Prince of Air (10 page)

“Wait a minute,” Maisie said. “How do we know you?”

Before the kid could answer, that photograph on the wall going up the Grand Staircase in Elm Medona flashed through Felix's mind. Great-Aunt Maisie posing for the camera, and Great-Uncle Thorne sticking his face in the picture.

This was that same face.

“Great-Uncle Thorne!” Felix managed.

The kid clicked his heels and bowed.

“One and the same,” he said. “One and the same.”

If there was one thing Maisie knew for certain—and right now, she did not feel certain of very much—she knew this neighborhood. She knew how the Mexican restaurant on the corner kept Christmas lights up all year and how the little café used barrels for tables; she knew that a few blocks north, where she and Felix and the somehow teenage Great-Uncle Thorne walked, fancy clothing boutiques lined the street. Except instead of fancy boutiques selling ridiculously high heels and tiny, wispy dresses, slabs of meat hung from hooks, dripping blood onto the streets. The air reeked with an irony smell combined with the odor of raw meat and sweat.

“Slaughterhouses,” Great-Uncle Thorne said when he saw the look of disgust cross her face. “This is the Gansevoort Market, home to over two hundred slaughterhouses.”

Felix gulped the fetid air, trying not to gag.

“Also home to the best steak and eggs in the city,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, leading them past cow carcasses and pig heads and large strips of who knew what other kinds of meat.

Even when they ducked into a tiny restaurant, the smell followed them.

Felix glanced around the crowded place. Men in blood-splattered aprons shoveled huge amounts of steak and eggs into their mouths. It seemed they all knew one another, and their loud conversations made the place practically buzz.

Great-Uncle Thorne ordered three plates, then squeezed into the corner table with them.

“I don't understand,” Maisie said as soon as he sat down.

He raised his eyebrows at her.

“How . . . ,” she began, but she stopped because there were so many things she didn't understand, she wasn't sure what to ask first.

“How did I get here?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked.

“That we can figure out,” Felix said. “At least, I think we can figure it out,” he added.

Great-Uncle Thorne leaned back in his chair and surveyed them.

“You don't know very much about how all this works, do you?” he asked. He had to practically shout to be heard over the din of noise there.

Felix shook his head.

But, insulted, Maisie said, “We know how it works. We need a shard from the Ming vase. I guess we don't actually have to be
in
The Treasure Chest, but we both need to touch the object.”

Satisfied, she smirked at Great-Uncle Thorne.

“Ha!” he said. “Just as I thought. You don't know anything about it.”

“Well,” Felix said, “we don't know how you can be here as a . . . a . . .”

“Young man?” Thorne said, smiling wickedly.

“Right,” Felix said.

Great-Uncle Thorne—it was hard to still think of him this way now that he was a teenager—leaned closer to them.

“You don't know why The Treasure Chest exists, do you?”

Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “You don't know why you two can do it when, for example, your parents couldn't. Or why Maisie and I can do it, do you?”

Again, he kept talking before they could answer.
Rhetorical questions
, Felix thought.

“You don't know why Maisie kept those handcuffs all these years or why she's been trying to get back here, do you?”

“All right!” Maisie said angrily. “Fine. We don't know any of that. So why don't you tell us?”

Just then, a man with massive arms rippling with muscles and covered with tattoos slid three heaping plates of food onto their table. He slapped down three cups of black coffee, splashing as he did. He grunted something at them, then walked away.

Great-Uncle Thorne cut into his bloody steak with delight.

“Bon appétit!” he said.

Felix stared down at the steak, blood oozing from it. His stomach flipped.

“Excuse me,” he called to the man who had brought them the food.

The man stopped and glared at him.

“I like my steak well done,” Felix said.

“That is done well,” the man said gruffly.

“No,” Felix said. “This is rare.” He held up a bloody piece of steak as evidence.

The man threw back his head and laughed heartily. “Rare?” he managed to say. “Hardly, my boy. The streets are full of beef. It ain't at all rare.”

“I mean, it's cooked rare.”

“Whatever you say, son,” the man said, wiping at his eyes and walking off. “Whatever you say.”

The eggs, which Felix didn't like, either, had blood seeping into them. He pushed the plate away and tried to focus on what Great-Uncle Thorne, who was chewing away happily, was about to tell them instead.

“So tell us,” Felix urged. “Why can we do it?”

“Why do you think?” Great-Uncle Thorne said between bites.

“Because we live in Elm Medona?” Maisie guessed.

“Irrelevant!” Great-Uncle Thorne announced.

“Because we're related to Phinneas Pickworth?” Felix said.

“Closer,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.

“You're just like Great-Aunt Maisie,” Maisie grumbled. “She can never tell us anything. She always makes us figure it out.”

Great-Uncle Thorne's blue eyes glistened. “That's how we were raised. Our father loved puzzles and games, anagrams and mysteries.”

“Well it's not fun,” Maisie told him. “It's frustrating.”

“Twins!” Felix said suddenly. “We're twins. And you and Great-Aunt Maisie are twins.”

“Aha!” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “You've got it. You need twin power to time travel.”

Maisie and Felix waited while he wiped up some egg with a hunk of bread and took a bite, which he chewed slowly.

Finally, he patted his mouth with a napkin, took a satisfied breath, and said, “My father, Phinneas Pickworth, and his twin sister, Amy, grew up time traveling. As did their father, Thaddeus, and his twin sister, Isabel.
All
Pickworth twins have done it.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Maisie said, shaking her head.

Great-Uncle Thorne looked at her, surprised.

“There's only two shards missing from the vase,” Maisie said. “You can't do it without a shard.”

Thorne waved his hand at her like she was a fly he was shooing.

“From
this
vase,” he said. “The original Treasure Chest, and everything in it, was destroyed when the original Elm Medona burned down before Maisie and I were born.”

“What?” Felix said. “There was another Elm Medona?”

Great-Uncle Thorne nodded. “The cottages used to be made of wood. Many of them burned down.”

“It was in Newport, too?” Maisie asked.

Great-Uncle Thorne nodded again. “My father spent years traveling the world for objects to put in our Treasure Chest. Including replacing the Ming vases. He led an expedition through China searching for their matching twins.”

“Twins,” Felix said softly.

“Fine,” Maisie said. “But what I want to know is how you can be sitting here and only be sixteen years old? When we were standing in the auditorium at school, you were old.”

At that, Great-Uncle Thorne's face grew worried. “Yes,” he said. “This is all my sister's fault. If I ever see her again—”

“Then she's not with you?” Felix said.

“I haven't seen her,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I was hoping you two had.”

“But where could she be?” Felix said, panicking.

Great-Uncle Thorne sighed a deep sigh. “She's had this plan for decades.”

“What plan?” Maisie asked.

“Many, many years ago,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “we picked up that pair of handcuffs in The Treasure Chest and landed here. In fact, we landed at Coney Island.”

“That's where
we
landed,” Felix said. “Didn't you?”

“I did,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “Smack on the midway. Thought I broke my hip. I lay there staring up into the face of a woman who looked quite worried. ‘Young man,' she said. ‘Are you all right?' I glanced left, then right, trying to see this young man of whom she spoke. She leaned closer to me. ‘Young man?' she said, and that's when I knew it was me to whom she referred.
I
was a young man.” He said this last with a sense of awe.

“But Great-Aunt Maisie?” Felix asked.

“By the time I got up and the woman inspected me and pronounced me fit to walk, Maisie was nowhere in sight.” His jaw set with determination. “Of course I hightailed it straight to that rapscallion's show, certain I would find her there. But she seems to have vanished.”

“Rapscallion?” Maisie said.

Great-Uncle Thorne narrowed his eyes. “Harry Houdini,” he said as if it pained him to utter the name.

“But that's where we've been!” Felix exclaimed. “We've been staying with his family, and we went with him and his brother to Ohio and—”

“Stop!” Great-Uncle Thorne shouted.

Everyone in the restaurant went silent.

Great-Uncle Thorne stood, slamming his fists on the table.

“I
hate
Harry Houdini!”

After they calmed Great-Uncle Thorne down and left the restaurant with him, Maisie dared to ask why he hated Harry Houdini with such a passion.

“I'm not crazy about him, either,” she said. “He thinks he's the greatest thing ever, and he says
youse
and
ain't
,
and he's obsessed—”

“You don't have to tell me about Harry Houdini,” Great-Uncle Thorne said through gritted teeth. “I know all about him.”

The three of them had walked uptown for several blocks, and slowly the smells of blood and meat were replaced with the wonderful aroma of baking bread.

Felix looked at the redbrick building in front of them. He blinked to be sure he saw what he thought he saw.

Satisfied, he forgot all about Great-Uncle Thorne and Harry Houdini and grabbed his sister's shoulder.

“Look!” he said, pointing. “We're at the Chelsea Market!”

Maisie broke into a smile. For a moment, this felt like
her
New York. The Chelsea Market was where they would go with their parents to buy specialty foods like good extra virgin olive oil and fresh fish.

But her smile disappeared as she read the sign: N
ATIONAL
B
ISCUIT
C
OMPANY
.

“Nothing's the same,” she said sadly.

“Of course it isn't,” Great-Uncle Thorne snapped at her. “You don't travel back in time to keep everything the same.”

That reminded Felix of what they had been talking about a few minutes earlier.

“Why do you hate Harry Houdini so much?” he asked Great-Uncle Thorne.

“Because he and Maisie fell in love, that's why. When we came here all those years ago, they fell in love, and Maisie wouldn't come home with me. She said she was going to stay in 1894. With Harry. Even though she knew what happens if you stay . . .”

Maisie remembered her own desires to stay with Clara and Alexander. “What happens?” she asked.

Great-Uncle Thorne looked at her hard.

“You die. In the present.”

Felix gasped.

“Now you understand why I had to do what I did. When we got back to Elm Medona, I took the shard and hid it from her—”

“She was right!” Maisie said. “You did steal it.”

“Steal it?” Great-Uncle Thorne roared. “I hid it so she wouldn't go back. And she kept the handcuffs with the hope of finding an opportunity to return. Without me and the shard, she was stuck. Until you two came along.”

“Wait a minute,” Felix said. “How did you get back if Harry didn't keep the handcuffs?”

“I knew you didn't know how any of this works,” Great-Uncle Thorne said triumphantly. “Haven't you had any aborted missions yet?”

Maisie and Felix both shook their heads.

“You're lucky,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “It can happen. Some kind of wrinkle, and you never find your subject—”

“Subject?” Felix asked.

“The person who gets the object.”

“So that can happen?” Maisie said. She'd been afraid of that.