Edison's Gold Page 4

  The siren had grown fainter, and within moments the threesome was enveloped in total darkness. The only sounds they could hear were the clumsy clunking of their elbows and knees against the aluminum vent.

  “Betcha anything Salvatore’ll just think we set off the alarm on our way out,” Tom said into the darkness. He was hoping to calm his friends’ nerves as well as his own.

  “Let’s hope,” said Colby. “Otherwise, they’ll have to send a search party to find our starved and dehydrated skeletons in the walls.” She shivered. “Did I mention I hate it in here?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’ll figure out what happened when he sees the vent grate lying on the floor,” said Noodle.

  “Did you guys hear that?” Colby stopped cold at the sudden hissing and clanking sounds echoing in the distance. “Sounds like a giant snake’s up there waiting for us.”

  “Sounds more like an old furnace to me,” said Tom, trying to sound calm even though his stomach was sick with nerves. He’d never done anything remotely this bad before. None of them had.

  Up ahead, a tiny pinprick of light lengthened as they inched closer.

  “It looks like another vent. Probably where that noise is coming from,” said Tom, just as he reached the latticed grate opening that was screwed into the aluminum chute’s side. Through the slats, he peered into what looked like a cramped boiler room. One dim lightbulb cast jagged, asymmetrical shadows over a row of humming water tanks and furnaces.

  At the far end of the room, he could just make out a skinny iron ladder, bolted to the wall and leading up toward the high ceiling.

  “And there’s our way out of here.” Tom kicked out the grille and jumped about ten feet to the ground. Colby landed behind him, graceful as a gazelle, while Noodle’s long limbs hit the cement at awkward, jutting angles.

  “I don’t wanna spend one more second in this place than I have to.” Colby pushed past Tom and swung her body up onto the shaky ladder with a gymnast’s ease. Tom and Noodle followed several paces behind her.

  A few rungs up, Tom felt the first wave of fresh terror wash over him. He tried to keep both eyes focused on Colby’s sneakers, but his fear of heights was slowing him, and he knew the second he looked down, he would get all dizzy and nervous and probably fall.

  “You all right, Tom?” Colby called down to him as if she’d been reading his mind.

  “Like you said, the sooner this is over, the better.”

  “Whenever I’m nervous, I like to do calculations. So, like, if we’ve been climbing for four minutes, at two rungs per second, each rung equals roughly ten inches. So every minute, if we travel one hundred feet, then—”

  “Sweet game, dorkus malorkus,” Noodle chimed in from below them. “It’s not helping.”

  Scared as he was, Tom was glad he could at least count on the distraction of his friends.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” yelled Noodle, just as the plinking sound of crashing metal filled the room.

  Tom looked down, heart in his throat, to see that his friend was just barely hanging on to the ladder’s iron sides. His upturned face was pure fright.

  “What happened?”

  “The rungs! One of them just gave way under my feet!”

  “Are you okay?”

  Noodle nodded, gulping down his fear.

  “I really think we’ve made things a lot more complicated than they need to be,” he added in a quivering voice, “and I’m kinda starting to regret it.”

  Tom could feel himself start to lose his cool. Cold sweat prickled on his scalp and at the back of his neck.

  Colby was getting way too far up on the ladder.

  Noodle was clinging for dear life below.

  “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be okay,” he whispered to himself as he clutched his warm hands around one of the rusty metal rungs. But he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to keep going. His fear of heights had paralyzed him.

  “Tom?” He could hear Noodle’s voice near his feet. “You’re doing fine. Just put one hand in front of the other. I’m scared to death, too, but if we keep—”

  “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Above, Colby screamed, a sound as jarring as shattering glass.

  Hang on, Colb!” Tom called up to her. Climbing unsteadily toward the sound of her screams, he forced his mind to find a calm image—a smoothly operating Nanny Golightly, expertly flipping blueberry pancakes. It wasn’t really helping much, but thankfully his instincts had taken over, forcing his hands to keep climbing even as his mind kept telling him to turn around.

  At the top of the ladder, he felt relieved to see that Colby had jumped safely onto the upper landing.

  “Twenty more rungs and you’re done, Noodle,” Tom yelled down once he himself was on solid ground. “There’s a ledge up here that’s wide enough for us all to fit.”

  “Yup.” Noodle’s voice was shaky. Tom listened closely to the sounds of his friend cautiously scaling his way to the top and prayed that no more rungs would decide to give way.

  Meanwhile, a very terrified Colby couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the dark pocket of space above their heads. “Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse than a snake.” She gulped cartoonishly loud.

  “Colby, there’s no way a snake could—”

  “Just look.”

  Tom followed her gaze.

  He saw the eyes first. Red and poisonous. On the drainpipe above, a huge rat hissed in fury. It was the only thing standing between them and the metal door at the far side of the landing.

  “It’s okay.” Tom could hear the tremor in his own voice. “She’s probably more scared of us than we are of her.”

  “Oh, yeah? She told you that?” Colby’s entire body was shaking. “ ’Cause I didn’t hear her say that.”

  Tom put a finger to his lips as Noodle joined them on the ledge, then took a step closer. The rat bared its yellow fangs.

  “Oh, man.” Noodle looked ill. “If you’d told me this is was what was waiting for me up here, I might not have kept climbing.”

  “Got any food on you?” Tom whispered to them.

  “Just my emergency raisins.” Colby scrounged around in her pockets. “They’re a good natural source of sucrose, in case I have an insulin attack.”

  “Colb, I’ve known you since you were five.” Noodle rolled his eyes. “And I’ve never heard anything about you having diabetes.”

  “Well, no. Not technically. But it runs in my family.”

  Tom bit back a sarcastic retort. Now wasn’t the best moment to tease Colby about her phony diseases. There’d be plenty of time for that once they got out of here. If they got out of here.

  She handed him a gummy ball of four stuck-together raisins, which Tom rolled into the gum he’d been chewing.

  “Hungry there, Mrs. Rat?” He waved the raisin-gum ball in front of the monstrous rodent, enticing her. She raised up on her hind legs, her bald pink nose sniffing, her whiskers twitching.

  Tom shivered. It was kind of creepy to have a rat’s total attention. He lobbed the food to the far side of the landing, away from them. Annoyed, the rat looked at him, then hopped down from the drainpipe to waddle after it, her tail slithering behind her.

  “That should keep her occupied for a bit.”

  Sure enough, within seconds of tasting the raisin-gum concoction, the rat began chewing noisily, like a dog eating peanut butter.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said Tom. “That door has got to lead us to somewhere better than here.”

  And it probably did. But unfortunately, it was locked.

  “All that climbing up,” complained Noodle, “and now there aren’t even enough rungs on that ladder for us to get back down.”

  “But there is another one of these.” Tom tapped the air vent next to the door, and started to unscrew its grate. “It’s our only option.” But the screws were rusty and painted over. He had to push hard to get them to budge.

  “And it looks like word’s hit the streets abou
t the food.” Noodle nodded toward another rodent that had materialized on the drainpipe and was peering down at them. The rat leaped, brushing against Noodle’s white sneakers.

  “Watch it! Don’t scuff the new kicks!” He kicked at a third, even fatter rat that had scuttled out from under a hole in the wall. It let out a piercing shriek and showed its ugly teeth.

  “These rats could be walked on a leash.” Colby’s body was plastered against the wall. “Tom, hurry up with that vent.”

  “Gross. They’re everywhere!” Noodle was hopping and kicking now as he tried to keep the rodents away from him.

  The air was vibrant, echoing with the vicious squeaking. There were nearly a dozen rats on the landing now, nibbling at the gum and raisins.

  “Got it!” Tom finally pulled the grate off the vent, and the three of them scrambled inside the wide crawl space as fast as they could.

  Finally, the rats were gone, and after a few minutes of crawling, the group approached yet another set of vent slats. But as soon as Tom peered through the opening, he realized they had a whole other problem.

  What is this place?”

  The bird’s-eye view showed a bright, airy atrium with a dark tiled floor, potted plants, and an ornate fountain in the middle of the room.

  Noodle craned his neck. “We’re still in the Met, I think. I see a sign that says no eating or drinking or cell phones. Definite museum-y rules.”

  “Must be one of the wings.” Tom recalled seeing tons of side rooms and offshoot exhibits on the museum’s webpage last night.

  “Think those trees are real? ’Cause if they could support me, I bet I could make the jump from that big shade thing over there.” Colby was nodding toward an enormous piece of fabric hanging down from a nearby archway.

  “That’s a terrible idea.”

  “Yeah, don’t mess with the order of our crew,” said Noodle. “Tom’s the daredevil who does the stupid stuff to get himself killed. You’re just the brains, remember?”

  “It’s a simple level-one dismount.” She was breathing deeply to steady her nerves. “Only without a net to catch me.”

  “Look,” said Tom, “I’m the one who got us into this mess. So I should be the one to get us out.”

  But Colby shook her head no. She had her grip ready, and there was no dissuading her. “Just open the grate before I chicken out.”

  Tom used one of his pocketknife’s wrench attachments to twist off the vent’s long screws. The guys watched in amazement as Colby took one final calming breath and kicked out her legs through the grate. She looked so frail swinging out against the atrium backdrop, then arcing gracefully toward the hanging fabric. Her fingers grabbed its bottom, and her body swung in like a trapeze artist.

  “Colby? Colby!”

  “I don’t think I’m gonna make it,” she called back, now hanging there forty feet above the ground.

  Museum patrons came running as soon as they heard the commotion.

  “There’s a girl up there!”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “She just fell out of the sky!”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “I’m cool,” Colby called down to the small crowd. “I can pretty much hang up here forever.”

  But more people had gathered below, their stares and shouts echoing throughout the courtyard. Cell phones were pulled out—a few to call for help, but others to snap photos of the girl dangling in the middle of the archway.

  Within seconds, a troop of uniformed guards came running, with walkie-talkies unsheathed as they radioed for back up.

  “Yep, that’s it,” said Tom. “We’re toast.”

  On a college application, does ‘convicted felon’ go under extracurriculars or sports?” Noodle cracked his knuckles and fidgeted restlessly.

  The threesome were seated in a line of folding chairs inside Lieutenant Ellen Faber’s nondescript office at the Central Park Precinct police station. Through the double-glazed window, Tom could see his mom and dad, along with Colby’s nana and Noodle’s mom, standing outside, talking with the grim-faced police officer.

  His mother’s expression was especially tense.

  This is bad, Tom thought. Even though Faber had agreed to let them off with only a warning, he figured that being in trouble with his parents would still be way worse than anything the police could legally do to him.

  “I bet you Faber only said we could leave so that we’d let our guard down,” Colby whispered. “Ever hear of good cop, bad cop? She’ll be bringing in the bad cop any second, trust me.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Noodle.

  Just then, Lieutenant Faber entered the room, followed by Tom’s parents, Noodle’s mom, and Colby’s nana.

  “Oh, my little Bernard!” Mrs. Zuckerberg cried, hugging Noodle and then giving him a twist on the ear the way she always did when he did something that both scared and upset her. Mrs. Z tended to be all of the overs: overprotective, overemotional, and generally overinvolved. “The thought of my baby at the police station. Dragged in like some criminal.”

  “Ma!” protested a beet-faced Noodle. “You watch too much CSI.”

  Lieutenant Faber cleared her throat, bringing the room to silence, before she took a seat behind her desk, folded her hands primly, and jumped into her lecture. “I’m sure you three are fully aware of how worried and upset we all are. Breaking into a closed exhibit—”

  “But we didn’t steal anything,” Tom interrupted.

  Faber shot him an icy stare, almost baiting him to keep talking.

  “Sorry.” Tom placed a hand over his mouth and slouched low in his chair.

  “Breaking into a closed exhibit, then having to be rescued from the air-conditioning vents by the fire department.”

  From the corner of his eye, Tom looked over at his mother, who was sitting in her chair, tight-lipped and poker-faced, which made her seem all the more scary.

  “Fortunately,” continued Faber, “the museum has agreed not to press charges. In so doing, however—”

  “Here it comes,” Noodle muttered, with another loud crack of the knuckles. “So long, NYU drama scholarship. Hello, lockdown.”

  Faber’s lips pressed together. It was clear she’d had about enough of these kids interrupting her day.

  “In so doing, however, you are all on one-year probation from entering the Met.” Her pale green eyes studied Tom for a long moment, and he couldn’t help feeling like there was something else behind her gaze. Something mistrustful.

  “I assure you, ma’am.” Now Tom’s dad spoke up, adjusting his glasses nervously, then wiping his palms on his grease-stained khakis. “These are good kids. This will never happen again.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Faber stood up from her chair and swept around the group to open her office door. “I hope to never see you all in here again. You kids could’ve seriously hurt yourselves.”

  As he exited the office, Faber gave Tom’s dad a steady once-over. “So you’re really Thomas Edison’s great-grandson?”

  “I am.” He puffed up a little. Tom wished he’d worn a less wrinkly shirt and that the fingerprint wasn’t so visible on his glasses lens.

  Faber nodded, not too impressed by what she saw.

  The kids shuffled out the door with their heads held low like badly behaved puppies. “Hanging there in the middle of the courtyard!” Tom heard Colby’s grandmother hiss. “I almost fainted when they told me. And I’m sure those vents are completely toxic, teeming with strange dust mites and allergens. You’ll catch an infection and be in an iron lung, sure as I’m standing here.”

  “I feel fine, Nana,” said Colby, “and I don’t think they even make iron lungs anymore.”

  Tom walked past the maze of police desks toward the station’s entrance, when he happened to look back and see Faber standing near the back hallway outside her office. She was talking to a portly man in a black suit that looked tight at every place on his body. The man’s neck was like an exploding tube of cooki
e dough that oozed into a sweaty bald head.

  The man glanced up and held Tom’s gaze with a stare so unnerving that Tom could feel himself getting flush. The man’s eyes narrowed into slits, and it felt like he was searing Tom’s identity into his brain, filing it away for future use.

  Faber placed a hand on the fat man’s shoulder and led him into her office, but before closing the door, she also locked eyes with Tom for a split second. It felt like they were issuing him some kind of warning. About what, though, he had no idea.

  Spooked, he turned on his heel and sprinted, bursting through the precinct doors and out onto the sidewalk—and wasn’t sure what to make of what he saw next.

  His parents stood together on the bottom step, speaking in low tones. As Tom neared, he saw his mom twist off her wedding band and, with a nod, place it in his dad’s palm. Now Tom was close enough to make out their overlapping waves of conversation.

  “No, no,” his dad said. “What kind of—”

  “Just talk to Pete,” his mother interrupted. “He’ll help.” She leaned in and kissed his father’s cheek.

  “You’re the light of my life, do you know that?” said his father, with a smile so warm and soupy it could have fogged over his glasses.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.” Tom approached with caution, testing the parental waters.

  “Well, if it isn’t the man of the hour.” His dad shook his head. “I’m still not sure what this latest stunt merits in terms of punishment.”

  “And we haven’t even addressed your little science-class escapade yet either,” added his mom flatly.

  “What were you all even doing in that exhibit?”

  They were coming at him from all angles. Tom wondered if he was ever going to see the light of day again.

  “Mom, Dad. You know I’m sorry to the millionth degree. And I would just like to point out that, although it was my first brush with the law, it involved a very respected museum, no damages, and no technical violation of—”

  His mother had her hand up, crossing-guard style. “Thomas Alva Edison, why do you always have to see how far the rules bend before they break?”