Page 39 of The Mystery of the Curiosities
I know you like mysteries.
Uh-huh. And this one was a stumper.
The Hall of Biodiversity was much dimmer than the lobby and a relief for my eyes. I had to resist the natural urge to stop and look at displays or watch videos, instead making a direct line for the next hall. And there was the great whale, greeting me as I walked in. The behemoth towered over the two-story room, looking down at visitors and displays with all of its twenty-one thousand pounds.
All right. So here was the whale. I looked left and right.
No dead bodies. A plus, I supposed.
I took the stairs down to the ground floor, walking under the whale and looking up in awe like every kid and adult always does. There were few people in the room with me, since it was just after opening at the museum and I hadn’t been sidetracked by the other halls first. I walked along the wall, taking a brief moment to study the displays of dolphins, walruses, fish, and all other crazy forms of sea life.
I found myself also looking over my shoulder—because so far my clues were usuallythrown at me. I not only wanted to see who was doing this and tackle the motherfucker to the ground, but I didn’t want to get beaned in the head with a brick either. But there was no one. Two people were watching the video on deep-sea submersibles while standing under the whale. A few more lingered on the floor above, making a slow circuit around the room.
No one was following me. No one was watching me.
Had I made a mistake?
I didn’t feel like it.
I huffed and walked back to stand under the whale, staring up at it. Maybe it had implied a different whale display, although for the life of me, I couldn’t think of where else in this museum that would be. And there weren’t any special, limited exhibitions going on that had anything to do with either whales or mermaids.
And really, what the hell was the mermaid comment supposed to mean? This was a museum ofscience. Mermaids were folklore. Myths, art, scams—
My thoughts came to an abrupt stop as I looked toward the far left. The corner was darker, and I’d definitely forgotten about the display, but there it was. The squid and the sperm whale. Or rather, the squid and the head of the sperm whale, because the model was huge.
I immediately walked in that direction, approaching it head-on. The squid was caught in the whale’s mouth, fighting valiantly. And there, on the stand with information on the exhibit, was a newspaper clipping.
It was in a plastic sheet and taped over the sperm whale description. I looked around once more, but there was no one watching me. Pulling out my magnifying glass again, I pried the sheet free and held it up close.
The newspaper was dated January 1843.Charleston Courier. It featured a bare-breasted mermaid and advertised a most wonderful curiosity! Only fifty cents to view the mermaid, which with inflation was somewhere around fifteen dollars these days. That was a hell of a lot of money to see a dried-out, dead monkey sewn to a fish tail.
Wait.
I was thinking of the Feejee Mermaid.
But that’s what this was, wasn’t it? This was one of the original ads for the mermaid that P.T. Barnum had boasted as part of his collection of curiosities. In fact, if memory served me right, it was one of his best business hoaxes. A naturalist from England, who was actually not a naturalist at all but hired by Barnum to pretend, had brought to America a most interesting oddity found in the South Pacific. Barnum had orchestrated “Dr. Griffin’s” arrival, excited the newspapers with false advertising of seductive mermaids, and borrowed a very fake, gross-looking thing that crowds believed to be a hideous mermaid.
And whether spectators accepted it as truth or not wasn’t the point. Barnum had so successfully played on human curiosity that everyone wanted to see the creature for themselves. I believe I read somewhere that ticket sales to his museum skyrocketed while the mermaid was “on loan” from Dr. Griffin.
So, was this my clue? An old newspaper clipping?
I turned it around, and there was a note taped to the back of the plastic sheet.
Prove the murder, win a mermaid!
What. The. Fuck.
My hands were sweaty and my gut churned uncomfortably. This was like some macabre carnival, where instead of popping the balloons and winning a teddy bear, I had to solve gruesome deaths to win a mummified animal. But what murder was the note referring to? Jefferson Davis 2.0?
“Kind of hard to solve when you fucking blew him up,” I growled at the note.
I had nearly turned away from the display, angry and frustrated and kind of scared, before I noticedsomethingfrom the corner of my eye. It was in the exhibit with the whale head and squid. I took a few steps closer and leaned in, looking into the dimness.
Sparkly stiletto shoes.
A glittery purse and shimmering dress.
There was a dead woman lying on the floor.
