“Right,” said the woman, peering over the edge of her desk. “Okay. Well. Let me know if you need anything.”
They walked the perimeter of the Octagon, which wasn’t big but also wasn’t small. The art on the wall was the kind his mom called “schmears”—a smear of one or two colors on a white canvas, the type of painting most people claimed could be done by kindergartners. And for all Theo knew, this entire exhibit was done by kindergartners. As if to prove this, the main doors opened and two men in matching shirts that said Sunshine Daycare stepped inside, leading a group of small children. The children wore clear plastic bubble suits that made them look like giant balloons with hands and feet. They bobbed and bounced behind the men. Two little girls repeatedly belly-bumped each other until one of the Sunshine Daycare people said, “Not too hard, girls, we don’t want you getting hurt!” One of the little girls promptly bumped the other onto her back, where she spun in lazy circles, flailing like a turtle. Nine’s head spun in kind.
Tess jerked on Nine’s leash, hauling her away from the little kids bobbing like buoys in a stream.
“It would be great if we knew what we were looking for,” said Jaime. “We don’t even have a hint. This whole place has been forgotten, in a way.”
After that, they climbed the staircase that wound itself up to the skylight. They spent at least an hour scouring the walls and the stairs and the floors for a sign of something cluelike.
“There must be something,” Tess said, once they had reached the skylight and couldn’t climb any farther. “Let’s go back downstairs and ask the woman at the desk.”
“I doubt she knows anything,” Theo said.
“Maybe she knows someone who knows something,” said Jaime.
When they got back to the front desk, the bubble-suited children were gone. The blond woman said, “Hello, again. What can I help you with?”
“We’re interested in the history of the Octagon,” said Tess.
“Great!” said the woman. “I have some brochures right here that give you the whole backstory.” Up close, she was a lot younger than Theo first thought. Not so much a woman as a college girl. Her fingernails were blue with little floating clouds.
“Thank you,” Tess said, taking a brochure. “We were wondering if you found any artifacts when you were renovating.”
The blond girl tipped her head, birdlike. “What kinds of artifacts?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Records or letters or doctors’ notes. Loose keys. Personal effects. Jewelry. Maybe bits of brick or stone with messages scratched into them by desperate patients. Like that.”
The girl kept smiling, though her eyes cut to the posh couple on the couch. “What? Why would you think we found anything like that?”
“This rotunda was the entrance of the New York City Lunatic Asylum,” said Theo.
The girl said, “This building opened as a retreat in 1839.”
“I’m not sure I’d call a lunatic asylum a ‘retreat,’” Jaime said, eyes on the sketch he was making.
Theo said, “Charles Dickens once visited here.”
Jaime read a quote from Dickens off his phone: “‘Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: There they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror.’”
“If you could keep your voices down,” the blond girl said, again glancing at the couple seated on the couch nearby.
“The patients got rotten food, scurvy, cholera. And when the asylum first opened, they were supervised by inmates from the penitentiary instead of nurses,” said Jaime.
The blond girl’s smile dimmed. She leaned forward and whispered, “Look, that’s not stuff my boss likes us to emphasize, especially when people are in the market for apartments.” She jerked her chin at the posh couple. The couple frowned.
“How much are apartments here, anyway?” Jaime asked.
The blonde slid a price sheet over to Jaime. Jaime regarded the sheet, then the blond woman, then the sheet, then the woman. “I think there are too many zeroes written here.”
“No, that’s the right number of zeroes.”
“You’d have to be Darnell Slant to afford a studio.”
“Tell me about it,” said the blonde.
“Tell me about it,” said Tess.
“Right?”
“No, I mean, really, tell me about it,” said Tess. “You guys had to have found something during your renovations. Things you donated to museums maybe?”
“The place was pretty much cleaned out when we got it. A pile of broken-down bricks. But not, like, significant bricks or whatever.”
Tess’s face fell. “Okay. Thanks anyway.”
“Except for some junk down in the storeroom.”
Theo’s skin prickled. “What kind of junk?”
“Stuff that we’ve been meaning to give to the local history people. We’ve been holding on to it while they’re working on getting funding for their own building. But I’m telling you, there’s nothing interesting. Some old boxes of garbage. A broken wheelchair. It’s not like we’re talking Morningstarr relics here.”
“Is there any chance we could see that stuff?” Tess said.
“Oh no,” the girl said. “My boss would kill me if I took people to the storeroom. Besides, it’s nothing interesting, like I said.”
“You know,” Jaime said, “my grandmother is in the market for a new place.”
The girl raised her eyebrow. “Seriously?”
Jaime said, “Oh, my grandma’s loaded.”
“Made her money in commodities,” Tess said. “And futures.”
“Yep,” said Jaime. “Both of those. Do you have a map that shows the grounds?”
The girl let go of her hair. “I bet you guys think you’re slick. You want a map to see where the storage room is, right? Do you think we’d put the storage room on the map?”
“We had to try,” said Jaime. “Thanks anyway.” He ripped a page out of his sketchbook. “For your time.”
The girl looked down. It was a picture of her twirling a curl around a little cloud finger. Even though Jaime had sketched only a few lines, he’d somehow captured the girl’s spirit. Theo hadn’t known such a thing was possible. He might have called it magical, if he believed in magic.
“Oh,” the girl said in a small voice. “This is . . . Oh.”
“Well,” said Jaime, slapping a hand on the counter, “we’ll get out of your way now.”
The girl bit her lip. “Hold on.” She ducked behind the desk and came back up holding a set of keys. “Bernard?” she called to the man in the suit speaking with the posh couple. “Watch the desk for a few minutes?”
Bernard’s smile was tight. “I’m with clients, Apricot.”
“Great, thanks, Bernie!” said Apricot, scooting out from behind the desk.