I breathed heavily, staring at the gap, waiting for the creature to appear. Nothing happened. Still rubbing the back of my head, I peeked in again to find the seven-foot skeleton of an alligator, suspended on cables from the ceiling. I had let Mr. Jackaby’s talk of the supernatural infiltrate my imagination. The bony beast above me was no more dangerous than the ones in the natural history museum back home.
I pulled the laboratory’s door shut with a squeak and turned to the spiral staircase. Willing myself to calm down and breathe evenly, I climbed the steps up to a poorly lit hallway on the second floor.
Feeling even more like a prowler in the semidarkness, I tried the first door on my right, hoping for a little light from the windows. I found, instead, precarious towers of treasures, trash, and bric-a-brac. A mounted stag’s head had been propped up against an expensive, newfangled phonograph, an assortment of silk neckties draped over the bell. Chess sets toppled into tea sets, and tea sets into toolboxes. A bed was nearly hidden beneath the bulk of the collection. Some light, at least, petered past the towering clutter, so I left the door open as I crossed to the room opposite.
This door opened to a bedroom that must have been the same size, but it felt easily twice as large because it was immaculately tidy. The bed had fresh linens and was topped with a plush comforter. Curtains with lace edging hung closed at the window, and as I crossed the floor to open them, I was startled by a sharp gasp. I turned to look for its source, my eyes straining to make out anything in the darkness. I threw back the curtains and whipped around. I was alone in the room, but the tingling in my spine was back, and rapidly creeping up my neck. My heart pounded.
“Hello?” I squeaked. “Is someone there?”
Across the hallway, one of the piles shifted. A silver saucer slid away from its service and to the floorboards with a clang. It rolled past the doorway and just out of view down the hall, where it revolved to a ringing stop.
There had been no gasp, just the sound of shifting clutter. I stepped into the hallway to retrieve the dish. The bedroom door slammed shut at my heels, and I spun. The light beneath the door vanished, exactly as though the curtains beyond had been pulled quickly shut, and I was caught by an icy chill.
In my rush to return to the well-lit office on ground level, I discovered that it is exceedingly difficult to bound both rapidly and gracefully down a spiral staircase while wearing a dress. As a result, my return to the first floor was executed in a thoroughly undignified somersault. My shoulder aching and my hair a tangled mess, I found my feet at last, and retreated to the safety of the office.
I took the seat behind the desk and waited for the tingles to leave my spine and my pulse to return to normal. A dusty chalkboard stood against the wall. I tried to make out any words, but they had been smeared to obscurity, if they had ever been legible at all. Several notes had been circled and connected in a sort of web, but all that remained now were the ghosts of the lines.
Ghosts.
I glanced up at the ceiling. Directly above me sat the impeccably tidy room with its polished floors and neatly tucked bed. And something else.
I shook my head. It wasn’t that I did not believe in ghosts; it was that I believed in them in the same noncommittal way that I believed in giant squids or lucky coins or Belgium. They were things that probably existed, but I had never had any occasion to really care one way or another. I had never given ghosts much thought—except, perhaps, as a frightened child gazing into shadows at bedtime.
Jackaby, I was rapidly discovering, had a way of opening that corner of my brain. It was a quiet little corner in which I had lived when I was younger. It was a corner in which anything was possible, where magic was not an improbable daydream, but an obvious fact—if still only just out of reach. In those days I had known there must be monsters in the world, but I would happily accept them, knowing that, by the same logic, there must also be wizards and wands and flying carpets. I had never really closed that part of my mind, just slowly stopped visiting it as I grew older. I had left it unlocked like the jumbled treasure room upstairs, waiting for someone to come poking about.
Where was Jackaby? Surely he should have returned by now. I thought about Swift and all those steps, but even the hobbling commissioner must have reached the room after such a wait. I found the mason jar, which Jackaby—or one of his previous assistants—had indiscreetly labeled BAIL MONEY in bold letters, and pulled it off the shelf. Stuffed in wads and rolls, there must have been over two hundred dollars in the thing! I gawped at the sum. How much should I bring? I had never bailed anyone out of jail before. I wouldn’t feel safe walking down the street with half a year’s wages in my pockets.
Fortunately, before I had to make a decision, I heard the lobby door bang shut. I tucked the jar back on the shelf and zigzagged quickly down the crooked hallway. Jackaby had just hung his hat beside mine on the rack when I poked my head into the lobby.
“Oh, hello, Miss Rook. Had a chance to look around a bit?”
“Just a bit,” I hedged.
“Good, good.” He hung up the scarf, which dangled nearly to the floor, but kept his bulky coat on for the time being. “While you’ve been relaxing, I have descried invaluable evidentiary information that may prove essential to our investigation.”
“What?”
“I found something. Come with me.”
Chapter Ten
Jackaby filled me in on the details of his return to room 301 as we walked back down the crooked hallway. He had been able to successfully slip in and out without detection, and had uncovered a few papers of interest.
Arthur Bragg had produced reams of scribbled notes, most kept in his own shorthand. Amid the papers on his desk were details of recent political debates and annotated minutes from city hall meetings. He had notes from interviews with Mayor Spade and with Commissioner Swift. Both men, as best Jackaby could tell from his quick glance at Bragg’s shorthand, were discussing the upcoming mayoral election.
“Sounds like Detective Cane was right,” I said. “Bragg must have been Commissioner Swift’s connection at the newspaper.”
“So it would seem.”
“I see why Swift was so angry about it being right under his nose! It wasn’t just a murder in his city—he let his personal newsman get killed before his free publicity even hit the stands.”
“Yes, well, it seems Mr. Bragg had been looking into something else as well.”
Jackaby reached the end of the hallway and gave the door to his laboratory a shove. It squeaked open, and he pushed past whatever had been blocking it, sending several ripe red apples rolling across the carpet.
“Oh, blast, it’s overflowing again,” he muttered, ducking absently under the skeletal alligator as he plowed in. “Mind your step. Help yourself to an apple if you like.”