Wonder Show Read Online Free Page A

a giant on the hill, towering over the bunkhouses, all angles and dark dead window eyes. Mister’s resemblance to it made a certain amount of sense, because he hardly ever left it.
    Mister liked having girls work for him. Long ago, when his mother was alive and still spry enough to enjoy a good party, there had been servants who were trained to run the household like a business: efficiently, quietly, and without crisis. On the day of his mother’s funeral Mister gave each of the servants an envelope with a terse letter of recommendation and a small sum of money and sent them packing. He saw no reason to employ professionals. Not when there was a population of girls so conveniently located at the bottom of the hill.
    The Home, too, had been his mother’s idea. A pet project, a personal charity that would (she had hoped) endear her to the people of Brewster Falls. She had pictured herself as a guardian angel, a patron saint. In the end, she failed to obtain endorsement of the church and the entire enterprise had backfired, for she was ultimately seen as the woman who sought to populate the town with young ladies of questionable character and perhaps even loose morals. The young men in town were delighted at first, but soon they turned on her as well, after seeing that the girls who came to The Home were just like the girls they already knew, only without parents or spending money or decent clothes.
    It was precisely these deficiencies that Mister preyed on when recruiting the girls for his household staff, by promising pocket change and the chance to win their way back into the hearts of the families who had sent them here. Of course, not every girl was convinced. Portia, for instance, was sure that Mister had no real desire to help any of his charges and had about as much chance of redeeming her as he did of sprouting a pair of wings and flying south for the winter.
    On the other hand, Portia was very curious about a few things, such as the contents of her personal file. The girls liked to speculate about these files, carefully stored in a secret place in the big house, cradling all sorts of vital information. Parents’ names, addresses, correspondence. Dates of release. The files became invisible security blankets, something to hold at night and soothe their minds, which buzzed and hummed like machines. Some girls who had been inside the house, for work or discipline, reported seeing marked papers and such on Mister’s desk, but since none of them had ever had the courage to touch anything in his office, they could not attest to the files’ contents. Portia doubted the credibility of these girls, as she doubted nearly everything she heard. But she reasoned that if the files existed, and if she could get her hands on them, she might find something useful. She had always suspected that Sophia had an idea of where Max had gone, though Sophia had always denied it. If she had shared that knowledge with Mister, he would likely have put it in Portia’s file.
    If there was such a thing.
    And the house itself fascinated her, tugged at the same part of her mind as ghost stories and the dime novels she had stolen from the general store and hidden under her mattress at Sophia’s. (They had probably been discovered by now.) She cast Mister as Bluebeard, luring girls into his house, locking his secrets away in closets where the dark was thick. She could see the house through a knothole in the cabin wall, and she watched it at night, the frigid winter air breathing back at her, and after some time she would have sworn she saw the house pulsating like a beating heart. Savage. Relentless.
    She couldn’t wait to get inside.
     
    “What makes you think he’s even going to ask you?” Caroline asked. “You’re nothing but trouble as far as he’s concerned.”
    “But he likes you, ” said Portia, “and you like me, and if you tell him you won’t go without me . . .”
    In fact, Mister had already approached Caroline several