“I think we’ll take the back door today,” he said lightly. But he wasn’t smiling.
The back door opened up from the kitchen into a grungy courtyard set six feet below street level and filled with trash bins and glass seltzer bottles. It was, thankfully, empty of press and of onlookers. Forty-Fourth Street was also free and clear, except for a spiffily dressed man walking a pair of poodles and a blues singer busking for change at the corner. Hardly anyone but the milkman knew about the museum’s back entrance, which was unmarked. Thomas led the way, then Max; Pippa followed her, and Sam took up the rear, hunching his chin to his chest and trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. Pippa hugged her thin jacket more closely around herself.
It was a pretty spring day, and the sun was perched high and round on a pillow of fluffy clouds, but the cold came from deep inside. Everything had changed overnight. They were trapped like specimens in their own museum, while people made up stories and lies about them. They might as well be pinned behind glass.
And poor Mr. Dumfrey . . .
They walked two blocks east before cutting downtown, passing into an area thick with dazzling marquees and Broadway theaters, women in massive fur coats despite the weather, and newsies hawking papers on the corners; ticket booths and music halls and the smell of roasted peanuts. Here no one glanced at them at all, and Pippa began to feel a little better.
It was just before they reached the Times Square subway entrance when it happened. They were passing underneath a vast network of scaffolding. Dizzyingly high above them, Pippa could see men drilling and pacing the roofs, and the air was loud with the sound of jackhammers and shouting. Sam stopped to tie his shoelaces and Pippa paused a few feet in front of him, craning her neck, staring up at the buildings rising hugely toward the sky, like fingers pointing the way to something.
On the scaffolding forty feet above their heads, a dark shape teetered. At first Pippa thought a person had slipped or jumped; then her heart stopped and she saw that a vast concrete block was tumbling through the air toward Sam.
“Sam!” she screamed.
Sam looked up and covered his head just in time. The concrete block hit his fists and shattered on impact. Pippa ducked as a chunk of stone came flying in her direction.
Thomas and Max came dashing back toward them. Thomas hooked Sam under the arm and tried to lift him to his feet. “Are you all right?”
Sam gently detached himself from Thomas’s grip. “I’m fine,” he said. His face was white, and he looked dazed, but he stood up, shaking his head. He flexed his fingers, wincing. “What happened?” he said. “Where did it come from?”
Pippa shook her head. “It—it must have fallen,” she said. The sidewalk was covered now with concrete fragments. Businessmen hurried past them, shooting the children aggravated looks, as though they had been the cause of the mess. The block that had fallen must have been the size of a car tire.
Thomas looked up. The workers on the roof were still dark shadows against the sun. No one shouted down to them. No one seemed to notice that the block had fallen. “The angle is wrong,” Thomas said.
“What?” Sam was dusting himself off. The shattered concrete had left a fine film of white powder all over his clothes.
“If it fell,” Thomas said, “it would have hit there.” He pointed to a spot closer by several feet to the building from where Sam had been kneeling.
“So what are you saying?” Pippa’s voice sounded especially high-pitched, even to her ears.
“I’m saying”—Thomas turned to her—“it was pushed.”
Sam laughed uneasily. “I could have been killed.”
“Would have been, if you was normal,” Max said.
“Were normal,” Pippa corrected.
“Maybe that was the idea,” Thomas said.
“Come on, Thomas.” Sam crossed his arms. “Who’d do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas scanned the sky, as though expecting more danger to come tumbling down out of the air. “Let’s not stick around to find out.”
Pippa turned and cast one last glance at the scaffolding and the dark silhouettes of workers on the roof. For a second, she thought she saw a man in a long coat watching them, standing motionless at the exact spot from which the concrete block had fallen. But then she blinked, and he was gone.