Sam stepped back from the window, his heart beating very fast.
At ten o’clock, when Mr. Dumfrey still hadn’t returned, Monsieur Cabillaud wrapped his small head in a voluminous scarf, straightened his bow tie, and affixed a small gold pin to the front of his lapel, which he had allegedly earned for secret acts of bravery related to the Belgian government.
“I, Monsieur Cabillaud, will go and speak to your American police,” he said grandly. “I will tell zem that zey have made a gravest error.”
At ten thirty, Miss Fitch appeared in the attic, and in a shrill voice commanded everyone to go to bed. But no sooner had she left the room than Monsieur Cabillaud burst into the room, his bow tie crooked, his scarf in disarray, his face drained of color.
“It is too late,” he panted out, leaning against the doorway, sucking in deep breaths of air. “Zee police have arrested Mr. Dumfrey. Zey have arrested him for zee murder of Mr. Potts.”
“Evans,” Thomas announced the next morning, slapping a folded newspaper down on the foot of Pippa’s bed.
“Good morning to you, too,” she mumbled, sitting up. For a second, she thought that everything that had happened yesterday—Potts’s death, the police, Mr. Dumfrey’s arrest—must have been part of a horrible dream. She rubbed her eyes and the attic came into focus, as did the newspaper headline.
DERANGED PROFESSOR RATTIGAN STILL MISSING FROM PRISON.
“Who’s Professor Rattigan?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Oops.” Thomas flipped the paper over, and Pippa saw an even larger headline, trumpeted practically across the whole page.
MURDER MUSEUM!
DEATH STRIKES AGAIN AT DUMFREY’S HOUSE OF HORRORS!
by Bill Evans
“What did that skunk write about us now?” Max, who was still in her pajamas, said.
“About what you’d expect. Dumfrey went crazy over the stolen head. Thought Potts might be to blame. So Dumfrey killed him. And we’re all in on it.” Thomas frowned and was quiet for several moments. “We have to go see him,” he announced.
“Dumfrey?” Pippa asked.
Thomas shook his head. “Evans.”
“Are you crazy?” Max burst out. “No way. He hates us.”
“He doesn’t hate us,” Thomas said. “He’s just trying to sell papers.”
“Well, I hate him.” Max crossed her arms.
“Listen.” Thomas lowered his voice. “We’ve got to help Mr. Dumfrey. We all know there’s no way he killed Potts, right? But somebody did. And Evans can help us. He’s been sniffing around this story from the start. He has the facts.”
Max made a harrumphing sound but said nothing. In the quiet, Pippa heard Sam snoring peacefully on the other side of the bookcase that divided the girls’ sleeping area from the boys’. She wondered how he could sleep so well after everything that had happened.
“Mr. Dumfrey would do it for us,” Thomas said, this time turning pleadingly to Pippa. His hair, she noticed, was sticking almost straight up from his head. “Mr. Dumfrey would do anything for us. He treats us like family. He is family.”
“But . . .” Pippa shook her head. Thinking of Mr. Dumfrey in jail made her feel angry and hopeless and then angry again. Who would warm his slippers by the radiator for him? Who would make sure he remembered not to eat any chocolate before bedtime? Would he even get any chocolate? “How can we help him? What are we supposed to do? We’re nobodies.”
Thomas cracked a smile. “We’re the freaks of Dumfrey’s Dime Museum,” he said. “That has to count for something.”
Max stood up, scrubbing her eyes with a fist. “All right,” she said. “But don’t blame me if Evans ends up with a knife between his tongue and his tonsils.”
Pippa forced a small smile back. “You in, Sam?” she asked, raising her voice.
He grunted something that sounded like “steel leaping” but she recognized as “still sleeping.” Thomas grabbed a copy of Statistics for Everybody and chucked it over the bookcase. It landed with a thunk.
“Ow!” Sam exclaimed. A second later his head appeared over the bookshelf. “What was that for?” he asked.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Pippa said. This time, she smiled for real.
Getting out of the museum proved more difficult than Pippa had expected. No sooner had she opened the front door than an explosion of voices began screeching—“There she is! That’s one of ’em!”—and she was blinded by a series of flashes as dozens of cameras went off simultaneously. Sam leaned over and shoved the door closed so forcefully, it rattled on its frame.