had when she’d opened it, and led him to a closet filled with cleaning supplies. “I need to see for myself, and you need to keep yourself busy.” She handed him a feather duster.
“What am I dusting?” Archer asked.
Mrs. Helmsley inspected the spotless dining room but, like Archer, saw nothing.
“The curtains! Dust the curtains!”
Archer grumbled as he went to the window. Do people even dust curtains? He raised the duster, but paused and peered through a slit between the fabric panels. A truck was idling outside his house. He squinted at the driver. Is that the crooked man?
Before the tiger incident, he, Oliver, and Adélaïde had visited a dilapidated expedition supply shop called Strait of Magellan. The crooked man was the nasty owner of the shop—a man who’d made lots of money betting that Archer’s grandparents were dead.
“What’s he doing outside my house?” Archer mumbled, and tilted his head to read the insignia on the side of the truck. “The Society… Barrow’s Bay… Rosewood.”
Was that the Society? The one his grandfather was once president of?
Archer opened the curtain wide, hoping to get a better look, but the truck squealed off down Willow Street.
That was the first stranger to lurk outside Helmsley House, but it wasn’t the last. No more than an hour later, reporters began incessantly knocking on the front door. It was like the constant drip of a leaky faucet.
“Only a moment of their time!” a reporter pleaded. “A glimpse of the insanity within—”
Mrs. Helmsley slammed the door in his face. That was the sixth knock of the morning.
“Do you have any idea where our trunks are, Archer?” Grandpa Helmsley asked, straining to see behind a couch in the sitting room. “A friend said he’d brought them home.”
“I used one when I went to Raven Wood,” Archer answered. “The rest are down in the cellar. In a hole.”
“In a hole! Who would put our—”
Mrs. Helmsley stormed into the room and shrieked. Two reporters had managed to climb the facade and were taking pictures through the windows. She nearly yanked the curtain from the rod as she wrenched it shut.
“It’s a deluge!” she cried, eyeing Archer’s grandparents as she marched off. “We’re all going to drown unless you speak to someone!”
Archer couldn’t believe it, but for what had to be the first time in his life, he actually agreed with his mother. His grandparents still hadn’t explained the iceberg to him. And while he wasn’t sure what they’d told his parents, it clearly wasn’t enough to satisfy.
“Why won’t you say something?” he asked.
“Telling the truth is not always easy,” Grandma Helmsley replied. “Telling the truth can make you sound unhinged.”
“And that’s exactly what he wants,” Grandpa Helmsley muttered, peeking through the curtain at the horde of reporters gathered outside. “I’ll bet he’s having a good laugh right now.”
Mrs. Helmsley flew by clutching a sign.
DO NOT DISTURB
NO REPORTERS
NO INTERVIEWS
NO ANYONE
Archer heard the reporters booing his mother as she furiously nailed it to the front door.
“Follow me,” he said to his grandparents, leading them into the cellar to retrieve their trunks.
♦ ANOTHER PIECE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE ♦
“Your grandfather’s shirts go in the top drawer, dear.”
Archer tucked them inside as his grandfather lifted a wooden crate from a trunk. Archer remembered that crate. Oliver had found it the day Adélaïde discovered that the trunks were hidden in the cellar hole. It was filled with corked jars of colorful powders and liquids.
“What are those?” he asked, dragging an empty trunk to the closet and returning to his grandfather.
“Something we should have thrown overboard on our way to Antarctica,” Grandma Helmsley said, glaring at the crate.
Grandpa Helmsley gave Archer an odd sort of smile. “I suppose you could say they were something of a parting gift. I’m surprised they’re still here. Each of these bottles does something different.” He set the crate on the floor and removed a jar that was filled with dark blue powder and pink specks.
“Take that one, for example,” he continued, handing it to Archer. “That’s Doxical Powder. One pinch of that, and you’ll find yourself behaving the opposite of how you normally would. Temporarily, at least.”
Archer brought the jar close to his eyes. “But that would be like magic.”
“It’s not magic, but it is powerful. Did you know there’s a berry that grows in tropical West Africa called the miracle berry? When you eat it, the juices coat your tongue and, for a time, make sweet things taste sour.”
Archer had never heard of such a thing.
“A botanist at the Society, a man named Wigstan Spinler—he told me Doxical Powder works from a similar principle, but with your brain’s receptors instead of your tongue’s taste buds.”
Archer moved the jar from his face.
“It’s strong, yes. But harmless.”
“Harmless?” Grandma Helmsley questioned. “Honestly, Ralph, after everything that… What I mean is, in the wrong hands, Archer, that jar could do a great deal of harm.”
Archer gently shook it and watched the fine powder shift. Could such a small thing really do so much?
“It’s made from plants,” his grandfather explained. “It should say on the back which ones.”
“Slate leaf, yellow hotus, and pugwort.” Archer lowered the jar. “Pugwort?” Benjamin had a plant of the same name.
“I believe pugwort gives it those pink specks,” Grandpa Helmsley said, and stuck out his hand. Reluctantly, Archer passed it back.
“Curiosity is natural, Archer,” his grandmother said. “But those jars are not to be played with. I’m not sure they should even exist.”
“And best not talk about them publicly, Archer,” his grandfather added. “Mr. Spinler’s research is something of a secret.”
“My roommate at Raven Wood would’ve liked that,” Archer said, watching his grandfather set the
