Walls within Walls

by Maureen Sherry

  They continued up the stairs to the street level, where the autumn sun hit them squarely in the eyes. The street was bustling with office workers with briefcases and trench coats, and the air was filled with the clicking noise of shoes traveling quickly on pavement. Then they saw the figure of a small boy running toward them, seeming oddly out of place, and yet familiar. It was Patrick.

  Pat came running up to them, his cheeks bright red. “Wasssssup?” he said, laughing. “You thought you could get rid of me! I’m the one whose idea it was to skip school, so nah-nah-nah, here I am!”

  “How did you beat us down here?” Brid wanted to know.

  “I just crawled under the turnstile at the Ninety-sixth Street subway station and zoomed down,” he said proudly.

  “Patrick!” CJ was livid. “We’re going to get caught now! Don’t you think Saint James’s will call Mom to see where you are? Didn’t the headmaster see you go into the school?”

  “I kept my hat pulled low when I went in, and then I went right out the kindergarten side door. They think I’m sick. You’re not the only one who can write an email,” Patrick retorted. “Nobody will call home.”

  “What sort of email did you write, Patrick?”

  “It said,” and Patrick put on a high, squeaky voice, “‘Dear Nurse Boylan, I am sorry to say that now both boys seem to have that stomach bug. They are puking everywhere, and they won’t be at school. From Patrick’s father.’”

  “You did not,” said Brid. “You really wrote puking and Patrick’s father?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Because grown-ups don’t use words like puking, and besides, Dad would have written Bruce Smithfork, not Patrick’s father. You complete nimrod.”

  The Smithforks walked toward the ferry building, arguing, oblivious to the people around them.

  “We are so busted! That was the stupidest email in the world! I bet all your Bs and Ds were in the wrong places!” Brid yelled.

  “How come you’re always leaving me behind?” Pat retorted.

  “Because you’re a baby!” CJ shouted.

  Eloise had simply stopped walking. When the children realized she wasn’t with them, they turned to see her standing, looking tiny, in front of the enormous ferry building. She was frozen like a statue, motionless.

  Brid came running up to her. “Eloise? Is something wrong?”

  “If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.” Eloise was pointing to enormous printed words high on the wall, inside the ferry building, large enough to read through the huge glass front.

  Brid gasped as she looked up at the elaborate script written on the wall of the building:

  WE WERE SO VERY JOLLY WE WERE SO MERRY, ALL

  NIGHT WE RODE BACK AND FORTH ON THE FERRY

  “But, this wouldn’t have been here when your dad was alive, right?”

  “No, it’s just a coincidence, but to me it’s a sign. Clearly, the joyful girl is the correct symbol for the fourth clue, because right now I feel like that joyful girl myself. I forgot how much my dad liked to take me here.”

  “Yeah, maybe we should give away apples and pears and all of our money except our subway fares.” CJ grinned, his anger at Patrick momentarily forgotten. “But to who?”

  “Let’s walk over and get our Ellis Island tickets so we can solve poem number five, don’t you think?”

  A half hour later, as they boarded the boat for Ellis Island, Eloise pulled out the fifth poem.

  The New Colossus

  Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

  With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

  Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

  A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

  Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

  Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

  Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

  The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

  “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

  With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  —Emma Lazarus, 1883

  “We’ve read that one in school, especially the part about huddled masses,” CJ said as they pulled up at the dock.

  “Yeah, masses of what?” Patrick asked.

  “Masses of people, new immigrants, came through this island every day back in the old days. Five thousand immigrants were processed every day in the new building.”

  “What new building?”

  “I guess this is the new building,” said CJ. “The original Ellis Island building burned to the ground just five years after it opened. So the new building had to be totally fireproof.”

  “There was only one man for that job,” Pat said, smiling.

  “That’s right. Rafael Guastavino built part of the new building—this one—which opened in 1900.”

  Brid was reading a brochure. “Do you know that forty percent of all Americans have relatives who came through here?”

  “Yes, and I remember when the government tried to stem the flow of people to this country,” Eloise said thoughtfully. “The rules changed to become more selective of the immigrants we accepted. Immigrants had to pass a literacy test. That happened when I was a girl.”

  “A literacy test?” Brid was interested.

  “They had to be able to read and write in their native language to gain entrance to this country.”

  “I hate tests,” said Patrick. “What happened if you didn’t pass?”

  “You got sent back to whichever country you came from.”

  “So what about that poem, about giving me your tired and poor and yearning to breathe free?” CJ asked.

  “That poem was written in the late eighteen hundreds, but by the nineteen twenties we weren’t so welcoming anymore.”

  “Eloise,” Brid said as she unfolded a copy of the map, “look at your father’s symbols, the ones near Ellis Island. There is a suitcase.”

  “Too obvious.”

  “There is a torch.”

  “That could be for with the Statue of Liberty, or the fire that happened here. Too vague.”

  “And there are some lips,” CJ noted.

  “Yes, strange, isn’t it? None of them feel right to me. I’m not sure what message my father was trying to convey.”

  Brid crossed the Great Hall and returned with several pamphlets. “We’re taking a tour in five minutes,” she said.

  “Tour? We don’t have time for a tour,” CJ complained.

  “The tour is free today for students and seniors, and that’s what we are,” she said. “Besides, we’re missing something here.”

  They crossed the hall to join their tour group, finding out that because of the dreary weather, the Smithforks and Eloise would be the only members aside from a middle-aged couple from Ireland.

  “Haven’t ye any school?” the Irish lady asked Brid.

  “We are working on a school project, and this is our grandmother,” Brid said.

  “Listen up, people,” said a lanky, twenty-something tour guide wearing a green Parks Department uniform. “As I take you on the complete step-by-step immigrant’s experience of Ellis Island, we will go from the disembarkation point here in the Main Building, where an immigrant was temporarily separated from his bags and family, to the Kissing Post, where everyone was reunited.”

  “Kissing Post! What?” Patrick said loudly. The Irish couple chuckled.

  “Kissing Post? Interesting,” said CJ as he looked again at their copy of the map.

  “Do you think that’s the answer?” Brid asked Eloise.

  “Of course,” said Eloise. “It just has to be those lips! I remember my father telling me the whole story. That was the reunion area for families. There were tearful, kissi
ng reunions, and people in that day called it the Kissing Post. How did I ever forget that?”

  “Well, it has been seventy years,” said CJ.

  “So, it’s the lips?” Brid asked again.

  “Hey, mister,” Patrick interrupted the tour guide. “Can we get right to the Kissing Post?”

  “Uh, no,” said the perplexed guide.

  With that, the Smithforks and Eloise simply walked away from the group, leaving the guide looking confused. They followed Brid’s map up an enormous set of steps, down a long hall, and out a back door that led to a wide patio structure.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Eloise said as she rubbed her fingers against the regal columns. She grabbed Patrick by the lapel of his Saint James’s blazer and planted a mushy kiss on his cheek.

  “So, I guess you’re saying it’s the lips,” he said, wiping his cheek. “That has to be the next symbol on the map.”

  Eloise smiled and kissed him again, this time on the other cheek.

  CHAPTER 36

  CJ held his breath every time the phone rang that night. He was nervously anticipating the head of his school trying to get in touch with his mother and her absent children; but the phone remained silent. By nine PM he started to think they had actually gotten away with skipping school. That feeling lasted until he went to delete the emails from his father’s computer.

  Immediately he saw the email Patrick had sent the school. It read:

  Dear Head Mister:

  I am Patrick’s dad and he is sick. His broder has been puking all nite an now Pat is puking his guts out. He cant come back to skool till next week. From Patricks Father.

  CJ’s heart fell. This wasn’t even close to something that the head of the school would fall for. Worse, there was a reply, not from the headmaster, but from someone called Bruce Smithfork’s Mobile.

  Of course, CJ thought. His father had taken a PDA with him. Of course he was able to see exactly every email coming or going from his computer, even though he was 7,500 miles away. Not only was Patrick busted, but so were Brid and CJ. CJ opened the reply email:

  Dear Patrick’s Daddy:

  I am so sorry about the puking going on there at 2 East 92nd Street, but I hope Patrick knows he has a massive punishment coming. Hope he enjoys the next few days, because when his real father is back in town, Pat will be spending a lot of time in his room. I also saw the correspondence between Patrick’s brother and sister and their schools, so I can only imagine the terrible illness overtaking your home. Please let them know they will also be confined to their bedrooms once I get back, thus ensuring a return to health. Mrs. Smithfork is sick, so I won’t bother her about this matter until I come back to New York City. Your secret is safe for about four days.

  From, Patrick’s Real Daddy

  PS: Please learn how to use spell-check, Patrick.

  Now what? CJ admitted to himself that it wasn’t even Pat’s fault. He blamed himself for trying this stupid trick. He should have known Patrick would have felt left out.

  They were just so close, so incredibly close to the treasure, with five of the seven answers under their belts. They had a musical note, the general’s star, the Mercury caduceus, the joyful girl, and the kissing lips. The sixth poem was about a trolley car. How hard could it be to determine where trolley lines had once run? CJ read the poem again:

  A Crowded Trolley Car

  by Elinor Wylie

  The rain’s cold grains are silver-gray

  Sharp as golden sands,

  A bell is clanging, people sway

  Hanging by their hands.

  Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff,

  Snatch and catch and grope;

  That face is yellow-pale, as if

  The fellow swung from rope.

  Dull like pebbles, sharp like knives,

  Glances strike and glare,

  Fingers tangle, Bluebeard’s wives

  Dangle by the hair.

  Orchard of the strangest fruits

  Hanging from the skies;

  Brothers, yet insensate brutes

  Who fear each others’ eyes.

  One man stands as free men stand

  As if his soul might be

  Brave, unbroken; see his hand

  Nailed to an oaken tree.

  This clue had to be the easiest one yet. The map contained four different locations for trolley cars, and most of them were along Third Avenue. With the help of Eloise, CJ felt certain they could solve this in one day. Then, they would only have to solve clue number seven before sending Pat back into the wall to push the correct symbols.

  At that moment Brid walked into the room wearing her silky Peace and Love pajamas, and holding a fuzzy stuffed elephant.

  “I’ve been reading that trolley car poem again,” she said. “I like the part about people being brothers, but not looking into each other’s eyes. I mean, on the bus or subway we are all smooshed together, but no one looks at anyone else. We all pretend the other people aren’t there.”

  “Yeah, well, get this, too: we are about to be grounded when Dad comes home,” CJ said.

  “What? Right when we’re making so much progress? There’s no way we can stop.”

  “Well, it looks like we don’t have to stop, at least not until Friday night. Read this.” CJ pointed to the screen in front of him.

  Brid studied her father’s email. “Maybe we should just take the rest of the week off,” she said.

  “Week off from treasure hunting?” asked CJ.

  “No, week off from school.”

  “You are crazy.”

  “Think about it. Once Dad comes home, and we’re grounded, he’ll make us tell him everything. Once we do that, it’s all over.”

  “Not necessarily. Dad might find it really interesting,” CJ said.

  “Oh, really? Is that what you want, a bunch of grown-ups telling us that all the things we’ve been doing are too dangerous, and we need to let professionals handle it?”

  “Professionals?”

  “Yeah, like the police. Once Dad hears that Mr. Torrio came into our apartment, he and Mom will act like we’re in danger. They’ll call the police.”

  “You have a point,” CJ said, rumpling his hair. He wished he knew what to do.

  “Please, CJ, please let’s just miss school for the rest of this week, get this mystery solved, and get in trouble with Dad on Saturday. We can be grounded on Sunday and back to school on Monday. By then, we won’t care, because we will have done something that people haven’t been able to do for seventy years.”

  “Scratch that—something that grown-ups couldn’t do for seventy years.”

  “You see my point,” said Brid.

  “I don’t know—we’re already in trouble. I’ll sleep on it. When we wake up in the morning, I’ll give you my answer.”

  But by the next morning, the unbelievable had happened. Brid woke first, as always. Her room was so bright and cold she thought she had left her windows open. Actually, it was just bright because the morning sun reflected off the November snow. Not just any snow, but enormous, light, slippery snow, the sort that got school canceled. Could it be?

  She ran to her dad’s office and checked her school website. Nothing. She turned on the radio, which had started to announce school closings, but not for the Mockingbird School for Girls. Brid remembered another girl saying they rarely had snow days since most girls walked to school. She hit the refresh button on the school website. There was a new message: Mockingbird School would open three hours late. But then she heard a beautiful thing on the radio: “Sun shall give way to more clouds, and an even thicker blanket of snow will fall by afternoon. Prediction of eight to twelve inches.”

  There was no way the schools would open. She hit the refresh button again. Bingo!

  “Mockingbird School for Girls shall be closed today and possibly tomorrow. Please check the website for updates.” She went to the Saint James’s website. “School closed today,” it read.

  She ran into CJ�
��s room. “No school today!” she sang. “Blizzard today, no school! It’s a sign from Mr. Post that we were meant to solve the mystery.”

  Just then Patrick walked in.

  “No school today, Patrick. Yippeeeee!”

  Pat’s eyes grew wide. He stuck both index fingers in the air maniacally and swiveled his hips. “Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Let’s go sledding in the park!”

  “Are you crazy? Let’s go find Marie Antoinette’s necklace, or maybe a Fabergé egg, or Louis the Fifteenth’s medallions!” said Brid.

  “And bricks of gold!” shouted CJ.

  Suddenly, Anne Smithfork stuck her head into the room. “Kids, you have a day off today, and I feel much better. Let’s all go sledding in Central Park!”

  The room turned uncomfortably silent.

  “All this time in bed has given me a chance to think,” she continued. “I miss the way we used to be—together all the time. When Daddy comes home, I’m telling him I want things to be like our old life. We don’t need fancy furnishings. All that shopping and decorating takes up too much time and money. Maricel just called in sick, and we don’t even really need Charlize the homework helper. I want to be the one to help with homework!”

  CJ broke the silence. “No, Mom, you’ve been great. It just takes a while to settle into a new place. Right, guys?”

  Brid and CJ looked nervously at each other, while Patrick hugged his mother. “Sure, Mom,” Pat said. “We’d love to go sledding with you, but you were really sick. Today is your first day out of bed, and we like that lady from downstairs a lot. She can take us sledding.”

  CJ couldn’t believe how smart Patrick was. It was the perfect response.

  “No really, kids, I feel much better. Maybe we can just build a fire in the fireplace and read books, stay in our pajamas all day.”

  “Um, maybe for a little while,” Brid said, not wanting to make their mom suspicious. Besides, she still looked so pale that Brid felt certain she would get tired soon, and she was right.