“What time did Mr. Potts die?” Thomas asked.
“Wish I could tell you,” Evans said. Now that he wasn’t typing anymore, he seemed once again at ease. He leaned back in his chair and interlaced his fingers. “Doc Rosenkrantz—that’s the ME at Bellevue—is a hard nut to crack. He keeps his lid screwed on tight, if you catch my drift. Funny. Most people like to see their names in print.”
“Not us,” Pippa said pointedly.
“You might change your minds,” Evans said with a wink.
She scowled.
“Now listen, kiddos.” Mr. Evans put both hands on his desk and began to stand. “I don’t want to take up too much more of your time—”
“That’s all right,” Thomas said. “We have just a few more—”
“So I’ll just see you out. Thanks for dropping by. Always a pleasure.”
Before they could protest, Mr. Evans herded the children out into the hall and ushered them back toward the front door. Even as he was pressing them out the door, he was beaming and shaking their hands.
“Incredible, all of you. Don’t mind what the papers say, it’s all the biz, ha. I’m your biggest fan, really I am, don’t forget, Bill Evans has your back. . . .”
The door slammed shut behind them. And suddenly they were standing in the blazing sunshine with the blue sky high above them, stretched like a wire between the buildings. Pippa took a deep breath of clean air.
“Well, that was a waste of time,” Max said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Thomas said quietly.
Max rounded on him. “Are you crazy? He didn’t tell us nothing.”
“Anything,” Pippa couldn’t help but saying. Max glared at her.
“He did, too,” Thomas said. “He told us the name of the doctor—the medical examiner—who looked at Potts. Dr. Rosenkrantz. He’ll have the answers we need.”
Pippa hated to say she agreed with Max. “But you heard what Mr. Evans said. He said Dr. Rosenkrantz—or whatever his name is—would never talk.”
“So we’ll have to make him talk,” Thomas said, and he turned to Sam, and grinned.
“No way,” Sam said, for about the seventeenth time in two minutes, as they descended into the vast black entrance of the Chambers Street subway station. “You must be out of your mind. I’ll wind up in jail next to Dumfrey.”
Thomas trotted beside him like a puppy hoping for a treat. “Okay, okay.” He held up both hands. “No tough-guy stuff.”
Sam stopped in the middle of the stairs, glaring, and an old woman, moving in the opposite direction, let out a volley of curses.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Thomas said, making an X over his heart with a finger.
Sam sighed. “What’s the plan, then?” he said.
They once again began making their way through the crowd, down the stairs, and into the tunnels. Sam was already tired. The interview with Bill Evans—the thought of seeing their names or, worse, their pictures, in the paper—had made his head hurt. His feet hurt, too. His shoes were too small—everything was always too small.
He just wouldn’t stop growing. Sometimes, he lay in bed with his ankles sticking out over the footboard and his head banging up against the wall, and he tried to think very small thoughts: of being squeezed inside a walnut; of fitting, like Thomas, into a pipe in the wall; of being pressed underneath a gigantic thumb. He kept hoping that if he thought hard enough, it might help him shrink a little. But so far, nothing was working.
Dumfrey thought it was wonderful. “You’re a strong man, Sam!” he always said with a hearty laugh. “The strongest boy in America. You’ll look good with some size on you.”
What Dumfrey didn’t understand was that Sam didn’t care about being a strong man. All he wanted was to be normal. He wanted to play with a puppy without worrying about knocking the air out of its little lungs. He wanted to be allowed to hold Cornelius in his hand, like Thomas did, and feed him bread crumbs. He didn’t want to yank doors off their hinges accidentally. He didn’t like the fact that he could not give Pippa a hug when she was upset because he risked crushing her ribs.
He remembered how the detectives had looked at him at Anderson’s apartment, after the door had splintered to pieces at his touch. Like he was some kind of freak.
Well, he was.
“All you’ve got to do is get us in,” Thomas said. His eyes were bright and it occurred to Sam that he was actually enjoying himself.
“In where?” Sam said suspiciously.
“The morgue,” Thomas said, and ducked under the turnstiles without paying a token. Sam frowned and pushed two tokens into the coin slot.
“Like—like where they put the dead people?” Max stuttered.
“Sure,” Thomas said, turning to her. “But you aren’t scared of a few dead bodies, right, Max? You’ve seen plenty.”
Sam heard the challenge in his voice. Max must have, too.
“Sure,” she said, turning away from him.