Escape to the World's Fair Read online

  “So he’s inside?” Jack asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” the bored man replied. But then something caught his eye behind Frances. “Hey!” he yelled. “You can’t just run inside, kid!”

  Instinctively Frances turned back to check on Harold. He was gone!

  “That little redhead kid just ran inside the fun house!” the man snapped. “He has to pay ten cents!”

  “Look, I’ll go get him,” Frances explained.

  The man leaned out of his booth and looked Frances up and down. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, going around dressed like that,” he said.

  The last thing Frances wanted to discuss right now was her boys’ clothes. “Sir, I’ll just go inside and fetch my brother—”

  Just then Alexander stepped up alongside her. “How she dresses is none of your business!” he said to the man indignantly.

  Now Frances felt even more self-conscious with Alexander coming to her defense. Were her silly pants going to cause a scene while Harold was getting himself into trouble inside the fun house? “Never mind!” she muttered, and darted inside.

  “And you have to pay ten cents. . . .” Frances heard the man call after her.

  “Harold!” Frances called. “What are you doing?”

  After a moment, Alexander joined her, followed by Jack and Eli.

  “That’s fifty cents you all owe me!” the man at the front yelled.

  The four of them made their way down a dark corridor until they came to a doorway. Frances started to go in, but suddenly a figure appeared right in front of her and she leapt back. “Yikes!”

  But the figure was her own reflection. And behind her, Jack’s reflection.

  “It’s a mirror,” Jack said. “A maze of mirrors!”

  They all began to walk slowly through the maze. “Harold!” Frances called again. She spotted him once, though the mirrors made it look like there were four Harolds.

  “Ow!” Alexander called. “I just bumped into another mirror that I thought was a doorway!”

  “I know! This place is making me seasick!” Eli said.

  “I’m over here, Frannie,” Harold called. Frances followed his voice until she finally found him near the end of the maze. Then, one by one, the three boys joined them.

  “I’m sorry!” Harold cried. “I wanted to get away from the clown!”

  “I know, but you’re getting us all into trouble!” Frances told him.

  “We have to get out of here somehow,” Jack insisted. “We didn’t pay admission, and if the Fair guards catch us we’ll likely get kicked out of the Fair! Then we’ll never find Moses McGee.”

  Alexander snapped his fingers. “I think I saw a door out of here! One of the mirrors had a doorknob in it, right at the height where a doorknob should be. It’s just a little ways back there. . . . I mean, I think. It’s hard to tell in a place like this.”

  “What if we close our eyes and just feel along the wall?” Jack suggested. “That way our eyes won’t trick us.”

  “Good idea!” Frances said. “But we have to be fast.” She could hear voices coming from the direction of the entrance (or what she thought was the direction of the entrance, at least).

  “I’ll lead,” Alexander said. He squinted his eyes shut and went step by step sideways down the corridor, keeping his hands along the mirrored wall. Eli followed, then Jack, Harold, and Frances.

  “I found the door!” she heard Alexander say, and when she opened her eyes, there it was—a door standing ajar, with daylight coming through!

  When Frances made it outside with Harold and the others, they were in a sort of narrow alleyway along the side of the Temple of Mirth.

  “Close that door!” Jack said. “Quick, before someone sees!”

  But just then Frances felt a hand on her shoulder, and she heard a woman’s voice from right behind her.

  “It is too late,” the voice said. “I have already seen.”

  19

  MADAME ZEE

  “All of you,” said the woman. “Come with me. Quick.”

  The woman’s face held no expression. She was older and looked stern, with dark hair pulled back tightly and a sharp chin. Her clothes were plain, and she had a badge pinned to her shirtwaist that said OFFICIAL CONCESSIONS—LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION.

  She led them to the back end of the alley and then down another back-street that appeared to run behind all the buildings on the Pike.

  “What’s going on?” Jack asked, but really, he knew: They’d been caught.

  “You are in trouble,” the woman said. “So you come with me. You hurry.” Her voice was all business.

  We’re sunk! Jack thought. He glanced over at Frances and Alexander and Eli, and could see their faces were grim, too.

  They passed street sweepers emptying their sacks of trash and Fair workers taking their breaks. Finally the woman stopped at a door in the back of a small, squat structure and motioned to the children to go inside.

  Jack figured she was taking them to some kind of guard post where they’d be questioned. The fellow from the ticket booth at the Temple of Mirth would likely be there, too, and tell the guards what they’d done. Then it would be all over. They’d be ejected from the Fair. Or even taken to the police, who would give them over to Miss DeHaven. . . .

  But then the woman pulled aside a curtain, and there were no guards—the room wasn’t an office at all. It was some kind of parlor, with Oriental rugs scattered all over the floor. Elaborately patterned tapestries and drapes hung on all sides so that it seemed like they were inside an exotic tent instead of a room. What is this place? Jack wondered.

  “I’m sorry!” Harold cried suddenly. “It’s all my fault! I ran inside the funhouse without paying because I was scared of the clown! And then we were in the maze of mirrors and we wanted to get out!”

  “We’ll go back to the Temple of Mirth and pay what we owe,” Alexander offered.

  The woman shook her head. “They are fools. You owe them nothing.”

  “W-what do you mean?” Frances stammered.

  “I mean it is no wonder you want to leave the Temple of Mirth!” the woman declared. “No wonder the little boy is frightened of the great big ugly clown face!”

  Jack could hear just the faintest trace of an accent in the woman’s speech. It wasn’t German or Russian or Irish. It sounded a little like the accent of a man who had a pushcart on Jack’s street back in New York. The man sold sweet cakes and bottles of rose water, but Jack couldn’t remember where he’d come from.

  The woman went on. “Who in their right mind wishes to walk in the labyrinth of mirrors? So many mirrors facing each other, such bad luck! No wonder you would wish to leave such a place! Is not a place of mirth. Bah!”

  “Were . . . were you helping us just now?” Jack asked.

  “Yes!” cried the woman. “Of course I help you. Every day I walk past that infernal place and see the people come out. They are green in the face. The little children, they are crying from fright. They all waste their ten cents. The man who runs that place, Mr. Fernand, he is a scoundrel!”

  At the mention of the name Mr. Fernand, Jack saw Frances’s eyebrows go up, and Jack knew what he had to ask. “So . . . there’s no Mr. McGee there?”

  The woman looked at Jack with a curious expression. “There’s no Mr. McGee, my child. Not anymore. But you may call me Madame Zee.”

  Jack’s head started to spin. No Mr. McGee? Maybe she thought he was talking about someone else. At any rate, they had reached a dead end here. “Um . . . well, thank you for all your help, Madame Zee. . . .”

  “We really appreciate it,” Alexander added. “But we ought to go. We need to—”

  “Oh! Do not leave!” Madame Zee said suddenly. “You must stay.” She lowered her voice. “I see how your clothes are. I think you have had some hard times an
d that you are on your own, yes?”

  Eli nodded. But Frances seemed more suspicious. “Why would you help us?” she asked.

  Madame Zee sighed and sat down on the parlor couch. “So many people come to me for help. I tell them their fortunes. They always want to find something that they’ve lost, or someone who is gone.” She looked down at her hands and her voice grew softer. “All I can give them are words. I tell them things that will happen in their lives.”

  “You mean, you give them warnings?” Jack asked.

  Madame Zee shook her head no. “I do not call them warnings. People don’t like those. You give them a warning, they think it will not happen to them. My own son, for instance. He went to work for some bad people. I tell him he will get hurt! But he never listened. . . .” She took a deep breath. “Never mind. I will not speak of sad things now. Anyway. I do not warn people anymore. I simply tell them things I think will happen.”

  “And do they really?” Harold asked.

  Madame Zee shrugged. “I never know. The people come for their fortunes and then they leave. But you children, I can give you a place to sleep, offer you food, mend your clothes. These are real things! And then . . .” She looked right at Jack again. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

  Jack felt self-conscious under her steady gaze. “I do?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice quavering and her eyes starting to fill with tears. “Someone I miss very much.”

  Jack didn’t know what to do. He noticed Frances had narrowed her eyes the way she did when she didn’t quite trust something, and Alexander and Eli wore skeptical looks. Jack had heard about fortune-tellers—they were supposed to be charlatans who couldn’t really predict the future. Madame Zee had practically admitted that herself when she said she didn’t know if the things she foretold ever really happened! So it was very possible that those tears of hers were just an act. Right?

  He was still considering this when Harold broke away from Frances’s side and ran over to the sofa. “My name is Harold and I’m sorry you are sad.” He opened his arms and gave her a big hug. Clearly he believed Madame Zee.

  Madame Zee wiped her tears and smiled. “Thank you, young Harold. Now, the rest of you, what are your names? And you will stay here, yes?”

  Jack exchanged looks with Alexander, who shrugged. Frances rolled her eyes, and Eli gave a crooked half smile that seemed to say, Guess we’re stuck here. The older boys hadn’t given a signal yet, after all, and the reward was still waiting. And they couldn’t very well leave Harold behind.

  “Yes,” Jack told her. “We’ll stay.”

  20

  THE PORCELAIN HAND

  Madame Zee brought out a pitcher of cold water and some paper cups, and then a washbasin and cloth so that they could freshen up. Frances scrubbed her own face and then Harold’s.

  “Frannie, don’t be mad,” Harold whispered. “Madame Zee seems really nice.”

  “Let’s just be careful,” Frances warned. “She’s still a stranger.”

  While the others took their turns washing up, Frances looked around. The parlor they were in appeared to be a back room. A set of tied-back drapes marked the entry into another room—which, judging by all the odd bric-a-bric on a table in there, was likely where the fortune-telling took place—and beyond that was the open front entrance. There was a velvet rope hanging across to prevent fairgoers from coming in, but Frances could see people strolling past in the late afternoon sunlight and faintly hear the hubbub of the Pike beyond all the draperies.

  “Just a moment,” Madame Zee said as she went behind a partitioned screen. “I must get ready for work.”

  Frances still didn’t trust Madame Zee, kind as she seemed, so she supposed this was a good moment to take a closer look at some of the stuff in the front room. She motioned for the others to join. “Look at all this hocus-pocus stuff!” she whispered to Jack. On the table was a stack of cards with strange pictures on them and a crystal ball on an iron stand. A tiny plaque on the stand read MADAME ZOGBHI. Frances had no idea how a name like that was pronounced. No wonder this woman had everyone call her Madame Zee—the zee was really just the first initial of her last name, and it was probably easier.

  “Hey! I found something!” Jack had picked up something from the top of a cabinet next to the table. It was a model of a hand—life-size—cast in white porcelain. It stood straight up on a base just below its wrist, looking as if it could wave hello.

  But that wasn’t the most curious thing about it. The lines of the palm were marked in black paint, with labels such as LINE OF FORTUNE, LINE OF HEART, and LINE OF HEAD. The fingers were marked MERCURY, APOLLO, SATURN, JUPITER. And then symbols were scattered across the whole hand.

  “I guess it’s a guide for reading palms,” Frances said.

  “I know, but look at the symbols!” Jack turned the hand over and over. “These are on the medallion! And remember I told you I saw some of the symbols carved into a trunk on the boat? They’re on this thing, too!”

  Alexander came over and looked at the hand too. “We should ask Madame Zee.”

  “Ask me what?” Madame Zee said as she came out from the back room. She had wrapped a silk scarf around her forehead, and her dark hair hung loose. Over her shirtwaist she’d donned a robe embroidered with stars, and she wore a necklace made from thin gold coins. She looked more like a fortune-teller now, though Frances figured it was all still an act if she needed a costume.

  Madame Zee saw Jack holding the porcelain hand. “Oh! You wish to know about palmistry, yes? Many secrets are revealed in the hand.” She took the porcelain hand from Jack and began to point out some of the features. “These are the lines, and these are the mounts. . . .”

  “What about the symbols?” Frances asked.

  “Ah, yes. They are for the constellations in the sky. We are born under certain stars. Some people, they are born under the stars of Taurus the Bull—”

  Madame Zee paused, for a short bald man had approached the velvet rope at the entrance. “Hey, Catherine!” he called. “I don’t suppose you could lend us a hand over at Streets of Cairo?”

  Madame Zee gave him a smirk. “Again? And close my place for the night?”

  “Aw, you know how it is,” the short bald man said. “Maloof didn’t show up again, and they need someone to talk to the musicians. You know the language. We’ll give you Maloof’s wages and some of the tips, too.”

  “All right,” Madame Zee replied. “Is such good money, I cannot say no. I will be there soon.” The man walked off and she turned to the children. “These fools, they pay me too well. I must go for a while.”

  “But will you tell us more about these symbols?” Jack asked.

  Madame nodded. “I will tell you everything. Maybe I will train you so you can run this place while I go help these dunces over at the Streets of Cairo! But for now, you stay and rest. I will return.” She unhooked the velvet rope and stepped outside.

  “One more thing!” Frances called. “Your first name is Catherine?”

  “My second husband, he was American,” Madame Zee said with a shrug. “So I took American name when I marry him. Pretty name, you think?”

  “Yes,” Frances replied, and Jack nodded, too. They had so many more questions, but Madame Zee was hurrying off down the Pike, where the electric lights at the entrances to all the attractions were starting to glow brighter as the daylight faded.

  The children returned to the back room and settled into a corner that was strewn with rugs and cushions surrounding a low table. There was a small electric lamp overhead, and everything felt soft and cozy. Frances felt Harold slouching against her the way he did when he was tired, and Jack and Alexander appeared to be sleepy, too. But Eli still looked alert—he actually looked nervous.

  Jack noticed, too. “Are you all right, Eli?”

  Frances knew that Eli was a little sup
erstitious about the medallion, and she wondered if he was uncomfortable being here in the fortune-teller’s parlor.

  Eli took a deep breath. “I found something I forgot about. I’ve had it in my pocket this whole time, and it slipped my mind that I even put it there! It could have gotten us into big trouble if someone discovered I had it.”

  “What is it?” Frances asked, but Eli was already reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small bottle and set it on the table. The label said PURE GIN.

  “The gin!” Jack exclaimed. “From the steamboat! From when we were hiding down by the crates!”

  “I took this bottle out of the crate to see what it was,” Eli explained. “Then the deckhands came by and almost found us. I guess I was so shook up that I just put it in my pocket. And then I forgot all about it.”

  Frances picked up the bottle. The label had some tiny print with lots of misspelled words. IMPORTD FROM EROUPE. PREMIUN SPIRITS. She didn’t drink gin, of course, but even if she did she had a feeling she wouldn’t trust this stuff. “We’d better throw it out the first chance we get.”

  “Good thing nobody else discovered you had it,” Jack told Eli. “Can you imagine if the guards had caught us at the Temple of Mirth, instead of Madame Zee? They would have searched us.”

  “We’re all really lucky,” Alexander pointed out. “And speaking of Madame Zee, do you suppose she’s originally from Egypt?”

  “She must be, if she’s helping out at the Streets of Cairo exhibit,” Frances said.

  “Guess that’s why they call it the ‘World’s Fair,’” Eli said. “There’s folks from all over the world here, and they’re trying to make everything look like a different country.”

  Eli was right, Frances realized. The fake mountain was meant to look like Germany, and out on the Pike they’d seen signs for places called IRISH VILLAGE, MYSTERIOUS ASIA, SIBERIAN RAILWAY.

  “I know it’s supposed to feel like we’re traveling the world,” said Frances. “But really, it sort of feels like we’re in a big circus.”