It wasn’t until they reached the street that Thomas remembered Max—and then, only because Sam reminded him.

“We have to find her,” Sam said. “We can’t just abandon her.”

Pippa looked as though she was inclined to disagree.

Thomas said, “She might have found her way out. She might be halfway back to the museum by now.” He was desperate to return to the museum and read the report on Potts’s death, still tucked neatly into his pocket.

“But what if she isn’t?” Sam persisted with unusual force. For the first time it occurred to Thomas that Sam must like Max—must like her a lot.

“All right, let me think.” Thomas’s head was pounding. Going back into Bellevue was a terrible idea. Someone would soon discover they had stolen the report from Potts’s body, assuming it had not been discovered already. They needed to get off the street, as far away from Bellevue as possible.

But Sam was already heading toward Twenty-Eighth Street and the entrance to Bellevue.

“Where are you going?” Thomas said, hurrying after him. With a groan of protest, Pippa followed.

“To find Max,” Sam responded.

“You can’t just charge in there,” Thomas said. “What excuse will you give?”

There was a girl tottering up the street, her hair in pigtails and wearing makeup, as though she had just stepped off the stage. Thomas noticed, vaguely, that her face looked sort of like a pickle: miserable and sour.

“Sam, wait,” Thomas said, and in the process accidentally jostled the girl on the street. “Sorry,” he mumbled, barely looking at her.

“Sorry!” the girl exploded. “Sorry? Is that all you’ve got to say to me, you giant nitwit?”

Thomas stopped, startled by the girl’s outburst. Sam and Pippa stopped with him.

“I’m . . . very sorry?” Thomas said cautiously. It occurred to him that the girl might be one of the patients from Bellevue.

“Are you serious?” It was the girl’s voice—familiar, abrasive, like the hard strike of steel against stone—that struck Thomas as suddenly familiar. “You ought to be licking my boots right now—all of you—you ought to be down on your knees and kissing my toenails—”

“Max!” Thomas cried out, just as she jutted her face further into the streetlight, and the familiar point of her chin and hard little nose and white scar were revealed beneath the thick coat of makeup.

Sam’s jaw was nearly on the ground. “Is it—is it really you?”

“Who else would it be, you twerp?” Max nearly screamed, and gave Sam a hard whap on his arm. Thomas was sure it couldn’t have hurt him, but Sam flinched and drew back several inches. Pippa stifled a laugh.

“Left me to the wolves . . .” As she spoke, Max began scrubbing at her face with the sleeve of a coat. Up close, the makeup was even more hideous than Thomas had judged it from a distance. Thick mascara clumped her lashes, and bright circles of rouge bloomed on her cheeks like a rash. Her lipstick was a hideous red and smudged around her lips. No wonder Max looked so upset.

“Calm down, Max,” Thomas said. “Tell us what happened.”

Max paused long enough to glare at him. “How do you expect me to calm down when I just spent the past hour playing Little Miss Muffet with a bunch of loonies?” she demanded, and then resumed her furious scrubbing. She yanked her hair out of the pigtails and threw down the hair ribbons, hard, in the gutter. “I look like a class-A idiot!”

“I think you look kind of . . . pretty,” Sam ventured, in a small voice. For a moment, Thomas thought she would hit him again.

“Come on,” he said, before Pippa could dissolve into giggles and make everything worse. “Let’s get out of here.”

By Thirty-Third Street, where they got into the subway, Max had calmed down—although she still refused to look at Sam, whom she inexplicably blamed for the whole episode. By vigorously raking her fingers through her hair, she had restored it to its normal state of wildness.

She told them how she had been hauled upstairs by the nurse and presented at the registration desk.

“And before I know it, some wacko in a nightgown comes barreling over, practically throws herself at me, and starts calling me sweetie pie,” Max said, outraged. The makeup had mostly come off, except for thick smudges of mascara, which gave her the look of a raccoon. “Well, what was I supposed to do? She painted me up like a clown and made me play cards. I only got out of there when she nodded off.”

Except for a homeless man dressed in toeless boots, a long overcoat, and a pair of aviator’s goggles, the children were alone on the subway car as it lurched through the tunnels. Thomas, seeking once again to make peace, at last extracted the medical report from his pocket, smoothed it down on one thigh, and began to read.

“What about . . . ?” Pippa nodded toward the homeless man, whose chin was nodding on his chest.

“It’s all right,” Thomas said. He couldn’t wait any longer. He scanned the page and its densely packed writing.

“Well?” Max said irritably. “What’s it say?”

“Give me a second,” Thomas said, frowning. Some of the words were unknown to him; others were illegible. Under Cause of Death, the medical examiner had printed poisoning by cyanide. That they already knew.

“Here,” he burst out, and read, “‘Subject’—that’s Potts—‘died between the hours of midnight and two in the morning on Thursday, April twenty-fifth.’”

Pippa shivered. “How awful.”

Thomas kept on reading. “‘Judging from the contents of the subject’s stomach—’”

“Eww!” Max and Pippa burst out together and then glared at each other. Thomas ignored them.

“‘—and also from the time of death, the poison was likely administered with the subject’s dinner at around eight p.m. on Wednesday. Stomach contents—’”

“Thomas!” Max and Pippa shrieked.

“‘—show dinner of roast beef, pickled onions, and”—Thomas grimaced—“prune juice.”

“Roast beef?” Max frowned. “We had canned tuna and old bread that night.”

Pippa shook her head. “Potts didn’t eat at the museum on Wednesday night. I remember—Goldini broke a cup and no one could find the broom and I thought Miss Fitch would burst into flame. Potts came home later.”

Thomas had reached the end of the report. He stared at it for a moment longer, as though the words would float off the page and reveal something further to him. The subway screeched and jerked to a halt, and Thomas suddenly realized the train had arrived at their stop. But as Thomas and the others pushed onto the platform, he had the strangest sensation that they were being watched. He turned around as the doors slid closed and the train began to chug forward. The homeless man was awake now, staring at him with an amused expression. Thomas felt a small shock, as though he’d accidentally touched a socket without drying his hands. He had the strangest feeling he’d seen the man before.

But then the train was gone, swallowed up by the black tunnel, and Thomas pushed the thought out of his mind. It was late. He was probably imagining things.

“Thomas?” Sam, Max, and Pippa were already halfway down the platform, waiting for him.

“Sorry,” he said, and hurried to catch up.

“We were talking about Potts’s dinner,” Pippa prompted.

Sam shoved his hands in his pockets as they moved down the empty platform toward the stairs that led to the street. “I guess the question is, where on earth did he eat?”

It was nearly ten o’clock at night and far too late to continue their investigation. They headed directly back to the museum. A fog had rolled in from the river and snuck between the buildings like some vast, yellow-furred animal. Even after Thomas had slipped beneath his thick woolen blanket in the attic and Sam was snoring peacefully next to him, he couldn’t get warm—as though the fog had followed him up into the room and was tickling the soles of his feet.

His mind was turning restlessly. Potts had been murdered—why? Had he perhaps gone to see Mr. Anderson? But for what purpose? Thomas rolled over, pounding a lump from his pillow with a fist. Mr. Anderson couldn’t help, either; he, too, had been killed. All after the disappearance of that stupid head . . .

Thomas remembered the gasp from the ancient lady—Mrs. Weathersby—in the front row the day the head had been revealed. She, too, was dead. What was the connection? Could the head really be cursed?

He dismissed the idea immediately. He had read every single book in the museum’s library, many of them multiple times. He knew all about ghosts and witches, spell casting and ancient curses from the battered books Phoebe the Fat Lady brought home.

But he was very practical. He had been orphaned at a young age. He knew in all probability his real parents were dead. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe they just hadn’t wanted him, because he was different, because he could make his joints bend backward and his heels touch his head.

He wasn’t troubled by this idea—at least, he was not troubled by it very much. That was real life. He knew that people were afraid, and they disliked difference, and they sometimes acted cowardly.

He knew, too, that in real life, curses did not kill people. People killed people.

But why?

He got up. He would never sleep this way—not until he warmed up. He decided to go down to the kitchen and search for some milk in the icebox. Mrs. Cobble had sometimes heated it on the stove for him, with a little cinnamon and honey, to help him sleep.

It was very dark, and moonlight filtering through the high windows cast enormous shadows everywhere. He moved silently down the stairs, and had almost reached the ground floor when he heard muffled sounds of weeping. He froze, then inched forward, around the bend, holding his breath.

It was Phoebe.

She was crouched in the middle of the Hall of Wax, her bulging back and shoulders touched with silvery light. Her long hair was loose and she was cradling her head in her hands. Hugo was crouching next to her. He kept one hand several inches from her back, as though he wanted to touch her but was afraid that, for all her bulk, she would shatter.

“Shhh,” he was saying. “It’ll be all right.”

“It won’t be all right,” she whispered fiercely, snapping up her head to glare at him. “How can you say that?” She let out another low moan, an animal sound, and covered her face again. “Poor Mr. Dumfrey! After everything he did for us . . . and now he’s in jail! I’ll never live it down. I won’t.”

“Bee,” Hugo said—a nickname Thomas had never heard. “Bee, please. We’re only doing what we must. To be happy. We deserve to be happy, don’t we?”

Phoebe only responded by sobbing harder.

Thomas drew back and retreated up the stairs, abandoning his plan for warm milk. He would never be able to sleep tonight, anyway, even if he were bathed in a tub of it.

There was no longer any doubt. Phoebe and Hugo were involved, somehow, in some way, in this mess.

It was up to him to prove it.