Let's Play Dead Read Online Free PDF

letters for me to sign before whisking them away to mail. I sighed. I was beginning to fear that this paragon of efficiency was a fairy tale, or at best, a dinosaur well on the way to becoming extinct. Who wanted to be the nameless, faceless assistant to somebody, after all? As a feminist I applauded that: too many capable, talented women in the past had settled for that type of paid servitude. But as the president of a busy institution, I wished I could resurrect just one. I needed help, and I knew it.
    So I didn’t get much done before I had to leave for my appointment. I didn’t even have anyone to tell that I was officially leaving for the day. I stuck my head into Carrie’s cubicle. “Carrie, I’m headed out—I’m going to go talk to Arabella Heffernan at Let’s Play, and then go home from there.”
    Carrie’s face lit up. “Let’s Play? Ooh, I loved that place when I was a kid. My mom used to drag me to all these stuffy museums and I hated those, but sometimes she’d let us go to Let’s Play and it was great. Say hi to Furzie.”
    “Furzie?”
    “The big blue bear at the front entrance. Don’t worry—he doesn’t bite.”
    “That’s good to know. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
    It was a fifteen-minute walk to Let’s Play, and I knew enough to stick to the smaller streets—if you took the larger ones, it was like walking through a wind tunnel as the tall buildings funneled the gusts at you.
    Let’s Play was unique in my experience with museums. It occupied a pair of adjacent two-story brick buildings that had begun life in the late nineteenth century as small businesses, or maybe it was factories. Little had been changed structurally, and there were still a lot of exposed beams and naked pipes inside. The city had changed around the buildings, but their location was ideal for visiting parents, since they lay in close proximity to the other child-friendly Philadelphia museums. Parents had to park only once, and then if they wished they could split up, one parent leading the older kids to the science museums to visit dinosaurs, the other heading for Let’s Play, where hands-on interaction with the diverse exhibits was not only allowed but actively encouraged. I loved the concept. Why should a museum be a dark and stuffy place where everyone kept telling you “shush” and “don’t touch”? Let’s Play was the polar opposite: it was welcoming and friendly. I was curious to see what the new exhibit would be like, but I was sure it would be fun, at least if you were a kid.
    I walked in and introduced myself at the front desk, shouting to make myself heard over the noise of happy children. I smiled toward Furzie, who beamed benevolently over all comers. There seemed to be kids everywhere—must be some school group here today, or maybe the usual allotment of children had been compressed into a smaller-than-usual space because of the construction Arabella had mentioned. The frazzled young woman at the desk made a call and nodded encouragingly at me, then pointed toward the gift shop off the lobby. I made the assumption that Arabella would meet me there and drifted over.
    I love gift shops, and this one made me wish I had kids. Heck, I wanted half the things I saw: a menagerie of wind-up animals; prisms; all sorts of wonderful rulers and crayons and erasers. There was nothing battery powered in sight, thank goodness, and everything looked appropriately indestructible. I was contemplating how a large spider embedded in Lucite would look on my desk when Arabella came bustling in, apologizing breathlessly.
    “Nell, so good to see you. Sorry to keep you waiting, but things have been so crazy. Of course, that’s been true for months—maybe crazy is the new normal. Let me take you upstairs so we can talk.”
    There was no way to stem her burbling, so I nodded in agreement and followed her back into the melee of the hall, then up a flight of stairs. Things were appreciably quieter on the second floor,