Saving Houdini Read Online Free PDF Page B

spread through him, like warmth filling a room. He felt his head clear. He swallowed and licked a couple of sugary crumbs off his fingertips.
    “That’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten!” he said aloud.
    Some people looked at him. He didn’t care. The hot cross buns lasted exactly a minute longer.
    He continued east along the Danforth. A clock in a window said it was 11:55. He was supposed to go—if he
liked
—to that house in four hours. He’d already decided: no chance. But … he was curious. He knew most of the streets that let outonto Danforth Avenue, and Arundel was right in the middle of everything.
    He walked up to number 64 and stood across from it. It was scrunched up between two other houses. All the curtains were drawn. There was no way he was going to knock on that door. He didn’t linger, in case someone was watching him through a crack in the drapes. He went back down to Danforth Avenue.
    People continued to scurry along the street. It was lunchtime now and ladies stepped nimbly over the streetcar tracks; men passed by holding their fedoras down on their heads. Some of the women had fur collars on their jackets. All the hats! Many of the men had large, furry beards. It was hard to see their faces.
    And there was a gas station
right
on the sidewalk! British American Gasoline. He’d seen old gas-station commercials where boys with freckles and white-billed caps washed windshields with white cloth serviettes. A nickel thumb-flicked into the air afterwards. There was a kid of no more than fourteen using a pump that looked like a baby bottle with a glass top. It was all strangely close to the sweet old-timey images he’d seen now and again, but at the same time, there was something scary about it.
    A voice was calling to him. Not just in his head, but an actual man’s voice. He was saying, “Hey! Son?”
    The man was wearing an apron over a suit and holding a pair of scissors. Dash took a big step back.
    But the man was smiling. “Circus leave without you?”
    “Beg your pardon?”
    “Or are you just in from Prussia?”
    Dash didn’t know what to say. The man was looking up and down the sidewalk. “Where are your parents? They let you walk around in public with such majestic hair? And no hat?”
    Dash took his eyes off the man long enough to look at the shop window. M ILLS B ARBER was painted on the glass. H AIRCUTS 25¢.
    “You coming in, or are you going to risk capture by the Bald Men’s Auxiliary? Come on now, I can’t let you walk around in broad daylight like that.”
    He held the door to his shop open. Dash couldn’t say no. In any case, no one had hair like his here—he’d have to get rid of it if he wanted to fit in.
    He stepped into the barber shop. It was cool inside. There were two men waiting in chairs and a boy already sitting in front of one of the mirrors, where another barber was working on him. The boy had black hair, too much of it, and on one side it had already been trimmed back to his ears and thinned out. He shot Dash a glance through the mirror and then ignored him.
    The barber pointed. “Take a seat, son.”
    One of the men waiting there said, “Looks like an emergency, Tom. He can go before me.”
    “Me too,” said the other man. “I’m curious what he looks like under all that.”
    The barber—Tom Mills—gestured to his empty chair. “I’ll take you next, then.”
    “I don’t have any money,” Dash said under his breath.
    “When you find your parents, you can come back with your quarter. Can I trust you?”
    “Yes, sir,” Dash said quietly, reluctant to lie.
    “Then up you go.”
    He draped Dash in a black, silken sheet, the sort of material magicians used. This kind of trick was called a
transformation.
Turn a boy from 2011 into one from 1926. The barber went to work, snipping back and forth, and big hanks of dark brown hair fell from his head.
    The other kid was almost done. His barber was swishing at the back of his neck with a huge brush that