“Take him out for a date,” the older man said, then gave an ugly laugh. “What do we usually do with ’em? Leave him out on the table, so the doc can start the slice and dice.”
Footsteps squeaked on the floor as the men passed into the other room. She wished they would hurry. Pippa was desperate to get out of this terrible hole and wondered whether this was how Mr. Dumfrey felt, sitting in his jail cell. Thinking of Mr. Dumfrey steeled her nerves slightly. She was doing this for Mr. Dumfrey.
After what seemed like forever, the men’s footsteps returned and then retreated up the stairs. Pippa tried to sit up, forgetting how small the space was, and banged her head.
“Ow,” she said aloud in the darkness.
“Are you all right?” The cabinet slid open and Sam’s face was revealed, blinking down at her and Thomas. Pippa squinted in the electric light, which seemed suddenly blinding.
“I’m all right,” she said, sitting up, although she had a cracking headache. “Let’s get out of here.”
She had seen, she thought, enough dead people for one evening.
It wasn’t until they reached the street that Thomas remembered Max—and then, only because Sam reminded him.
“We have to find her,” Sam said. “We can’t just abandon her.”
Pippa looked as though she was inclined to disagree.
Thomas said, “She might have found her way out. She might be halfway back to the museum by now.” He was desperate to return to the museum and read the report on Potts’s death, still tucked neatly into his pocket.
“But what if she isn’t?” Sam persisted with unusual force. For the first time it occurred to Thomas that Sam must like Max—must like her a lot.
“All right, let me think.” Thomas’s head was pounding. Going back into Bellevue was a terrible idea. Someone would soon discover they had stolen the report from Potts’s body, assuming it had not been discovered already. They needed to get off the street, as far away from Bellevue as possible.
But Sam was already heading toward Twenty-Eighth Street and the entrance to Bellevue.
“Where are you going?” Thomas said, hurrying after him. With a groan of protest, Pippa followed.
“To find Max,” Sam responded.
“You can’t just charge in there,” Thomas said. “What excuse will you give?”
There was a girl tottering up the street, her hair in pigtails and wearing makeup, as though she had just stepped off the stage. Thomas noticed, vaguely, that her face looked sort of like a pickle: miserable and sour.
“Sam, wait,” Thomas said, and in the process accidentally jostled the girl on the street. “Sorry,” he mumbled, barely looking at her.
“Sorry!” the girl exploded. “Sorry? Is that all you’ve got to say to me, you giant nitwit?”
Thomas stopped, startled by the girl’s outburst. Sam and Pippa stopped with him.
“I’m . . . very sorry?” Thomas said cautiously. It occurred to him that the girl might be one of the patients from Bellevue.
“Are you serious?” It was the girl’s voice—familiar, abrasive, like the hard strike of steel against stone—that struck Thomas as suddenly familiar. “You ought to be licking my boots right now—all of you—you ought to be down on your knees and kissing my toenails—”
“Max!” Thomas cried out, just as she jutted her face further into the streetlight, and the familiar point of her chin and hard little nose and white scar were revealed beneath the thick coat of makeup.
Sam’s jaw was nearly on the ground. “Is it—is it really you?”
“Who else would it be, you twerp?” Max nearly screamed, and gave Sam a hard whap on his arm. Thomas was sure it couldn’t have hurt him, but Sam flinched and drew back several inches. Pippa stifled a laugh.
“Left me to the wolves . . .” As she spoke, Max began scrubbing at her face with the sleeve of a coat. Up close, the makeup was even more hideous than Thomas had judged it from a distance. Thick mascara clumped her lashes, and bright circles of rouge bloomed on her cheeks like a rash. Her lipstick was a hideous red and smudged around her lips. No wonder Max looked so upset.
“Calm down, Max,” Thomas said. “Tell us what happened.”
Max paused long enough to glare at him. “How do you expect me to calm down when I just spent the past hour playing Little Miss Muffet with a bunch of loonies?” she demanded, and then resumed her furious scrubbing. She yanked her hair out of the pigtails and threw down the hair ribbons, hard, in the gutter. “I look like a class-A idiot!”
“I think you look kind of . . . pretty,” Sam ventured, in a small voice. For a moment, Thomas thought she would hit him again.
“Come on,” he said, before Pippa could dissolve into giggles and make everything worse. “Let’s get out of here.”
By Thirty-Third Street, where they got into the subway, Max had calmed down—although she still refused to look at Sam, whom she inexplicably blamed for the whole episode. By vigorously raking her fingers through her hair, she had restored it to its normal state of wildness.