Thomas couldn’t have moved if he wanted to. He was terrified into utter stillness. Go away, he thought. Please just go away.
Potts began shoving aside furniture. Thomas’s whole body went white-hot with fear when Potts drew close to the bureau. Potts shoved the bureau away from the wall with a cry of “Aha!” But he didn’t think of opening the bottom drawer, where Thomas hid in thick and filthy-smelling darkness, sweating against the splinters.
And then it happened.
The sneeze—the sneeze Thomas had repressed and swallowed until it returned to wherever unsneezed sneezes go—came roaring back. It blew up his throat and exploded into his nasal passages. It reverberated through his whole body. There was no stopping it. It was a storm, a force—and when Thomas sneezed, the whole bureau sneezed, too, and shot out its bottom drawer like a giant wooden nose expelling snot.
And even as the echoes of the sneeze were still hanging in the air, as Thomas was wiping his nose with the back of his hand, shaken, exhausted from the force of that superhuman sneeze—even then, the looming shadow of Potts spread over him, and the stink of tobacco grew stronger.
“There’s the little worm,” Potts said, showing off all his rotten teeth. And he bent over and plucked Thomas up with one meaty hand.
“I’m very disappointed, Thomas,” Dumfrey said, shaking his head so that the skin underneath his chin wobbled—as though it, too, were disappointed. “Very disappointed indeed.”
“Caught in the act!” Potts bellowed. “Snuffling and sniffling in my underthings, the little weasel. He oughta be paddled raw as an almond!”
“That’s enough, Potts.” Dumfrey fixed him with a hard stare. His blue eyes glinted like ice. “You’ve made your grievances known. Now please leave us.”
Potts grumbled something that sounded like “muffin” but was probably far more unpleasant, and gave Thomas a final glare before stomping out of Dumfrey’s office.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Dumfrey’s voice softened. “What on earth were you doing?”
Thomas opened his mouth to reply, but just then the door flew open and Pippa hurled into the room, breathless.
“It was my fault, sir,” she said. “I told him to do it.”
Thomas stared at Pippa. He was shocked—grateful, too. He’d never thought Pippa would take the blame for anything.
“Is that true, Thomas?” Mr. Dumfrey asked quietly.
Before Thomas could reply, the door once again banged open, this time with such force that an oil portrait of a young Dumfrey—looking almost exactly like an old Dumfrey, except with more hair and fewer chins—tumbled off the wall with a clatter.
“Don’t listen to Pippa.” Sam was standing in the doorway, wide-eyed. “It was my idea.” He noticed the toppled painting and winced. “Sorry, Mr. Dumfrey.”
Dumfrey frowned and settled back in his chair. “Explain.”
“I—I—well . . . ,” Sam stuttered.
Pippa balled up her fists and then released them. “It’s a long story. . . .”
Thomas jumped in. “It’s about the head, sir.”
“The head?” Dumfrey’s eyes seemed to triple in size behind his glasses.
Now Thomas felt himself falter. Dumfrey’s gaze was like that: it turned your knees to noodles. “It’s just that we thought . . .”
“It seemed possible . . . ,” Pippa chimed in.
“It seemed probable,” Thomas corrected.
“That Potts might have . . . ,” Pippa said.
“Or must have . . . ,” Thomas amended.
“Stolen it,” Sam finished.
“Eighty-two and a half percent of all store burglaries are committed by an employee,” Thomas blurted out. “I read it.”
There was a long moment of silence, punctuated only by a loud, disapproving squawk from Cornelius. Dumfrey removed his glasses. With one end of his purple tie, he began polishing them. “Anderson was right,” he murmured. “That head has brought nothing but trouble.”
Thomas felt a small tingle of alarm race up his back. Anderson . . . he had heard that name before. . . .
No. He had seen it—on a piece of paper in Potts’s room.
“Anderson, sir?” he prompted, trying not to sound too curious. Pippa shot him a puzzled glance.
Dumfrey barely looked at him. “Arthur Anderson. Anderson’s Delights. Ever heard of it? No? He’s the one who sold me the blasted head in the first place. A good friend of mine, even though he’s an awful cheat. Once tried to pass off a yellow-painted penny as a recovered Spanish gold coin. Shameless! He warned me that the head was bad luck. I thought he was just saying that so I would sell it back to him . . . but he was right; he was right.”
Thomas felt like exploding from excitement. “Sorry, Mr. D., it was all a big mistake,” he said quickly, plastering on a smile. He grabbed Pippa’s arm and started hauling her backward toward the door. Sam took the hint and followed them. “Won’t happen again, we promise you.”