“It means,” Pippa said, with a superior-sounding sniff, “that Mr. Dumfrey’s been keeping us prisoner.”
“That’s bunk,” Max said. “Mr. Dumfrey saved us.” She watched Danny drift into the kitchen, his worried face barely level with the table; and Smalls, gripping a coffee mug, which in his enormous hand looked like a doll’s teacup; and Monsieur Cabillaud with his scarf carelessly arranged around his tiny head. They belonged here, all of them. It was probably the first place they had ever belonged in their whole lives.
She, Max, belonged here, too.
“Listen.” Thomas dropped his voice to a whisper. “Something happened last night.” Gesturing for them all to lean in, he explained what he had seen and overheard the night before. Then, leaning back, he said, “I have a plan.”
“Big surprise,” Max grumbled.
He acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “We’re going to have to split up. Max and I will follow Hugo and Phoebe. Sam and Pippa can try and figure out where Potts was on Wednesday night and who he was with.”
“I think Max should come with me,” Sam said immediately. “In case we need to, um, interrogate someone. Or intimidate someone. Or both.”
Max rolled her eyes, even though secretly, she was pleased that Sam thought she was intimidating.
“Fine,” Thomas said smoothly. “Pip and I’ll follow Hugo and Phoebe, then. We’ll meet back here later. Everyone got it?”
Pippa sighed. “Got it.”
Sam smiled. “Got it.”
“Got it.” Max popped a saltine into her mouth and pocketed another for the road.
There were over two dozen bars, pubs, restaurants, and luncheonettes in the area immediately surrounding the museum, ranging from the decent to the disreputable to the disgusting, and it turned out Potts had, at some point or another, eaten, drunk, or gambled in nearly all of them.
Max had cooked up their cover story: they would pretend to be looking to track down their uncle and would give a description of Potts when asked what their uncle looked like. This required that they pose as brother and sister, an idea Sam initially resisted. But people would be more likely to talk, Max argued, if there was no question of murder, feeling proud of herself for thinking of it. Thomas wasn’t the only brainy one in the group.
“I still don’t see why we have to be related,” Sam grumbled, after leaving Momma Maroon’s Luncheonette, where the proprietor, an enormously fat woman with a face as red as an apple and thick eyeglasses, had said she could see the family resemblance perfectly.
Up and down the streets, into bars where the air was vibrating with smoke and foul smells, and restaurants where grubby-looking men were bent over thick bowls of soup and the floors were covered in peanut shells; hour after hour of the same response. Yeah, sure. He sounds familiar. But haven’t seen him in a few weeks at least. Sorry, kids. Better luck next time.
“I’m starting to hate that word,” Sam said on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street, after their latest failure. “Luck.”
Max kicked a trash can in frustration, and a stray cat leaped out from its depths and bared its teeth before slinking away. “This is crazy,” she said. She had been excited to set out. But that was hours ago, and her saltine and cheese had long since been digested. She was hungry, and her feet hurt, and her jacket was making her hot. “He could have gone anywhere, with anyone, in the whole stupid city.”
“We can’t give up now,” Sam said, but he sounded just as tired as she felt.
“What are we supposed to do?” Max said. “We’ve been at it for hours already.” Max shoved her hands in her pockets. She was enraged and she didn’t know why. She tried to direct her anger at Sam, but it didn’t work. He looked tall and saggy and exhausted, like a piece of taffy that has been overstretched, and she could only feel bad for him.
Instead, she pushed her anger outward, onto the whole world, expanding it until it grew like a mist to cover everything around her. The world, Max felt, was an evil, rotten, pit of a place. Exhibit 1: She’d been dumped like a discarded banana peel by her own parents. Exhibit 2: She barely remembered the orphanage where she’d landed, but she did remember cages, like for animals, and people inside them, and darkness. Exhibit 3: Her foster mother took her in just to have someone to scrub her linens and wash out her toilet bowl, and Max had run away. Exhibits 4 through 87: She had lived on the streets and raised herself, learned to pickpocket and steal, memorized the best places to sleep so she wouldn’t get chased off by the cops, made friends with the rats.
And the last, final proof: she had finally found a place where she was safe, and that, too, was in danger.