could a five-year-old just wander out of the buildings?' Bryant shouted. 'What kind of a place you guys running here?'
'Well ... well ... you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr Brown '
Marie cut them both off. 'You've got to find him,' she whispered. 'It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be . . . be . . .'
'Oh, Mrs Brown, I really think such worries are premature,' the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia - there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr Elfman's prognosis was grave. 'If he got out, he's probably dead,' Elfman said.
Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen, pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns of Haven had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.
At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.
'Hey!' the jan;' tor yelled. 'Hey, kid!'
'Hi,' Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. 'Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost.'
The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances - by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.
When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again ... after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly - who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad - also burst into tears.
'Christ, Hilly, where you been?'
Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ('I was followin' a pixie,' Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.
'I like the pups, too,' he said. 'Can we have a puppy, Daddy?'
The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the 'puppies,' too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr and Mrs Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight