The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  “I don’t see anything,” said Theo.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Tess said. “Let’s flip it over.”

  Carefully, they lifted the painting and turned it over. If it had once had paper backing, the backing had been removed. There was no writing on the painting.

  “Nothing,” Theo said, flipping it back. “Maybe it’s not the painting, exactly. I wonder what that building is, in the background?”

  Jaime allowed his eyes to drift over the sunken eyes, the tiny middle-aged-lady faces on the children, the looming castle, the trees, the bushes. Something about the painting called to Jaime, something about the way everyone was posed. Two of the children gazed off in different directions, but the wife and the son looked up at their father, as if waiting for him to speak, while the oldest daughter reclined in the grass and seemed to be staring directly at Jaime, daring him to figure it out. He looked from the reclining girl to the man, who must be William Waddell himself. Then he noticed something sticking out of William’s pocket. Some sort of book or paper.

  “Here’s a question,” Jaime said. “If you were going to have your portrait painted, would you stick a random paper in your pocket like that?”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Tess.

  “I would,” Theo said, “if I wanted everyone to look at it.” Theo pressed the magnifying glass against the tiny square of paper depicted in the painting. “I don’t see anything written on it, though.”

  “Maybe something’s written under the paint,” said Tess.

  “Or written in invisible ink,” Jaime said.

  “Maybe,” said Theo.

  “I was kidding,” Jaime said.

  “I wasn’t,” said Theo. “But some inks are developed by heat, and some by a chemical reaction. If there’s any kind of invisible writing here or anywhere on the painting I don’t know what to use to reveal it.”

  “This was before 1855, remember?” said Tess. “So would the ink be made of something natural—lemon or vinegar or spit?”

  “The Culper spies used ferrous sulfate and water,” said Theo. “Basically, iron. We need sodium carbonate to activate it.”

  “Where are we going to get sodium carbonate?” Tess said.

  “This is a restoration department,” said Jaime.

  “So?” said Theo.

  Jaime went to the wall and looked at the shelves of chemicals and solvents. “So, they clean old paintings with sodium carbonate.”

  “You’re kidding,” Theo said.

  Jaime grabbed a box of washing soda off the shelf, held it up. “I wasn’t.”

  He ran to the sink and grabbed a cup sitting on the counter. He filled the cup with water and brought it back to Theo. They mixed a bit of the washing soda with the water. Jaime found cotton swabs on the supply shelf, dipped one into the solution, and then held it out to Tess. She put her hands up. “You’re the artist, I think you should do it.”

  “I hope this doesn’t ruin the painting,” Jaime said. “I mean, I don’t love it or anything, but . . .” He rubbed the swab gently against the “paper” in William Waddell’s pocket.

  “I saw this movie once where they found invisible writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence,” said Tess. “They rubbed a lemon all over it to reveal the message.”

  “That’s so stupid,” said Theo. “If the invisible ink was juice or vinegar, they would have smeared the whole thing till it was unreadable.”

  As Jaime rubbed, he thought he saw the faintest hint of brown underneath the white. “Holy secret writing, Batman. Give me the magnifying glass.”

  Theo passed the glass. Jaime centered it over the brown scratches.

  The Other Hamilton shows you the shape of things.

  They were staring at this new riddle, stunned, when they heard voices outside.

  Jaime tossed the glass back to Theo and his phone to Tess. “Zoom in and take a picture.” He pulled out his sketchbook.

  “What are you doing?” Theo whispered.

  “I don’t trust technology,” Jaime said.

  Tess took a photo. “We have to cover up the writing,” she said. “Maybe there’s some paint or a marker around here.”

  “Markers? Are you serious?” Jaime poured more of the washing soda into the water and dipped the swab. He scrubbed at the painting until the writing was gone. “I hope I didn’t wreck this.”

  “You didn’t. You found the next clue,” said Tess. Jaime felt the flush up to his ’locs. He could get used to being a cipherist.

  The voices got louder. Nine mrrowed.

  “We gotta go,” Theo said. He waved at a door on the other side of the room. Jaime hoped it wasn’t a janitor’s closet.

  They bent low and ran to the door, ducking into the next lab just as the frosted-glass door to the restoration room opened.

  Voices crept under the door. “That was incredible!”

  “She’s incredible!”

  “I would watch her read from the dictionary.”

  “I don’t think Sig liked her, though.”

  There was laughter, and then: “Hey, did someone already start cleaning the Waddell piece?”

  Tess, Theo, and Jaime ran through the lab to the door on the opposite end, almost slamming into a group of women trying to get in.

  “Oh, sorry!” said Tess. “We thought this was the bathroom.”

  A black woman wearing one of the biggest, most magnificent curly weaves Jaime had ever seen said, “Sure you did.”

  Another woman said, “Sig is looking for you kids.”

  Jaime’s stomach sank. So they would be arrested after all. Or worse.

  The one with the weave smiled. “He’s tearing apart the corporate offices. If you catch the elevator now, you should miss him.”

  Jaime said, “Thank you. Seriously.”

  The woman gave him a beautiful, motherly smile. “That guy thinks he’s working for the FBI. What’s the FBI going to do with an angry refrigerator?”

  Jaime was still trying to picture an angry refrigerator when Tess pulled him into the hallway. They heard shouting coming from either end, coming from everywhere. Tess stabbed the button.

  “The elevators don’t come any faster when you do that,” Theo said.

  “I know,” Tess said, stabbing the button anyway.

  The doors finally opened and they jumped inside. When the elevator reached the ground floor, they held their breath, released it when they saw no one but tourists. Once outside, they inhaled the scent of smoke, saw the burn marks on the pavement. The Rollers were taking care of piles of spent sparklers.

  “We should send Lora Yoshida a thank-you note,” Tess said.

  Jaime patted his pockets, making sure he still had his phone and his sketchbook. “Weird that she was the one to distract Sig the Refrigerator, though.”

  Theo kept looking back over his shoulder, as if he expected Sig to be behind them. “Why is it weird? I mean, it’s weird to want to burn things in the street, but other than that . . .”

  Jaime stopped walking. “Don’t you guys know who she is?”

  “An artist?” Tess said.

  “Yeah, and she’s also Darnell Slant’s ex-wife.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tess

  “That’s way too adorable,” Tess said.

  “You keep saying that coincidences are adorable when I don’t see how one has anything to do with the other,” Theo said. “Koala-pandas are adorable.”

  “You’re adorable,” Tess said.

  Jaime said, “I’m thinking it’s a little adorable, too. Cuddly, at least.”

  “You’re hurting my head,” said Theo.

  “What I think your sister means is that this is starting to feel planned somehow,” Jaime said.

  Tess said, “Grandpa Ben always said that when you tried to solve the Cipher, the Cipher was trying to solve you.”

  Theo frowned so hard that all his features scrunched to the middle of his face. “How could the Cipher engineer anything? It’s a
puzzle. A series of clues. It isn’t alive.”

  A Roller crossed in front of them, scraping up bits of burned paper and snack wrappers. “How would you define alive, Theo? Is that Roller alive? Is Grandpa’s Lancelot alive?”

  “So you think a Morningstarr Machine talked Lora Yoshida into putting on a performance to distract museum security guards? That’s nuts. You’ve seen the insides of Morningstarr Machines, and you know that’s all they are, machines. Amazing machines, but machines.”

  “I’m not saying I have all the answers—”

  “You don’t have any answers—”

  “I’m just saying that this feels weird,” Tess said.

  Theo sighed. “What’s weird is that this has been too easy.”

  “Easy?” Jaime said. “A man built like a fridge just tried to send us to jail.”

  “What I mean is that it took years for people to solve a single clue in the original Cipher. We’ve solved a bunch already. The odds of that seem astronomical. As if . . . as if the Cipher wants to be solved.” He tugged on his lip, as if he were about to pull it up and cover his whole head with it, wrap up his body, and roll into traffic, because what he and Tess had just said was too ridiculous, too fantastical and impossible and a million other un-Theo-like things.

  A shiver danced up Tess’s spine. She stepped in closer to her brother and to Jaime. “We should be more careful. We can’t talk about this with anyone else. We can’t let on. We can’t let anyone overhear us, either.” She checked behind them to see if they were being followed. Nine turned and checked, too.

  “Well, that doesn’t look obvious at all,” Theo grumbled.

  “Let’s figure out what we need to do next,” Jaime said.

  “I’d like to figure out how Slant keeps getting all these artists and supermodels to marry him,” said Theo. “He looks like he colors his hair with shoe polish.”

  Tess didn’t bother to point out the irony of Theo “The Hairball” Biedermann talking about anyone else’s hair. She was still thinking about this, her mind conjuring up everything from government spies to foreign agents to hostile aliens disguised as human beings to minions of Slant, all with ridiculous hair, when they entered the lush green of Central Park, all gently rolling hills and tufts of trees. They got three pretzels with mustard and sat on a park bench to eat them. A slight breeze lifted Tess’s braid, and she smelled pretzels, hot dogs, and the faintest scent of zoo. The Rollers were here, too, picking up refuse left from picnics and impromptu baseball games and rolling it away. A bunch of teenagers played exo-ball, their metal exoskeletons allowing them to leap over one another’s heads and crash into one another while laughing like hyena-wolves. Nine watched them leap, rapt.

  Jaime pulled out his sketchbook, on which he had written the words from the painting:

  The Other Hamilton shows you the shape of things.

  “This sounds more like a riddle than a cipher,” Theo said.

  “Hamilton like Alexander Hamilton? Who’s ‘the Other Hamilton’? And what’s the shape of things? What things?” Jaime said.

  “I don’t know,” said Tess. She gave the sketchbook back to Jaime and took her pretzel from Theo. There was nothing like a New York City pretzel. She wondered briefly if she should be worried about what they were made out of—recycled cardboard? school paste?—and then decided she didn’t want to know. Theo had a smear of mustard on his upper lip. Neither Tess nor Jaime informed him of it.

  Jaime set the sketchbook aside and consulted his phone. “Alexander Hamilton is buried in the graveyard at the Trinity Church. I say we try there first.”

  “But we’re not looking for Alexander Hamilton, we’re looking for the Other Hamilton,” Tess said.

  “His other half, maybe?” said Jaime. “His wife is buried there, too. And his kids.”

  “Huh,” said Theo. “Maybe. It’s worth checking out, anyway.”

  “The Morningstarrs liked to be cryptic, didn’t they?” said Tess. “Get it? Buried? Cryptic?”

  “And you say my jokes aren’t funny,” said Theo.

  “The mustard on your face is funny,” said Tess.

  It was early afternoon, so the Underway only had a scattering of people. A woman buried in shopping bags. Two more teenagers with Starrboards. A man in coveralls who was fast asleep sitting up. Jaime took out his sketchbook and drew the car and the people, simple, quick lines that somehow captured them all.

  “Where did you learn to draw like that?” Tess asked.

  “My dad.”

  “Your dad? But I thought he was some kind of engineer?”

  “He is. But he also paints, watercolors mostly. He’s not much of a talker, but he paints pictures of the things he does and things he sees and sends them to me. I have paintings of test tubes and landscapes and monkeys and street fairs and all kinds of stuff—wait, I have one with me.” He dug around in his side pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. Tess opened the folded paper—so soft, the way paper gets when it’s handled a lot. Inside was a painting of a windswept red desert, a camel trekking across the sand, reins held in the hand of a tall woman. She was wearing a long white cloak and looking back over her shoulder, dark curls escaping the hood.

  “It’s beautiful. Different from your stuff, but I like it.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaime. “Me, too. He thought about being an artist when he was young but . . .” He shrugged. “Mima’s parents, my great-grandparents, brought her to Florida from Cuba when she was my age. She says they had it rough for a while. She’s practical. She wanted my dad to be comfortable. She wanted him to have a real job.”

  “Being an artist isn’t a real job?”

  “Not like being a doctor or scientist or engineer is.”

  “I guess,” said Tess. “Who’s the lady? She’s pretty.”

  Jaime paused. “My dad likes to put my mom in his paintings sometimes.”

  “That’s nice,” Tess said.

  Jaime nodded, refolded the drawing. On the back of the paper, Jaime’s dad had written Be good to Mima. Home soon.

  Jaime saw what she was looking at and then said, “He’s never home soon enough.”

  Tess worried her fingers in Nine’s fur. She had questions the way she always had questions: How much did Jaime miss his dad? How much did he miss his mom? Was it harder to miss someone who was forced to leave you or someone who chose to? But their stop came soon enough, and Tess shook her questions out of her head. They filed out of the train and walked the short distance to the Trinity Churchyard. According to Jaime’s phone, the church had three burial sites—the churchyard at Wall Street and Broadway, the Trinity Church Cemetery on Riverside Drive, and the churchyard at St. Paul’s Chapel. The graveyard itself might have been spooky if it hadn’t been so sunny and warm, and if there weren’t so many tourists crowding the walkways, reading the old cracked stones, the strange markers with skulls and wings.

  The biggest crowd surrounded Alexander Hamilton’s grave, not only because he was Alexander Hamilton—a Founding Father of the United States, chief of staff to George Washington, face on the ten-dollar bill, and dopeface who managed to get himself killed in a duel by the vice president of the United States—but because his was a sizable monument, with four pillars and a sort of obelisk-like triangle on top, flowers and coins left all around it. A tour group took rubbings of the markings on the tomb.

  Theo said, “Hamilton wasn’t that old when he died. Who knows what he could have done if he hadn’t dueled with Aaron Burr.”

  “What happened to Aaron Burr?” said Jaime.

  “Ignominy!” said Theo.

  At Jaime’s surprised laugh, Tess said, “Sometimes Theo talks like a dictionary. Anyway, for a dude that was born in the 1750s, Hamilton wasn’t the worst. He created our banks and stuff. And he was supposed to be an abolitionist.”

  “Hmmm,” said Jaime. “Unlike Jefferson, who talked about people being equal but still had slaves.”

  “Right?” said Tess. “But Hamilton didn’t trust the
poor even though he’d grown up dirt poor. Which is strange when you think about it. Why would hate yourself?”

  Theo said, “Grandpa Ben always told us that great people are capable of doing terrible things and that we shouldn’t ever forget it.”

  “But I wonder if that’s what happens when you grow up,” said Tess.

  “What do you mean?” said Jaime. “You turn evil?”

  “No. And I’m not talking about everyone. Just that some people have all these convictions; they know what’s right and wrong, but they get too old and too tired to follow through. They give up. Or maybe they get so scared and selfish that their convictions get twisted to serve them instead of serving the world and the people in it.”

  “Meaning you turn evil,” said Jaime. “That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard.”

  “Well, I could be wrong,” Tess said.

  “When she says ‘I could be wrong,’” Theo said, “she means ‘I could not possibly be wrong.’”

  “My grandmother is like that,” said Jaime.

  “I knew I liked your grandmother,” Tess said.

  “Speaking of wrong, we’re looking at the wrong grave,” Jaime said. They turned to look at a line of grave markers near Alexander Hamilton’s monument. The largest was for his wife, Eliza. The marker said:

  ELIZA

  DAUGHTER OF

  PHILIP SCHUYLER

  WIDOW OF

  ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  BORN AT ALBANY

  AUG. 9TH 1757

  DIED AT WASHINGTON

  NOV. 9TH 1854

  INTERRED HERE

  Jaime did another search on his phone. “Says here that Eliza Hamilton spent the rest of her life after Alexander’s death fighting for his legacy. She founded orphanages in New York City and Washington, DC.” Jaime looked up. “Well, she doesn’t sound too evil.”

  Tess glanced the graveyard and lowered her voice. “Look at all the people taking pictures of Alexander Hamilton’s grave, and nobody’s over here.” But Tess still didn’t know how the marker would show them “the shape of things.” The stone itself wasn’t unusual. So they tried the graves of the other, other Hamiltons, Hamilton’s children, but there wasn’t anything unusual about those grave markers either.