Inside the Shadow City (41 page)

“But the million-dollar question, Janice, is who set Penelope Young free and directed the police to her kidnappers? So far, Miss Young has refused to discuss her mysterious benefactor. We can only hope
that the person responsible receives the credit he deserves. Reporting live from Chinatown, this is Adam Gunderson for News Channel Three.”

“The credit
he
deserves?” I yelled at the television set. I considered setting them straight, then thought better of it.

The next morning, New York's newspapers picked up the story, and headlines across the city screamed
Superhero on the Loose!
and
Who's Our Hero?
Wherever you looked, there were profiles of Jacob Harcott and his father, yearbook pictures of The Five, and elaborate maps showing the warehouse and the location of the hidden room. But the only paper that had managed to get a real scoop was the
Daily News,
which published a small item in its gossip column.

Spotted: Princess Sidonia of Pokrovia and her mother, Queen Livia, at JFK Airport, boarding a flight to Moscow and rudely insulting an airline employee when they were refused an upgrade to first class.

I ripped the item out of the paper and set it aside for that night's meeting of the Irregulars.

At 7:45, Iris knocked at my door. She was dressed in black and struggling with a Louis Vuitton suitcase and a dirty black backpack. The mysterious delivery of a case of Angus McSwegan's Finest Scotch Whisky had gotten the nanny off her back for the night.

“Moving in?” I asked her when I opened the door.

“Sorry I'm early,” said Iris, smiling eagerly.

I had a feeling she had been dressed and ready to go for hours.

“Not at all,” I said. “It's a good sign.”

“I brought everything.” She dropped the two bags near the door.

“So I see. Go ahead, take a seat. Do you want some coffee?”

“Do you have any juice?” she asked, looking a little embarrassed.

Betty was the next to arrive. Her face was free of makeup and her clothes were surprisingly normal. Even her trademark sunglasses were missing.

“What—no glasses?” I asked.

“I'm tired of all the disguises,” Betty said. “Unless there's a good reason to be someone else, I'm going to try being me for a while.”

“And to think that all you needed was a knock on the head to bring you to your senses,” I told her.

“If that was all she needed, I'd have been happy to give it to her a long time ago.” Oona walked up behind Betty and put her arm around Betty's shoulders. “You look fabulous,” she said. “Where did you get that shirt?”

Luz and DeeDee arrived together, comparing methods of stain removal.

“I didn't know if you'd be able to make it to the meeting,” I told Luz. “Doesn't your mom know you snuck out of the house last night?”

“No, Attila saved me. I'm telling you, I'm dating a criminal genius. When I told him I had to sneak out, he came over to my workshop and pretended to be me. You know,
he can really sound like a girl when he wants to. It's a little weird sometimes. He told my mother I was busy and wouldn't let her inside the shop…” Luz's voice trailed off the moment she spotted the black backpack that Iris had left in the hallway. “You took the gold?” she asked. From the sound of her voice, she didn't approve.

“We found out whose it was,” I said. “Actually, Iris did. It belonged to Pearcy Leake. We thought he would want us to have it.”

“That skeleton was Pearcy Leake?” DeeDee asked. “The guy who wrote
Glimpses of Gotham
?”

“The one and only,” I said.

“What are we going to do with his gold?” Luz wanted to know.

“Split it up, I guess. Think of all the new equipment you'll be able to buy. The coins are old. They're probably worth a fortune.”

Luz stared down at the backpack and nudged it with her toe.

“I don't want it. Give my share to someone else.”

“What do you mean you don't want it?” I asked in amazement.

“It's bad luck,” she said, not bothering to elaborate.

“If she doesn't want it, I don't want it, either,” said DeeDee. “You can give my share to someone else, too.”

“Okay, who's the lucky person?” I asked.

“Why don't we just give it back?” said DeeDee.

“What's a skeleton going to do with a fortune?” Iris asked.

“That's not what I'm talking about,” DeeDee explained. “Pearcy Leake must have died from a plague,
right? I heard my dad saying that there's a team of scientists at Columbia University who are trying to find a cure for the bubonic plague. Believe it or not, it's still killing people. So why don't we give the money to them?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Luz.

“Well, if you don't mind, I think I'll hold on to my share,” I told them. “Somebody's going to need some money when the Princess comes back to town.”

“As long as you promise not to blow it all on shoes,” warned Luz.

By eight o'clock, everyone had arrived—except for Kiki Strike. By eight fifteen, we were starting to worry. Had she vanished? Would we see her again? At half past the hour, I heard a window open in my bedroom. I grabbed a poker from the fireplace and walked to the back of the apartment. Climbing through the window was Kiki Strike. I made a mental note to get better window locks.

“Do you have a problem with using the front door?” I asked.

“They're after me,” Kiki said, thoroughly annoyed.

“They can't be,” I told her. “The Princess and her mother were on a plane to Moscow last night.”

“Not
them,
” said Kiki. “Reporters. Penelope Young squealed on me. I nearly had my photo taken
three times
on the way here.”

“Penelope Young squealed?”

“Haven't you been watching the news? She sold her story. She even had a piece of proof—that stupid business card I gave her mother. I don't know what I was thinking. Now everybody's looking for a short girl with white hair.”

I laughed. “You're about the only person on Earth who doesn't want to be famous.”

“It's not funny. How am I supposed to get anything done when there are people watching me all the time?”

“I get your point,” I said. “Betty should be able to come up with a disguise for you. What would you like to be? An Eastern European princess?”

“I'm telling you, it's not funny, Ananka,” said Kiki, but I could tell she was starting to lighten up.

• • •

The next morning, a blurry photo graced the front page of the
New York Post,
along with the headline:
Is This Kiki Strike, Girl Detective?
Wherever Kiki was, I knew she was cursing Penelope Young.

“Doesn't this look like that friend of yours, Ananka?” asked my mother, holding up the newspaper as I ate my breakfast.

“What friend?” I asked, chewing on a piece of toast.

“Don't be cute,” my mother warned. “And don't talk with your mouth full. You know the one I'm talking about. The girl with white hair. You said you spent the night with her a couple of days ago. And she was at our house yesterday. I saw her coming out of the bathroom. She's the same girl who asked me about poisons a while back.”

“I guess it does look a little like her,” I said. “But the picture's not very good. It could be anybody.”

“Isn't your friend named Kiki?” she asked, pointing at the headline.

“Yeah,” I admitted with a shrug of my shoulders.
After being questioned by the FBI, it's hard to be scared of your own mother.

“So is there anything you'd care to tell me?” she asked.

Where my mother was concerned, it was always best to stick with the truth. She never believed it anyway.

“Are you suggesting that I've been spending my nights fighting crime with my friends? Is that what you think?”

“I don't know what to think,” she admitted, sitting down across from me at the kitchen table. “You're not the same girl anymore.”

“No, but maybe that's a good thing. You never found me all that interesting before.”

“That's not true, Ananka,” my mother insisted. “You may be more mysterious now, but you've
always
been interesting. Just promise me that you'll be careful. It's hard to be interesting when you're dead.”

“I promise to be careful,” I told her. “So do you really think I'm interesting?”

My mother sighed and shook her head. “You're the most
interesting
person I know,” she said.

• • •

Apparently, my mother wasn't the only person who bought the paper that day. By evening, New York was in a frenzy. Sidewalk vendors sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words:
I Am Kiki Strike, Girl Detective
. Within a week, entire grade schools were forming Kiki Strike hunting parties. Much to the disappointment of their parents, hundreds of girls (and a few boys) dyed their hair white and took up kung-fu.

For a while, the bizarre events that regularly take
place in New York received new attention. A cat burglar nabbed in a Fifth Avenue apartment? It must be the work of Kiki Strike. A flock of South American parrots set loose in Queens? Kiki Strike again. (Actually, Luz was responsible for that one.) When Kiki saved a woman's poodle from an electrified manhole cover, the ungrateful wretch used her cell phone to place a call to the
New York Times
before Kiki could even leave the scene.

It was funny at first, but eventually, we had to put a stop to the madness. All it took was one phone call to the intrepid reporter at News Channel Three.

“Good morning, Janice! I'm reporting live from Murray Hill on a stunning development in the case of Kiki Strike, Girl Detective. I'm here with Svetlana Jones, owner and operator of Samizdat Stationery and Printing. Now, Ms. Jones, you say that you personally printed the business card that's become so famous. Could you tell us a little about the person who placed the order?”

“Certainly, Adam Gunderson,”
said Svetlana Jones, a child-sized woman with a cane and a thick Russian accent. She pushed her unfashionably large glasses back and patted her hair, which was the color and texture of an enormous dust bunny.
“She was sixteen years old. She had red hair like borscht. And her words flowed as fast as the Volga.”

“I'm going to show you a picture, Ms. Jones. Is this the girl who ordered the business cards from your shop?” Adam Gunderson held up a photo of Penelope Young to the camera.

“Yes, that is the girl. I remember her. She said she was going to sell a story to the newspapers and become very rich. Then she laughed like crazy person.”

“Ms. Jones has just identified a photo of Penelope Young. I'm sad to report that Kiki Strike, Girl Detective was just a hoax concocted by another greedy schoolgirl. Reporting live from Murray Hill, this is Adam Gunderson for News Channel Three.”

Following Adam Gunderson's groundbreaking report, the newspapers and television stations turned their attention to actual news. But try as we might, the legend of Kiki Strike couldn't be stopped. In a few short weeks, she had attained the level of fame that it took Bigfoot decades of sightings to achieve. But with New York's intrepid reporters no longer roaming the streets in search of a tiny girl with white hair, the Irregulars were finally able to get back to business.

• • •

As soon as Kiki Strike was able to leave her house unnoticed, we secretly returned the money the Princess had stolen from the Chinatown Savings and Loan and destroyed the entrance to the Shadow City beneath Oliver Harcott's warehouse. After that, we relaxed and watched as justice was served.

Naomi and The Five traded their designer clothes for the less tasteful uniforms of a juvenile justice detention facility, where they reportedly had a little trouble making new friends. Thomas Vandervoort and Jacob Harcott graduated from juvie to jail and were soon joined in the
big house by Jacob's father. Oliver Harcott had been captured as he tried to smuggle himself across the Canadian border while hidden in a barrel of pickled herring. All three men could be seen riding the daily ferry to Hart Island, where they spent the long, hot summer digging graves for the city's dead. Even Penelope Young received the punishment she deserved. Fleeing from the reporters who hounded them day and night, Penelope and her parents moved to a small fishing village in the coldest, dreariest county in Maine. Though Penelope was too far away to cause the Irregulars much trouble, we'd heard that she quickly made a nuisance of herself by trying to convince any fisherman who would listen that Kiki Strike was not a hoax.

As for the Princess and her mother, they were last spotted in St. Petersburg, sunbathing at the palatial summer home of a well-known Russian gangster. A few days later, they boarded a train bound for Noril'sk and disappeared into the Siberian wasteland. We all suspected they'd be back someday, but for the moment, New York and its Shadow City were safe.

Copyright © 2006 by Kirsten Miller
Frontispiece illustration copyright © 2006 by Eleanor Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in the United States of America in June 2006
by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
E-book edition published in April 2011
www.bloomsburyteens.com

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Miller, Kirsten.
Kiki Strike: inside the shadow city / by Kirsten Miller.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.