“A celebration?” Philippa repeated.
“My dear child,” Mr. Dumfrey said as he crossed the room and filled a kettle from the tap in the corner, then plunked it down on the electric hot plate perched precariously on an overstuffed leather stool. “Mrs. Weathersby did us a tremendous favor this evening. One look at the shrunken head, and she was struck down with terror! She collapsed under the fierce gaze of its eyes! And to think that Bill Evans was right there to witness it . . . really most convenient. He used to be one of the best of his kind, you know. Broke the story of the great stock market crash even before the stockbrokers knew about it! Of course, his name doesn’t mean what it used to. He got into some trouble because of his fondness for the—you know.” Mr. Dumfrey whistled and made a drinking motion with his thumb and pinkie finger. “But even so. Most exceptionally fortuitous!”
As he spoke, Mr. Dumfrey reached for the tin of cocoa powder but grabbed instead a tin of cyanide—once used as evidence in the infamous Morrison murder trial—in his distraction.
Thomas scrambled to his feet and plucked the cyanide out of Mr. Dumfrey’s hand, replacing it with the correct tin. Mr. Dumfrey patted him on the head absently.
“I thought the old lady had ate something bad,” Max said. “And that’s why she keeled over.”
“Eaten, my dear,” Mr. Dumfrey said, now setting down five mugs on his desk. “You thought the old lady had eaten something bad. And she did—trout, she told me, from Corrigan’s Chophouse. Poor thing. No wonder she dropped so fast. You can get food poisoning just from reading the menu!” Mr. Dumfrey roused himself and smiled. “Ah, well. But the point is they don’t know that, do they?”
“Who’s they?” Philippa asked. She loved Mr. Dumfrey dearly, but his mind, it seemed to her, was like one of those Chinese knots that Thomas often worked his way out of in his solo acts: strings all over, everything a tangled mess.
Mr. Dumfrey’s eyes grew dreamy and unfocused. “The public,” he said in a hushed voice. “The vast and hungry public. They need us, you see. They’re starving. They’re dying! They hunger for the tiniest spark, the kindling to their imagination, the stories to light their brains and hearts on fire!” By this time, the kettle was shrieking, and the sound roused Mr. Dumfrey from his reverie.
“And by golly, we’ll give it to them,” he said cheerfully. “The Curse of the Shrunken Head. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I thought so. And so did Bill Evans. Now be a good girl, Pippa, and help me spoon out the cocoa.”
“Cocoa, cocoa, cocoa!” Cornelius repeated, ruffling his feathers in a satisfied way.
Sam woke up the next morning to an unfamiliar sound. At first he thought it must have been raining, a terrible rain that sounded like fists pounding on glass.
But no. It couldn’t be raining. Sunlight was filtering through the attic windows, lighting up dust motes revolving lazily in the musty air and skating over the jumble of bookshelves and costume racks, bureaus and old trunks, scattered clothing and squashy clothes. And then he realized that the sound was not coming from the attic but from one of the lower floors. Having never known rain to fall upward, he sat up carefully, intending to go investigate. Mr. Dumfrey’s latest gift to him, The Illustrated Guide to Pet Care and Management, slid off his lap.
On the other side of the bookcase, he could hear the new girl, Max, snoring. He thought the noise was kind of cute. Like a baby pig in hay—or at least what he imagined a baby pig would sound like. He considered telling her that, then immediately thought better of it. Sam didn’t know much about girls, but he figured that most of them wouldn’t appreciate being compared to a pig, even a baby one. Especially not Max.
She was quite a girl, Max was.
He changed clothes, pulling on a pair of his softest pants and a T-shirt and deliberately avoided his reflection in the standing mirror wedged next to his bed. He didn’t want to see how many pimples had sprouted overnight. He combed his hair carefully forward with his fingers.
The rain that wasn’t rain was still ongoing. If anything, it was even worse.
Just as Sam was shoving his feet into a pair of beat-up canvas shoes, Thomas burst through a grate in the floor, nearly toppling him. Sam reached for the chest of drawers to steady himself and accidentally ripped out a huge chunk of wood. Great.
“You’ve got to see this,” Thomas said. His eyes were shining. Even his freckles looked more pronounced, as they did whenever he got excited.
Sam exhaled and unclenched his fingers, and saw the wood had become mere splinters and sawdust. Double great. At this rate, Mr. Dumfrey was never going to let him have a pet termite, much less a hamster or a dog.