The Museum of Extraordinary Things(89)

Mr. Weiss was waiting on the concrete steps outside his building, wearing a winter coat, though it would be summer in a matter of days. Eddie sat beside him, the wolf at their feet. When Eddie confirmed that the murderer had been caught, Weiss nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “I knew you’d find him.”

“Yet I feel I’ve failed.” Hannah was still dead. Harry Block was still in the mansion on Sixty-second Street.

“Every good man feels that he’s failed.”

Eddie grimaced. He shook his head. “That’s not me. Good would never be a proper term.”

“Your father told me that you were. That was why I came to you.” Weiss seemed extremely sure of himself. “You know why I believed him?”

Eddie shrugged. “Because you pray with him each morning and a man you pray with is one you believe?”

“God is the only one I pray with,” Weiss corrected him.

“So maybe you trust my father because you grew up in the same town and you worked together.”

“Those things are true, but they have nothing to do with my faith in your father. In the town where we grew up, one boy slit his brother’s throat and another stole from his own grandmother so that he could flee to Paris. Coming from the same town means nothing. I’ve worked with many men I wouldn’t even speak to if I passed them on the street. Mules work together, so do men, it means nothing as well. I have faith in your father because he’s a good man, and like every good man, he, too, has failed. But I can tell you this, he knows what it means to be a human being.”

“To be a failure?”

Weiss sputtered out a laugh. His beard had turned white in a matter of months. He clapped Eddie on the back. “To forgive,” he said. “As he’s forgiven you.”





NINE



* * *





THE GIRL WHO COULD FLY


**********





MY FATHER locked me in my room. When he discovered that the coffin had been stolen he informed me that he had never been as disappointed in his life, or as betrayed. He found me in the yard and confronted me, but I blamed the liveryman, as I was meant to do. Perhaps I wasn’t convincing, for my father seemed to know I was no longer under his command. He may have noticed my expression of longing as I watched Eddie disappear with the liveryman. He tricked me into admitting I had gone to Manhattan without his permission by saying he’d had me followed. He was a liar, but he knew how to get the truth out of people. When I stumbled over my words, stating I had indeed traveled to Manhattan because I thought I needed to return the camera the photographer had left behind, my father shouted that I was a woman of deceit. He changed in a moment, before my eyes, his face filling with rage. Was this my thanks to him, for raising and caring for me? I promised him that nothing had happened, but he shook his head. Why should he believe me now? How could he know whether or not I’d been ruined by this man in Manhattan, and if I’d given myself freely to a worthless individual?



He did not speak to me all the next day, but in the evening he told me to bathe in cold water, which I did, using the lye soap he left out for me. He put out my robe for me, which I slipped on. He waited in the corridor and had me follow him downstairs. In the parlor the cereus plant looked ghostly and green in the evening light. I’d always thought of it as a bundle of sticks, but now it seemed possessed with life, and I could have sworn it moved toward me, as if in warning. I had lived with it my whole life and had never once seen it bloom. I had thought the plant to be a burden, and yet I felt a certain connection to this wretched specimen, for I’d cared for it for so long. Perhaps plants knew gratitude, as humans did, and remembered kindness as well as cruelty.

My father led me through his library, into the museum. I thought of how I had so longed to enter it and know its secrets when I was a child. How intrigued I’d been when I’d been made to sit upon the stair where I could only peer through the dark to glimpse the many curiosities displayed inside. I had thought my father could make miracles, but I was wrong. He could only possess them.

My father gestured that I should go on without him. “We’ll see if you’re a liar or if you’re still my daughter,” he said in a cold tone.

When I went inside the exhibition hall, the Professor closed the door behind me. I heard the click of a lock. A man was waiting there. This was most unusual. I paled when I saw him. He rose from his chair to greet me.

“You needn’t worry,” he assured me. “I’m a physician.” There was an urgency in his tone that caused me to worry. “Doctors are privy to all sorts of secrets hidden from other men.”

He came forward, and there was that same urgency in his step. I hoped he didn’t take note of the scent of my fear, for they say that terror makes a person weaker, and I did not wish to be at anyone’s mercy.

“Your father has called upon me to judge your physical well-being.”

“I’m quite well,” I informed him. “I don’t need a physician.” There was the beat of my pulse at the base of my throat, the same throb of panic I’d felt when I stepped into the cage at Dreamland.

“I’m afraid that you do. Your father is worried. He reports that you’ve made the acquaintance of a man in an improper way.”

I felt burning hot, even though the room was chilly. “There was nothing improper.” I began to understand what my father had meant when he declared I was ruined. He believed I’d given myself to Eddie, and, in every sense but the physical act, I had.