The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Tess drifted back to the grave of Eliza Hamilton. It made sense to her that the Morningstarrs would use this marker for a clue. Not only was Eliza overlooked, she was trying to make sure her husband wasn’t. She was trying to do the right thing. And wasn’t that what Theresa Morningstarr was wondering about in that first letter sent to Grandpa Ben?

  Tess wanted to do the right thing, too. She wanted to solve this mystery. Not just for herself and her home, but because Grandpa Ben couldn’t.

  She moved closer to the grave marker. She ran her gaze over every inch of the stone but still didn’t see anything unusual.

  Except . . .

  She dropped to her knees and squinted. Underneath the inscription was a small . . . circle? She traced it with her finger. No, not a circle.

  “What is it?” said Theo.

  “An octagon,” she whispered. Then leaned back on her heels and frowned. “Does that mean anything to you guys?”

  “Nope,” said Theo.

  “Nope,” said Jaime.

  Tess got to her feet, worried the end of her braid. “It has to mean something. I think the Cipher wants us to remember this lady. To think about the things she did, things that were important but didn’t make her famous.”

  Jaime held up his phone. “She was known to take orphan children into her own home even though she was broke.”

  “Too bad she’s not here right now,” Theo said. “She could take us in. We’re homeless now, too.”

  The joke just hit Tess like a brick.

  Home.

  Less.

  She was homeless. They were homeless. Which of course was the reason why she was here in the first place, because Slant had stolen their home from them, snatched it away like a robber grabs a purse. Yes, she’d spent twenty-four hours imagining her family in a split-level in Idaho, crammed in a car, floating in a boat on a shark-riddled sea, and farming alpacas in New Mexico, but it was the first time she’d heard someone say it so plainly, so baldly, so technically. Home. Less.

  Nine mrrowed and Tess patted the top of her domed head, rubbed her striped ears, tried to relax, tried to make her own joke. “Homeless orphans. We’re like something out of Dickens.”

  “I . . . ,” Theo began, then stopped, index finger pointing at nothing, nowhere. Then he tapped his cheek, one, two, three.

  “What?” said Jaime.

  “What?” said Tess.

  “Look up ‘Octagon, Dickens, NYC’ in your phone,” Theo said.

  “Okay,” said Jaime, typing, “but I don’t see—Oh!” He stared as his phone for a long moment, reading.

  They should have gotten a phone for their birthday—why hadn’t they gotten a phone for their birthday? “What does it say?” Tess said.

  Jaime held out the phone. The first entry on the screen said, Octagon, New York City, an award-winning Manhattan landmark. Out loud, but not loud enough for the other tourists to overhear, she read: “‘The Octagon was built as a stunning island retreat in 1841. Designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and built with handsome stone quarried from Roosevelt (formerly Blackwell’s) Island itself, the Octagon’s signature rotunda was so striking that English novelist Charles Dickens praised it as “remarkable,” and “spacious and elegant.”’”

  “Yes!” Theo said. “Dickens made a trip to New York in the 1840s and wrote about the Octagon in American Notes for General Circulation. My grandpa used to read it to me.”

  Jaime blinked. “My grandmother read me The Cat in the Hat. In five different languages, but still.”

  “The Octagon wasn’t a retreat at all,” Theo continued. “It was the entrance to the New York City Lunatic Asylum.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Theo

  As soon as he said the word asylum, Tess flinched as if stung by a bee. She closed her eyes, lids twitching. Theo didn’t have to ask to know what she was thinking about. The day they brought Grandpa to that new place, shiny and blue and smelling like mouthwash. This will be better for Grandpa, their mother said. He’ll have twenty-four-hour care. He can’t manage anymore on his own and I . . . I . . . It will be better for him. And Grandpa Ben, small and hunched on the new bed, trying to smile through it. It had been one of his rare good days, and that only made the whole thing worse. A wizened woman hobbling down the hall on the arm of a relative grinned through the open door. Welcome to the asylum, she’d said, giggling, until her grown daughter hushed her. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

  In the cemetery, crumbling grave markers all around them, Nine snuffled, then chewed on Tess’s fingers, but still Tess stood there, eyes closed, swaying a little. Theo should snap her out of it, he should take her arm or say something.

  “Is that girl okay?” said a man standing nearby with his family. He was wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt that said “Take a Bite Out of Gotham City,” which was plain nonsensical.

  “She’s fine,” Theo said. “She just gets headaches sometimes.” He willed Tess to open her eyes, see the man’s nonsensical T-shirt, say, “Thabat’s sabo sabilly.”

  “Doesn’t look like a headache to me,” the man said.

  Now other people in the graveyard were looking and whispering. Theo wanted Tess to laugh, to tell them that no one had paid her this much attention since kindergarten, when she’d brought in a bone and told the class that it could be a chicken bone or the finger bone of a Sasquatch that had gotten into the city from New Jersey via the Lincoln Tunnel, and she was forced to have a talk with the school counselor about the difference between real life and make-believe.

  Nine’s meows turned loud and insistent. Theo was telling himself to say something, to do something, when Jaime lifted his hand as if to put it on Tess’s shoulder. Though Jaime didn’t touch her, she seemed to feel it just the same. Her eyes flew open. “What?” she said. “What are you guys staring at?”

  “Are you . . . ?” Jaime said.

  Tess flushed, wrapped Nine’s leash around her hand. “Me? I’m totally fine.”

  His parents told Theo to go easy on Tess after she’d had one of her “spells,” to be gentle with her, but he knew Tess hated that.

  “Are you done with your nap?” Theo said. “Can we go now?”

  She made a show of rolling her eyes. “You’re such a robot.”

  “That’s me,” he said, letting out a rush of breath that felt like the pulling of a splinter. “Your robot brother.”

  But the asylum would have to wait; they needed to get home for dinner. On the Underway, Tess dug a napkin out of her pocket and told Theo he still had mustard on his face, like nothing weird had happened. With the Guildman staring him down, he was careful to tuck the soiled napkin in his pocket. He didn’t want to drop it and get thrown off the train. Nine seemed to notice the Guildman’s attention and sat on Theo’s feet, guarding him.

  With the warmth of the cat against his legs and the rocking of the train car, Theo could stop thinking about Tess and about Grandpa and think, instead, about something that didn’t make his brain and eyes feel like they were made of water.

  He thought about Charles Dickens.

  Dickens first came to America in 1841 to lecture Americans about international intellectual property, something Americans weren’t much interested in at the time, because they liked being able to publish the work of non-Americans without paying any of the writers. But Dickens had ten children to support. Plus, he enjoyed writing about America—the gross parts of it, anyway. Like the Five Points neighborhood, which he described as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” with “coarse and bloated faces” peeking through “broken windows that seem to scowl dimly.” That was probably why Theo had dreamed of the Five Points, because Dickens had written about it in American Notes, one of Theo’s all-time-favorite bedtime stories. In American Notes, Dickens had also written about Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island. Theo wondered what they would find there, where they would go next. And then he wondered again at the way in which the clues kept coming together for them, snappin
g neatly the way Legos did. In 1855, the newspapers said that the Cipher was just waiting for the right people to solve it. Had it been waiting for them all this time? A bunch of seventh-going-into-eighth-graders? Grandpa Ben had always told him to never underestimate himself just because he was young. The energy of young people powers the world. You are smart, Theo. More than that, you are curious, and that will carry you. But Tess was the curious one. And Theo was smart enough to know there was a mountain of things he didn’t know, and that mountain weighed on him.

  When they got back to 354 W. 73rd Street, they said good-bye to Jaime and let themselves into the apartment. Which was crowded with society members. Edgar Wellington, Priya Sharma, Omar Khayyám, Imogen Sparks, and Ray Turnage were all sitting in the living room, eating oatmeal cookies. Grandpa Ben’s Lance clomped around the Biedermanns’ apartment, serving large glasses of milk. He seemed about as happy as an empty suit of armor could seem.

  “Ah, here are the kids now!” said Mr. Biedermann.

  Theo and Tess greeted everyone and took a few cookies from Lance’s tray. Nine circled the room, getting scratches and pats and murmurs of Who’s a kitty, are you a kitty?

  “We decided to bring Lance down here because he seemed so lonely upstairs by himself,” said Mr. Biedermann.

  “Good idea,” said Theo, munching on a cookie. But Tess was eyeing the society members suspiciously.

  “So . . . ,” she said, trying desperately to sound casual but not sounding remotely casual, “what are you guys doing here?”

  “We have to start packing up Grandpa’s apartment,” said Mrs. Biedermann. “Since he always wanted the society to have his collection, I asked them to come over and help, since they know which artifacts are important.”

  Tess lowered the cookie from her mouth. “We don’t have to do that now, do we?”

  Nine circled back to Tess and rubbed against her leg. Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann exchanged a look. Edgar Wellington said, “We’ll just be taking inventory for a while. We won’t remove anything till you’re ready.”

  Mrs. Biedermann knocked back a swallow of milk. “Except for Lance.”

  “What about Lance?” Tess said.

  “We don’t have the room for him here, and it’s not good for him to be alone anymore. He shredded six rolls of paper towels and left the mess in the bathtub.”

  Tess put the cookie back on Lance’s tray and stalked from the room, Nine on her heels. Mrs. Biedermann sighed.

  Edgar Wellington said, “She just needs some time.”

  “That’s just what we don’t have, Edgar,” said Mrs. Biedermann.

  Lance stomped back to the kitchen and rattled around in a cabinet until he found the griddle.

  “Well,” said Mr. Biedermann, “I hope you Cipherists like pancakes.”

  The next morning, Theo, Tess, and Jaime met in the lobby to head over to Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island. There were several ways to get onto the island: Underway; bus; cab. And the best way to get onto the island was not under it or even across to it, but over it.

  They got off the Underway and walked to 59th Street and Second Avenue, where they found the Roosevelt Island Tramway Plaza. Unlike the Underway trains, which ran on tracks both below and above the city streets, the tram was a trolley car suspended from wires slung over the East River from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island. For the same cost as an Underway ride, you could traverse the East River and see the city from the air.

  After a ten-minute wait, Theo, Tess, Jaime, and Nine boarded the tram, a red car attached to the wires above with a large silver clawlike contraption. Luckily, Roosevelt Island wasn’t that popular a destination, so there were only a few tourists scattered about, and none with nonsensical T-shirts. The tram pitched a bit and then began its ascent. Tess was quiet, after a big fight with their mother over the fate of Lance, which she won, but only temporarily. Jaime was busy with one of his sketches, a black superhero with lightning coming from his ears. Theo’s muscles and nerves relaxed as the frantic sounds of traffic—the squeals of tires, the horns, the sirens—got farther and farther away. Even the gentle sways of the tram in the wind didn’t startle him. The tops of apartment and office buildings came into view, the water towers perched on top of them like spaceships drawn by children. Alongside the tram, the 59th Street Bridge was so close that Theo, not prone to imagining such things until recently, envisioned the people who had built it more than a hundred years ago sitting on the girders, legs dangling as they ate their lunches. In the distance, the spires of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Morningstarr Tower spiked the clouds beyond the endless rows of buildings. Below, the East River, greenish when you stood close to it, shone like a silvery ribbon.

  “Remember the first time we took the tram?” said Tess finally. “With Uncle Edgar and Grandpa? What were we? Four or five?”

  “Yeah,” said Theo. “I remember that you asked if there were sharks in the East River and Uncle Edgar told you that story about that great white shark in New Jersey.”

  “Uh, what shark in New Jersey?” said Jaime.

  “You don’t know about the shark in New Jersey?” said Theo.

  “No, I don’t, and even if I did, you would tell me anyway, so why don’t you just tell me?” said Jaime.

  “In 1916, a great white or a bull shark—people still argue about which—killed a bunch of people on the Jersey Shore before swimming into the Matawan Creek, where he killed two more people.”

  “A shark can swim into a creek? Seriously?” said Jaime. He turned to Tess. “Now I understand why you’re so obsessed with sharks.”

  “After that, Tess wouldn’t even swim at the Y.”

  Jaime added a shark to his drawing.

  The car began its descent toward Roosevelt Island. Jaime quickly sketched the view from the tram—the buildings, the Queensboro Bridge, the river like a ribbon complete with a shark fin sticking out of it. Theo remembered another story Uncle Edgar had told on that first tram trip, one about a submersible shaped like a shark, with the saw-toothed skin of a shark, built by the Morningstarrs. Grandpa Ben had laughed and said, aside from some mentions in a couple of old letters, no substantial evidence of that submersible had ever been found—no plans, no prototypes. Uncle Edgar had replied, “Maybe because the Morningstarrs didn’t want it to be found.”

  But the Morningstarrs, as brilliant as they were, couldn’t have known the future, couldn’t have been certain that the clues they had so carefully hidden in the buildings and the streets and artifacts wouldn’t be destroyed by progress or chance. The Tredwell House could have been knocked down for a drugstore, the Waddell painting stolen or spray-painted by deranged men wearing Take-a-Bite-Out-of-Gotham-City shirts. Blackwell’s Island, a dumping ground for criminals and mentally ill people, was now a land of apartment buildings and schools and parks. It was just luck that one of the few original structures left on the island from the time of the Morningstarrs was the Octagon.

  It seemed crazy to rely on luck, but one of Grandpa Ben’s favorite questions was this one: Isn’t there a fine line between brilliance and madness?

  Maybe if the Morningstarrs could rely on luck, Theo could, too.

  If he could persuade himself to believe in luck.

  Which he didn’t.

  To reach the Octagon, Theo, Tess, and Jaime took a twenty-minute bus ride to the northern tip of the island. They stood in a parking lot in front of a beautiful rotunda made of blue-gray stone, two large boxy wings flanking either side.

  “It looks brand-new!” said Tess.

  Jaime showed them some old pictures of the Octagon on his phone, so run-down that it was barely recognizable. “How do we know what to look for when so much of the original has been replaced?”

  “Remember what Slant’s minions said to us when we caught them prying that tile off the wall?” Tess asked. “They said they would use the artifacts to decorate the lobby of the new building. Maybe they did that here, too.”

  “Anyt
hing really significant would have been given to a museum,” Theo said.

  “Then maybe someone can tell us which museum,” said Tess. “Come on.”

  They walked up the steps and into the building. Inside, the design was spare and modern, with a flying staircase spiraling all the way up the walls of the rotunda, culminating in a skylight at the very top. Everything was polished wood and marble. If there were clues or artifacts still in the Octagon, you’d never know it.

  A couple that Theo’s mom would have called “posh” sat on a couch looking through some documents with a man in a suit. More posh people stood staring at paintings hung on the walls of the rotunda. A blond woman smiled toothily at them from behind a desk. “Hello! Can I help you? Oh, wow, pretty tiger-lion, but we don’t allow pets in the building.”

  “She’s not a pet,” said Tess. “Well, she’s not just a pet. She’s a service animal. And we’re just looking around.”

  “Right,” said the woman, peering over the edge of her desk. “Okay. Well. Let me know if you need anything.”

  They walked the perimeter of the Octagon, which wasn’t big but also wasn’t small. The art on the wall was the kind his mom called “schmears”—a smear of one or two colors on a white canvas, the type of painting most people claimed could be done by kindergartners. And for all Theo knew, this entire exhibit was done by kindergartners. As if to prove this, the main doors opened and two men in matching shirts that said Sunshine Daycare stepped inside, leading a group of small children. The children wore clear plastic bubble suits that made them look like giant balloons with hands and feet. They bobbed and bounced behind the men. Two little girls repeatedly belly-bumped each other until one of the Sunshine Daycare people said, “Not too hard, girls, we don’t want you getting hurt!” One of the little girls promptly bumped the other onto her back, where she spun in lazy circles, flailing like a turtle. Nine’s head spun in kind.

  Tess jerked on Nine’s leash, hauling her away from the little kids bobbing like buoys in a stream.