Jewel of the East (17 page)

Even though Felix landed hard, his back crashing onto a wooden floor, he oddly still had the sensation of moving. Moving slowly. Upward.

He opened his eyes and saw a sea of high-button boots, long skirts, and stiff trousers.

“Little boy,” a woman with a feathered hat scolded. “Get back up here or you’ll fly off.”

Felix pulled his aching self up to a sitting position. He was facing about a dozen people sitting on a wooden bench, staring down at him.

He grinned up at them and took the hand of a man with a mustache even bigger than Great-Uncle Thorne’s, letting the man help him to his feet. Everyone scrunched over so that he could squeeze in.

In the distance, Felix saw the ocean glittering bright blue. That combined with the sky, equally as blue and sprinkled with perfect white, fluffy clouds, made him feel as if he had landed smack into the middle of a postcard. A postcard that was definitely going up a hill along a creaky track. The people around him looked like they had stepped out of a postcard, too, with their big hats and suits and funny shoes.

A few of the women were holding hands tight and staring all wide-eyed and scared.

“It’s my first time,” one of them said. She had hair in big, bouncy banana curls, and the tip of her nose was sunburned.

“Mine too,” the dark-haired one beside her said in a quivering voice.

Felix nodded at them as if he understood. Shifting his gaze in the other direction, away from the ocean, he saw a giant, fake elephant. There appeared to be people standing on top of it.

The car reached the top, paused, then coasted down the track.

Everyone, except Felix, screamed or gasped or laughed nervously.

Felix smiled. Wherever he had landed, this was a roller coaster. The slowest roller coaster he’d ever been on.

Maisie’s head popped out from between the legs of the banana-curled girl and the dark-haired girl.

“What was that?” she said, laughing.

The man with the giant mustache glared at her.

“Young lady,” he said. “You have just taken a ride on the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railroad.”

“I have?” she said, scrambling to her feet.

The roller coaster had come to a stop, and
everyone was getting out. But instead of leaving the ride, they were getting into another car.

The girl with the banana curls fanned herself wildly. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

Her dark-haired friend nodded and wiped her forehead with a small, white handkerchief.

Maisie and Felix tried not to laugh as they followed them out of the car and onto another one.

“Now what?” Maisie asked.

“We’re switching tracks,” a woman explained. “So that we can go up that hill.”

Once again, the car crept up a hill along a wooden track, going slower than the speed limit on Thames Street back in Newport. Once again, it paused at the top and then made its rickety way down. As the people around them screamed and closed their eyes, Maisie and Felix laughed.

A few summers ago, their father had taken them to Coney Island, where they’d ridden an old wooden roller coaster called The Cyclone. Felix, terrified, could only do it once. But Maisie and their father rode it over and over again, her squeals filling the salty amusement park air. Their father had told them that at the turn of the twentieth century, amusement parks were built at seaside resorts, like Coney Island and Atlantic
City and all along the coast of New England. Most of those parks were long gone now, he’d said. A lot of them were destroyed by fires because everything in them was made of wood. Others had closed due to neglect. Surely they were in one of them right now.

Felix studied the clothes of the people sitting on the bench with them. Yes, they looked like people from the turn of the century. And there was the ocean in the distance. He even heard the sound of music that played on merry-go-rounds.

The car came to a halt, and everyone stood to disembark.

Maisie grabbed Felix’s arm and pointed to the words written in lights across an arch.

“How did we get so lucky?” she said.

Felix read the words out loud.

“Coney Island,” he said.

To time travel and land in an amusement park—and not just any amusement park but an amusement park in New York—made Maisie about as happy as she could be. Not only could they ride rides all day (although she hoped the other rides were better than that lame roller coaster), eat hot dogs, and walk on the beach, but she could pretend she lived back here and at the end of the day get on the J train and head home.
Almost a perfect day. Except for one thing: Where were Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne?

If she asked Felix, he would get all worried, and there would go their day of fun. He would want to find them, and instead of getting on—Maisie tried to take in everything she was seeing and decide what to do next—there! That Ferris wheel over there. Instead of riding that, they would have to walk up and down looking for two cranky, old people.

“Look!” she said to her brother. “Let’s go on the Ferris wheel.”

The sign in front of it said: W
ORLD’S
L
ARGEST
F
ERRIS
W
HEEL
. Which it wasn’t. The thing had only twelve cars and moved excruciatingly slow.

Still, she grabbed Felix’s arm and pulled him toward it. Her plan, she decided, was to keep him too busy to wonder about Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne. Eventually, they would find whomever they needed to find, give him or her the handcuffs, then go back home. For all they knew, Great-Aunt Maisie and Great-Uncle Thorne were still standing in the auditorium at Anne Hutchinson Middle School fighting over the handcuffs.

Maisie stopped suddenly.

The handcuffs. Who had the handcuffs? She didn’t. She lifted her hands in front of her face just to be sure. Her black, tulle, magician’s assistant skirt didn’t have any pockets, and neither did the old leotard she had on from her misguided efforts at a ballet class last year. The thing had small pills all over it and was just tight enough to be uncomfortable and ride up her butt. No pockets there.

She glanced at Felix who was staring at The Roundabout with a worried expression. Maybe he had the handcuffs in his pocket. But if she asked him that, and he didn’t have them, then he would get worried about how they were ever going to get home and their day would be ruined. Maisie sighed over all the things she had to keep quiet about so that Felix would stay calm.

“World’s largest Ferris wheel!” she said, continuing toward it.

This time, Felix took her arm and stopped her.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “We have to pay for a ride.”

He pointed to a sign.

“Five cents, to be exact,” he said.

Of course they had to pay, Maisie scolded herself. How could she be so dumb? Somehow they had to find some money. She wasn’t going to
be at Coney Island on a beautiful day and not ride the rides.

Maisie’s face brightened.

“Uh-oh,” Felix said. Clearly she’d come up with a scheme that he would no doubt not want to be part of.

“Do you have your cards with you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said carefully.

“Well then, we’ll have to get to work, won’t we?” Maisie told him.

Performing card tricks on the runway of Coney Island was one of the last things Felix wanted to do. But he recognized that determination in his sister’s eyes. No matter what he said, he would never be able to convince her that this was a bad idea.

He took the deck of cards from his jacket pocket, shuffled them, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, what I have here is an ordinary deck of cards…”

An hour later, Maisie and Felix had two dollars and twenty-five cents, and they were sitting in one of the wooden cars on the Ferris wheel, slowly rotating upward.

“You promised we could go on The Roundabout,” Felix reminded Maisie.

They were standing on top of a giant, wooden
elephant called The Elephant Colossus. They’d already gone inside its legs. One had a cigar store and the other sold postcards. The body of the elephant was a hotel, and here, twelve stories up, was an observation deck where they could look down on the runway, which throbbed with people.

Dusk had settled over Coney Island. The beach beyond the amusement park was still crowded. People splashed in the ocean beneath a reddish-orange sky.

“I know,” Maisie said. “It’s just hard to get enthusiastic about a merry-go-round.”

“I went on The Serpentine Railroad with you,” he said. “Three times.”

The Serpentine Railroad was the other roller coaster. It went all of twelve miles an hour, twice as fast as The Switchback but still eternally slow. Felix had started to enjoy the slower pace of the rides, how the Ferris wheel took almost twenty minutes to go around, and how the roller coasters felt like rides in a convertible, the wind blowing on his face and the salty ocean air mixed with the smell of hot dogs roasting and the pungent oil they used to grease the tracks.

Those hot dogs. Felix had eaten three. And two Italian ices sold by a man in a straw hat and
red-and-white-striped jacket. He played a strange instrument that he told them was called a hurdy-gurdy. It had strings and a keyboard, and the man cranked it to make music that sounded almost like bagpipes. As he played it, a skinny, little monkey with big eyes danced in front of him.

Thinking about it made Felix hungry again. He smiled to himself. What a perfect day this had been. He had been careful not to mention the fact that they had no idea where Great-Aunt Maisie or Great-Uncle Thorne might be. Maybe they were out there somewhere in that crowd waiting in line to ride the Ferris wheel or enter one of the sideshows. Maybe they were back in Newport at Anne Hutchinson Middle School. Felix knew that if he speculated as to their whereabouts with Maisie, she would get mad at him for ruining the day. He could almost hear her grumbling about those old people getting in the way of a perfect summer day at Coney Island.

Wait a minute
, Felix thought.
A perfect summer day?

“Maisie?” he said.

“Okay, okay, we’ll go on the merry-go-round.”

“Wasn’t the Talent Show in March?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “That rhetorical question is supposed to make me realize something, right?”

Felix opened his arms wide. “It’s definitely summer here.”

“So?” she said.

She hated when he figured something out before she did. What did it matter that the Talent Show was in March, and it was summer here at Coney Island in 18… 18-whatever?

“Sir?” Felix said, turning to the man beside him. “What’s today’s date?”

The man laughed. “Why? Do you have an important engagement?”

“As a matter-of-fact,” Felix said. “I kind of do.”

The man furrowed his dark eyebrows. “It is June 18, 1894.”

With slow, deliberate motions, the man pulled a very large pocket watch from his vest pocket.

“And,” he added, “it is seven seventeen in the evening.”

He wiggled his eyebrows and turned back to his conversation.

“How could we have traveled to a different day?” Felix blurted.