“All right,” Sam said with a sigh, looking more like a sad stretched piece of taffy than ever. “Let’s go home.”
On the corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street, Sam stopped to tie his shoes for at least the third time that day. Max waited for him impatiently, shifting her weight, both dreading what they would have to say to Pippa and Thomas and eager to get it over with.
They had paused in front of Paulie’s—a restaurant so grubby that they had skipped over it entirely. Even Potts couldn’t have been tempted to eat there. Through grease-streaked windowpanes, Max saw a dozen people huddled like refugees over their plates.
Down the street, Max noticed a woman wearing an enormous hat and a fur collar, despite the sunny April weather. She was distributing fliers and jabbering at a high volume to everyone who passed, although Max could not make out what she said. And on the opposite side of the street, coming from the direction of Eighth Avenue—
“Pippa!” she called out, waving. “Thomas!”
They looked just as tired and discouraged as she felt. Thomas had a dusting of white plaster in his hair, which made him look like an old man. Pippa’s dress, normally stiff and starched and perfect, was splattered with mud and torn at the hem.
“What happened to you?” Max and Pippa asked, at the exact same time.
“I asked first,” they said again, together.
“We lost them,” Thomas said. “We followed them halfway across the city and back again, in and out of shops, then down to Fourteenth Street, and—poof! They disappeared.”
“Disappeared where?” Max asked.
“If we knew that—” Thomas started to say. But by that point the woman with the fliers had advanced even farther down the street, and Max made out, finally, what she was saying.
“These poor, helpless children,” she wailed as she shoved pamphlets in the hands of passersby. “Extraordinary and underappreciated! Uneducated! Underfed! Overexploited and worked half to death, like plow mules. It’s an outrage, and Mr. Dumfrey must be held accountable. . . .”
“Uh-oh,” Max muttered. She felt like she was frozen and watching a steam engine bear down on her. But before she could squeak out a single word of warning, the woman’s eyes pivoted in her direction—small, beady eyes set deep in a face as pink as a baby’s scrubbed bottom.
“You!” she cried, her eyes gleaming as she took in Thomas and his dusty hair, Max’s ragged coat, Sam with one shoe untied, and Pippa’s torn and ragged dress. “How remarkable! How extraordinary! Which one of you is Sam? Aha—the little one is Thomas! And this must be Philippa, and Mackenzie.”
“Max,” Max said, but the woman ignored her.
“It’s really an incredible coincidence,” the woman said. “I’ve just been talking about all of you—you poor, poor things. Are you cold? Or too hot? Can I get you anything to eat?”
Max was hungry, actually, but she kept her mouth shut.
“Who are you?” Thomas said.
The woman laughed, a laugh as shrill as the whistle from a steam pipe. “How silly. Of course. I haven’t introduced myself. It’s just as though I feel we know each other . . . My name is Andrea von Stikk.” She paused, as if waiting for her words to take effect. “Of the Von Stikk Society for Children’s Welfare? Of Von Stikk’s Home for Extraordinary Children?” She looked at them expectantly, and, when no one said a word, shook her head and sighed. “Poor creatures. You really have been terribly undereducated. But all that will be sorted out quickly when we get you into our home. We have a wonderful school, of course, and programs for educating young boys and girls in over a dozen fields of work. . . .”
Max heard several words she disliked strongly: for example, work and school.
“Now, come along,” the woman said, and spread her arms as though she intended to wrap them in a hug—another thing Max hated. “Let’s find somewhere decent to sit and talk.”
As she said the word decent, she cast a disapproving glance at Paulie’s restaurant, and it gave Max an idea.
“Sorry,” Max blurted. “We’re in a rush. Important business.”
“Business?” Andrea chirped primly, as if she’d never heard the word.
“Places to go, people to see, bodies to bury—you know, the usual. Anyways, nice to meet you, see you never, and thanks for the chat.” As Max spoke, she took Pippa by the arm and hauled her into Paulie’s. Thomas and Sam hurried after them.
“But wait!” Andrea shrieked. “You can’t go in there! It simply isn’t suitable for childr—”
The door swung shut behind them, blocking out the sound of her outraged voice. And, as Max had expected, she didn’t follow them into Paulie’s. She wouldn’t dare.