He was wearing the same jeans and ball cap as yesterday, but he had switched to a sleeveless shirt. A muscle shirt, I thought it was called. It was gray, and his arms were bare in the brisk September sunshine. It wasn’t even hot out.
The tattoo I’d glimpsed on his biceps yesterday was on full view now. It was Snoopy on his doghouse. It was badly done.
“I have so many questions,” I said, looking away again. “I don’t want the answers to any of them.”
Like the rest of Fell, the hospital was both old and ugly. The ceilings were low, the floors yellowed, the air heavy with unpleasant smells. This was a building that vividly remembered World War Two.
I’d never been here before. We hadn’t broken bones as children, us Esmies. We didn’t play hard enough for that. Vail had dislocated a shoulder once, and I had cut my chin deeply enough to leave a small scar, but that was all. Dodie had sailed through childhood without a flaw.
There was a quiet hum of busyness in the hospital, the crackle of announcements over the speaker system, low conversations. I led Bradley to a front desk labeledinformation. A fortyish woman sat behind it, wearing glasses on a chain around her neck.
“Can I help you?” she asked, giving me a narrowed look.
Bradley stepped around me to talk to her. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”
Glasses Chain blinked at his biceps. I didn’t know whether she was pondering his slightly seedy masculinity or, as I had, was wondering why Snoopy was there, and why half of his face was blurry. “I’m fine,” she replied.
“We need to find Joan Sleeter,” Bradley said. “Can you tell us where to go?”
The woman lifted her gaze, just a little too slowly, to his face. “Do you know Joan?”
“She’s expecting me,” Bradley said.
Glasses Chain lifted her phone. “She’s the assistant to the administrator. I’ll have to call her.”
“You do that,” Bradley said.
As the woman dialed and spoke on the phone, he glanced over his shoulder at me and waggled his eyebrows. “Dad told me who to ask for,” he said.
“What name should I give her?” the woman asked, cupping her palm over the phone and leaning over the desk.
“Bradley Pine,” he answered her. I was completely forgotten. “Gus Pine’s son.”
“I could have handled it,” I grumbled, after the woman had directed us to the third floor and waved us on.
“Yeah,” Bradley agreed. “But you’re not wearing this shirt.”
I pushed the button for the elevator. “Do you always use your biceps to get what you want?”
“It’s worked since high school,” he replied, and I let loose a reluctant laugh.
The elevator doors opened, and we both paused as we looked into its tiny parameters, badly lit by half-dead fluorescent lights. “Should we take the stairs?” I asked.
“It’s only two floors.” He didn’t sound much more confident than I was, but he stepped inside. “It’ll be fine.”
It should have been amusing, the two of us silent in the elevator, listening as it creaked upward through the depths of the building. Normal people would laugh it off. But this was Fell.
“Is this place haunted?” I asked Bradley in the silence.
“That’s a really good question,” he replied.
The doors slowly opened, and we stepped into a soulless hallway, the waxed floors silent beneath our feet. There were far-off voices, but no other sign of humans. The hallway arched off both left and right, with no indication of which direction we were supposed to go. I picked left and started walking.
“You should apply,” Bradley said as he followed me.
“What?”
“To the strip club. I bet they’d hire you. I’d pay to see you naked.”
