The Shrunken Head

by Lauren Oliver

  “But they’re not even looking,” Sam protested.

  “Then I guess the case is closed,” Mr. Dumfrey said firmly, and Pippa knew that the conversation was over.

  Midmorning, Thomas was sitting in the Odditorium, rereading The Probability of Everything, having already finished Statistics for Everybody, which he had found disappointing. Suddenly, he heard a loud commotion from the entrance hall.

  “You’ve got some nerve showing up here.” Miss Fitch’s voice was shrill as a fire bell. “After all those lies you wrote up in the paper. I don’t know how you sleep at night. I ought to snip your fingers off—”

  Rounding the corner, Thomas saw that Miss Fitch had Bill Evans cornered and was waving a heavy pair of sewing scissors threateningly in his direction.

  “It’s all right, Miss Fitch,” Mr. Dumfrey said. He, too, had been attracted by the noise. Miss Fitch gave a final, injured snip of her scissors, then turned and stalked off, muttering under her breath about the shame of it.

  Mr. Evans eased off the wall and adjusted his tie. “Charming woman,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Is she always that friendly?”

  “What do you want?” Thomas blurted out, before he could stop himself. He thought Mr. Dumfrey might scold him for being rude, but instead he saw a smile pass briefly across Dumfrey’s face.

  Mr. Evans addressed his words to Dumfrey. “You’re not mad about what I wrote, are you?” He took off his hat and spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. “You know how it is, Mr. D. Gotta spice things up, give stories a bit of a twist if you want to sell papers. And, boy, are we selling them.” He grinned. “They’re going like hotcakes. People love a good horror story, and this business of the head’s got everyone riled up.”

  Mr. Dumfrey stared at him with no expression. Mr. Evans’s smile faltered, and he coughed.

  “Look at it this way,” he said, trying a new tack. “You need a little bit of publicity, now that the head’s up and vanished.” Thomas had to admit that Mr. Evans had a point. “Think of it: The Four Orphan Freaks of Dumfrey’s Dime Museum. It’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? That’ll bring in the crowds. I thought maybe I could do a little roundup of the kids, a few interviews, maybe a photograph—”

  “Absolutely not,” Mr. Dumfrey said stiffly.

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea,” Thomas interjected. “He’s right. We could use the publicity.”

  Mr. Dumfrey shot Thomas a withering glance, and Thomas wished he hadn’t spoken. Mr. Dumfrey returned his gaze to Bill Evans, drawing himself up to his full five feet five inches. “Now listen here, Evans. You don’t have to tell me about publicity. I practically invented it. But I won’t have you implicating Thomas or Sam or any of them. I won’t have you hurling imprecations or insinuating allegations or—or—”

  “Dragging us into it,” Thomas suggested.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Dumfrey said.

  Mr. Evans smiled. “All due respect, Mr. D., they’re already implicated.” His two front teeth were large and somewhat protruding, which gave him the look of a tall, skinny, eager rabbit. “Murder’s no common potato, Mr. Dumfrey, and they’re neck-deep in it.”

  “Murder?” Mr. Dumfrey repeated.

  Bill Evans had started to make for the door. Now he turned around and said with false casualness, “Oh, yeah. The medical examiner’s report came back. Mr. Anderson didn’t do himself in after all. He was strung up by someone who wanted to make it look that way.” Evans’s eyes slid over to Thomas and Thomas quickly looked away. His heart was beating fast in his chest.

  He had been right.

  “You can read all about it in the afternoon papers,” Mr. Evans said, jamming his hat on his head. “Afternoon to you both. If you change your mind about the interviews, Mr. D., you know where to find me.”

  Then he was gone.

  “So what now?” Pippa said.

  They were all gathered after dinner in the loft. Sam had cleared a small central space in the cluttered room, and Pippa had poached some unused props and old exhibits from the storage cellar, including a large Navajo blanket, several woven pillows sent to Mr. Dumfrey by a maharaja, a three-legged stool once owned by George Washington, and a walnut table inlaid with ivory. Now they were all sitting, drinking Ovaltine from earthenware mugs. Steam from their cups intermingled above their heads.

  “What do you mean?” Max took a long slurp of hot chocolate. “You heard what Dumfrey said. It ain’t our business.”

  “Isn’t.”

  “Same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Ain’t.”

  “But we have to do something,” Thomas insisted, jumping in. “Mr. Anderson wanted the head back. And then he was killed.”

  “Maybe there is a curse,” said Max.

  “You can’t really believe that,” Thomas said, and Max shrugged.

  “Does it matter? We’re no closer to finding the head than we ever were,” Sam pointed out.

  There was a minute of heavy silence. Thomas’s stomach made a noise like a dog’s whimper. It had been a slow day, as Mr. Dumfrey had predicted. The murder of Mr. Anderson and continued talk of Mrs. Weathersby’s death had eclipsed the short mention of Mr. Dumfrey and the museum from which the head had been stolen. With the exception of a few local kids, who had pressed grubby palms against the front door and peered in through the glass, and one rich-looking man and his snub-nosed daughter, who had come after lunch and imperiously demanded to see the “freaks,” then inquired whether they might be rented out for a birthday party, there had been no customers at all.

  The entertainers had passed the hours performing various chores and tiptoeing around Mr. Dumfrey, who remained locked in his study doing the books with Monsieur Cabillaud, as though he were a pressure cooker in danger of explosion. But in the absence of Mrs. Cobble, no one had remembered to go to the markets. And so dinner had been canned tuna and day-old bread and mustard.

  Thomas took a long sip of his Ovaltine, hoping it would help ease the cramping in his stomach. “I still think Potts knows something,” he said.

  Pippa nodded. Her dark bangs practically concealed her eyes. “He knew Mr. Anderson. Or at least they’d met. So why doesn’t he say so?”

  Max shrugged. “Might not be anything to it. Maybe he pawned some stuff. Or did business for Mr. Dumfrey.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas said, unconvinced. He had the vague, prickling sense that they were missing something—and that something very bad would happen as a result. “But then why—?”

  “Shhh,” Sam said sharply. “Someone’s coming.”

  A stair creaked; there was a shuffling, a rustling of skirts, and a murmured word. Thomas held his breath. Max had frozen with her mug halfway to her lips. Pippa leaned close to the door, listening.

  More footsteps. Then a voice, low, urgent, on the other side of the door at the top of the stairs.

  “Were you careful?”

  Sam’s eyebrows shot nearly through his hairline. Thomas and Pippa exchanged a glance, and Max barely managed to swallow her hot chocolate without choking on it. They knew that voice. It was Phoebe.

  “Very.”

  And that one: Hugo.

  “Do you think—do you think anyone knows?”

  “No. They might suspect. But they can’t possibly know. We took every precaution.”

  “But if Dumfrey finds out . . .”

  “Dumfrey won’t find out.”

  Thomas was holding his breath, and he could feel his lungs like two water-filled balloons in his chest. As far as he knew, Phoebe and Hugo never even spoke to each other, unless it was to inquire about who was performing first or where the talcum powder had got to.

  It was quiet for a moment—so quiet, he could hear a scuffling sound he couldn’t quite identify. A mouse poked its head out from between two crates just next to Pippa. Pippa’s eyes were tightly closed. Thomas knew she must be trying to think her way out through the door, into the minds of Hugo and Phoebe. Encouraged, the mouse advanced
forward, sniffing experimentally at her bare calves.

  Thomas opened his mouth to warn her, or try and frighten it off, but then Phoebe spoke again and he clamped it shut.

  “And you’re sure—you’re sure the money will be enough?” She sounded breathless.

  Even through the door, Thomas could hear the smile in Hugo’s voice. “My dear,” he said, “we will not have to worry about money for a long, long time.”

  At that moment several things happened. The mouse, having reached Pippa’s big toe and decided it looked (or smelled) sufficiently like a wedge of cheese, bit down; Pippa’s eyes flew open and she gasped, and kicked, and sent the mouse directly into the pot of cooling hot chocolate perched on the three-legged stool, where it landed with a small splash.

  “What’s that?” Phoebe cried from outside the door. “Did you hear that?”

  “Who’s there?” Hugo called out. Then, in a low voice: “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Good night, Phoebe.”

  The stairs creaked again, and Hugo and Phoebe’s footsteps receded. The mouse, now covered in chocolate, sat up contentedly and began grooming itself.

  “I guess I won’t have a refill,” Max said, making a face.

  With painstaking care, Sam lifted the mouse carefully from the pot by its tail and placed it on the ground after giving it a shake. The mouse squeaked in protest and scampered off, shooting Sam an injured look.

  Pippa exhaled a long breath. “That was close,” she said.

  “All that talk about money and Dumfrey . . .” Sam looked up at Thomas. “Do you think they had something to do with this mess?”

  “I don’t know.” Thomas shook his head. He had that feeling in his chest again: something bad was coming. “But I think we have to find out.”

  Thoughts of Phoebe and Hugo were soon to be driven straight out of Thomas’s head.

  He was outside even before the sun broke free of the horizon, when the air was still the dark purple of the velvet curtains in the Odditorium, when New York was at its quietest. From a high window across the street, a bunch of green-eyed tabbies—just a few of the dozens owned by Miss Groenovelt, the neighborhood cat lady—peered down at him in silence.

  He went west on Forty-Third Street, past Cupid’s Dance Hall, where the gutters were filled with lipstick-coated cigarette butts, stamped there by women who had stopped dancing only a few hours earlier; past Majestic Hardware, its vast display of tools glinting dully like metal teeth behind the dust-coated windows; past Sol’s candy store on the corner of Forty-Third and Ninth, shutters still rolled down tightly against the morning, its candy-striped awning rustling lightly in the wind. Garry, the night porter at the Hotel St. James, saluted solemnly, in the military fashion, as Thomas passed.

  Beyond Ninth Avenue, the neighborhood got dingier, the buildings sadder, with the scrawny, desperate look of beggars. Thomas kept his head down, barely registering the Salvation Army soup kitchen, which in a few hours would be crowded with people jostling for a bowl of soup and some bread, or the old Union Carriage Factory, now closed, its windows boarded up, its doors glued shut with caulk.

  His mind was turning over everything that had happened, from the death of the old woman to the theft of the head and Mr. Anderson’s staged suicide, discovered so soon by the police to be murder.

  That bugged him. It was a smart idea to make Mr. Anderson look like he’d killed himself because of worries about money. But it had been executed stupidly, carelessly. So the killer wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. Or maybe—the idea struck Thomas so hard that it stopped him in his tracks—maybe two people were responsible. Two people who plotted together, had worked together to steal the head, then planted Anderson’s card on Mr. Potts.

  Two people . . . like Hugo and Phoebe?

  He had this last, unsettling thought just as he reached the Hudson River. The gray surface of the water was stiff with small white peaks drawn up by the wind, like a large surface of whipped cream. Across the river, he saw the lights of New Jersey come on one by one. Thomas let the wind chase out thoughts of Hugo and Phoebe and worries about the museum, and instead watched the seagulls wheeling in the air.

  In moments like this—quiet moments—Thomas sometimes let himself think about his real parents: who they must have been and whether they were still alive. Sometimes he felt only a curious detachment when he thought of them; other times, a fierce, dull anger, like a rock burning at the bottom of his stomach; and occasionally, a kind of longing he had no name for, like the tug he felt hearing the last notes of a song he loved.

  The sun had finally broken loose of the buildings behind him, and orange light spread across the sky like a broken egg yolk flowing over a plate. Thomas realized he was hungry, and decided to go home to see what Mrs. Cobble was cooking, before he remembered that Mrs. Cobble had quit.

  He found a dime in the pocket of his stiff canvas jacket and decided to stop to buy eggs on his way back to the museum. The sun warmed his face and the knot in his stomach began to loosen. Maybe his premonition the night before, his sense that something terrible was coming, was wrong.

  Maybe everything would be okay after all.

  Sol was rolling up the metal shutters, revealing display cases filled with glistening rainbow-colored jawbreakers, thick slabs of taffy in every imaginable color, coiled ropes of licorice, and fudge wrapped in waxed paper. Thomas stopped to talk to him in the hopes of scoring a few free Peanut Chews, and so didn’t notice the dusty gold Buick sedan rolling slowly down the street, and the men within it, their battered hats pulled low over their eyes, their collars turned up as though against a hard wind.

  By the time Thomas reached the museum, the Buick was parked directly in front of the entrance. It was too early for visitors. The museum wouldn’t open for another few hours. Thomas took the steps two at a time and pushed open the door, which was unlocked.

  Then he froze.

  There was a strange and unpleasant smell in the air. It smelled like cheap aftershave and tobacco and faintly, just faintly, like sour milk.

  Thomas’s heart dove into his shoes. He knew that smell.

  Monsieur Cabillaud was sitting behind the ticket desk, nose to page with one of the vast, overflowing ledgers in which Mr. Dumfrey kept track of the accounts due and overdue, and surrounded on all sides by towering stacks of papers.

  “Where’s Mr. Dumfrey?” Thomas asked.

  Monsieur Cabillaud looked up, blinking blearily above the frame of his glasses. His eyes were red, as though he had been at it all night, and his tiny head was as shiny as polished wood. The bow tie he always wore was tilting dangerously to the left.

  “Dumfrey,” Thomas prompted.

  “Zat is zee very same thing ze police have wanted to know,” Monsieur Cabillaud said, frowning. “Do I look like Monsieur Dumfrey’s garde d’enfant? Go upstairs, I tell zem, and look for him yourself. Sacre bleu! It is enough work to try and keep a roof above our noses. . . .”

  Thomas didn’t bother to inform Monsieur Cabillaud that the correct expression was keep a roof above our heads. His heart, already in his shoes, had flattened through the soles of his feet when Cabillaud had mentioned the word police.

  He skidded through the entrance hall, under the familiar, weathered banner advertising Pinheads! Bearded Ladies! Alligator Men! Dwarves! NOVEL AND ASTOUNDING EXHIBITIONS! MORE THAN ONE THOUSAND CURIOSITIES! and sprinted down the central hallway, past the Hall of Worldwide Wonders, and to the performers’ staircase. He passed Miss Fitch on the second floor. Her face was as tight and pinched as the puckered end of a lemon.

  “Have you seen Mr. Potts?” she demanded, but Thomas didn’t even bother replying.

  “Thomas Able!” she cried as he shoved past her.

  “Sorry,” he panted out, even though he wasn’t.

  Just before he reached the third floor, he stopped and drew back. Mr. Dumfrey’s door was closed, and Thomas could just make out the murmur of voices. Pacing the small landing was Lieutenant Webb, chewing on the end of an unl
it cigar and occasionally spitting bits of tobacco onto the floor. Even inside, he wore his belted trench coat and hat, but Thomas could make out his eyes, glittering and hard, and the jutting angles of his forehead, like the skull of the Cro-Magnon Dumfrey had on display in the Hall of Worldwide Wonders.

  Thomas’s foot squeaked on the stair. Webb pivoted in his direction and Thomas retreated quickly, around the bend in the staircase and out of sight.

  He needed to hear what Hardaway—Thomas assumed it was Hardaway in the room with Dumfrey—was saying.

  He returned to the second floor and moved into the Hall of Wax. Just between the life-size figure of Benjamin Franklin signing the Declaration of Independence and the model of Adam and Eve confronting the serpent (an old garden hose painted to resemble a boa constrictor) was a large air vent. Thomas dislodged its grate easily, as he had many times before, and crawled headfirst into the walls.

  Thomas inched forward on his stomach, until he reached the air duct that fed directly into Mr. Dumfrey’s chambers. Using his hands and feet for purchase, he shimmied up the narrow metal tube, feeling, as always, a little bit like a chunk of food that was going the wrong way through someone’s throat. He could hear the rumble of voices through the metal and knew he was getting close.

  The air duct flattened out again, and he eased forward, pressing his nose against a small metal grate that was situated directly above Mr. Dumfrey’s overflowing desk. Lying on his stomach, nose squashed against the grate, he could see the shiny dome of Mr. Dumfrey’s head and the wisps of hair combed across it; he could see, too, the battered top of Assistant Chief Inspector Hardaway’s hat, which passed in and out of view, as Hardaway paced back and forth.

  “It looks bad for you, Dumfrey,” he was saying. “First your little group of freaks is sniffing around—”

  “They’re not freaks,” Mr. Dumfrey said sharply. “They’re extraordinary. And they weren’t sniffing around. I sent them to Mr. Anderson’s to conduct some business for me.”