The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Jaime didn’t say it, but they didn’t have decades before Slant would take possession of their building.

  He went back to the letter. “What if the names are the most important thing about this letter? Miss King. Mr. Munsterberg. Tredwell.”

  “I guess we can go to the library and use the computers to look them up,” said Tess.

  Jaime stuffed the sketchbook in one pocket, the Morningstarr letter into another, and he fumbled for his cell phone in a third. “I can look it up right now.”

  “You have a phone?” Theo grumbled. “We’re not allowed to get one till next year.”

  For the name “Miss King,” Jaime got so many results that nothing stood out. “Mr. Munsterberg” yielded an entry about one Hugo Munsterberg, a psychologist who wrote a book about the film industry in 1916. But the name “Tredwell” was different. “‘The Seabury Tredwell House, built in 1832,’” Jaime read aloud. “‘The Tredwell family lived there for a century. It’s a museum now. Everything inside is preserved just as it always was.’”

  Nine the cat started to pace and Tess’s knee started to bounce. “What if there’s something important hidden at the Tredwell House?” she said.

  Jaime read from the letter in his hands: “A fresh start, a new perspective.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Guys. What if . . . what if there are two trails of clues? The one that people have been following for years, and this one. Like a secret cipher?”

  Theo’s hand hovered in the air, as if he didn’t know where to put it. “Huh.”

  Jaime wanted to chortle and to chuckle and to roar. He felt like laughing the way you do at a surprise birthday party, the way you laugh when they bring out a cake shaped like Spider-Man.

  They got up and shot through the gallery doors, almost mowing down Guffaw Man and his tour group.

  Guffaw Man snorted and said, “Are you kids still trying solve the Ciiiii—”

  The rest of the word was swallowed up by the wind as they ran right past him and into the bright sunshine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cricket

  The morning after Darnell Slant—or rather, his creepy minions—told the residents of 354 W. 73rd Street that they were officially homeless, six-year-old Zelda “Cricket” Moran woke up the same time she always did: 5:22 a.m. on the dot. And she did the same thing she did every single morning: she climbed out of bed and selected her outfit for the day. She was very particular about her outfits, which she matched very carefully to her moods. (This didn’t always please the adults around her, especially on class picture days or family reunions when she insisted on wearing a skeleton costume or a gas mask.) That morning, she put on a pink tutu, striped tights, red sparkle high-tops, her favorite heart necklace—the one that the building had given her—and a black T-shirt with a picture of a skull and crossbones and a snake head poking through the eye socket, because this was the most metal outfit she owned and she was feeling particularly metal.

  Since no one else was up, she marched into the kitchen, poured herself a bowl of her favorite cereal—no milk, because milk made everything soggy and soggy was not metal—and ate in front of the TV. When she was done with her breakfast, she spent the next fifteen minutes practicing her crowd-surfing in the front foyer, which was a little difficult because she was by herself. After a while, Karl trundled into the room and tugged on her pigtails as if they were handlebars and he was trying to steer her. He was always trying to steer her. Stop trying to steer, Karl! Or else he was spinning the lock on the pantry door, scrambling to get at the Cheez Doodles. He loved Cheez Doodles.

  Cricket got up and unlocked the pantry—silly Karl, the combination was 1, 2, 3—and grabbed a handful of Cheez Doodles. Karl ate them while Cricket put on his harness. Then she walked him around the apartment. Well, Cricket walked. Karl was on his back with his legs in the air, getting dragged along. He looked a little bit dead. That was pretty metal.

  Her mom finally shuffled out into the living room. “Cricket, please don’t drag your raccoon around like that. You know how dirty he gets.”

  “He likes it, don’t you, Karl?”

  Karl scrubbed the cheese from his masked face with his tiny hands but didn’t try to get up.

  “Right,” said Cricket’s mom. Her hair was mashed down on one side of her face and her eyes were bloodshot. It wasn’t a good look for her, but it was also too early in the morning for Cricket’s UNBRIDLED HONESTY. At least, that was what her dad would have said. The first time he said it, she had to look in her special word book for the meaning of unbridled. Then she spent the next two weeks galloping around like a horse.

  “Who are you today?” her mom asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to anyone over the age of seven,” her mother said.

  “I’m a ballerina-spy-deathmetalhead.”

  “Lovely,” said her mother, walking into the kitchen area. She opened one cabinet after another, using bad words under her breath. Cricket had looked up some of those bad words in her special word book. She wondered if her mom knew what the words meant. She thought not.

  Cricket said, “If you’re looking for the coffee, I used it for my experiments.”

  Her mom’s head swiveled toward Cricket like a bobble toy. “Experiments?”

  “I was a supermodel-scientist-archvillian yesterday, remember?”

  Her mother closed the cabinets, slumped at the kitchen table. “It should be a crime to mess with a woman’s coffee.”

  “Are you going to have me arrested?” said Cricket.

  “Of course not.”

  “Call Detective Biedermann! I would like to be arrested!”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Would, too!”

  “Cricket, it’s not even six in the morning. It’s too early for this. It’s always too early for this.”

  “Too early for what?”

  Her mother made a tiny sound like a cross between a sigh and a sob and put her head down on the table. She did that a lot—sighing and sobbing and putting her head down on the table. She did it so much yesterday that her dad told her that she had to stop BURSTING INTO HYSTERICS at the drop of a hat. Cricket’s special word book defined hysterics as “a fit of laughing or crying or yelling.” But Cricket’s dad was the one yelling and nobody had dropped any hats anywhere. When Cricket informed him of all this, his face got as red as a riding hood. She was going to tell him about being as red as a riding hood, too, but she decided to bridle her honesty.

  Anyway, all the adults in the building seemed to be BURSTING INTO HYSTERICS, one after the other, like the first graders in Cricket’s class passing around the sniffles. Her mother tried to explain why. She said all the adults were upset because some man named Dermal Plant bought the building where they lived and didn’t want them to live there anymore. Daddy was especially upset because they’d probably have to go stay with Cranky Cousin Gordon in Bayonne, New Jersey. Cranky Cousin Gordon’s whole house smelled like nachos even though Cricket had never once seen him eat nachos. PECULIAR.

  Once Dad got out of bed, her parents would probably start arguing about Cranky Cousin Gordon again and Dermal Plant and nachos, and Dad would flail around accusing everyone of BURSTING INTO HYSTERICS.

  Cricket had better things to do.

  “I’m going to take Karl for a ride.”

  Her mother didn’t lift her head from the table. Her voice was muffled when she said, “Don’t you want to wait for your brother to wake up? Maybe he can be your sidekick.”

  “Otto is just a dumb baby. Karl is my sidekick. He has a bandit mask and tiny monkey fingers.”

  “Monkey fingers,” said her mother to the wood of the table. “Right.”

  Cricket tucked her necklace under her shirt so no one would be tempted to steal it, put Karl into the basket at the front of her three-wheeler, and rolled it toward the door.

  “Stay on this floor, okay, Cricket?”

  “Hmmph,” said Cricket, what she said when she didn’t want to
lie but was totally not telling the truth.

  Out in the hallway, Cricket and Karl made laps around their floor, going faster and faster each lap. Karl made happy chirping noises the whole time, like a good sidekick. He probably needed his own outfit. What would a deathmetalhead raccoon wear? A helmet, of course. Probably one with antlers.

  They got on the elevator and punched the letter L. The elevator groaned, the sound a lot like the sound her mother had made while slumped over the table. The elevator went up first, then down, then up, left, right, then finally headed for the lobby. Cricket’s dad said that the elevator reminded him of Cricket, which made no kind of sense.

  A shrill ding! and the doors opened. The lobby had miles of smooth, slippery tile, perfect for a race. Because it was so early in the morning, it was completely empty, completely quiet. Cricket started slowly but sped up, rounding the corner so fast that she almost tipped over. She was about to say, “That was close!” but before she could say it, someone else did.

  “That was close.”

  Cricket stopped pedaling and looked up and up and up. A giant of a giant was standing in front of her, his big, white, speckled face hanging like a moon.

  “You should be more careful when you play, little girl,” the man said. “You could get hurt.”

  Cricket did not enjoy being spoken to as if she were a dumb baby. “You are the color of ranch dip,” she announced.

  “I prefer the term alabaster.”

  She stared.

  The man smiled.

  It was not a good look for him.

  Cricket pressed a lever on the handlebars and backed up the tricycle, beep-beep-beep. That was when she noticed the ring of yellow tape around his wrist. “What’s on your bracelet?”

  “This is caution tape. Do you know what the word caution means?”

  “Hmmph,” she said.

  The man stepped forward right into Cricket’s personal space. “It means that there are certain things in this building a little girl shouldn’t touch. And certain places in this building that are too dangerous for a little girl to go.”

  Behind the tall man, another much shorter man had his ear pressed to a small brass door that hung high on the lobby wall, his gloved fingertips tapping here and there, tap-tap, tap-tap. Cricket wondered if the door talked to the short man the way the walls talked to Tess Biedermann, if the man was also ECCENTRIC. The short man looked up when he felt Cricket watching. He smiled, too.

  And it wasn’t a good look for him, either.

  The tall man said, “This is what they call a dumbwaiter, a little elevator people used to deliver items or maybe send trash down to the basement, but it doesn’t work anymore. And the door seems to be stuck. Do you know how to open it?”

  Cricket shrugged.

  “Do you know anyone else who knows how to open it? The building manager perhaps?”

  “Hmmph,” said Cricket.

  The little man stopped tapping and stepped away from the wall. It was then that Cricket saw that the tapping hand wasn’t a hand at all, and it wasn’t even attached to the short man. The man whistled, and the leathery brown creature—a spider? A lizard?—scuttled down the wall and into a waiting bag.

  “We don’t want anyone playing with this door,” said the tall man. “It’s broken. And if you got it open, a little girl could fall down the shaft.”

  “A little girl could,” said Cricket.

  The man’s watery eyes fell on Karl. “Or her raccoon could fall. A little girl wouldn’t want anything to happen to her raccoon.”

  Cricket felt her face go as red as a riding hood. Nobody talked about Karl falling down anywhere.

  “I think we understand each other,” said the tall man. He patted Cricket on the head.

  Nobody patted Cricket on the head.

  But today, Cricket was a ballerina-spy-deathmetalhead, and she knew what was what. She bridled her honesty. She smiled her sweetest little-girl smile. Karl chirped his cutest raccoon-cat chirp. The man nodded and walked back to his short friend. They put an X of CAUTION tape on the brass panel of the dumbwaiter.

  Cricket motored her trike back to the main elevator. She would never tell the men that she knew how to open the dumbwaiter. Or what she’d found inside. She would never tell anyone.

  But she would keep an eye on those men from now on, because that’s what a spy would do.

  So. Very. Metal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tess

  The morning they were supposed to go to the Tredwell House, her mom took one look at Tess and said, “One of those nights?”

  It had been one of those nights, and it hadn’t. Yes, she was so wired and tired that her nerves felt like a marmoset-mongoose had been chewing on them, but it was a small price to pay if they had actually found a new branch of clues to solve the Cipher. But of course she couldn’t say that. Not yet. Today they would try to find the next clue, if there was one. Only then could they be sure they were on to something new, something no one else had found before.

  “I’m okay,” Tess said to her mom.

  “Did you try meditation?” her father asked.

  She’d tried her favorite guided meditation video for an hour. She’d organized her underwear drawer by color. She’d tried counting backward from one million. When the sun rose that morning, she was on number 937,582.

  “I tried,” said Tess. “But sometimes it just doesn’t work.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t sleep either,” said Mr. Biedermann. “Your mother, on the other hand, was snoring up a storm.”

  “I wasn’t snoring,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  “How would you know?” said Mr. Biedermann.

  When they finally harnessed Nine and met Jaime in the lobby, Jaime was the one who seemed sleepy. Even his short ’locs looked a bit droopy.

  “My grandma was online this morning looking for jobs. She already has an interview for next week. And my dad texted and said he was calling a friend to see if he can get us another apartment. In Hoboken.”

  “Nobody’s moving to Hoboken yet,” said Tess. “Or Idaho.”

  “What’s with you and Idaho?” said Theo.

  “What’s that?” Tess said.

  “Idaho?”

  “No, that.” Tess pointed at the strips of yellow caution tape X-ed over a metal panel by the mailboxes. “Who put that there?”

  “I bet it was those two creepy guys who served the eviction notices,” said Jaime.

  “Stoop and Pinscher,” Theo said.

  “Don’t tell me those are their names,” said Jaime.

  “I won’t, then,” said Theo. He was silent for half a second, then blurted, “Stoop and Pinscher really are their names.”

  “Ignore him,” Tess said. “Do you have the letter?”

  Jaime patted his side pocket. “Right here.”

  To get to the Tredwell House, which was now called the Merchant’s House Museum, they walked over to 72nd and Broadway to catch the number 2 to Times Square. Today, the Guildman in the glass box was gaunt as a skeleton but with eyes like precious stones. He scanned the car, looking for rule breakers and troublemakers. For a second, the Guildman’s amber eyes seemed to lock on Tess’s. She held her breath, but he quickly moved on. Nine nudged her hand. She exhaled slowly and then took three more deep cleansing breaths.

  At Times Square, the train stopped, and the three of them ran up the stairs to catch the N. This train started underground but climbed steadily upward into the air until they were riding high above the city streets. Below the tracks, people and cars darted like silverfish, but everyone’s eyes were on the Morningstarr Tower, glass panels gleaming, spire needle sharp and poking into the clouds, Underway tracks curled around the base. Tess didn’t say what she was thinking, what they all were thinking, that it was only a matter of time until Slant got his hands on the Tower, too. What would it look like with the word SLANT slapped on the front of it, blinking in neon? Nothing that Tess ever wanted to see.

  The
y got off the train at 8th Street and walked five minutes to a four-story redbrick row house with green shutters and a door painted a dignified cream. An elegant wrought-iron fence matched the railing leading up the stairs. Two fixtures that maybe once held lightbulbs stood on either side of the entrance. It was a pretty house, but nothing on the outside screamed “clue!” Unless you were a student of history—or one of Benjamin and Annie Adler’s grandkids—you wouldn’t know that 29 East 4th Street was one of the few remaining nineteenth-century structures still standing in New York City. The building right next door was plastered with demolition notices. Which made Tess mad all over again, the nimbus of outrage buzzing in and around her head. She marched up the steps, threw open the door, and burst inside.

  Dozens of people already crowded the narrow front hallway, including an entire troop of Morningstarr Scouts, all wearing matching red shirts and beanies, all looking like a flock of birds. Everyone turned to stare first at Tess, then at Nine, then at Jaime and Theo behind her.

  “Welcome to Tredwell House,” said a beige young man in a boxy beige suit like an envelope. His name tag said Colton. “As I was saying, Tredwell House was purchased in 1835 by a wealthy merchant named Seabury Tredwell for eighteen thousand dollars. That’s about half a million dollars today.”

  “Not a lot for New York City,” grumbled a middle-aged man with a fake orange tan and the kind of smooth, unwrinkled face Tess’s dad liked to call “well preserved” and her mom liked to call “pickled.”

  Colton, the tour guide, said, “It used to be that there were many, many row houses of this style here and all over the city, but what makes the Merchant’s House unique is that it’s the only one left standing.”

  One of the Morningstarr Scouts, a short girl wearing a patterned headscarf under her beanie, said, “Are there any ghosts in here?”

  “Ah, I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Colton. “First, I want to tell you about Seabury Tred—”

  The girl said, “Everything is better with ghosts.” The other Morningstarr Scouts nodded.