by Laura Ruby
Jaime turned to a new white page, licked the tip of his pencil. With the view of the city he loved filling the window in front of him, he tried, once again, to conjure a superhero to help him save it.
CHAPTER FOUR
Duke
Five miles away from Jaime’s Hoboken apartment, in a glass tower in Manhattan, a tall, pale man with a vague resemblance to a smug turtle leaned back in a leather chair, his feet up on his huge mahogany desk. The man’s name was Jackson “Duke” Goodson, and he was having a good day.
First, he was having a good day because he wearing a brand-new hat. It was, like all his other hats, a cowboy hat—this one a soft, mushroom-y beige with a brown leather band. When he’d walked into the office that morning, his secretary, Candi, said, “Good morning, sir! Love the hat!” She said it every morning about every hat, but he never got tired of it. He was quite well-known for his cowboy hats. In any one of the newspaper profiles written on Duke Goodson—and there were many—you could always find a line that went something like: “Duke Goodson was easy to spot in the crowd due to his trademark cowboy hat,” or, “Goodson, clad in one of his customary hats, is a good son of the South, born and raised in Oklahoma.” That his real name wasn’t Jackson “Duke” Goodson, that he hadn’t grown up anywhere near Oklahoma, that he just wore the hats to distract from his four-thousand-dollar Italian suits, well, that just made the profiles all the more enjoyable to read.
He was just starting the latest profile when his fancy new cell phone erupted with the song “All My Exes Live in Texas.” He took his feet off the desk, scooped up the phone, clicked the green button.
“Goodson here,” he barked.
“Sir, we’re having a little trouble getting Mrs. Chopra to sign the—”
“If I don’t have those papers on my desk tomorrow morning, signed and notarized, you’re fired. Understand that will be the least of your problems. And your family’s.” He clicked off the phone.
Sometimes his people needed a little encouragement, and he was all too happy to provide it.
He went back to his newspaper. He didn’t have to read the profile to know what it said, though he read it anyway. The writers of the newspaper profiles would always mention Duke Goodson’s hats, but then they moved on to what Duke Goodson actually did to deserve all this attention (and it wasn’t wearing hats). Duke Goodson was a fixer. When rich and powerful people had a problem, they called Duke Goodson to fix it. Has your wayward teenage son taken up burglary out of boredom and ended up in jail and, worse, in the papers? Call Duke. Need a loan for your brand-new casino but the banks don’t want to give you the cash? Call Duke. Want to be mayor or senator or governor or dogcatcher but everyone including your own spouse hates your guts? Call Duke. And, true to his (false) name, Duke was very good at fixing things. So good, in fact, that Duke Goodson was nearly as rich and powerful as his clients. Something the writers never failed to mention, too.
The headline of this article was “The Fixer’s Fixer.”
Not bad for a good ol’ boy from the South. He would have giggled, except he wouldn’t be caught dead giggling.
The phone sang about exes in Texas again. He picked it up and said, “Well?”
“It’s done,” said a voice on the other end of the call.
“Better be,” said Goodson, and rang off. Goodson tossed the phone to the desk, one side of his mouth yanked into a satisfied smirk. And here was the second reason he was having a good day: He had finally wrapped up some loose ends on the 354 W. 73rd Street project. Loose ends by the names of Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher. Not their real names either, but it didn’t matter. Stoop and Pinscher were much worse at concealing themselves than Duke Goodson was. Much, much worse. After they’d been released by the police, Stoop and Pinscher had disappeared. It took a few weeks of searching, but he’d found the two of them holed up in a motel in some Podunk town in the middle of an Illinois cornfield. Pinscher had even gotten a job at the local gas station in order to keep himself and his stooped friend in bugburgers and Pop-Tarts. Wrappers everywhere in that motel room. It was disgusting. Also disgusting: Pinscher blaming his and Stoop’s failures on a bunch of kids. Stoop tearing up over his dead mutant pet as if it had been a golden retriever instead of a scuttling scrap of trash grown in a lab.
Useless, the two of them. Like blundering minions in a comic book.
So Duke did what one does with useless, blundering minions. He had Stoop and Pinscher dispatched to an outpost in Siberia. Duke knew lots of fine folks there. Hardy fellows, Siberians. Didn’t take any guff. Not that Stoop and Pinscher were in any condition to give any guff.
It was sad, really.
Ha, no, it wasn’t.
Goodson pushed the newspaper and the phone aside, pulled out a file labeled Morningstarr, made some notes. The third reason Duke Goodson was having a good day was because he’d grown curious about the kids who had allegedly gotten in Stoop and Pinscher’s way. Not curious because he actually believed Pinscher, but curious because he believed in being thorough. (How could mere children get in the way of grown, competent adults? They can’t! They’re children! Small, hungry, silly, helpless, overrated things, children. Duke didn’t understand why anyone would have them. He himself had never been a child, even when he was a child.)
Though the children weren’t interesting in and of themselves, Duke had discovered that they did have rather intriguing relatives. Two of them were the offspring of a New York City detective and the grandchildren of one Benjamin Adler, and the third child was the son of an engineer and the grandson of the former manager of 354 W. 73rd Street. Duke imagined that that police detective knew quite a bit about the Old York Cipher, maybe her father had even given her a clue or two before he lost his mind to dementia. And Duke imagined that the former building manager knew quite a bit about the building she’d managed for half her life. Including its secrets. Well, if it had had any secrets—which Duke wasn’t sure it did, but his client was sure—and his client was the one paying. Who was Duke Goodson to argue with a man willing to pay through the nose for a little information? So information Duke’s client would get. No matter what Duke Goodson had to do to get it.
He might start small, or rather, big: with that cat. Can’t have an oversized feline like that just wandering around the city, free as you please. Eating Stoop’s lab-grown monster was one thing, but people could surely be harmed by such an unnatural creature. That really would be too bad. (Well, depending on the person.) Besides, Duke had some ideas for that cat.
“Candi!” Duke shouted.
His gorgeous blond assistant appeared in the doorway. Like all his girls, she was a former cheerleader, all red lipstick and lean muscle. “Yes, sir?”
“I might have a job for you later.”
“Anything you need, sir.”
“Right now, I need my nap. Hold my calls for twenty minutes,” Duke told her, tossing her the cell phone.
She caught it with one hand, slipped it into the pocket of her red dress. “Certainly, sir. Shall I close the door?”
“Yes, thank you, Candi.”
Once the door was closed, Duke Goodson leaned back in his chair, put his feet back up on the desk, and tipped his new hat so that the brim shaded his eyes against the fluorescent lights. As he did right before every nap, he let his mind roam over the accomplishments of the day. The hat, the blundering minions squared away in Siberia, his delicious plans for some pesky, squirming children and their various pets and relatives. The delight on Darnell’s face when Duke cleaned up this whole silly situation, the bonus added to Duke’s Swiss bank account.
Duke’s last thought before he fell asleep: What the reporters never put in their profiles about him, what they never figured out, was his real specialty, his true talent, the motto he lived by.
In order to fix things, you first had to break them.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tess
For the next few days, Tess, Jaime, and Theo assembled names for their list of possible own
ers of the Jennings dress. Tess was as eager to figure out the mystery of the black gown as she’d been every other aspect of the Old York Cipher, and her mind churned with questions. Whose gown could it be? Did it belong to Eliza Hamilton (who mourned her husband for fifty years)? Or to someone like Anna Ottendorfer (a widow-turned-owner of a mid-nineteenth-century German-language newspaper in New York)? Or maybe it belonged to the elusive Ava Oneal (a puzzle of a whole different kind)?
But as eager as Tess was during the day, her nights were different. Ever since she began reading about the people of New York whose lives were wrapped up in the mystery of the Morningstarrs, Tess’s sleep—when she could actually sleep—was fitful and filled with monsters.
Sometimes the monsters took recognizable shapes. Tess floated alone in a vast ocean, the water cold and inky, as a fin raced toward her. Tess careened down a city street, as a Komodo dragon the size of a truck sprinted behind. Tess tiptoed around the hallways of 354 W. 73rd Street, Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher lurking around every corner. Tess was strapped to a chair while Darnell Slant ranted about progress from a TV and the walls of her home collapsed around her.
And sometimes there were no monsters in her dreams, and that was worse. She dreamed it was 1851 and she was waiting with Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in America. Dr. Blackwell had put out a sign at her office in Manhattan, advertising her services as a physician, but even women were too angry and afraid to see a woman doctor. In the dream, Tess kept asking what was wrong with a girl being a doctor? Why was everyone so angry? What was everyone so afraid of? But no one had any answers.
And then it was 1793, before the time of the Morningstarrs, and she was sitting with black and white and brown orphans in the home of Catherine “Katy” Ferguson, who had invited the orphans inside for lessons in life and scripture. The daughter of an enslaved woman, Katy herself never learned to read or write, but she remembered what her mother had taught her about the Bible when she was little and wanted to pass on this knowledge. Tess asked her who had stolen her mother from her homeland, who had enslaved her, who had kept Katy from learning to read, who was keeping her from her mother in Virginia, but Katy kept shaking her head. There was no single monster, Katy said. Or too many monsters to count, which amounted to the same thing.
The very worst nightmare: Tess watching in horror from her bed while the bruise-colored shadows coalesced into a creature vaguely human-shaped but something both more and less human. The monster blocked her doorway, her only escape, filling the space, hulking there, waiting for her to make a move. Tess told herself it was nothing, she was imagining things, she was only dreaming; but the monster told her that she was awake and utterly alone, that everyone else in the world was gone, that it been saving her for last. It was patient, it been around forever, it was made of lies and deception, rage and resentment, bitterness and oblivion, and it would wait as long as it took. It would wait her out. And it would win, because it always did.
When she had this last, worst nightmare, Nine would climb up into her bed and nibble on her fingers and lick her face until she woke with a shudder. Then Tess would hold on to the Cat as if Nine were a buoy in a storm-tossed sea all the way till the morning.
“Well, you look perfectly terrible,” Tess’s mother said, when Tess shuffled into the kitchen after hours of tossing and turning. “Nightmares again?”
“Probably,” said Tess, grabbing a cereal bowl from the cabinet. “I don’t always remember.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m fine.” Tess plunked the bowl on the table and filled it with cereal, though she wasn’t that hungry. “Still thinking about 354 West 73rd is all.”
“That’s understandable,” her mother said. “We all are.” Her mother’s tone was neutral, but her eyes were shrouded with worry.
With the sun coming through the windows burnishing her mother’s face, the terror of the nightmares faded a little. Tess began to feel foolish that she’d been so scared. She had her mom; she had her dad and brother and Aunt Esther. She wasn’t alone. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll keep trying my meditations. And Nine helps a lot.”
At this, her mother smiled and glanced down at Nine. “I’m glad you have her.”
“I’m glad we have her,” said Tess. Nine mrrowed, brushed up against Tess’s legs, then wound herself around Tess’s mom’s, getting fur on Miriam Biedermann’s suit pants.
“Is Dad already at the office?”
“Yep,” said her mother. “He needs to prep for the new school year.”
Tess’s dad was a school social worker, and he took the “worker” part as seriously as Tess’s mom did. “He’s there already? It’s not even seven o’clock!”
“He’s got a lot of kids to take care of. You know him.”
“And you’re going to work early today, too?” Tess asked.
“Have to. New partner,” said her mother, grimacing.
“Really? What happened to Syd?” Tess had liked her mom’s old partner, a man with silver hair but the big biceps of a body builder.
“The stress and the tedium finally got to him. He’s quitting to become a park ranger.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously,” said her mother. “He said that he’d rather deal with bears stealing food from campers than with the police brass. No idea how this new guy is going to work out. He’s really green. Just out of uniform.”
Tess took spoonful of cereal, chewed. “Is it hard to be a cop, Mom?”
Her mother poured herself more coffee and sat down at the table with Tess. “It’s hard, but probably not for the reasons you’re thinking. Not that many people know this, but when the police department was created in the 1830s, it was to protect rich people and rich people’s stuff. That usually meant rich white people and their stuff. And even though 1830 sounds like a long time ago, it’s really not. Hard to shake that legacy. Hard to get some people to trust me when I say I want to help them find the things they’ve lost, the things that have been stolen from them. Why should they believe me?”
“Because you are trying to help?”
“Sometimes, that’s not enough,” her mom said. Then she suddenly laughed. “Wow, I sound grumpy. Maybe I should join Syd and the bears.”
“Sounds like a band name,” Tess said.
Theo shambled into the kitchen, yawning. “What sounds like a band name?”
Tess ate another spoonful of cereal. “Syd and the Bears.”
“What kind of band name is that?” said Theo, grabbing the cereal box and pouring himself a bowl.
“Maybe it does need a little more oomph,” their mother agreed. “Syd and the Felonious Bears.”
Theo splashed milk all over his cereal and a little on the floor. Nine moved in to lap it up. “I like ‘The Felonious Bears.’ No Syd.”
“What have you got against Syd?” said Tess.
“Who’s this Syd, anyway?” Theo said.
“Mom’s old partner, remember? But she’s getting a new one today.”
“Let me guess: a felonious bear?”
Their mom ruffled his bushy hair. “You’re the felonious bear.”
An hour later, Tess and Theo had finished their breakfasts and showers, and their mom had left. While they waited for Jaime to arrive, they consulted their list of possible owners of the Jennings gown—society wives, writers, poets, musicians, daughters, pirates, thieves, actresses, educators, mathematicians, scientists.
It was a very long list.
Theo said, “Mom might be right about the felonious bear thing, because if we don’t narrow this list down, we’re not going to have a choice but to break into the dry-cleaning shop and steal that dress to see if there’s anything hidden in it.” Theo dug around in his hair as if there were something hidden in there. “Maybe the dress isn’t a clue at all.”
“Has to be. The ticket numbers matched up,” Tess said. She combed through the list of names, but the dress could have belonged to any of them and none of them. “Ok
ay, so the only embellishment on the gown was that lace with the little hearts.”
“Uh-huh,” said Theo, who didn’t care about lace or hearts.
“Maybe it means something.”
“What does?”
“The hearts.”
“As in, we should have counted the hearts? Maybe the number of symbols is important.”
When Jaime finally arrived, he used his phone to send the photos of the dress to the twins’ computer. They blew up the images on the screen. They counted the number of hearts on the lace and got one hundred and eleven.
“Doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Theo.
“Me, neither,” Jaime said.
Theo continued to root around in his shaggy hair, scratched. “I don’t think the lace is important. It’s just lace. Lace is lace.”
“Like I said the other day, there’s got to be something else hidden in that gown. In the hem or the undercoat or whatever you call what goes under these old-fashioned dresses,” Jaime said.
But something was itching at Tess’s nightmare-exhausted brain. She’d been so scared during the night, and even in the morning. But then she saw the sun on her mother’s face. And felt . . . love.
Maybe the gown wasn’t important, the number of symbols wasn’t important, but the symbol itself was.
Hearts. Love. Hearts. Love.
“Love!” she said. “Love is the thing!”
“Okay,” said Jaime, looking at Tess as if she’d grown another nose.
“No, you don’t understand. The heart means love.”
“We’re aware of the symbolism, Tess,” said Theo. “We all got the same Valentine’s cards in the first grade.”
“The only Valentine’s Day cards you got were from Mom and me,” Tess retorted. “I’m saying that what’s important is the symbol of love on the lace. Love on the lace, love on the lace.” Her eyes went wide. “Lovelace! Ada Lovelace!”