The two men were inching closer together, as if they were both swirling toward a central drain.
“I’m telling you,” Bumstead said, matching the man’s tone, “that if you take one more step, you’ll regret the day your mother cooked ya . . .”
For a split second, both men appeared to be frozen. Then, with a shout, the bald one charged. Bumstead gripped the frying pan like a baseball bat and swung. As the bald man ducked, an unidentifiable slop hit Sam directly in the chest.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he groaned.
Now the two men were on the ground, rolling dangerously close to the fire, wrestling and punching and spitting.
“You stole it!”
“I didn’t!”
“Did!”
“Didn’t!”
“Maybe we should just let ’em kill each other.” Max’s eyes were shining. “Save us some trouble.”
“Then we won’t know the truth about Freckles,” Thomas pointed out. He turned to Sam. “What do you say, Sam? Time to break it up?”
Sam sighed. Recently, it seemed, everything was his responsibility. “I’ll take care of it,” he grumbled.
He reached the tussling men in two long strides. The bald man had the advantage. He was on top, pinning Bumstead with his knees. Bumstead’s nose was bleeding. The bald man had gotten hold of the frying pan, and now he raised it high, sweat gleaming on his forehead, his eyes wild.
“You want the pan?” he shrieked. “You want the pan? I’ll give you the pan!”
Before the bald man could bring the pan down on Bumstead’s head, Sam plucked it easily from his hand.
“I’ll take that, actually,” he said. “Now if you’ll just step along, sir. We have some questions to ask our friend Sticky Fingers here.”
Bumstead flinched at the sound of his name, as if it pained him. The bald man staggered to his feet.
“Hey. How about you mind your own business, kid?” In the firelight, his buckteeth gave him the look of a deranged jackrabbit. Several other pajama-clad spectators had drawn close to watch the fight, and Sam swallowed a sigh. Once again, he’d become the center of attention.
“You know what? Since you both want the pan so badly . . .” The frying pan was the heavy cast-iron kind. He took the pan in two hands, squeezing and pushing at the same time, until it cracked in two. The noise was sharp as gunfire and several of the onlookers jumped. “There,” Sam said. “One portion for each of you. Happy now?”
The bucktoothed man was gaping at Sam, white-faced, as if he’d just seen him step from the grave. When Sam tried to give him his half of the frying pan, he staggered backward.
“W—witchcraft,” he rasped. Then he turned and sprinted into the darkness, scattering the spectators in his path.
“Typical. All that work for nothing.” Sam shook his head. Solly Bumstead was trying to wiggle backward, away from the firelight, perhaps hoping he could sneak away. Sam tossed the broken frying pan to the ground, missing Bumstead’s left ear by inches. “And now on to you, Mr. Bumstead.”
And Sam lifted Bumstead easily with one hand, as if he weighed no more than a feather, and set him gently on his feet.
“I didn’t do it,” were the first words out of Bumstead’s mouth.
Thomas and Pippa exchanged a look.
“You don’t even know what we’re here for,” Thomas pointed out.
“Doesn’t matter,” Bumstead said stubbornly. He had a sallo
w face and a weak chin. His cuffs were filthy and too long, and his thinning hair was coated in pomade that smelled a little like glue. “I know I ain’t done it, because I ain’t done anything.”
“Sounds like you got a guilty conscious to me,” Max said, narrowing her eyes.
“Conscience,” Pippa corrected her.
Bumstead scowled. “Well, you didn’t come to give me no prize, did you? So what? Did some payroll office get knocked over? A jewel robber make away with somebody’s diamond necklace? Some fancy old painting go missing from a museum?”
“Worse,” Thomas said evenly. “Someone was murdered.”
Bumstead startled a little. His expression turned uncertain. “M—murdered,” he stammered. “Well, now you’re way off the bag. Back in the day I was a top thief, sure. Best in the whole city. But I never went around hurtin’ nobody.” He worried the ragged hem of his shirt. “I’m a peaceful man, honest. What would I go around killing somebody for?”
“You tell us,” Thomas said, watching Bumstead closely. “Siegfried Eckleberger is dead.”
“Eckleberger . . .” Bumstead whispered the name like a curse. He closed his eyes. Next to Thomas, Pippa twitched, and he wondered whether she was again feeling a wave of Bumstead’s hatred consume her. When he opened his eyes again, he just looked like a tired old man. “I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead,” Bumstead said. “The man got me shipped off to prison for eight long years. Lost my nerve in lockup. Got scared straight. Now I couldn’t steal a tulip from a garden, even if I tried.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Sam ventured to ask.
Bumstead guffawed. “A good thing? A good thing? And how am I supposed to make a living, now I can’t do the only thing I was ever good at? No one wants to hire a slug like me, especially not now I got time on my record.”
“So you admit you hated Eckleberger?” Max pressed.
“Hated him? Sure. Of course I hated him. There was a time, you know, when I was really worth something.” Bumstead’s eyes grew unfocused, as if he was peering into the past. “There wasn’t a safe I couldn’t crack or a door I couldn’t open. I once stole the mayor’s watch when he was sitting next to me at lunch. You know that Rachel Richstone girl who’s been in all the papers? I once took a sapphire necklace off her at her own birthday party. ’Course she wasn’t a Richstone yet. She was still a Van der Water back then, and practically oozing money. Her old man did something in metals. Or was it minerals? Either way—” He broke off suddenly when Thomas gave a little shout. “Are you okay?”