Breakfast was getting worse and worse. When Max made it downstairs the following morning, she found Thomas, Pippa, and Sam sharing a plate of hard cheese and saltine crackers.
Sam slid over as soon as he saw her to make room for her on the bench. Ignoring him completely—she was still angry at him, mostly because he had told her she looked pretty with her hair tugged and pulled like a poodle’s—she elbowed in next to Pippa.
Thomas was bent over a newspaper and every so often he groaned.
“What’s the matter?” Max asked, popping a saltine in her mouth.
“What do you think’s the matter?” Pippa said, and, whipping the newspaper out of Thomas’s hands, slammed it down in front of Max.
Max was not a strong reader, but she recognized the name of the paper, The Daily Screamer, and could just spell out the headline that dominated the front page.
VILLAINS OR VICTIMS?
DUMFREY’S HORROR-HOUSE—A DANGER FOR OUR YOUTH
“So what’s it all about?” Max said, shoving the paper back, so she wouldn’t have to read the whole article herself. She didn’t actually know how to read—at least, nothing more than a few street signs—though Monsieur Cabillaud was threatening to teach her.
“It’s about us,” Thomas said. He read: “‘Dressed in foul-smelling rags, the children of Mr. Dumfrey’s Dime Museum have been so systematically abused, they do not appear to know how pathetic they appear. . . .’”
“Pathetic?” Max screeched. “Smelly?” True, she did not often wash her hair. And true, she liked to wear her lucky jacket on a daily basis, the one with several pockets for her knives. But she was positive she didn’t smell.
“‘Isolated from children their own age, forced into the most despicable tasks, like cleaning the museum of spiders’—I never said he forced us to, did I? Just that he liked them released outside—”
“Go on, Thomas,” Pippa said.
Thomas continued, “‘and denied a basic education’”—Thomas frowned and lowered his voice, since Monsieur Cabillaud was sitting nearby—“‘the children confuse major European countries and are unable to complete the most basic arithmetic’—he’s twisted everything around, you see?—‘and defend Mr. Dumfrey as if he were a father and not the man who has kept them in captivity all these years.’”
Max slammed a fist against the table, causing the cheese to levitate temporarily off its crackers. “I’ll have him skinned!” she said. Then: “What’s captivity mean?”
“It means,” Pippa said, with a superior-sounding sniff, “that Mr. Dumfrey’s been keeping us prisoner.”
“That’s bunk,” Max said. “Mr. Dumfrey saved us.” She watched Danny drift into the kitchen, his worried face barely level with the table; and Smalls, gripping a coffee mug, which in his enormous hand looked like a doll’s teacup; and Monsieur Cabillaud with his scarf carelessly arranged around his tiny head. They belonged here, all of them. It was probably the first place they had ever belonged in their whole lives.
She, Max, belonged here, too.
“Listen.” Thomas dropped his voice to a whisper. “Something happened last night.” Gesturing for them all to lean in, he explained what he had seen and overheard the night before. Then, leaning back, he said, “I have a plan.”
“Big surprise,” Max grumbled.
He acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “We’re going to have to split up. Max and I will follow Hugo and Phoebe. Sam and Pippa can try and figure out where Potts was on Wednesday night and who he was with.”
“I think Max should come with me,” Sam said immediately. “In case we need to, um, interrogate someone. Or intimidate someone. Or both.”
Max rolled her eyes, even though secretly, she was pleased that Sam thought she was intimidating.
“Fine,” Thomas said smoothly. “Pip and I’ll follow Hugo and Phoebe, then. We’ll meet back here later. Everyone got it?”
Pippa sighed. “Got it.”
Sam smiled. “Got it.”
“Got it.” Max popped a saltine into her mouth and pocketed another for the road.
There were over two dozen bars, pubs, restaurants, and luncheonettes in the area immediately surrounding the museum, ranging from the decent to the disreputable to the disgusting, and it turned out Potts had, at some point or another, eaten, drunk, or gambled in nearly all of them.
Max had cooked up their cover story: they would pretend to be looking to track down their uncle and would give a description of Potts when asked what their uncle looked like. This required that they pose as brother and sister, an idea Sam initially resisted. But people would be more likely to talk, Max argued, if there was no question of murder, feeling proud of herself for thinking of it. Thomas wasn’t the only brainy one in the group.
“I still don’t see why we have to be related,” Sam grumbled, after leaving Momma Maroon’s Luncheonette, where the proprietor, an enormously fat woman with a face as red as an apple and thick eyeglasses, had said she could see the family resemblance perfectly.
Up and down the streets, into bars where the air was vibrating with smoke and foul smells, and restaurants where grubby-looking men were bent over thick bowls of soup and the floors were covered in peanut shells; hour after hour of the same response. Yeah, sure. He sounds familiar. But haven’t seen him in a few weeks at least. Sorry, kids. Better luck next time.
“I’m starting to hate that word,” Sam said on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street, after their latest failure. “Luck.”
Max kicked a trash can in frustration, and a stray cat leaped out from its depths and bared its teeth before slinking away. “This is crazy,” she said. She had been excited to set out. But that was hours ago, and her saltine and cheese had long since been digested. She was hungry, and her feet hurt, and her jacket was making her hot. “He could have gone anywhere, with anyone, in the whole stupid city.”
“We can’t give up now,” Sam said, but he sounded just as tired as she felt.
“What are we supposed to do?” Max said. “We’ve been at it for hours already.” Max shoved her hands in her pockets. She was enraged and she didn’t know why. She tried to direct her anger at Sam, but it didn’t work. He looked tall and saggy and exhausted, like a piece of taffy that has been overstretched, and she could only feel bad for him.
Instead, she pushed her anger outward, onto the whole world, expanding it until it grew like a mist to cover everything around her. The world, Max felt, was an evil, rotten, pit of a place. Exhibit 1: She’d been dumped like a discarded banana peel by her own parents. Exhibit 2: She barely remembered the orphanage where she’d landed, but she did remember cages, like for animals, and people inside them, and darkness. Exhibit 3: Her foster mother took her in just to have someone to scrub her linens and wash out her toilet bowl, and Max had run away. Exhibits 4 through 87: She had lived on the streets and raised herself, learned to pickpocket and steal, memorized the best places to sleep so she wouldn’t get chased off by the cops, made friends with the rats.
And the last, final proof: she had finally found a place where she was safe, and that, too, was in danger.
“All right,” Sam said with a sigh, looking more like a sad stretched piece of taffy than ever. “Let’s go home.”
On the corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, Sam stopped to tie his shoes for at least the third time that day. Max waited for him impatiently, shifting her weight, both dreading what they would have to say to Pippa and Thomas and eager to get it over with.
They had paused in front of Paulie’s—a restaurant so grubby that they had skipped over it entirely. Even Potts couldn’t have been tempted to eat there. Through grease-streaked windowpanes, Max saw a dozen people huddled like refugees over their plates.
Down the street, Max noticed a woman wearing an enormous hat and a fur collar, despite the sunny April weather. She was distributing fliers and jabbering at a high volume to everyone who passed, although Max could not make out what she said. And on the opposite side of the street, coming from the direction of Eighth Avenue—
“Pippa!” she called out, waving. “Thomas!”
They looked just as tired and discouraged as she felt. Thomas had a dusting of white plaster in his hair, which made him look like an old man. Pippa’s dress, normally stiff and starched and perfect, was splattered with mud and torn at the hem.
“What happened to you?” Max and Pippa asked, at the exact same time.
“I asked first,” they said again, together.
“We lost them,” Thomas said. “We followed them halfway across the city and back again, in and out of shops, then down to Fourteenth Street, and—poof! They disappeared.”
“Disappeared where?” Max asked.
“If we knew that—” Thomas started to say. But by that point the woman with the fliers had advanced even farther down the street, and Max made out, finally, what she was saying.
“These poor, helpless children,” she wailed as she shoved pamphlets in the hands of passersby. “Extraordinary and underappreciated! Uneducated! Underfed! Overexploited and worked half to death, like plow mules. It’s an outrage, and Mr. Dumfrey must be held accountable. . . .”
“Uh-oh,” Max muttered. She felt like she was frozen and watching a steam engine bear down on her. But before she could squeak out a single word of warning, the woman’s eyes pivoted in her direction—small, beady eyes set deep in a face as pink as a baby’s scrubbed bottom.
“You!” she cried, her eyes gleaming as she took in Thomas and his dusty hair, Max’s ragged coat, Sam with one shoe untied, and Pippa’s torn and ragged dress. “How remarkable! How extraordinary! Which one of you is Sam? Aha—the little one is Thomas! And this must be Philippa, and Mackenzie.”
“Max,” Max said, but the woman ignored her.
“It’s really an incredible coincidence,” the woman said. “I’ve just been talking about all of you—you poor, poor things. Are you cold? Or too hot? Can I get you anything to eat?”
Max was hungry, actually, but she kept her mouth shut.
“Who are you?” Thomas said.
The woman laughed, a laugh as shrill as the whistle from a steam pipe. “How silly. Of course. I haven’t introduced myself. It’s just as though I feel we know each other . . . My name is Andrea von Stikk.” She paused, as if waiting for her words to take effect. “Of the Von Stikk Society for Children’s Welfare? Of Von Stikk’s Home for Extraordinary Children?” She looked at them expectantly, and, when no one said a word, shook her head and sighed. “Poor creatures. You really have been terribly undereducated. But all that will be sorted out quickly when we get you into our home. We have a wonderful school, of course, and programs for educating young boys and girls in over a dozen fields of work. . . .”
Max heard several words she disliked strongly: for example, work and school.
“Now, come along,” the woman said, and spread her arms as though she intended to wrap them in a hug—another thing Max hated. “Let’s find somewhere decent to sit and talk.”
As she said the word decent, she cast a disapproving glance at Paulie’s restaurant, and it gave Max an idea.
“Sorry,” Max blurted. “We’re in a rush. Important business.”
“Business?” Andrea chirped primly, as if she’d never heard the word.
“Places to go, people to see, bodies to bury—you know, the usual. Anyways, nice to meet you, see you never, and thanks for the chat.” As Max spoke, she took Pippa by the arm and hauled her into Paulie’s. Thomas and Sam hurried after them.
“But wait!” Andrea shrieked. “You can’t go in there! It simply isn’t suitable for childr—”
The door swung shut behind them, blocking out the sound of her outraged voice. And, as Max had expected, she didn’t follow them into Paulie’s. She wouldn’t dare.
“If she called me poor dear one more time . . . ,” Pippa said, shaking her head and making a vaguely threatening gesture with her fist. Max felt a brief flicker of admiration for her. But it was quickly snuffed out. “Ew,” Pippa said, looking around them. “What is this place?”
The air in Paulie’s was thick with the smell of boiled cabbage, cigarette smoke, and rancid meat. Behind the counter, a mammoth man wearing a blood-caked apron was frying up bacon. A waiter with the guilty look of an escaped convict was hurrying among the rickety tables, which were covered not with tablecloths but old, grease-spotted newspapers. In one booth, a man with dirt-encrusted fingers was noisily slurping coffee as black as tar; at the counter, two toothless women were dealing cards. The other patrons of Paulie’s looked as sad, scared, and pathetic as any Max had ever seen.
“What’re you doing in here?” The man in the butcher’s apron—Max assumed he was the owner—came bellying out from behind the counter. “We’re not buying nothing, so you can take whatever you’re sellin’ and get going.”
They needed to stall. Max wasn’t ready to risk another run-in with Angela von Stuck-up, or whatever her name was.
“We’re looking for our uncle,” she said quickly. Pippa and Thomas gave her a confused look, but Sam picked up on the game right away.
“That’s right,” he chimed in. They had practiced their parts all day long. “He wanders off sometimes. Gets confused.” Sam lowered his voice conspiratorially. “He’s not all there in the head.”
The man in the butcher’s uniform smiled. Half his teeth were rotting. “Sounds like one of our customers, all right,” he said, and then let out a booming laugh. Max was blasted by the smell of his breath and did her best not to flinch. “The name’s Paulie,” the man in the apron said. “This is my joint. I’m here all day, every day. I remember everybody who walks through those doors. What’s he look like, this uncle of yours?”
“Dark hair,” Sam said. “Tall—even taller than me. Wears a gray cap, pulled low, and has scars on his cheeks.”
It was the same description they had given to twenty other restaurant and pub owners that morning. But this time, Paulie began nodding slowly, so his many chins wobbled like a turkey’s neck.
“Yeah,” Paulie said thoughtfully, wiping his hands across his apron. “Yeah. Sounds familiar. This would have been . . . Wednesday, right?”
Max swallowed back a little cry of excitement. Thomas and Pippa exchanged a glance. Wednesday was the night Potts had been poisoned.
“Exactly,” Max said eagerly. “Wednesday.”
Paulie stepped aside as the waiter skirted by them, holding a stack of dirty plates. “Yeah, he was here,” Paulie said. “They sat right over there.”
This time, Max couldn’t conceal her excitement.
“They?” she asked. “He was here with somebody?”
“Sure was. Didn’t get a good look at the other guy. He was wearing a hat. Your uncle seemed worked up about something, though.”
The waiter was still hovering nearby. He had deposited the stack of plates and was now pretending to wash the counter, although Max felt sure that he had never washed a single surface in Paulie’s in his life. He was eavesdropping. She gave Sam a nudge.
“And you don’t remember anything about the—the other guy?” Thomas asked.
Paulie turned to him. “He your uncle, too?” He gave a mean smile. “Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at the other guy. All’s I know is your uncle was nervous.”
Thomas nodded, frowning a little. Pippa had closed her eyes and her face was very pale. Max realized, with a little start, that she was trying to read. She was trying to think her way into the folds of Paulie’s brain.
“Look,” Sam spoke up suddenly. “We’re going to be honest with you.”
Max shot him a look. This was not part of the script they had agreed on.
“It’s really important we find out who our, um, uncle was with on Wednesday,” Sam said. “The truth is he was poisoned, and—”
Sam did not get any further. Because the waiter, with a short, anguished cry, vaulted over the counter, knocking over the entire stack of dirty dishes, and sprinted for the door.