The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  “Are you actually reading that book?” Tess asked.

  Theo turned a page. “It was good enough for Ava Oneal.”

  “If you keep playing with that seal, Mrs. Cruz will have to fix it. Or Stoop and Pinscher are going to come up here and steal it for their collection.”

  “You really want to lecture me about the seal?”

  “Have you found anything else in that book?”

  “Not yet.” When Tess didn’t leave, Theo sighed. “I’m going to finish this chapter. And then I’m going to get some sleep. You should, too.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’ve got that zombie look. Like your eyeballs are going to cave in and your face is going to fall off.”

  Standing there, all gushy and loose on the outside, all tense and hungry on the inside, Tess felt like a zombie. It wasn’t always this way. When they were little, Theo was the zombie, so plagued by nightmares that he used to come into Tess’s room in the middle of the night and curl up on her floor, soothed by the sound of her breathing. She didn’t know how they’d switched places, when exactly she’d become the nervous one and he’d learned to calm himself, learned to read nineteenth-century novelists with their nineteenth-century worries until his mind quieted and he could drift off, content that things were better now. She wondered if they would switch places again and again the whole of their lifetimes, which of them she’d rather be, if she even had a choice.

  Nine nudged Tess’s fingers, and Tess’s own insistent, zombie energy nudged her out of her reverie. “I’m getting a snack,” she told Theo, who merely turned another page in the book.

  In the living room, the light of the moon shone through the windows, illuminating the streamers of toilet paper that festooned the furniture. Beneath those windows was Lancelot, who was “sleeping” in a pile of towels, looking a lot like Theo had when he was curled on her floor, stunned silent by his latest nightmare.

  Lancelot didn’t stir when Tess entered the space or when she rummaged in the box for one of the leftover cupcakes. Every once in a while, he’d let out a sigh so human that it froze Tess in her tracks.

  “You miss him, don’t you?” Tess whispered.

  Her answer was a tiny metallic creak as Lance shifted slightly under the towels.

  “I miss him, too. I miss the way things were.” She went to Lancelot and pulled one of the towels up to his chin. She had no idea if this would soothe the machine. What soothes a machine? The question sounded like a clue to one of Grandpa Ben’s crossword puzzles. Puzzle makers believe in misdirection, Grandpa said—was the clue “dentist’s number” talking about the dentist’s phone number or her social security number or her license plate number or her anesthetic? Number or NUMBer? NUMBer or number? You need to look at the clue from every angle, consider every possibility. When he worked the Sunday puzzle, he told Tess how to do it: Write in pencil; pick out plurals and fill in all those easy s boxes. Relax—how can you think, he’d say, if you’re wound up tight? When the puzzle stops being fun, walk away, come back to it later, sleep on it, you’ll feel better in the morning.

  But when she woke up, she didn’t feel better. And she didn’t feel better the next night, or the next. They scoured every page of Penelope but found no more information, and they still didn’t know where in the building to look or what to look for. After being so sure that they were on the right track, so sure that the Cipher was both reading them and guiding them, Tess now felt farblunget herself, lost and confused, even abandoned. Maybe the book wasn’t a clue. Maybe a story was just a story. And the more time went by, the harder it was to believe that they’d ever found anything of significance, that the Morningstarrs would have hidden clues in a letter that could be lost or a chair that could be misplaced or a painting that could be destroyed. Her mood only worsened when she went out to take a walk with Nine and came back to find some random guy, white and round and bald, slapping a notice to the front door of the building:

  THE CITY OF NEW YORK

  DEPARTMENT OF INSPECTIONS

  THIS BUILDING IS CONDEMNED

  FOR THE PURPOSES OF PUBLIC SAFETY, A CONDEMNED BUILDING MAY BE ORDERED VACATED.

  THIS BUILDING LOCATED AT: 354 W. 73RD STREET IS TO BE VACATED BY: JULY 31ST

  DO NOT OCCUPY

  PERSONS OCCUPYING THIS BUILDING PAST JULY 31ST OR REMOVING THIS NOTICE ARE SUBJECT TO A $1,000 FINE OR 90 DAYS’ IMPRISONMENT OR BOTH.

  “What is that? What are you doing?” Tess demanded.

  The man barely glanced at her. “I’m knitting a sweater. What do you think I’m doing?”

  Tess’s chest heaved as if she’d just run a marathon. “This building is not condemned.”

  “Whatever you say, kid,” the man told her. “I just hang the signs.”

  “It’s not!”

  “So, call city hall and argue with them.”

  “Take that sign down!” Tess shouted, but the man was already marching off, as if Tess were about as consequential as a stain on the sidewalk.

  Tess ripped the sign off the door, balled it up, and threw it to the nearest Roller tidying up the street. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment, so she went to Jaime’s apartment instead. It took only one knock for Mrs. Cruz to throw open the door and say, “What is broken?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Cruz.”

  “Good! Jaime is in his room drawing his pictures.” She saw Nine and immediately her voice got an octave higher: “Hello! Are you a kitty?” In response, Nine pranced around her ankles.

  Tess went to Jaime’s room, which was a shrine to every superhero of every type of comic book ever written. Enormous floor-to-ceiling bookcases were packed with figurines: Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Wonder Woman, Wasp, Captain America, Hulk, Supergirl, Super Indian. And those were only the ones that Tess remembered. There were hundreds of others, probably packed in some of the boxes that littered the bedroom floor.

  Jaime looked up from his drawing—the Octagon as it would be viewed from the top of the stairs. Jaime had captured the place perfectly. There was a figure at the bottom of the stairs, barely sketched in.

  Tess said, “Who’s that?”

  “Nobody yet,” said Jaime. “Are you okay?”

  “Theo says I have that zombie look.”

  “Now that you mention it . . . ,” Jaime said.

  Tess bent to see Napolean and Tyrone in their cage. Napolean was curled up in a tight ball, napping, while Tyrone was a blur of fury on her wheel. Nine was mesmerized.

  “She’s not going to try and eat my hamster-hogs, is she?”

  “No. She just likes to be intimidating.”

  “So does Tyrone.”

  “Who’s Tyrone?”

  “The hamster-hog. When she’s mad, she poops green.”

  Tess slumped in the chair by the window. There was a Morningstarr seal on the molding, but this one was on the upper right side, freshly painted white as the rest of the trim. “Theo has one of these seals by his window, too. But his is on the bottom of the sill.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaime. “Mima says that certain apartments have the seals on the window moldings, sometimes two or three seals, and certain apartments don’t. And some of the seals are on the left or right, some in the middle. She thinks that all the windows had them at one time, and probably a lot more of them, but people pulled them off or painted over them or whatever.”

  “Huh,” Tess said. She stood to touch the seal, the raised star encircled by a sun. She’d been seeing this seal her whole life, but suddenly it seemed weird that some of the windows had the seals, and some of them didn’t.

  “Toss me your pencil,” Tess said.

  He did. She jammed it into the wood.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” said Jaime. “Mima is going to kill me!”

  The seal that had looked like nothing so much as a stamp in the molding, popped out of the frame. Tess hefted the piece in her hand, scraped some white paint off with a fingernail, revealing a flash of silver.

  It had the look
and the weight of a coin.

  “How many of these are left in the building?”

  Jaime stared at the coin in her hand. “I don’t know.”

  “We need to find out. And we’re going to need something else, too. It’s not going to be easy to get.”

  Jaime said, “What’s not?”

  “Your grandmother’s key ring.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jaime

  Jaime said, “Oh, sure. And while we’re at it, let’s steal Thor’s hammer.”

  But he was only half listening. This morning, his dad had called to talk, the first time Jaime had had a real conversation with him in weeks. If you could call it a conversation. Jaime’s dad was there, smiling, tanned dark from all his work in the Sudanese sun, but what he was saying was terrible. “You’ll love Hoboken! My friend Jorge said the apartment is even bigger than it looks in the pictures I sent you. Did you see? Three bedrooms! The building is new, so that’s less work for Mima. Fewer repairs.”

  “Mima doesn’t want less work,” said Jaime.

  “Sure she does,” said his dad. “She’s getting older.”

  “So now she’s some frail old lady?”

  “What? When did I say that? I just said she’s getting older.”

  “And that means we should just let Slant take the building that Mima has lived in for most of her life? Let him push us right out of the city?”

  “Stop whining. If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for the people who don’t have beautiful new apartments,” his father said. “Did I tell you the math and science academy is right at the edge of town?”

  “Math and science academy?”

  “It’s so close you won’t even have to take a bus.”

  “I like the bus!” Jaime had roared, which was dumb, because he didn’t really care about taking the bus. But his dad was talking about this move like it was nothing because, for his dad, it was nothing. His work assignments took him all around the world and he loved every minute of them, was always trying to get Jaime to come to Egypt or Brazil or Russia or wherever, like Jaime could jump into a whole different world, just like that. His dad could never understand wanting to stay put. Every move was an adventure.

  But Jaime wanted to have his adventures here, right here, on this skinny island, in this ramshackle building. What’s a superhero without his city? What is he supposed to protect, if not his home? It didn’t make any sense to Jaime. Which is why he said the thing he couldn’t have known, shouldn’t have said:

  “Mom would have understood.”

  The video quality was good enough to show the slight twitch at the corner of his dad’s eye, the only indication of pain he ever showed. “Yes,” he said. “Your mom understood a lot of things.”

  “Papi,” Jaime began.

  “It’s late. I need to eat my dinner. Look at the pictures of the apartment. Maybe it won’t be such torture, eh?”

  And the video cut out.

  Jaime dragged his attention back to Tess. Her knee was bouncing and her cat was frantically rubbing against it, trying to make her stop. “There are a bunch of these around building, I know it,” she was saying. “And I bet they’re not in random places. They’re in some sort of pattern. The clue in Penelope isn’t the inscription, it’s those seals drawn around the inscription.”

  Jaime tried to remember what Mima had said about the seals. “All of them are located on the windows in the front of the building. And they’re only on the middle floors.” He closed his eyes and pictured the entire front wall of 354 W. 73rd, as if it had been torn free from the rest of the building—seven rows of windows, five windows across. There were seals in Tess’s apartment, Jaime’s apartment, and the hallway on the fifth floor, but Mima had also found seals on the third and fourth floors. He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and drew the rows of windows to show Tess where the seals had been found.

  “We could ask your grandmother to let us into the apartments facing the street to check it out,” said Tess.

  Jaime groaned. “Even if she agreed, which she wouldn’t, there’s no way she’s going to let us gouge things out of the window frames. But we can go knock on doors. Ask if anyone needs a patch or something.”

  “I don’t think we want to tell anyone what we’re up to. Even if they could be trusted, we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

  “Not even our own,” said Jaime.

  Tess said nothing. Jaime took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Mima takes an hour nap every day around one. As long as we get the keys back before she wakes up, we should be okay.”

  “That’s good,” said Tess. “People usually work during the day. No one should be home.”

  “Except Mr. Perlmutter.”

  Mr. Perlmutter was approximately a thousand years old, rarely left his apartment, and sprinkled conversations liberally with one of three sentences: If you think I’m paying for this garbage, you’re nuttier than a squirrel in September. Stop that caterwauling/ screeching/yammering/hammering, we’re not living in a zoo! You think I can do that with my sciatica/cataracts/ rheumatism/hemorrhoids/corns?

  “We should save Mr. Perlmutter’s place for last,” Tess said.

  “Ya think?” said Jaime.

  They called Theo and told him to bring Ava’s book. To kill time before Mima got home, the three of them watched a movie about some people who used giant robots to battle giant monsters, which Tess said needed more girls to be realistic.

  “Maybe the monsters are girls?” said Theo. When Tess glared at him, he said, “What? What did I say?”

  Mima came home around a quarter to one, tired and dusty. She set her toolbox on the counter. “Hello, children. I see that you are having a good time staying inside on a beautiful day instead of going outside and getting fresh air.”

  “We’re going out when this movie’s over,” said Jaime.

  Mima set her keys next to the toolbox, muttered something about movies warping the brains of young people, and went to her bedroom. As soon as he heard the door shut, Jaime stuffed his sketchbook in his pocket, grabbed the keys and the toolbox off the counter. Then they slipped out the door. First, they checked the window in the hallway. Sure enough, Mima had already replaced the seal on the molding, but in the middle, on the right-hand side.

  He hesitated before prying it off. But they were desperate, so . . .

  With a screwdriver, he levered the seal out of the molding and handed it to Tess. He spackled the hole as neatly as he could. Then he marked the location of the seal in his sketchbook.

  In the elevator, Theo said, “Let’s start with the Schwartzes on the fourth floor They both work in an office somewhere. Nobody should be home.”

  Jaime said, “Knock first, just in case.”

  Tess knocked. “Hey, Ms. Schwartz? Wondering if you have, uh, an egg I could borrow?”

  Theo mouthed the words, An egg? Tess put her fingers to her lips, but there was no reason to be quiet. No one was home.

  Jaime flipped through the key ring until he found the right one. He opened the door and the three of them slipped into the apartment. The Schwartzes hadn’t started packing yet, but it wasn’t going to take them long. They had no books and barely any furniture, and what furniture they had was odd: a low, skinny orange couch and two purple chairs shaped like giant hands. They also had a machine—not a Morningstarr invention—that cleaned the floors, a plain flat disc that resembled nothing so much as a flying saucer whirring about, banking off walls and feet.

  “What would you call this style? Modern?” said Jaime.

  “Strange,” said Tess.

  In the bedroom, the Schwartzes had a bed, a dresser, and a couple of side tables. “No books in here, either,” said Theo. “How can you not have any books?”

  “Lots of people don’t read,” said Jaime.

  “Why not?” said Theo.

  “Let’s discuss literacy rates later,” said Jaime. He went to the window and found two seals close together
in the bottom left-hand corner of the molding. He pried them out. This time, Tess spackled while Jaime noted the location of the seals in his book.

  Once they were out in the hallway, they checked the window in the hall. Here they found no seals, and no evidence that the molding had been patched.

  “Okay, whose apartment is across the hall?” Tess said.

  “The Hornshaws,” said Theo. “But they have a dog.”

  The Hornshaws’ dog was a basset hound that spent twenty-three hours a day in a coma. Tess said, “Nine is more of a dog than that dog.”

  Again, Tess knocked, waited to make sure no one was home. Jaime let them in. Woody the basset hound didn’t even lift his head off his doggy bed long enough to yawn. They all ran to the Hornshaws’ bedroom, where they found another two seals on the right side of the window molding, right in the middle.

  Tess checked her watch. “We still have fifty minutes till your grandmother wakes up.”

  They took the elevator to the fourth floor and were in and out of the third apartment—the Moran family’s—in a few minutes. Jaime tried not to focus on the alphabet blocks and teddy bears and trucks strewn about, tried not to think about where Cricket and Otto would play, who would watch over them, if they couldn’t solve the Cipher in time. This time, the seals were on the upper left-hand corner of the molding, two of them. The hallway window yielded three seals on the lower right side.

  “I’m surprised that Stoop and Pinscher didn’t take these,” said Jaime.

  “Oh, I’m sure they’re coming back for them.” Tess checked her watch again. “We have forty-three minutes.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to be long enough to get Mr. Perlmutter to let us in,” said Jaime.

  “Only one way to find out,” Tess said. She took a deep breath and knocked.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming! Stop all that hammering! What is this, a zoo?”

  Jaime was wondering how many zoos Mr. Perlmutter had actually been to, because he didn’t remember any particular animals making hammering sounds, when Mr. Perlmutter cracked the door. His rheumy eye swam in the opening.