I opened the door to a blast of yellow. Emma looked miserable in an enormous canary-colored dress with poufy sleeves and a hem that swam around her feet.
She sighed. “It was the lesser of many sartorial evils, I assure you.”
“You look like Big Bird,” I said, following her out of the bathroom, “and I look like Mr. Rogers. This Bentham is a cruel man.”
Both references were lost on her. Ignoring me, she crossed to the window and looked out.
“Yes. Good.”
“What’s good?” I said.
“This ledge. It’s the size of Cornwall, and there are handholds everywhere. Safer than a jungle gym.”
“And why would we care about the safety of the ledge?” I asked, joining her at the window.
“Because Sharon’s watching the hall, so obviously we can’t go out that way.”
Sometimes it seemed like Emma had whole conversations with me inside her head—ones I wasn’t privy to—and then she’d get frustrated that I was confused when she finally let me in on them. Her brain worked so quickly that once in a while it got ahead of itself.
“We can’t go anywhere,” I said. “We’ve got to meet Bentham.”
“And we will, but I’ll be hanged if I’m spending the next hour twiddling my thumbs in this room. Saintly Mr. Bentham is an exile living in Devil’s Acre, which means he’s likely a dangerous lowlife with a sordid past. I want to have a look ’round his house and see what we can find out. We’ll be back before anyone notices we’re gone. Word of honor.”
“Ah, good, a stealth operation. We’re dressed perfectly, then.”
“Very funny.”
I was in hard-soled shoes that made every footstep sound like a hammer blow, she was in a dress yellower than a hazard sign, and I’d only recently found the energy to stand on my own two feet—and yet I agreed. She was often right about these things, and I had come to depend on her instincts.
“If someone spots us, so be it,” she said. “The man’s waited eons to meet you, apparently. He’s not going to kick us out now for giving ourselves a little tour.”
She opened the window and climbed onto the ledge. I stuck my head out cautiously. We were two stories above an empty street in the “good” section of Devil’s Acre. I recognized a stack of firewood: it was where we’d been hiding when Sharon exited the abandoned-looking storefront. Directly below us was the law office of Munday, Dyson, and Strype. There was no such firm, of course. It was a front, a secret entrance to Bentham’s house.
Emma offered her hand to me. “I know you’re not a great fan of heights, but I won’t let you fall.”
After being dangled above a boiling river by a hollow, this little drop didn’t seem so frightening. And Emma was right—the ledge was wide, and decorative knobs and gargoyle faces protruded everywhere from the masonry, making natural handholds. I climbed out, grabbed on, and shimmied along after her.
When the ledge turned a corner, and we felt fairly certain that we were paralleling a hallway out of Sharon’s view, we tried opening a window.
It was locked. We shimmied on and tried the next one, but it, too, was locked—as were the third, fourth, and fifth windows.
“We’re running out of building,” I said. “What if none of them open?”
“This next one will,” Emma said.
“How do you know?”
“I’m clairvoyant.” And with that she kicked it, sending shattered glass into the room and tinkling down the front of the building.
“No, you’re a hoodlum,” I said.
Emma grinned at me and then knocked the last few shards from the frame with the flat of her hand.
She stepped through the opening. I followed, somewhat reluctantly, into a dark and cavernous room. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust. The only light came from the window shade we’d just broken, its puny glow revealing the edge of a packrat’s paradise. Wooden crates and boxes climbed to the ceiling in teetering stacks, leaving only a small aisle between them.
“I get the feeling Bentham doesn’t like to throw things away,” Emma said.
In reply, I released a rapid-fire triple sneeze. The air was swimming with dust. Emma blessed me and lit a flame in her hand, which she held up to the nearest crate. It was labeled Rm. AM-157.
“What do you think is in them?” I said.
“We’d need a crowbar to find out,” said Emma. “These are sturdy.”
“I thought you were clairvoyant.”
She made a face at me.
Lacking a crowbar, we ventured farther into the room, Emma enlarging her flame as we left the petering window light behind. The narrow path between the boxes led through an arched door and into another room, which was equally dark and nearly as cluttered. Instead of crates, it was crammed with bulky objects hidden beneath white dust covers. Emma was about to pull one away, but before she could I caught her arm.
“What’s wrong?” she said, annoyed.
“There might be something awful under there.”
“Yes, exactly,” she said, and tore away the cover, which scared up a cyclone of dust.
When the air cleared, we saw ourselves reflected dimly in a glass-topped case of the sort you find in museums, waist high and about four feet square. Inside, neatly arranged and labeled, were a carved coconut husk, a whale vertebra fashioned into a comb, a small stone axe, and a few other items, the usefulness of which wasn’t immediately obvious. A placard on the glass read Housewares Used by Peculiars on the Island of Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, South Pacific Region, circa 1750.