“I think you might want to work on your speech,” Thomas said.
Dumfrey jerked in his chair, as though he’d been electrocuted. He peered closely at Thomas. “My speech? Of course . . . my speech.” He reached suddenly for a pen, once again dislodging the papers from the corner of his desk. “Excellent suggestion, my dear boy. I’ll write a speech that’ll have the hardest-hearted scoundrel weeping in the aisles. I’ll write a speech that’ll knock the socks off a nun!”
“What about Evans?” Pippa prompted.
“Oh! Evans.” Mr. Dumfrey waved a hand. “Yes, yes. Go and see Evans, if you’d like. Give him my best.” He licked the tip of his pen and paused, his hand hovering over a blank piece of paper. “Now let me see . . . Potts, Potts. What on earth will I say about Potts?”
They left him bent over his paper, frantically scribbling, and Pippa felt better, satisfied that everything was back to normal.
It didn’t take them long to find Evans once they arrived at Mercy General. A bored receptionist, her face concealed behind a copy of the Daily Screamer, directed them upstairs without even glancing in their direction. They took a rickety elevator to the third floor and could hear him even before the doors had opened fully.
“So then I said to him . . . that may be a bear, but it’s the prettiest bear this dog has ever seen!”
A chorus of female laughter, like the twittering of birds, followed this pronouncement.
Thomas gestured the group forward. This floor was surprisingly empty. There were no nurses bustling in and out of rooms, pushing patients in wheelchairs, and calling to one another. Just several empty hallways branching out from an equally empty waiting room, where a radio was buzzing forlornly in the corner.
As soon as they traced the sound of Evans’s voice, it was easy to see why. All the nurses—at least two dozen of them—were crammed into Evans’s room. Every available surface of the room was occupied either by a woman or a flower arrangement, so the air smelled as thick as a perfume factory.
“You are too much!” one of the nurses was saying, as Thomas, Pippa, Max, and Sam gathered awkwardly in the doorway. Pippa coughed and two dozen heads swiveled in their direction.
“Pippa!” Evans cried, sitting up a little further in bed. He was wearing a short-sleeved undershirt and had his left arm in a large cast. There was a faint bruise on his left cheek.
“Thomas! Mackenzie! Sam! I don’t believe it. You brought the whole gang. How wonderful.”
“Awwww.” A nurse with black hair and a powder-white face was smiling in a particularly stupid way. “You didn’t tell us you had children, Bill. Shame on you.”
“He isn’t—” Pippa and Max started to say.
“We’re not—” Thomas and Sam said at the same time.
But their protests were drowned out by Evans’s booming laugh.
“I wish!” he said. “Sorry to say, darling, these extraordinary children are no relations of mine. But come in, come in. Not you, Sam—you might break something. I’m kidding!” He roared with laughter.
“Hey.” Another nurse, this one with a wide, childish face and a wad of gum in her mouth, squinted at them. “Don’t I know you kids from somewhere?”
“We were hoping to talk to you alone,” Pippa said loudly, with an emphasis on the word alone, before Evans could cause a scene and introduce them as the freaks from Dumfrey’s museum.
“Of course, of course. Anything for you.” Mr. Evans turned apologetically to the crowd of nurses. “You heard the little lady. Mind giving us some breathing room, sweethearts?”
The nurses shuffled one by one out of the room, giggling and whispering, waving to Evans and promising to return soon. One or two of them shot Pippa a dirty look.
“Well, now,” Evans said, as soon as they were alone. “What can I do you for?”
“We, um, just came by to see how you were feeling,” Pippa said. It was embarrassing to see a grown man in nothing but an undershirt, tucked up in bed like a small child, and she had difficulty meeting Mr. Evans’s eyes. Instead, she focused on a strange blurry birthmark she could see on his right forearm.
Mr. Evans caught her staring. “You’ve found my dirty little secret,” he said, winking. Pippa, looking more closely, realized it wasn’t a birthmark at all but an old tattoo, faded and green with age, of a large flat-nosed fish. “Got this when I was in the navy. Sailor first-class. USS Saratoga.” He turned his arm so that the tattoo was concealed. “Good thing we sea dogs are made of tough salt. I’m telling you, my number almost came up yesterday.”
“What happened?” Thomas asked. He pulled himself onto a countertop, between two large arrangements of pink and white carnations.
Evans touched a finger to his nose. “Aha. There’s the rub. I knew you kids would come looking for the real story.”