The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Watching Theo got a lot less awesome and way more horrifying when Mr. Moran pointed at the blocks and said, “That’s exactly what Slant will do to this building. Knock it down to the ground. He’ll build condos that cost millions apiece and we’ll all end up in Staten Island.”

  “Try Idaho,” said Tess Biedermann, who elbowed her way into the conversation.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?” said Mrs. Hornshaw.

  “The detective is making some calls.”

  Mr. Moran said, “She’s not going to be able to do anything. The city owns the building; the city can sell it.”

  Mrs. Yang said, “We’re nothing to any of them.”

  The taller Ms. Gomez agreed. “We’re bugs.”

  Otto yelled, “I’M NOT A BUG I’M A NINJA!”

  “But I thought this place was a historical landmark,” said Mrs. Adeyemi. “I thought it was protected.”

  “The motion never passed. Who do you think is on that board?” said Mr. Yang.

  Mr. Moran nodded. “Bajillionaires.”

  Theo paused midstomp. “There is no such number as ‘bajillion,’” he said, and then brought his foot down. Blocks sprayed up.

  “Can’t we sue?” said Tess, “I mean, if we all band together . . .”

  Mrs. Biedermann laid her phone on the kitchen counter. It hadn’t even made a sound, but everyone stopped talking. Theo Biedermann stopped stomping. Cricket zoomed around the room on her trike till her dad caught her.

  “Well,” Mrs. Biedermann began. And that’s all she had to say for every face in the room to fall.

  “What?” said Tess. “Well, what?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  “You’re sorry,” spit Mr. Perlmutter. He brandished his walker again, then hobbled out the door.

  The rest of the people took a last sip of coffee, a last bite of blintz. Mrs. Moran took ahold of the trike while Mr. Moran gathered one kid under each big pink arm.

  Cricket, dangling in her father’s grasp, looked at Jaime. “Your hair looks like little worms.”

  “Be nice, Cricket,” said her mother wearily.

  “My hair is little worms,” Jaime told Cricket. “They dance when no one is looking.”

  “Mommy, I want hair worms that dance when people are looking. I want famous hair.”

  “Sure you do,” her mother said, patting her own short and tidy black ’fro.

  “I’M A NINJA!” shouted Otto.

  “You’re just a dumb baby,” said Cricket to her brother, who had Cricket’s bronze skin but limp hair. “You’re not famous at all.”

  Jaime sat on that couch, feeling like a dumb baby, not famous at all. Slant, Inc., had offered everyone relocation money, but not nearly enough to keep everyone in this borough, let alone this neighborhood. And who would find Mima another job? She loved this building. She loved the goofy elevator and the old windows and the ancient plumbing and the plaster that always needed fixing. For Mima, there would never be another building like this one. She had stopped following Mr. Biedermann around and was now standing alone in the middle of the room, frowning at the vacuum as if it had failed her.

  Plus. Plus.

  His mom had lived here.

  Mrs. Biedermann scooped up her phone and made another call. “Ronnie? Yeah, it’s me. Great, thanks. You? Glad to hear it.”

  “Mom, I just need to talk to you for a minute,” Tess Biedermann said. “If we could—”

  Her mother held up a hand, kept talking. “Listen, your sister’s a real estate agent, right? She any good? Be honest! Okay. Can I have her name and number? Something’s come up and we might have to find a new place. Yeah, I know. I’ll explain later. I have a pen, go ahead.”

  Tess Biedermann finally gave up. She slumped on the couch next to Jaime, the two of them watching Theo knock down the last wall standing. Tess said, “He never does stuff like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Never freaks out. Never messes things up.”

  “Oh,” said Jaime. He didn’t know what else to say. Everything was already messed up.

  The Biedermanns’ apartment emptied out. Mr. Biedermann gathered the plates and coffee cups. Mima put the little vacuum back wherever she’d found it. Jaime stood to follow her out, but she said, “Why don’t you stay with your friends? I have some calls to make, too.”

  Friends? He’d gone to grammar school with the twins and knew them a little. But they were like a set of salt and pepper shakers; they didn’t seem to need anyone else. Jaime wasn’t sure what he needed. He wanted to crawl under the coffee table and curl up with the cat till the whole thing was over, but what kind of chicken did that? He should march his famous hair to the mayor’s office and stage some sort of protest. Make speeches or chain himself to a radiator or go on a hunger strike or all three. Something. Something.

  Mrs. Biedermann covered the phone. “Tess? Did you sort Grandpa’s mail yet?”

  “What? No. Who cares about—”

  “Why don’t you bring it upstairs and put the new batch with the rest?”

  “But—”

  Mrs. Biedermann’s eyes landed on Jaime. “Maybe Jaime wants to go with you. And the cat. And your brother, before he decides to start kicking our furniture out the window.”

  “What does it matter?” Tess grumbled. But she whistled for Nine. The cat crept out from under the coffee table and Tess slipped her into a harness.

  “Come on, Theo,” Tess said. “Mom wants to get rid of us.”

  Mr. Biedermann put a stack of plates in the sink with a rattle. “Tess, you know that’s not what your mother meant.”

  Tess didn’t answer. She marched toward the door. Turned. Glared. At both of them. “Are you guys just going to stand there, or are you coming with me?”

  Theo blinked, focused on Jaime for the first time since Jaime had arrived in the apartment. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think you look a little blintzed to me,” Jaime said.

  Theo smiled, a tiny smile that disappeared as fast as it had appeared. “We’re all a little blintzed.” He stepped over the destruction and followed Tess out of the apartment.

  “Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann,” Jaime said, though he wasn’t sure what he was thanking them for, really.

  Mrs. Biedermann waved, continued her phone call.

  “Bye, Jaime,” said Mr. Biedermann absently. “Hope you’ll come by again.”

  “Sure,” Jaime said, the word thick on his tongue. “We have a whole month.”

  In the hallway, as Jaime was shutting the Biedermanns’ door behind him, he noticed something white and crumpled on the floor. He picked it up. An envelope with a gold seal and what looked like teeth marks. How upset had Mima been that she’d missed a piece of trash littering up her building? That she didn’t stop and pick it up? That none of the other tenants had?

  He turned the envelope over, smoothed it out. The words TRUST NO ONE TRUST NO ONE TRUST NO ONE screamed at him. “Now you tell me,” he muttered.

  “Jaime?” Tess called. She was holding the elevator with a stiff arm and a furious expression, wispy tendrils of hair standing out in a corona all around her head. She reminded him of Tyrone the hamster-hog trying to power her way to a more just universe.

  Don’t let anybody get you down.

  Jaime folded the envelope and slipped it into a pocket. “Coming.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tess

  The major symptoms of shock: weak pulse, clammy skin, shallow breathing, dizziness, light-headedness, confusion. To this list, Tess added numb lips, itchy toes, gnashing teeth, and a deep desire to toss the nearest real estate developer into the Hudson. Maybe all the real estate developers. And their creepy minions. Where does a person find minions anyway? Was there a job board online somewhere? How would an advertisement for minions read? Have you ever been told your smile makes people uncomfortable? Does your voice sound like a dentist’s drill? Does your gaze cause others to break out in hives?
Have you misplaced your moral compass?

  “Tess, are you okay?” Jaime asked.

  Right. She wasn’t alone in the elevator. Sometimes she forgot she wasn’t alone, like when she walked down the street and realized she’d been mumbling to herself for blocks.

  “Tess?” Jaime said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “Yeah?” said Tess.

  “You were mumbling to yourself,” Theo said.

  “I don’t mumble,” Tess said.

  “I wasn’t talking about the mumbling, I was talking about your eye,” said Jaime.

  “My eye?”

  “It’s sort of . . . twitching.”

  “My eye is really, really angry.”

  “Makes sense,” said Jaime.

  But the twitching was contagious, Tess noticed. As they rode to the penthouse, Jaime’s fingers typed out manic messages against the leg of his jeans. Theo’s foot tapped as if he was reliving the way he’d destroyed the Tower of London. Nine paced the length of her leash, pausing only to sniff at their sneakers. Even the elevator was twitchy; it lurched forward, stopped, jerked back, retraced its path, then lurched and jerked again.

  Finally, they reached the seventh floor and the elevator released them into the corridor, which smelled of oatmeal, musty newspaper, and just the tiniest bit of lavender. Tess dug around in her messenger bag, pulled out the keys to her grandfather’s apartment, and unlocked the door.

  Grandpa’s apartment had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and dining room, even a library. He’d offered to switch apartments with the Biedermanns once, but Mom said there was no way that Grandpa would be able to fit his stuff anywhere else.

  “I’ve never been up to the penthouse,” said Jaime.

  Theo grunted. “My mom says a more accurate name would be ‘the fire hazard on the top floor.’”

  Which was true. The apartment was packed with books and maps and parchments, strange gadgets designed by the Morningstarrs and others, piles of newspaper that formed little chimneys all over the place. How would they sort it all? And where would they move it?

  Tess let go of Nine’s leash and the cat pranced between the chimneys. Huge windows lined one wall, motes of dust dancing in the bright sunshine. Nine leaped up to catch them like a bear snapping at spawning salmon.

  “Wow,” said Jaime. “This is . . .”

  “A mess?” said Theo.

  “Amazing,” said Jaime.

  Clanking sounds erupted from the kitchen, followed by some high-pitched squealing that pasted Nine’s ears to the top of her head.

  “I thought your grandpa wasn’t here,” said Jaime.

  “He’s not,” Theo said.

  “Then who—”

  A man dressed entirely in silver armor complete with helmet clomped into the living room. He held a tray with a plate of cookies and three overfull glasses of water that sloshed all over his chain-mail gloves.

  Jaime’s mouth dropped open. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It is,” said Theo. “A Lancelot. Servant model. Built by the Morningstarrs, based on designs by Leonardo da Vinci. Something they did when they were young, but the machines caught on.”

  Tess said, “In the early eighteen hundreds, everybody had a Lance—well, all the rich people had a Lance—but they went out of style more than a hundred years ago.”

  “Maybe if you got him a different outfit,” said Jaime.

  “Lances can get destructive when left alone too long,” Theo said. “My grandpa’s always finding the toilet paper pulled off the rolls and dragged around the house.”

  Jaime nodded. “So they’re like big metal kittens?”

  Lance held out the tray to Jaime, metal arms squeaking.

  “He makes the cookies himself,” said Tess. “Oatmeal. They’re pretty good, usually. He must have made these before my grandpa . . . well, before he left. They might be a little stale.”

  “Stale cookies are still cookies.” Jaime took a couple of cookies and a glass of water. “Thanks, uh, man.”

  Tess wasn’t hungry, but she took a cookie, and Theo did, too. Lance clomped back into the kitchen, where he started banging around pots and pans. If he had the ingredients, Lance could make cookies, beef stew, vegetable soup, or pancakes; you never knew which. Normally, just the thought of an empty suit of armor whipping up a batch of pancakes would make Tess laugh, but now . . .

  She put the water and cookie on top of a stack of papers, her stomach clenching and unclenching in its own interpretative dance of catastrophe. When she went back downstairs, her parents would tell her to stop worrying so much, that worrying didn’t solve anything. But worrying was supposed to keep bad things from happening—that was the entire point of worrying. You said to yourself, I hope I don’t die in a bizarre accident with a revolving door, and you didn’t, see? Because you worried about it.

  She felt as if she had been smacked in the face with a revolving door. A stale cookie wasn’t going to fix that.

  But what would?

  What could?

  Tess said, “Well, I can’t say I didn’t expect this.”

  “That your Lance would need some oil?” Jaime said.

  “That Slant would eventually get our building,” Tess said. “That he’d want to destroy it.”

  “I didn’t expect it,” said Theo. “Not in our lifetime. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

  “An affront to decency?” Tess said. “An affront to humanity? An affront to every living creature in the known and unknown universes?”

  “It’s pretty bad,” Jaime said. He took a bite of a cookie, raised his brows, and popped the rest of the cookie into his mouth. “I wish we could do something.”

  “Like what?” said Theo.

  The cat banked off the window, flipped in the air. Jaime wandered around the apartment, sipping his water, picking up framed photographs and putting them down again, pressing middle C on the baby grand piano that Grandpa used to play before he got sick. Tess almost explained about Grandpa, about where he’d gone, but Jaime was examining a Duke map of New Amsterdam, 1664. Next to that was another map that showed New York City under British occupation from 1776 to 1783. And then a drawing of the Tombs, a fortress prison on Centre Street built around 1830 in the style of ancient Egyptian architecture, right next to the Five Points neighborhood.

  Jaime leaned in to look more closely. “What is this place?”

  “That’s the Tombs courthouse and prison,” Tess said. “The building’s still there. It’s where my mom works. But the neighborhood around it was torn down a long time ago. It was mostly immigrants living in cruddy buildings that were sort of sinking into the ground. Lots of crime and stuff. The Morningstarrs were immigrants, too, and when they first came, that’s where they lived. Later, they fought to get the place cleaned up, the people fed, schools built, things like that.” She nodded at a portrait of the Morningstarrs on the opposite wall. In it, the twins looked like two cotton swabs—long faced with wispy tufts of white hair.

  “Not everyone wants poor people fed and educated,” said Jaime.

  “Or living in decent housing,” said Tess. Again her stomach accordioned in, accordioned out. She imagined the people of the Five Points who had just arrived in America, whole families crammed into a single hot and dirty room, the stink of Collect Pond, fouled with factory runoff and waste, seeping in through the racked walls. She hoped that Idahovians were against fouling ponds with factory runoff. She hoped they supported decent housing.

  Jaime moved from the drawing of the Tombs to a framed newspaper clipping hanging lopsided. “‘New York Sun, 1855,’” he read. “‘Morningstarrs leave first clue in city-wide treasure hunt.’”

  Theo recited, “42, 1, 2; 42, 20, 7; 42, 1, 10; 42, 2, 17; 42, 2—”

  “Stop showing off, Theo.” Tess waved her hand. To Jaime, she said, “He remembers every number he hears and likes to remind everyone.”

  “I remember studying the first clue in grammar school,” said Jaime. �
��It’s a book cipher using an Edgar Allan Poe story.”

  “‘The Purloined Letter.’ From a magazine called The Gift. My grandpa has a couple of copies of that magazine, too,” Tess said, pointing. “Right on that shelf.”

  Jaime wandered over to a nearby bookcase, scanned it, and pulled out the magazine, the pages of which were laminated.

  “The first number is the page number, the second number is the line number on that page, and the third number is the word in that line,” Theo said.

  “‘It begins, as everything does, with a lady. Her book holds your keys,’” said Tess. “We know. Everybody knows.”

  Theo said, “But did you know the word begins doesn’t actually appear in the story, only the word begin?”

  “What does it matter?” said Tess.

  “Details always matter,” Theo said. “Like the fact that the Morningstarrs used that story in the first place. They could have used the Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The Bible. Something by Dickens or Melville or even a recipe for a cake. They could have used anything. But they used a detective story about something hidden in plain sight, which pretty much describes all the clues they left.”

  “They used a detective story because they had a sense of humor,” Tess said.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Theo.

  “I thought they were real sticks in the mud,” Jaime said. “Never laughed. Never smiled.” All three of them looked again at the portrait of the Morningstarrs, who seemed to be glowering at them the way eagles eyed their prey.

  Tess crossed her arms. “It’s just a theory my grandpa was working on. He said that anyone who designed machines the way they did had to have a sense of humor.”

  “They designed the machines the way they did because they thought people would accept them if they looked more like natural creatures,” said Theo.

  Tess waved him off. “You sound like a history book.”

  “Thank you,” said Theo.

  Jaime leafed through the magazine, counted down the lines on the pages. Then he said, “That’s your grandpa’s thing, right? Studying the Morningstarrs? Trying to solve the Cipher?”