The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  “Yeah, I heard you. But we’ve got some things going on here. Can anyone else take this? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Yes. I know. I’ll be there in an hour.” She clicked off, laid the phone on the counter, took one look at Tess, said, “What happened to your face?”

  Tess rubbed her cheek. “Nothing happened to my face.”

  “Which is why you have a big red mark on it. Because nothing happened.”

  “I banged it on the pole in the Underway,” said Tess.

  “Did you have a spell? Theo, did she have a spell?”

  Theo said, “She didn’t have a spell.”

  Mrs. Biedermann swept both their faces with her mom-cop laser gaze. Then she said, “I’ll get you some ice.”

  “It’s fine,” said Tess.

  “It’s swelling,” said her mother. She dug around in the freezer and pulled out a bag of peas. She tossed them to Tess.

  “Is this dinner?” said Tess.

  “Yes. Put it on your face.”

  Tess pressed the bag of peas to her cheek and kicked at the empty boxes on the floor. “What are these?”

  Her father heaved a heavy, forlorn sigh. Her mother said, “Those would be boxes.”

  “Why do we have boxes?”

  “Boxes are usually used to pack things.”

  “But we just heard yesterday!” said Tess. “We have a whole month!”

  Her mother’s eyes went soft. “We’re getting a head start, honey. We have a lot of stuff, including the stuff in your grandpa’s apartment, which we should have packed months ago but I couldn’t manage because . . . Look. I just don’t want to leave everything for the last minute.”

  Her father sighed again. He appeared to be packing one book at a time, placing it in the box only after he’d read the cover, the flap copy, and the acknowledgments. Nine crawled out from under the coffee table holding a sock, which she then draped across Mr. Biedermann’s knee. He patted her head, and she gave a mournful chirp.

  Tess edged closer to her mother. “Dad doesn’t seem too happy.”

  “None of us are happy. I’m not happy. I don’t want to leave here. I never thought I’d have to.” Her mother put her hands on her hips, her gaze moving from the kitchen to the living room, to the dining room, to her husband sighing over a pile of books on the floor. “But we have to prepare.”

  Tess was about to spill it all, beginning to end, from the strange letter written by Theresa Morningstarr and mailed to Grandpa Ben, to the clue underneath the Tredwells’ servants’ stove, Stoop and Pinscher already wrecking the place, and the need to stop them. But something in her mother’s face kept her from doing it—the way her brow crinkled, the way her lids looked ever so slightly red, as if she’d been crying. Her mother never cried, at least not in front of Tess. Tess’s mother wore dark suits and sensible shoes, a badge and cuffs on her belt. She didn’t break down. There was nothing she couldn’t handle.

  Still.

  Tess scratched for a topic that wasn’t terrible, that wasn’t loaded. “What are we having for dinner?”

  “Peas.”

  “Come on.”

  “I already called for Chinese. That okay with you?”

  “Sure,” said Tess.

  Her mother tucked a loose curl behind Tess’s ear, her fingers gentle. “Things are going to fine. I promise.”

  Tess couldn’t tell who she was trying to convince.

  They ate on the coffee table. Fried rice, chicken with cashew nuts, vegetable lo mein, egg rolls. Nine loved egg rolls and spent the whole meal trying to lick Tess’s lips.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. Biedermann after downing some food quickly but neatly, “I gotta go.”

  “Are you sure someone else couldn’t take it?” said Mr. Biedermann.

  “Some whiny important guy had a break-in. Has some connections, so . . .”

  “So the brass wants the best on it,” said Mr. Biedermann. He and Tess’s mom stood up. They didn’t touch, but the look that passed between them was like a touch, so much so that Tess felt like she was watching something she wasn’t supposed to. She rammed half an egg roll into her mouth.

  “You could take human bites,” said her mother.

  “Or ladylike ones,” said Theo.

  Tess chewed loudly. “I’m a lady and these are my lady bites.”

  “Mouth closed, please. No one needs to witness your mastication process,” said Tess’s father, who was more of a stickler about things like manners.

  “I only do it to gross Theo out.”

  “Except it grosses your dad out instead,” said Tess’s mom.

  “Not you?” said Tess.

  “You have to work pretty hard to gross me out,” she said. “Okay, I’m off to console a very sad, very rich man who has lost his prized coin collection.”

  Nobody mentioned anything about not-at-all-rich people losing the only home they’d ever known, nobody talked about their beloved elevator stripped to the gears and used to make a bit of lobby art.

  Theo said, “Go get the bad guys, Mom.”

  “Don’t I always?” she said.

  Then she was out the door. Tess and Theo and their father threw out the cartons and washed the plates and silverware. After that was done, Theo disappeared to his room, and Tess asked her father if he wanted help packing the boxes. She didn’t want to help pack the boxes, but the sight of him packing them alone was too sad.

  “I think I’m done packing for the night, sweetie,” said her dad. “How about we watch a movie instead?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  They flipped through the channels and found Storm II. Tess had already seen it, but it was better than any of the Wonder Womans; they’d rebooted that one three times and still hadn’t made a version in which Wonder Woman wore actual pants. So, they watched Ororo Munroe battle a water dinosaur with her mutant weather-manipulating powers.

  “It’d be so cool to have mutant powers,” Tess said.

  “With great power comes great responsibility.”

  “That’s Spider-Man, Dad.”

  “Oh, right. How about ‘With great power comes zappier lightning’?”

  “I like it.”

  They still weren’t tired when Storm II was over. They flipped through the channels till they found another, older movie they’d seen many times about a guy who finds out his life is not really a life, but some sort of computer-generated virtual reality, and he has to save the world from the tyranny of the machines. Tess and her father settled on the couch, Nine stretched across both their laps, purring loud enough to power the universe. When they got to the part where the main character has to make a choice—open the white box and he can live out his entirely manufactured life with all its petty joys and annoyances, or open the black box and learn the hard, cold truth about the world—Tess yawned and said, “Of course he opens the black box. Anyone would open the black box.”

  She’d said this before. She’d probably said it every time they watched this movie. And every other time she’d said this, her father had agreed, yes, of course, who wouldn’t open the black box? Who wouldn’t want to know the truth?

  This time, her father said, “That’s the problem. People think they’ve already opened the black box.”

  “Huh? What you mean?”

  “They think they’re the only ones who understand the real truth about the world, and that it’s everyone else who’s been tricked.”

  “Yeah, but if you found out that you had been lied to, who wouldn’t want to know what’s really going on?”

  “Most people aren’t so brave.”

  “But—”

  “The biggest problem we have is that people like to fool themselves into thinking that they could never be fooled.” He took her hand, squeezed it, let go. “There aren’t enough boxes in the world to fix that.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Theo

  It was the sort of dream you know is a dream as you’re dreaming, and yet, Theo couldn’t wake up.

  He was creeping up the s
tairs of the Tredwell House, wincing every time the old boards creaked underfoot. He’d brought a flashlight but didn’t want to risk using it—someone outside might see the beam in the windows and call the police. So, he felt his way in the dark, sliding his hands along the walls. When he hit a velvet rope that blocked the servants’ quarters, the metal clasp clanged like a bell. He snatched at it, stilling it with his hand, waiting for the echo to dissipate. The air had the same smell as before—furniture oil and must and history—but there was a heaviness to it that hadn’t been there in the daytime, a weight, as if all the dead Tredwells were with him, solemn and silent, as he unclasped the rope and rounded the last flight of stairs to the attic. Which was silly, because he believed in ghosts as much as he believed in gnomes or fairies or true love between any people besides his parents and grandparents. (His dad believed in ghosts; his mom said he’d believe in love one day. They both said he’d grow out of the weird dreams.)

  He stood, eyes adjusting to the moonlight that poured through the windows. The narrow beds came into view, the little stove squatting sullenly against the wall like some animal that had been robbed of its prized possession, just waiting for the opportunity to steal it back.

  (He hadn’t grown out of the dreams.)

  He stepped into the pitch-black of the closet and closed the door behind him. He found a metal panel with numbers. (What was this doing in the closet of the Tredwells?) But he turned the flashlight on and tucked the end between his teeth, light facing the panel. With the screwdriver he’d brought, he removed the metal panel, revealing the wires underneath. He pulled a wire cutter from his pocket (why was he carrying wire cutters?), unclipped and reclipped, cut and spliced; and soon enough, the back of the closet yawned and he was stepping into the chill air of the archives.

  But this was not the archives.

  (Why would this be the archives?)

  This was not anywhere he recognized.

  (Why couldn’t he wake up?)

  Instead of standing inside, he was standing outside, in the middle of a cobbled street, the gray scrim of moon shining on foul water pooled in the gutters. On either side of the street, shabby two-story taverns leaked out-of-tune piano music punctuated by raucous bursts of laughter. A horse-drawn carriage clattered down the street, splashing him with mud and who knows what else. He yelped and tried to wipe it off, getting noxious muck all over his hands.

  “Well, well, well. What are you supposed to be?”

  Theo whirled around. A man wearing some sort of costume—a long coat, short pants, a rumpled hat—leaned in doorway, picking his nails with a knife.

  “I said, what are you supposed to be?”

  Theo said, “Excuse me?”

  “Excuse you? Excuse you?” The man sauntered toward Theo. He was so ripe with sweat and grime and cheap wine that Theo slapped his hand across his nose and mouth and cursed his sense of smell.

  (Wake up.)

  The man twirled the knife in Theo’s direction. “What kind of togs are those?”

  “Togs?”

  “Togs! You got cole in them pockets?”

  “Coal? I don’t understand.”

  “Cole! Coin!”

  Theo backed up a step and bumped into another costumed man who smelled as bad as the first one, maybe worse. “Who’s this, Reggie? A new friend a yours?” the second man said. The second man shoved Theo into the first one. The first man pushed him into the second, and the second man caught him as he staggered, laughing as Theo struggled to get away.

  (Wake up!)

  A third man—jacket torn, hair greasy, teeth black—tottered into the road, grinning a Halloween grin. “What’s this? One of the swells come to the Five Points?”

  “The Five Points?” said Theo, so surprised he stopped struggling for a second. “But the Five Points neighborhood doesn’t even exist anymore!”

  “Five Points is all around you, boy!”

  Theo thrashed in the man’s arms, looking for something, anything he recognized. The closet he had stumbled out of. The Morningstarr Tower in the distance. But . . .

  “Where’s the Tower?”

  “Tower?”

  “The Tower! It should be right over there!”

  “There ain’t no tower! Boy thinks he’s in a fairy tale!”

  “I do not believe in fairy tales. The Morningstarr Tower.”

  “The what?”

  “The Morningstarrs. A man and a woman. Really rich and important. They built all of New York City!”

  “Nobody named Morningstarr around here.”

  “They made the Cipher! If you want cole, coin, whatever, you have to solve the Cipher! It’s a treasure hunt!”

  The man holding him shoved him to the stones. “There ain’t no tower. There ain’t no Morningstarrs. And if there’s a treasure, you’d best be telling us where it is before we hush you right here.”

  (Wake up.)

  “I don’t know where it is!” said Theo.

  (Wake up!)

  “I’m trying to find it!”

  “WAKE UP!”

  “I have to find it I have to find it I have to find it—”

  He sat up. He was not in the archives. And he was not in the Five Points. He was in his bed, sheets twisted around him, his mom leaning over him.

  She said, “It’s okay, Theo. It was just a dream.”

  “What . . . what time is it?”

  “About two in the morning.”

  “Oh,” he said, and flopped back down on his pillow.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  Yes. No. “This has been a really weird day.”

  “What were you dreaming about?”

  “I broke into a house.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I had tools and everything.”

  “Wonder who exposed you to that sort of criminal activity.” She smiled in the dark.

  “And then I was in the Five Points neighborhood and ran into a bunch of really smelly, really dirty guys.”

  “Five Points?” She sat on the edge of the bed. “You mean the gang area downtown, from the eighteen hundreds? I think your grandfather read you too much Dickens when you were little.”

  “Maybe.”

  His mother straightened the twisted sheets, draping them over him. “Where did you guys disappear to all day?”

  “Museum.”

  “Anywhere else? The society maybe?”

  “How did you know?’

  “I talked to Edgar about donating some of your grandfather’s collection to the archives. He mentioned you’d stopped by. He was worried. He said you got upset.”

  “Me? I didn’t get upset. Tess got upset.”

  “He said you seemed upset.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  She nodded. “What are you trying to find?”

  “Nothing,” he said too quickly.

  Her expression didn’t change. “Uh-hmm,” she said. “You can look as hard as you want for . . . whatever you want, but I don’t want you guys getting hung up.”

  Too . . .

  . . . late.

  “We’re not getting hung up,” Theo said.

  “You might need to manage your expectations.”

  She didn’t say, No one has been able to solve the Cipher, not even my father. She didn’t say, The Cipher is just a story to lure the tourists and make New York seem like a place where dreams come true. She didn’t say, What’s done is done, and we need to get more boxes. But she didn’t have to. Theo picked at the plaster seal on the window molding.

  “Theo, if you keep playing with that, Mrs. Cruz is going to have to spackle it again.”

  “If Slant is going to knock down the building anyway, what difference does it make?”

  His mother gazed at him another moment, expression unreadable. Then she stood, pressed a kiss on his forehead. “I think we should both get some sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good night.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?�
�

  “Did you catch them? The ones who stole the coins?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “These things take a while. Can’t skip any of the steps in an investigation.”

  “But soon you’ll catch them?”

  She smiled. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Right. Tomorrow.”

  And then it was tomorrow. Another day, another society, this one the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, 170 Central Park West at 77th.

  The home of George Washington’s chair.

  Theo, Jaime, Tess, and Nine decided to forgo the Underway and walk. Though it was still midmorning, the pretzel and hot dog vendors were out in force, the steam from their carts salting the air. When they arrived at the museum, they stopped to let Jaime sketch the life-size bronze statues of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln at the entrance. Inside, a poster declared the museum’s special exhibits:

  The Games We Played: American Board and Table Games

  Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded-Age Portraits in America

  Keith Haring All Over

  Lion-Heart: Old New York and the Electrocell Revolution

  Ciphers and Secret Societies: The Puzzling Case of the Underway Guildmen

  New York City Pizza: A History

  They declined the map offered at the ticket window, marched past the permanent Morningstarr exhibit—complete with a household version of the Roller, about the size of a cat; an early model of the Morningstarr Analytical Engine, based on the work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and the giant portrait of the twins themselves, all white hair and deep frowns and road-map skin—and went right for the chair, passing furniture, paintings, and other exhibits, including this sign on an otherwise empty pedestal:

  THIS OBJECT HAS BEEN TEMPORARILY REMOVED AS WE REVISE ITS FACIAL EXPRESSION, WHICH WAS DEEMED ZOOLOGICALLY IMPROBABLE AND/OR TERRIFYING TO SMALL CHILDREN.

  They finally found what they’d come for: a plain mahogany chair with a simple design on the back. The plaque next to the chair said that on April 30th, 1789, at Federal Hall in downtown New York City, George Washington sat in this chair on the day of his inauguration.

  Jaime pulled his sketchbook from his back pocket and made a quick drawing of the chair, front, back. Surreptitiously, he tested the back and legs to see if it came apart somehow. He even got on the floor and drew the underside of the chair, which got him in trouble with one of the wandering guards, who told him to get up and stop crawling around the floor like some sort of cuckoo bird.