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?