Steampunk Carnival (Steam World Book 1) (4 page)

The carriage slowed to rest in front of the grey-sided boarding house. A wooden sign out front spelled the name in easy-to-read letters:
The Weekly Boarder
, followed underneath by the scrolling words
Mrs. Ophelia Weeks, Proprietor
. Magdalene opened the carriage door, and Katya followed her out.

For the first time, Katya felt aware of the driver sitting behind the horse. He was not a nameless fellow worker but someone who had braved Mr. Lieber’s wrath. She paused while Magdalene walked ahead to the porch. The driver did not look down at her, his eyes lost in thought against the horse’s back.

“Thank you, Mr. Davies,” Katya said. “Have a good day.” She went up the sidewalk without waiting for a reply. When she reached the porch, she glanced back, and Mr. Davies raised his hand to her in a subtle wave.

Magdalene unlocked the front door, and Katya trailed her into the hall. She started up the front circular staircase while Magdalene bolted the door. Katya opened her room and left the door ajar for Magdalene. Magdalene joined her, closing the door quietly, and Katya turned to face her. She tossed her gloves and jacket onto the bed, holding up the paper-wrapped notebook.

Katya explained in a hush. “I found this in the garbage.” She unwrapped the greasy toilet paper, too preoccupied with the notebook to take the oil-soaked strand to the trash. She let it fall to the rug.

Magdalene kept her distance. “What is it? Did you look inside?”

“The first chance I got. Do you know what this is?”

Magdalene shook her head. “What’s the big secret? Did you find someone’s diary?”

“Better.” Katya opened the notebook so Magdalene could see it. “It’s Mr. Warden’s notes on how to build the carnival rides.”

Magdalene pulled off her white gloves and tossed them on the bed next to Katya’s. She took the notebook gingerly in her hands. “Why would he throw this away?”

“I don’t know.”

Magdalene turned the pages slowly. Her cornflower-blue eyes scanned each drawing fully. “It’s not just the rides, Katya. There are pages on how to lay them out across the grounds.”

Katya stepped around to Magdalene’s side, and they stood staring at the notebook together in the middle of the room.

Magdalene turned back a page and pointed to the bottom. “This one puts the food in front behind the ticket booth as one long stall.” She showed Katya the next page. “This one has two smaller food stalls but still in the front of the carnival.”

“Why would he throw this away?”

“Are you sure it’s Mr. Warden’s?”

“Whose else could it be? There’s no information in the front. I checked.”

Magdalene perused the first few pages of the notebook. “It’s just pictures of engines and how they work.”

Katya remembered her trembling fear while Mr. Lieber argued with Mr. Davies and beat the carriage horse. “You understand why we have to keep this a secret, don’t you? Mr. Warden obviously wanted to hide this. He never thought anyone would find it. It was halfway down the trash bin, the one closest to his office.”

“It smells like it, too.” Magdalene extended the notebook a few inches away but continued to flip through it.

“Why would he want to destroy this?”

“I don’t know. Do you think it has something to do with the death threats?”

Katya tried to connect the two but could not. “Everybody knows Mr. Warden built the carnival. Destroying his notebook isn’t going to erase everybody’s memory.”

“Maybe he wrote something else in here, something personal.” Magdalene turned the pages more quickly. “It’s just one drawing after another, isn’t it?”

Katya watched the schematics flip by, plans for the Tower and other attractions she did not recognize. A few of them were crossed out with a simple ink line. “If it weren’t for the circumstances, I’d love owning this book.”

“What circumstances?”

Katya grimaced at the thought of Mr. Lieber’s whip cracks. “I’m afraid to have it. I like Mr. Warden, but I don’t trust him. If he really were trying to destroy this and finds out we have it –
I
have it – I could be in big trouble.”

Magdalene turned past pages of several different plans for the Warden wheel. “Maybe Mr. Lieber threw it away.”

“He wouldn’t do it unless Mr. Warden told him to.”

“Unless they’re not as close as everyone thinks.”

Katya walked to the dresser and unpinned her hat in front of the mirror. “If that’s the case, we don’t know anything for sure.”

“Are you still trying to solve the death threat mystery?”

Katya dropped the hat pin into its holder and laid her hat on the dresser. She turned to Magdalene, a new realization chilling her blood. “Mr. Warden hired the new security to keep us safe.”

“Yes.”

“No. I think Irina was right. The security is to keep Mr. Warden safe. Everything is to keep him safe. I passed one of the new guards tonight within fifty feet of the woman who screamed when her wedding ring fell in the trash. I was the only one who responded. I never saw security again. If the security is there for everyone, wouldn’t one of them come forward to help a screaming woman?”

Magdalene reached the last page of the notebook and folded it closed. Despite its exhilarating content, she set her mouth in a frown. “I’d hope so.”

“Did you find anything personal in there?”

“No. Most of it’s filled with plans. The last third or so is blank.”

Katya took the notebook from Magdalene. “Where can we possibly hide this that not even Mary or Mrs. Weeks will find it? You know how thoroughly they clean.”

Magdalene glanced around the room. “You could wrap it in fresh paper and hide it in your underwear drawer.”

“And have all my corsets smelling like old peanuts and stale popcorn? No, thank you.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Katya’s eyes searched every drawer and corner of the room. “I could put it under the dresser.”

“It’s too high. They’ll clean there.”

“I could keep it in the sleeve of a jacket I leave hanging in the armoire.”

“Then all of your clothes will smell.”

Katya opened the top drawer where she kept her corsets, an array of blue, purple, and silver silks adorned with lace. “I could keep the notebook here and move my corsets to other drawers.”

“Now you’re thinking.”

“We don’t have anything to wrap it in.”

Magdalene took a moment to think. “Mrs. Weeks puts her old newspapers in the garbage before she goes to bed. Today’s issue should be pretty clean.”

Katya passed the notebook to Magdalene. “Do you think she’ll miss it?”

“Grab the middle pages. She’ll never notice.”

Katya sat down on the bed and loosened the lacings on her boots. She pulled them off and set them on the rug. “Which garbage are they in?”

“The kitchen. She cleans it up before she finishes reading the news.”

Katya searched Magdalene in wonder. “How do you know all this?”

“I’ve lived here much longer than I’ve worked these crazy carnival hours. I used to see her do it every night. If there was a paper in the house, this is what she’d do with it.”

Katya grabbed a book of matches from the dresser. She struck one and lit a small glass lamp from the dresser. “Wait for me. I’ll be right back.”

Katya slipped out of the room and took all the care she needed to close the door with only the slightest bump. She hurried to the front staircase where she could disturb only one person, the gently snoring Mrs. Weeks. The other front room belonged to the awake and elsewhere Magdalene. Katya descended the stairs almost silently, not stopping when she reached the first floor. She continued into the basement, the air noticeably cooler against her skin. She turned and entered the first room on the right, a spacious kitchen stocked with everything Mrs. Weeks needed to cook for her boarders. The fireplace sat cold and dark.

Katya had not visited the kitchen for anything but her afternoon hair curling for months. She was grateful the lidded trash bin was easy to see, tucked under the edge of the large prep table. She slid it out and set the cover on the table. Like Magdalene predicted, Mrs. Weeks’ newspaper sat neatly folded on top of the fragrant garbage. For the second time that night, Katya reached into the trash and lifted out something valuable.

The headline shouted,
Bell’s Latest Experiment Another Failure
. In smaller letters beneath it, bolded words elaborated,
Alexander Graham Bell insists he will perfect the machine that could replace the telegraph, but a decade of failures leaves many skeptical.

A pang of homesickness struck Katya for New York and the family she had left behind. She remembered her parents talking about Alexander Bell when she was a girl and how close he thought he came to passing the human voice through telegraph wires. Even though a widely publicized accident with battery acid scarred his hands almost beyond use, his assistant Thomas Watson stood by him through every experiment while their benefactors came and went. Katya wished more than ever someone would invent something better than the telegraph. Letters and telegrams took too long for her youthful impatience, and she would have welcomed the chance to hear her mother’s voice from so far away.

Katya pulled the middle sheets of the newspaper out and left the outer pages in the garbage. She eased the lid onto the bin and crept back to the stairs. She climbed them, careful to keep the newspaper away from the flame in the lamp. With a little maneuvering, Katya freed a few fingers from the newspaper and opened the door to her room.

Magdalene sat in the corner chair, staring intently at the drawings in the notebook.

Katya closed the door. “You wrap it, and I’ll make room.”

Katya passed the newspaper to Magdalene and crossed the room to the dresser. She set the glass lamp aside and rearranged the contents of her drawers, listening to the crisp crinkling of the newspaper behind her.

Magdalene carried over the tightly wrapped notebook and set it in the empty drawer. “It’s such a shame. It should be on display somewhere, not hidden in here.”

Katya blew out the light in the lamp and returned it to its place on the dresser. “I know, but it’s too dangerous for that now.”

“Maybe Mr. Warden is dangerous, which means the carnival will be dangerous as long as he owns it.”

Katya pushed the drawer closed, shutting the package out of sight. “Mr. Warden can’t be all bad, or he wouldn’t need Mr. Lieber to do things for him.”

“That’s who you’re really afraid of, isn’t it? Mr. Lieber?”

Katya nodded stiffly.

“Have you told Mr. Warden he frightens you?”

“No. There’s no point.”

“I thought maybe he would listen to you. None of the women are comfortable around Mr. Lieber.”

“There are only four of us. He wouldn’t fire Mr. Lieber if I took all my clothes off and danced around his office. The two are inseparable. It’s hard to talk to Mr. Warden without Mr. Lieber there.”

“But you were alone with Mr. Warden when he...” Magdalene chose her words discretely. “...gave you your job?”

“Yes.” Katya appreciated Mr. Lieber’s absence on that cool afternoon. She remembered introducing herself to Mr. Warden, noticing how handsome his definite features made him. She could not have guessed they would share a tight embrace in the back room of his office. He proved more than pleasing to look at, employing strong, supple fingers. His mouth explored hers expertly. The pressure of Mr. Warden’s hands against her corset and her breasts beneath it raised goose bumps on her skin just to think about it. And she had thought about it countless times since then. With a breath, Katya returned her focus to Magdalene and Mr. Warden’s less-appealing qualities. “It may have gotten me a job, but it taught us from the start what kind of man Mr. Warden is.”

“And you’re sure he’s not as bad as Mr. Lieber?”

“Quite sure.”

“What do we do with the notebook now?”

Katya lowered her eyes to the unassuming surface of the closed dresser drawer. “We wait and see if anyone mentions it. We wait and hope we’re not the next to get death threats.”

The youngest employees at the carnival were boys, the same ages as some of the carnival’s biggest fans, between eight and fourteen. Like the inconspicuous security, few guests noticed them in their dark attire, but Katya watched them at work. They stayed mindful of the crowd as they wound their way through it, carrying buckets of water from the pumps in the rear of the carnival to whichever ride needed them the most. They rarely spilled a drop, developing their arms, shoulders, and chests to three times the size of their peers. Katya did not trouble herself with all the politics she saw complicating the front pages of Mrs. Weeks’ newspapers, but she found herself supporting talk of more laws against child labor. Mr. Warden defended his hiring practices by saying these boys’ families needed the additional income and he hoped their nights at the carnival would build the foundation for a dependable work ethic. Laboring at the carnival kept them out of the factories and off of the farms. From what Katya had heard around the dinner table, she was more inclined to agree with Mrs. Weeks. Mr. Warden and other business owners like him were cutting costs by hiring children. They saved money on women’s wages, too, which made Katya duck her head with guilt at her higher salary. It was common knowledge that carnival employees made more than the average worker, but it did little to make Katya feel better.

A pair of boys waddled toward the Kaleidoscope at the front of the carnival, low-hanging buckets weighing down each arm. They set the buckets on the ground beside the ride’s operator, waiting for him to open the hatch to the boiler tank, as Katya had heard it called. Next to the boys, the ride operators’ costumes seemed all the paler and brighter. Mr. Warden meant the boys to blend in and all but disappear in the night. The ride operators and game runners dressed to be seen, their well-tailored jackets and pants embroidered with curling steam ripples or gleaming golden gears. Seamstresses had fastened many of their jackets with clasps and hooks rather than buttons. Their top hats, like several of Katya’s, sported metal buckles on the bands.

After a few hours near the front of the carnival helping various guests, Katya wandered toward the rear. Another pair of boys carried buckets toward the engine tucked neatly beneath the Beast. Without warning, they scampered away, ditching the buckets, which landed hard in the grass. An explosion thundered out of the engine. Katya’s arms flew up to shield her, but nothing touched her. Little debris decorated the air and the ground, mostly small metal scraps and bolts. Katya wrapped her arms around herself to try to stop her body from shaking.

Now the security appeared, revealing themselves in their plain clothes by approaching the Beast while the patrons shrank back. Katya lingered where she was, a safe distance from the coaster’s west side. She had a perfect view of the band stage where two security men briskly motioned the musicians to safety. For the first night since the carnival opened, the marches stopped, leaving the air bombarded only by voices and grinding machinery. The giant Beast rumbled to silence as the moving cars slid down the track and turned into the resting station behind the vacated stage. One of the operators helped the patrons out of the cars, reassuring them that they were completely safe.

Katya knew the real drama unfolded behind the coaster where the workers accessed the engine. She crept past the Beast, numerous patrons pausing to watch the activity before moving on to working attractions. Mr. Warden strode from his office toward the Beast faster than Katya had ever seen him move. Mr. Lieber kept in step beside him with a plainly dressed security man on his other side.

“What happened?” Mr. Warden bellowed at the ride operator studying the engine hatch.

“I don’t know. It just blew.”

Mr. Warden shoved the man out of the way. “What do you mean you don’t know? Do you know how much money this makes in a night? It’s second only to the wheel. Where’s maintenance? They’d better be on their way.”

“Security went for them.”

Mr. Warden turned toward the maintenance office, meeting Katya’s gaze in the process. He returned her watchful stare for several seconds before shifting to greet the maintenance man hurrying toward him.

“Can you fix it?” Mr. Warden barked before maintenance had even reached the engine.

“Let me have a look, sir.” The maintenance man stepped past Mr. Warden, lowering his tool box to the ground. He examined the engine parts with thickly gloved fingers and heavy-lidded eyes. His drab, dark brown clothes turned him into part of the machine, he stood so close to it. “Here’s the problem, Mr. Warden. This valve right here leading up from the boiler.”

Katya stretched her neck for a better view but could not see past the posts to what the man was indicating. She relaxed a little at the hope the incident was over.

“Can you fix it?” Mr. Warden repeated.

After half a minute, the man answered, “No. I’m not sure I can. I could look at what tools I have.”

“Tools!” Mr. Warden exploded. He adjusted his jacket and lowered his voice. “I expect this machine up and running by the time we open tomorrow, or you are never stepping foot on these grounds again. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll just get more tools.”

“Get your tools,” Mr. Warden growled amidst the sounds of the running coasters.

The man slunk away toward the maintenance building. Mr. Warden led Mr. Lieber and the plain security back to his office. Katya couldn’t see where the ride operator had gone, likely around the front of the coaster to help the other man appease the disappointed crowd.

Katya almost walked away, the spectacle of danger and argument completed. An unexpected figure passed beneath the giant coaster to the broken engine, rekindling Katya’s interest. The bearded game runner spent more than a minute there, his cream-colored suit with pale blue embroidered smoke wafting over it standing out against the dark metal and wood. He returned to his stall by the time maintenance returned holding a few extra wrenches in his hands. Katya strolled on, continuing her rounds. As she passed the Beast’s engine, she heard the last words she expected from the maintenance man.

“It’s fixed.”

Katya stopped and stared at him.

The man glanced around, as confused as she was but much more enthusiastic. He toggled a few levers and swiped his finger over a hole where a bolt might have been.

“It’s been fixed?” Katya called to him.

The man nodded and tested the sturdiness of a vertical pipe. “The valve’s working. I’ll have the rest of it fortified by tomorrow.”

Katya doubled her pace, avoiding eye contact with the game runner as she passed his stall. He explained the rules to his customers as if he had never left the booth, as if he understood nothing more complicated than its game. She swept straight across to the food stall and the opening at its back. She grabbed Magdalene’s arm, making the light change jump in her hand.

Magdalene barely held her composure. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“We have to talk.” Katya pulled on her arm.

“We’re very busy.” Magdalene managed to pass the change to the first person in line.

Katya forced a wide smile for the customers. “We’ll be right back.”

Katya dragged Magdalene out of the stall. Irina cussed loudly under her breath in Russian, but Katya moved on, steering Magdalene past the harmonica-playing contest on the side stage to the vibrating end of the El. Its cars whizzed down the track above them, curving back the same direction they’d come from.

“You’re going to get us fired,” Magdalene insisted.

Katya stuck her head close to Magdalene’s. “The game runner just fixed the Beast.”

“What?”

“The Beast. Steam pressure broke a valve or something. Maintenance wasn’t sure he could fix it. He was gone for one minute, and I swear, the game runner fixed it before he got back.”

“Who are we talking about?”

Katya hesitated. “I don’t know his name. He’s the one everyone calls the Mick.”

“I don’t know his name, either,” Magdalene admitted regretfully.

“I thought you knew everybody.”

“Not him. Nobody knows him.”

Katya pulled back a few inches to look Magdalene in the eye. “Everybody knows one thing: he’s a game runner. That’s all. How can he fix the Beast when maintenance can’t?”

“Maybe he had access to the notebook you found. He could’ve stolen it from Mr. Warden and thrown it out when he was done.”

“Everybody’s a crook around here.” Katya folded her arms and recalled the only clear memory she had of the game runner, watching him chase down the bear-stealing boy. He seemed too gentle and conscientious to steal Mr. Warden’s private papers and leave them in a garbage bin. “What do you think he could’ve gained by learning about the rides? Do you think he’d rather work with them than the games?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Warden seems more the type to take what he wants.”

“He hasn’t taken me,” Katya grumbled.

Magdalene grabbed hold of Katya’s arm, shocking her with the firm, sudden grasp. “Who would know these machines better than anybody?”

Katya searched her face, too dumbfounded to pull away. “Mr. Warden.”

“Not a name. Who?”

“The person who invented the carnival.”

“What if that person wasn’t Mr. Warden?”

Katya pointed halfway across the carnival to the game stall. “You think that haggard man who spends his nights talking people into spending their hard-earned money to try to win stuffed toys and trinkets invented this carnival?”

Magdalene raised a hand in defeat. “Then you tell me how he knew what to do.”

Katya remained silent, trying to find another explanation.

“I think he started the notebook, and it ended up in Mr. Warden’s hands one way or another. Mr. Warden built the carnival, knowing it wasn’t his. It explains why there are two kinds of marks in that book. The original pencil, and Mr. Warden’s fountain pen.”

“Why would the game runner come here?”

“How could he stay away? If he imagined all this, of course he’d be here. He might’ve sent those death threats to Mr. Warden.”

Katya shook her head. “I don’t know, Mags. He seems so nice.”

“Even the nicest of men would be driven mad by something like this. If he created all this, he’s a genius, and he deserves the fortune Mr. Warden’s been amassing from it.”

“Maybe he gave the notebook to Mr. Warden. Maybe he’s a silent partner.”

“Silence and the Steampunk Carnival don’t go together, Kat. If he were a partner to Mr. Warden, somebody would know about it. He’d be doing what Mr. Lieber’s doing, wearing a nice suit and sitting around the office while the rest of us work for our money.”

Katya could not argue with Magdalene anymore. Her head spun from the suggestion that the biggest scandal at the carnival was its very existence.

Magdalene took Katya’s hand between hers. “Do you agree we should talk to him about the notebook?”

Katya stared at her, petrified. “Mr. Warden?”

“No, the game runner.”

“Do you really think he’d talk to us?”

“Let me do the talking. I’ll figure out exactly what to say.”