by James Ponti
“Is there any other reason you can give us that would make us reconsider your suspension?”
“Yes, there is,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Our team needs to be reinstated because we’ve been asked to work on the Baker’s Dozen.”
Suddenly, things on the other side of the lights got very quiet. My teammates looked at me, wondering what on earth I was talking about. Dr. H considered this for a moment and begrudgingly smiled.
Now a different voice called down to us. It was one we hadn’t heard before, a pleasant voice belonging to a man who sounded older than the others.
“Could you please repeat that?” he asked.
“I said we have to be reinstated because we’ve been asked to help on the Baker’s Dozen.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” he replied before pausing and adding, “I’ll have to ask everyone except for the Prime-O to leave the room.”
Natalie, Alex, Grayson, and I all stood up to exit, but the man chuckled and called down to us again. “You four stay. I was talking to everyone else.”
“Good luck,” Dr. H said with a wink as he got up and left.
Now my teammates really gave me confused looks, and all I could do was shrug. My mom had told me what to say, but I had no idea what it all meant. We heard the others collect their things and leave, and soon the only noise was the sound of the lights humming. Then the older man had a brief conversation with the woman who had asked the last question. (I guess that means she’s the new Prime-O.)
“What’s the current status of the Baker’s Dozen?” he asked her.
“We’re down to two teams,” she said. “One current and one made up of past Omegas.”
It occurred to me that my mother must be part of the second team, a fact that made me smile.
“I thought we added a new team last month,” he said, a bit bewildered.
“We tried, sir,” she said, “but they were unable to solve the riddle.”
He thought about that for a moment. “Well, then I guess they wouldn’t have done too well on this assignment. Were you aware that a new invitation had been given out?”
“No, sir,” she said, “but they don’t need approval from me to extend one.”
Now the man directed his attention toward us. “Molly, can you confirm that you truly have been asked to help on the Baker’s Dozen?”
I repeated the response exactly as my mother had told me on the subway platform. “I can confirm that Triskaidekaphobia is the irrational fear of the number thirteen.”
“And do you suffer from this phobia?” he asked.
“No,” I answered, staying to the script. “Because, like the number thirteen, I am completely rational.”
“That’s very good to hear,” he replied.
We all waited for a moment to see if there was more.
“Does that mean we’re reinstated?” asked Natalie.
“Yes,” he said to our relief before adding, “with one catch.”
We traded nervous looks and then turned our attention back to him.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Baker’s Dozen is a top-secret operation,” he explained. “In fact, it’s so secretive that we cannot discuss it here.”
“Then how do we find out about it?” asked Natalie.
“By solving a puzzle,” he said. “If you can figure out this riddle, it will lead you to everything you need to know about the Baker’s Dozen.”
“And if we can’t?” I asked nervously.
“Well, then you’re back where you started,” he answered. “How do you think the hearing was going?”
“Not well,” I answered, stating the obvious.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “So I suggest you solve it.”
“What’s the riddle?”
“With this iron, you cannot press a shirt, but you can press your luck.”
Pressing Our Luck
Since Natalie’s apartment is only six blocks from the museum, we decided to go there to try solving the riddle. Alex was especially pleased with this decision when he found out that there was still plenty of leftover British Halloween candy. “That will definitely help,” he said with a straight face. “British candy’s good for thinking.”
“And you base that claim on what?” Natalie asked with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s a well-known fact,” he answered. “How do you think Isaac Newton came up with all the laws of motion? Chocolate.”
Considering we had just been reinstated, you’d think everyone would have been in a better mood as we walked along Central Park West. But there was definitely some tension, and I was pretty sure this had to do with the “You can’t ask me any questions” requirement I put on saving the team. To their credit, they didn’t ask. But they also didn’t say much of anything else.
Part of me wanted to blurt it all out and tell them about my mom and what happened on the bridge and the fight with the magician and his assistant. They had proven their friendship and trust to me more times than I could count. But Mom told me it would be dangerous if anyone knew about her. And I kind of worried what they’d think of me if they knew my mother was a zombie. Would they begin to question my loyalty to Omega? I mulled this over for a couple blocks as the cold November wind turned my cheeks a nice bright shade of pink. Finally, I decided to tell them the truth.
Well, sort of.
I told them about my mother approaching me on the subway and telling me what to say about the Baker’s Dozen. Only I left out the part about her being my mother. I just said it was a past Omega who wanted our team to work on the project. Technically, it was all true. But I’d left out some important facts.
I think Natalie was about to push for some more details, but Grayson saved me by changing the subject. “Do you think it’s significant that ‘baker’s dozen’ and ‘triskaidekaphobia’ both have something to do with the number thirteen?” he asked.
I thought about this for a second and realized I had no idea what he was talking about. “What does ‘baker’s dozen’ have to do with the number thirteen? Aren’t there twelve in a dozen?”
“Usually,” he said. “But in the Middle Ages, there were strict laws against bakers overcharging. If an order of bread was underweight, the baker could get his hand chopped off as a penalty. So they’d add an extra piece to every order to make sure there was enough.”
“Which means if you ordered twelve,” I said, understanding, “you’d get thirteen.”
“A baker’s dozen.”
Only Grayson would be familiar with medieval baking laws. I was truly impressed. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Well, I don’t know the answer to the riddle.”
We all laughed, which finally broke the tension.
For the rest of the walk, we tried to solve the riddle. We talked about ironing clothes, dry cleaning, and anything else that might relate to an iron. We played around with the phrase “push your luck.” But we got nowhere. We were totally stumped. We were also well aware of the fact that the last team that had tried to solve the riddle had failed, which was something we could not afford to do.
By the time we got to Natalie’s building, the only thing we knew for sure was that the lobby was nice and warm. My face had already started to thaw as we stepped onto the elevator.
“Here’s an example of triskaidekaphobia for you,” Natalie said as she pushed the button for the twelfth floor. “There’s no thirteen.”
“Seriously?” I said.
I looked at the panel and couldn’t believe my eyes. Sure enough, the button next to the twelve was fourteen.
“There’s no thirteenth floor on this building? Because of a silly phobia?”
“That’s true of a lot of the older buildings in New York,” Grayson said. “People were so scared of living or working on the thirteenth floor, they would just skip that number. There’s no thirteenth floor in the Chrysler Building or at 30 Rock.”
Like I s
aid, there was virtually nothing Grayson didn’t know.
“Speaking of phobias,” I said as the elevator began its climb, “I hope everyone notices that I’m going up to Natalie’s apartment. Again. That’s the second time this month I’ve overcome my fear of heights.”
“Are you counting Halloween as the first time?” asked Alex.
“Yes!” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I seem to remember you screaming in fear,” he joked.
“At the movie . . . and it was just a flinch,” I said as I gave him a slug.
“So how have you overcome this fear?” asked Grayson.
I thought about it for a moment before saying, “Once you’ve been in a fight on top of a bridge six hundred and fifty feet in the air, a twelfth-floor luxury apartment doesn’t seem so scary anymore.”
“Good point,” Natalie said.
The elevator dinged and the doors opened onto Natalie’s floor. But when the others started to get off, I motioned for them to stay and said, “Wait.”
“She jinxed it,” Alex said. “She talked about it and now she’s scared of heights again.”
“Wrong phobia,” I replied, on the verge of a breakthrough.
“What do you mean?” asked Grayson.
I pointed at the panel of buttons. “Because of triskaidekaphobia, you can’t press a button for thirteen.”
“Yeah,” Natalie replied. “That’s kind of what we just said.”
“Don’t you see? It’s just like the riddle,” I explained. “You can’t press the number thirteen. You can’t press your luck.”
“Oooh,” Alex said. “That’s good.”
The others nodded and for the first time in a while, we felt like an actual Omega team. We went into the apartment and settled in the family room to work on the puzzle. Natalie and Grayson sat at the computer, Alex kicked back in a recliner, happily munching from the bowl of Halloween candy. And I took the chair that was farthest from the window. (I may have been getting better at dealing with heights, but there was no reason to tempt fate and sit by the massive twelfth-story picture window.)
“Let’s break down the riddle piece by piece,” Grayson said. “With this iron, you cannot press a shirt, but you can press your luck.”
“I’m on board with Molly’s elevator theory,” Alex said midchew. “I’m thinking it’s an elevator that has a button for the thirteenth floor.”
“But what does that have to do with an iron?” asked Natalie. “And what elevator?”
He thought for a second before answering, “I have no idea.”
“Wow! You were right. That chocolate really does make you as smart as Isaac Newton,” she said sarcastically.
“What about an elevator made of iron?” I suggested.
“That could be,” Grayson said with a nod as he typed in a search and scanned the results. “There’s an elevator made out of iron in Brooklyn, but it’s a grain elevator, so there wouldn’t be buttons for any floor.”
“What if the elevator isn’t made out of iron?” Alex wondered. “What if it’s the building?”
“Can you make a building out of iron?” asked Natalie. “I don’t think it’s strong enough.”
“Maybe not,” Grayson said as he looked at the results of another search. “But there are some buildings in SoHo with cast-iron facades.”
“Any of them thirteen stories high?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“I think we’re getting off track,” Natalie said. “The riddle said, ‘With this iron, you cannot press a shirt.’ I don’t think it’s talking about the metal. I think it’s talking about one specific iron.”
Grayson kept running through search after search on the computer. He called out to us whenever he found something potentially useful. “At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there’s a Degas painting called A Woman Ironing.”
“Is there anything lucky or unlucky about it?” I asked.
“Other than having to do chores,” he said, “not particularly.”
“What about this one,” Natalie said, looking farther down the same list. “There’s also a painting of St. Reparata being tortured with hot irons. That sounds extremely unlucky.”
“I got it!” Alex exclaimed.
We all stopped and turned eagerly to him.
“Really?” Natalie said. “You figured it out?”
“Umm . . . no,” he said, guiltily holding up a candy bar. “I meant I found the specific type of chocolate bar I was looking for. It has nuts and caramel I had one on Halloween. It’s really delicious.”
Natalie balled up a piece of paper and threw it at him.
“Here’s one at the Museum of Modern Art by the artist Man Ray,” Grayson said. “It’s a painted flatiron with tacks glued along the bottom.”
“Does that even count as art?” Natalie asked, leaning in to get a closer look at the picture.
“Forget the art museums,” Alex said. “It’s not Flatiron with Tacks.”
“Wait,” I said excitedly. “That’s it.”
“It is Flatiron with Tacks?” asked Alex, confused.
“Not the tacks, just the flatiron,” I said. “Look up the Flatiron Building.”
Grayson smiled as he typed. A moment later, a picture of the Flatiron Building was on the computer screen. Grayson read the description next to it. “Completed in 1902, the Flatiron Building is considered a pioneering skyscraper of historical significance. The building is shaped like a triangle and gets its name from its resemblance to a similarly shaped clothes iron.”
By now, Alex and I had both gotten up and were looking over Grayson’s shoulder, reading along with him.
“Does it have a thirteenth floor?” Alex asked anxiously.
Grayson clicked on a couple links and found the answer. “Yes, it does!”
“Well, Molly, it’s a good thing you’re getting over your fear of heights,” Natalie said, “because it looks like we’ve got an elevator to catch.”
The Room That Isn’t There
The Flatiron is the only building I know that has its own optical illusion. That’s because it’s a giant triangle. If you stand at just the right spot and look at the front, you can make it seem like half the building vanishes. The security guard in the lobby, however, was not an illusion. And there was no trick to make him disappear. Too bad, because we needed to get past him in order to reach the elevators.
Our plan was to quickly check the directory on the wall and see which companies had offices on the thirteenth floor. Then we could try to convince the guard that we had an appointment with one of those companies. It was a good plan . . . except for one small problem.
“There are no floor numbers,” Alex said as he looked at the list, “just the names of the companies.”
Ugh.
There were at least fifty companies listed on the directory, and rather than arranged by floor, they were listed alphabetically. If we’d solved the riddle correctly (and I had a good feeling that we had), one of them held the secret to the Baker’s Dozen. But we had no idea which one it was. We also didn’t have much time to figure it out. Our sense of desperation must have caught the guard’s attention, because after a few moments, he got up from his desk and started walking toward us.
“Stall him,” Natalie whispered.
“Yeah,” I said in agreement. “Stall him.”
She gave me a nudge. “I was talking to you.”
“Me? How am I supposed to stall him?”
“Be creative.”
You’ve got to love the way Natalie gives advice that has absolutely no actual advice in it. I decided the best thing to do was to start talking to the guard before he got a chance to ask us any questions. That way, at least, I could direct the conversation. So I just asked him the first thing that came to mind.
“Excuse me, but how do you know which side’s the front?”
He stopped for a moment and tried to figure out what I was talking about. “I’m sorry, what?”
&nb
sp; “Which side of the building is the front?” I asked. “Square buildings have a front, a back, and two sides. But with a triangular building, how can you tell which side is the front?”
He gave me the same look I give my Latin teacher whenever she asks me to conjugate verbs. You know, the look that says, “I should probably know this, but I have absolutely no idea.” I decided to keep piling on.
“I mean, the side facing Fifth Avenue looks like the front. But so does the side facing Broadway. Does it have two fronts? Can a building even have two fronts? Is that possible? Or does it just have two sides and no front?”
“Those are all good questions,” he said. And while he was busy trying to come up with an answer to any of them, the others kept searching the directory for any hint as to where we needed to go.
The stall was working perfectly until an uninvited guest jumped into the conversation. Apparently, the fact that I was not actually looking for an answer did not matter. A question had been asked, and Encyclopedia Grayson couldn’t help himself.
“Fifth Avenue is the front.”
He said it like a fact and not like an opinion. And, knowing Grayson, I’m certain he was right. Still, I gave him my angry eyes, hoping he’d get the hint and help out.
“Are you sure?” I asked as I pointed to a photograph of the building that was hanging on the wall. “Both sides look identical. Why isn’t Broadway the front?”
“Yeah,” wondered the guard. “Why not Broadway?”
“Because the address is 175 Fifth Avenue,” he explained. “According to the US Postal Service, the address signifies the front of the building.”
“Hey, that makes perfect sense,” said the guard. “I could have thought about that all day and never figured it out.”
“Yeah, thanks for clearing that up,” I added, still staring daggers at Grayson. “I would have hated to waste any more of his time.”
By Grayson’s reaction, I could see that he finally realized his mistake.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
The guard now turned to the others and asked, “So, what brings you all to the Flatiron?”
“Well,” Natalie replied, taking the lead. “We have an appointment on the thirteenth floor.”