“We could try this one,” said Theo, pointing. “Looks like it’s the biggest.”

They headed for the next building. Branches clawed and grabbed at them, the dirt and leaves sucked at their shoes, willing them to stop, to lay down, to sleep, to stay, to stay here forever, to—

“Jaime!” said Tess.

“What!”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You seemed like—”

“—you were having a spell,” Theo finished for her.

“This place is freaking me out,” Jaime admitted.

“Me too,” said Tess. “The sooner we find the next clue, the sooner we can get out of here.”

But they made it to the next building with no more ghost sightings, no hint of bears. It felt huge, the stone towering over them. Here, too, ivy crawled all over the surface, small birds flew in and out of the broken windows. Between structures, there were tangles of pipes, portions of collapsed roofs or porches, rusting metal boxes that could have been generators.

As soon as they entered and saw the vast sheets of blue tile still affixed to the walls, they knew they’d found the right place.

“The blue,” said Tess. “So the clue is here.”

“We’re looking for red on blue, whatever that means,” said Theo.

“But where? This place is huge.”

Theo said, “Maybe we should split—”

“Don’t even say it,” Jaime said, regretting every scary movie, every horror comic he’d ever read. “We are not splitting up.”

“But we could—”

“No. We stay together, okay?”

Theo shrugged. “Okay.” He checked the watch his aunt had given him. “We have an hour left.”

“We’ll go room to room. And nobody wanders off. You hear me, Theo?”

“Yes, Dad,” Theo grumbled.

“Okay, then,” he said. He started down one long hallway littered with piles of dust, rotting wood, and ceiling tiles. In one room, an old claw-foot bathtub and sink sat in the middle of a pile of bricks. In another, brown vines, bare of leaves, snaked across the walls and ceiling. Piles of books were randomly strewn, some rotting, some still intact. Tess picked up a book.

“Studies on the Effects of Tuberculosis,” she read.

Jaime picked up another. “Baltimore Catechism.”

They dropped the books and kept walking. In another room, they found an old bed, possibly an operating table, that looked more like a torture device. On the floor, in a soup of melted soap, they found a spray of copper keys turning green. In still another room, this one with tile yellow as old teeth, a large rectangular metal container squatted below a ferocious-looking spigot.

“Is this for washing clothes or washing people?” Tess said. Nobody answered her.

After they’d explored most of the bottom floor, they ventured upstairs. Some of the rooms still had steel bed frames in rows where the tuberculosis patients or typhoid patients were housed, some of the rooms had a single bed frame by a window. Graffiti covered many of the walls: