The Clockwork Ghost

by Laura Ruby

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Jaime said, catching the handlebars. “Where are you going so fast, Cricket?”

  Cricket didn’t have time to answer, because the security guard came chugging up behind them, shoes squeaking on the marble floor.

  “Thanks, kid,” the guard said. “I’ll take it from here.” He reached out to grab Cricket’s arm, but Jaime stepped in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” he said to the guard.

  “My job,” the guard said. “Now, you listen to me, little girl, you need to—”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I asked you what you think you’re doing,” Jaime said. “Why were you chasing her like that? She’s just a baby.”

  Cricket began, “I am not a—” but Jaime held out a hand to keep her from finishing her sentence. Karl was surprised when Cricket snapped her mouth shut.

  The guard scowled and wiped sweat off his pale forehead. “She stole something from my desk.”

  “What did she steal?” Jaime asked.

  The man scowled even more deeply. “Something.”

  “Something,” Jaime said, his tone flat.

  “Something important.”

  “A sandwich? A cup of coffee? Your diary? A million dollars? What?”

  “No need to be rude,” said the guard.

  Jaime whipped off his eyeglasses, suddenly seeming much older than he was. “Rude is chasing a baby around an apartment building. Rude is scaring a baby.”

  “That girl does not look scared,” the guard insisted. But people in the lobby were starting to stare. The guard shifted from one foot to the other, as if his pants were too tight. Well, they were too tight, in Karl’s opinion, though he himself had never worn pants.

  “I was just trying to get my important, um, thing back.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Jaime, putting his glasses back on. “Well, maybe if you can tell me what it is, I can ask Cricket if she took it.”

  The guard looked from Jaime to Cricket to the furrowed brows of the residents in the lobby, then his shoulders seemed to sink in surrender. “You know what. I guess it doesn’t matter. I could get another, uh, another—”

  “Very Important Something?” Jaime said.

  Now it was the guard’s turn to snap his mouth shut. He marched back to his desk and dropped into his seat, his expression—what was the term?—ah yes, murderous.

  Jaime turned to Cricket. “Are you okay?”

  Cricket stared up at him as if she’d never seen him before. “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “What about your friend here? Karl, are you okay?”

  Thank you, yes, I’m perfectly well, Karl chittered. It’s been quite an adventure and I’ve built up something of an appetite. He held up the empty cheese curl bag.

  Jaime took the empty bag, balled it up in his fist, and tossed it in the nearest trash can. “I think Karl needs some more cheese curls.”

  What a smart boy, Karl thought. Good and kind. Some might even say heroic. By the way she was gazing up at him, Cricket might say exactly that.

  If she had been anyone but Zelda “Cricket” Moran, that is.

  “I don’t like that man,” Cricket said. “He’s PECULIAR.”

  “I don’t like him, either,” said Jaime. “But you should probably avoid him from now on. I’ll talk to your parents. You didn’t take anything from his desk, did you?”

  “Hmmph,” Cricket said.

  “Cricket?”

  “I don’t take things, I CONFISCATE them.”

  “Okay, did you confiscate anything from his desk?”

  “I might have confiscated a wiggle worm,” Cricket said.

  “A what?”

  “A WIGGLE WORM.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s a WORM and it WIGGLES,” Cricket said.

  “Okay?” said Jaime, clearly confused. “Where’s the wiggle worm now?”

  “I gave it to Karl. He ate it.”

  Karl chittered, The child did indeed give me said wiggle worm, Kind Sir, but I did not eat it. I would much prefer a cheese curl.

  “Well,” Jaime said. “Don’t take any more, uh, wiggle worms from anywhere.”

  Cricket crossed her arms. “I don’t take anything.”

  “Confiscate, then,” said Jaime.

  “I’m not making any promises,” Cricket said. “This place is too PECULIAR.”

  Karl was growing weary of this kind of talk; he was hungry and in need of a snack and a nap, in that order. He wished he could simply ask for these things in a tongue they could understand. It would be so much simpler.

  Instead, he was forced to wait as Jaime informed Cricket that she should be more careful and Cricket informed Jaime that she wasn’t scared of anyone, etc. Karl’s gaze wandered from Jaime and Cricket to the front of the lobby, where enormous glass windows showed a view of the street outside.

  And the man and the woman in the strange coats that stood watching them with dark and unreadable eyes.

  Karl opened his mouth to warn Jaime and Cricket, and was more disappointed than usual when no words came out.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tess

  Tess was in the middle of a rare and perfectly pleasant dream when her dad bellowed, “Rise and Shineth, for Thy Father Hast Made Thy Breakfast!”

  Theo rolled over and fell unceremoniously out of bed with a thud. “Have you been reading Shakespeare again?”

  Tess opened one eye and said, “Dad! I was having a good dream for once.”

  Her dad peered down at her. “What kind of dream?”

  Tess frowned. “I’m trying to remember. There were cats, though.”

  Theo sat up. “There’s always a cat.”

  Nine mrrowed agreeably and leaped from her spot on Tess’s bed.

  “Nine is ready to eat,” said her dad, who was wearing a T-shirt that said WHO’S YOUR LLAMA? with a picture of an alpaca. Theo seemed to be too tired to critique it.

  Her dad said, “What about you two? Ready to eat?”

  Theo scrubbed at his hair. “What did you make?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “That doesn’t exactly instill me with confidence.”

  “Oh, Cry for Him, for He Is Full of Doubt,” their father sang at the top of his lungs. “Come downstairs. You’ve overslept.”

  “It’s summer. You can’t oversleep during the summer,” Tess grumbled.

  “You most certainly can. Especially when your loving father has prepared a surprise breakfast and it’s getting cold.”

  Tess and Theo fought over who got the bathroom first—Tess won—and then dragged themselves downstairs to the kitchen to find stacks of pancakes shaped like . . .

  “Uh, Dad, what are these supposed to be?” said Theo.

  “What do you mean? You can’t tell?”

  He looked so sad that Tess said, “He’s just joking.”

  Theo said, “I’m—” but Tess kicked him under the table.

  “They’re Morningstarr Machines,” their father said. He pointed at various-sized blobs of pancake arranged on different plates. “See, this one is a Roller, this one is Squeegee, and this one is that new one, that big moth. I wonder where that one went. They had another sighting in the Bronx a couple of weeks ago but that was the last I heard.”

  “Looks just like them, Dad,” Tess said.

  Theo blinked. Said, “Dad, your shirt says ‘Who’s your llama?’ but I’m pretty sure that’s an alpaca.”

  Their dad looked down. “I love this shirt.”

  Theo relented, ate a bite of pancake. “Delicious.”

  Their father beamed. “Is Jaime coming over? I’m going to make him some spiders.”

  Tess ate her pancakes, which were blobby but tasty.

  “Have you been thinking about it?” Theo said, voice lowered so their father couldn’t hear.

  “About what?” said Tess.

  “The clue,” Theo said, biting the head off a Roller. “We’ll have to try Ada, Lovelace, Babbage, Morningstarr, or all or any combination of
those. It’s probably something more obscure. Maybe a word or phrase from the letter.”

  “Hmmm,” said Tess.

  “What?” said Theo. “You think we should try something else?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m still asleep.”

  “Let me know when you’re awake, then.”

  Tess took another pancake, soaked it in syrup, and tried to remember her good dream. Tess had been walking in a garden with an elaborate topiary, with hedges trimmed in the shapes of numbers. Cats darted in and out of the hedges. One of them was small and white, with one blue eye, one green. She led Tess to a table where a woman with a familiar face was drinking tea. The woman wanted to tell Tess . . . something about the clue. That they were looking in the wrong direction. That they had to back up a bit. She said she was the queen. No, that wasn’t it. She was a princess? No. Duchess? No.

  Oh.

  OH.

  Of course.

  Seems like Ada Lovelace had a bad sense of humor as well.

  “Not more obscure,” Tess said.

  “What?”

  “The key word isn’t more obscure. It’s obvious.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You know it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what the key word is.”

  Theo paused, pancake dangling on the end of his fork. “I do?”

  “It’s only thing it could be.”

  “You know,” Theo said, scowling, “it’s at times like these that I remember that I never liked you.”

  “You love your sister,” said their father.

  “What does that have to do with liking her?”

  The doorbell rang. Theo dropped his pancake and ran to get it, brought Jaime back into the kitchen.

  “Jaime!” said Tess’s dad. “Have a seat. I’ve made you some spiders.”

  “Thanks?” said Jaime, sitting at the table. “Oooh! Morningstarr Machines!”

  Tess’s dad said, “I’m glad someone appreciates my work.”

  “We appreciate you,” Tess said.

  Her dad said, “You haven’t tried the Rollers yet. They’re blueberry.” He went back to the stove and poured more batter into a pan.

  Theo wiped his mouth with a napkin and whispered, “Tess knows the key word.”

  “It’s obvious,” Jaime said.

  “It is?” said Theo.

  “Yes,” Jaime and Tess said at exactly the same time.

  Theo couldn’t help but shake his head. “It’s weird when you guys do that.”

  “Do what?” Tess and Jaime said, and laughed. For one moment, it was as if the tragedy of 354 W. 73rd Street never happened, that they were the same as they used to be. Tess tried to hold on to the feeling.

  After they finished their breakfast and helped wash the dishes, they went upstairs. Jaime pulled out his sketchbook and wrote the word COUNTESS across the top of the page.

  “HA! Told you it was an awesome joke,” Theo said.

  “If this actually is the key word, it’s no joke,” Jaime said.

  They consulted the Vigenère table they had found the day before:

  FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU

  “So,” Jaime said. “The key word countess gives us the order of the different alphabets. First, the C alphabet; next, the O alphabet; after that, the U alphabet.” He wrote the key word three times plus one extra C. Underneath that, he wrote the ciphertext:

  COUNTESSCOUNTESSCOUNTESSC

  FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU

  On the chart, Tess went to the C alphabet. “In the C alphabet, the letter F represents the plaintext letter D,” she said.

  Jaime wrote D underneath the ciphertext.

  COUNTESSCOUNTESSCOUNTESSC

  FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU

  D

  “In the O alphabet, the cipher character C gives us a plaintext character of O,” said Tess.

  Jaime wrote that down as well.

  COUNTESSCOUNTESSCOUNTESSC

  FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU

  DO

  They went through the whole cipher like this. Once they were through, Jaime read the message out loud:

  COUNTESSCOUNTESSCOUNTESSC

  FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU

  DONOTBEAFRAIDOFTHESPIDERS

  “‘Do not be afraid of the spiders,’” Jaime said. “Well. That’s helpful.”

  “I don’t see how that’s helpful,” Theo said. “Who’s afraid of spiders? You might as well say ‘Do not be afraid of the vacuum cleaner.’” He plucked a tiny mechanical spider from the nearest plant.

  “Not everyone likes those so much,” said Jaime, watching the little robot leap back into the plant and scurry up the stalk.

  “You don’t have houseplants?” Theo asked.

  “Mima likes to prune her own plants.”

  Tess said, “Forget about the spiders and the houseplants for a minute. Let’s back up. Maybe we were on the right track yesterday when we thought the clue was in the text of the letter Ada wrote. Remember, someone bothered to cover up the whole thing, not just the ciphertext.”

  “It was easier to cover up the whole thing rather than a little part of it,” Theo said absently, but he stuck his hand in his bushy hair and held it there, his thinking pose.

  Jaime turned the pages in his sketchbook to the text of the letter he had copied. “She says that she can imagine the puzzle displayed in a museum. One more relic among many.”

  “The Morningstarrs set these clues back in 1855. Old things end up in museums. At least, old things that aren’t streets or graves or entire buildings end up in museums.”

  “Yes, but the Morningstarrs couldn’t have predicted whether the objects or paintings or whatever these things are stayed in the area. Old things get shipped to other places. Old things get sold to collectors,” Theo said.

  “The Morningstarrs had faith,” said Jaime.

  “Huh?”

  “They had faith that these items were so important that someone would preserve them.”

  Tess didn’t say it out loud, but she thought it: Or, the Morningstarrs knew that someone would preserve them. But maybe that was the definition of faith. Something that you can’t prove but you know in your heart is true even when you can’t explain it.

  “We can search museum collections online,” Tess said.

  “And we can call the museums, too,” Jaime said.

  “Talk on the phone?” Theo said. “That sounds horrible.”

  “Some people still do it,” said Tess.

  “Old people still do it,” Theo insisted. “Mom does it.”

  “Theo has phone anxiety,” Tess explained to Jaime.

  “I do not!”

  “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said.

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Theo said, blushing.

  “But there have to be hundreds of museums in New York City,” said Jaime.

  They spent the rest of the morning searching museum collections online, took a break for lunch; Aunt Esther ordered a pizza for them, and then had to order another one when Tess complained she was still hungry. Then, they spent the afternoon calling big museums with enormous art collections dating back to the ancient Greeks and odd little museums that exhibited things like toothpastes from around the world and a shoe once thrown at the head of a former president of the United States. They got switched from department to department, and told repeatedly that they would just have to visit the museum themselves if they wanted more specific information, or informed that crank-calling museums was “a seriously silly thing to do,” or directed to current exhibits of other things they might be interested in, like elevator plaques from the Elevator Historical Society, a trivet from the Cast-Iron Museum, a tricycle with square wheels from the Museum of Mathematics, a giant butterfly called a “dogface” from the Staten Island Museum’s Wall of Insects.

  The ache in Tess’s shoulders moved to her head. She wished the Morningstarrs had simply drawn a treasure map like normal people. But then
, if they had done that, someone probably would have found it years and years and years ago, and grabbed the treasure for themselves. And Grandpa Ben might have never grown up in 354 W. 73, and neither would her mother, and if her mother hadn’t lived there, would she have ever met her father? Would Tess and Theo have ever been born? Grandpa Ben once told her about something called the butterfly effect, where one tiny event could affect a million bigger things, like the flapping of the wings of a butterfly could influence the formation of a hurricane weeks later. If you started reimagining the past, you could change your own existence, or undo it completely, which was just too weird to contemplate.

  Tess consulted the list of museums for the next one to call. “The 2nd City Reliquary,” she said aloud.

  “2nd City?” said Theo. “Isn’t that what they call Chicago?”

  “Reliquary,” Jaime said. “A place they keep relics. Like Ada said in the letter.”

  Why would there be a museum dedicated to Chicago relics in Brooklyn? Tess dialed the number anyway.

  A rumbly voice said, “2nd City Reliquary.”

  “Hi. I’m doing a group project for school about puzzles and I was just wondering if—”

  “School? Isn’t school out for the summer?”

  “It’s a very special school. We go all year round.”

  “Cool!” said the rumbly voice. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m looking for a certain kind of puzzle. It’s a cube made up of a bunch of smaller cubes, and you have to rotate them to—“

  “Oh! Yes! We have one of those around here somewhere.”

  “You do?”

  “Yep!”

  “Okay, then,” said Tess.

  “Okay!” said the rumbly voice.

  “One more question,” Tess said.

  “Sure.”

  “Why do they call your museum the ‘2nd City Reliquary’?”

  “Because it’s the second one.”

  “Was there a first one?”

  “Sure!” said the rumbly voice. “Until one day it disappeared.”

  “Uh . . . disappeared?”

  “One day it was here, next day the whole thing was gone. And I don’t mean the shelves were cleared out, I mean the entire building was just . . . gone. Poof! As if it had never been built. Weird, huh?”