by Laura Ruby
Jaime pulled the binder toward him and opened it to the sixth letter. He pressed a thumb against the edge of the two papers, the letter and the false back. “Still sticky,” he said. He laid the original letter on the table, placed the false back on top of it, and pressed all around the edges with his thumb. He held up the letter. “Good as . . . old?”
“Ha,” Theo said. He held the plastic sleeve open while Jaime slid the letter in. Once the paper was inside the sleeve, you couldn’t tell that there was anything strange about it at all.
Theo put the binder back on the shelf and lined up the edges. Once he was done, he said, “Ready?”
“Ready,” Tess said.
Theo went to the door and opened it.
Standing right outside was the pale blonde in a red dress—the same blond woman Theo had almost bumped into on the library stairs earlier, or was it a different one? She stared at the three of them for a long, tense moment, a stare so cold and calculating that it made Theo’s skin prickle. Then she smiled suddenly—a tensing of the face, a baring of too-white teeth. “Oh, sorry, children,” she said. “I think I have the wrong room.”
As she click-clacked away, Jaime said, “I don’t think that woman had the wrong room.”
Theo rubbed the back of his neck where the hair was standing on end. “And I don’t think she was sorry.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jaime
Sometimes, Jaime’s father would say he was sorry. “I’m sorry your mother isn’t here to see this new drawing.” “I’m sorry your mother isn’t here to watch you get this award.” “She loved you, more than anything. I’m sorry she isn’t here to tell you herself.”
Sometimes, Jaime went looking for his mother. She was in many of the photos on the walls of his apartment, of course, so that was often the first place he found her. But she haunted his father’s drawings, too, the ones he sent from Sudan or wherever he was on assignment. His father drew her everywhere—in the desert, in the rain forest, on a beach with the surf lapping at her toes. Even when she wasn’t smiling in the drawings, it seemed as if she were about to. Jaime kept most of his father’s drawings in a folder on his nightstand. He would go through the drawings one by one, sometimes for hours.
But since his mother had been a scientist, and an important one, she also lived in the heads of other people; on the web, Jaime had to share her with anyone and everyone. All Jaime had to do was type her name into the search box on his phone, and there she was: her towering hair; the easy confidence that shone through on the screen no matter where she was pictured, no matter what she was doing. It was like seeing a ghost. He would forget and touch the screen—expecting to feel the skin of her arm or her cheek—and be surprised by the cool glass under his fingertip.
Even more eerie than the images that popped up on his screen were the videos. The interviews and the lectures, the conversations and panel discussions. When he was younger, he watched these videos incessantly, memorizing everything his mother said, though he didn’t understand much of the complex physics that was her specialty. His favorite video clip had less to do with physics and more to do with the challenges of being a young black girl with an interest in science.
“Oh, there were certain people who tried to talk me out of it. Tried to persuade me to do everything else, anything else,” she said in the clip. “I was tall and athletic, so I should take up basketball or track and get a scholarship, these people said. I could study accounting or nursing. Something more practical than all this pie-in-the-sky stuff, they said.”
The interviewer said, “And what did you say?”
“I said that those are fine dreams to have, but they weren’t my dreams. Occasionally, those same people would get angry.”
“They would argue with you?” the interviewer said.
“Not always. More often they would just give you a long look. You could feel them taking in your skin color and your hair and your size, you could see them deciding that all problems in the world are caused by people like you, people who want things they shouldn’t want, who have dreams they aren’t supposed to have. People get strangely angry about things like that, have you noticed? That’s something I hope my son never has to feel. The weight of that look. But even if he does, I hope that he’ll never let it stop him. I hope he dreams dreams bigger than any star in the universe. I hope he dreams pie-in-the-sky dreams.”
Jaime had felt the weight of that look his mother spoke about, chilly eyes that scraped him up and down, left and right, eyes that said there were so many problems in the world and he just might be the cause of them. But he was always able to shake off the feeling in a second or two. Those people didn’t know him; they didn’t matter. His dreams mattered. The people he loved mattered.
But now, as he stood here in the New York Public Library, the blond woman’s icy stare lingered. It weighed on him like the lead blanket they put over you at the dentist’s, but it was something that exposed you rather than protected you.
Tess’s voice broke through Jaime’s reverie. “That woman was too creepy. Like she brushes her teeth with bleach. Let’s get out of here before she comes back.”
They returned to Dr. Little Crow’s desk. The whole time Theo and Tess chatted with the librarian, Jaime was scanning the library for another glimpse of light hair, a red dress the color of fresh blood. But she was gone.
Whiskers tickled his fingertips, and a thick purr hummed in his bones as Nine rubbed her face against his leg and hand.
“Jaime?” Tess said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he said, not quite fine. He had never been a nervous person, but here he was, practically shaking in his Converses because some wacky lady with a bad dye job had given him the evil eye. He wished Mima were here to stare that lady down, flay her in a dozen different languages. He wished he were big enough and strong enough to hold his head high like his mother always had, to have the quiet dignity and nobility of his father.
But then, Mima taught him to trust his gut, and his gut was telling him that the discovery of the Shadow Cipher gave them power, but the kind of power more powerful people covet, the kind of power more powerful people would do almost anything to get.
He waited until they were outside of the library before he said, “We have to come up with a better cover story for what we’re doing. We can’t just keep running around the city, telling everyone what we’re looking for.”
“But we’re not,” Tess said.
“We just told that librarian about the letters we wanted to see. We could have found them ourselves. What if the librarian mentions it to someone else or writes it down in some log or something? What if . . .” He paused, all sorts of horrible scenarios straight out of stories and movies racing around his skull. “What if somebody questions her? Or threatens her?”
Theo shook his head, but his eyes widened with alarm. “That’s why we hid the clue.”
“Someone else could find it. We’re not the only ones trying to figure out the Cipher.”
“Yes, but we never were,” said Tess.
Jaime jammed his hands in his pockets, trying to explain. “Ever since 354 West 73rd came down, I don’t know. It’s been different. I’ve felt different. And don’t tell me it’s because I live in Hoboken.”
“It’s because you live in Hoboken,” Theo said, almost automatically. Then he held up his hands in surrender. “No, I know what you mean. Things have been . . . strange.”
Tess swallowed hard, and Nine licked her fingers to soothe her. “That blond woman was the strange one,” she said. “Who do you think she is?”
“Probably nobody,” said Jaime. “But I don’t want to meet her again.”
“No more run-ins with icky strangers,” Tess said. “Agreed.” She reached behind her and tightened her braid with a quick tug. “Let’s get out of here. We need a break. Want to come back to Aunt Esther’s? We can grab something to eat.”
“Fig Newtons?” said Jaime.
“Theo makes a mean sandwich,�
� Tess said.
Theo said, “I make a good sandwich.”
Later, in the twins’ attic room, Nine sprawled like a rug on the rug. Remnants of a too-late lunch—plates and balled-up napkins and blobs of cheese hardened to adhesive—littered the floor all around them. Jaime liked this room, cozy and messy as it was. He peeled off a stamp of cheese from his plate and popped it in his mouth, reminded of something else Mima always told him: When you’re feeling nervous and out of sorts, eat something. You might just be hungry.
Mostly, it was true.
“Well,” Jaime said. “That sandwich was both good and mean.”
“Theo, himself, is both good and mean,” said Tess.
“Mean,” said Theo, “is usually a matter of perception.”
“You sound like a comic-book villain,” Jaime told him.
“Yeah, when they’re monologuing about how they and the hero are really a lot alike,” Tess said. “Two sides of the same coin.”
Theo pulled a Fig Newton off a platter. “About this clue.”
“Grumpy,” said Tess, tossing the crust of her bread to Nine. But she turned her attention to Jaime’s sketchbook with the sketch of Ada’s letter. “Okay, what do we have?”
The puzzle fit in the palm of my hand. Made of silver and gemstones. I believe I left it in the M.s’ drawing room. I wonder if that empty-headed little girl with the yellow hair stole it. She was clutching her reticule quite tightly when she returned to the table, if I recall.
If she doesn’t melt it down out of sheer frustration, I can imagine she will deposit it in a spare box in her attic, to be found by a descendant and displayed in some museum or another a hundred hundred years from now. One more mysterious relic among many.
Oh, we have much work to do to, Mr. Babbage. Much work.
Yours,
A.A.L.
FCHBMFWSHFUVWSXLJSMCBHWJU
“We have some drawings of a cube, some sort of puzzle box. And some talk about it being stolen in 1844. And there is this string of characters along the bottom, which could be a cipher,” Jaime said.
“I wonder if we’re supposed to be solving this cipher or looking for this puzzle box.”
“Or both,” said Jaime.
“Or neither,” said Theo.
“You know it’s totally okay to stop telling us our ideas are stupid,” Tess said.
“When did I say that?” Theo said.
Tess sighed so hard a loose spiral of hair flew up, then floated back down to rest against her temple. “Let’s start with the cipher along the bottom. Maybe it’s something we can crack,” she suggested. The three of them looked at the string of letters and then they all took another cookie for fortification.
Jaime said what the three of them were thinking, and probably Nine, too. “If it’s just some word scrambled up, a substitution cipher, there are going to be so many possible permutations.”
“Millions and millions,” said Theo. But they tried it anyway, putting the characters into cipher solvers on the web, coming up with all sorts of meaningless words and phrases.
“Maybe the string of characters refers to something in the letter,” Tess said. “Like, say, the letter F refers to the sixth line or the sixth word of the letter, and so on.”
“There aren’t that many lines in the whole letter,” Theo said.
“The individual words, then,” said Tess.
They tried the sixth word. Palm. Then the third word, fit. The eighth, the second, etc.
“Palm, fit, my, puzzle, and,” Jaime said. “It doesn’t sound like it’s forming a new sentence as much as repeating what the letter already says.”
“We could try frequency analysis,” said Theo.
“What’s that?” Jaime asked.
“There are certain letters in the English alphabet that are used more often in English words than other letters, like e and a. If this is a substitution cipher, and we figure out how often each letter appears in this cipher, we might be able to figure out what it says. There are tools on the web to do the calculations.”
While Theo found a tool and punched in the characters from the cipher, Jaime lay back on the rug with his hands behind his head, thinking. Any other day, Jaime might have been excited about Theo’s suggestion and eager to see what the tool came up with. And yet, though the food had made him feel better, he still got the feeling they were missing something obvious, that they were taking the long way around when there was a simpler solution. He mentally retraced the steps that had gotten them to the library in the first place. Lovelace, Babbage, the Analytical Engine, the—
Wait.
“Babbage!” he blurted.
“What about him?” said Theo.
“When we read about him before, wasn’t there something about him solving a specific kind of cipher?”
Tess grabbed his wrist. “Yes! But I can’t remember what it was called.”
Quickly, Jaime searched for the terms Babbage, cipher and found what he was looking for. “The Vigenère cipher,” he read, sounding out the unfamiliar word. “To encipher a message, you use twenty-six different cipher alphabets instead of just one.”
Theo stopped what he was doing. “Really? That’s awesome.”
“Here’s a table with the different alphabets,” Jaime said, holding up the phone. The twins leaned in to look:
“That is cool,” Tess said.
“The problem is that we need a key word in order to decipher the message,” Jaime said.
“Whomp-whomp,” said Tess.
Jaime checked the time on his phone, stood, stretched. “I’m going to be late for dinner if I don’t get going. Work on this tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” said Tess, holding up her fist. Jaime bumped it. Theo saluted. Nine wound herself around Jaime’s legs three times, as if she were casting some sort of spell. Maybe she was.
Jaime walked down the stairs and found Aunt Esther watering her plants while the mechanical spiders darted away from the streams.
“Jaime!” she said. “I thought I heard your dulcet tones wafting down from the attic.”
Jaime laughed. “I don’t think anyone’s called my voice ‘dulcet’ before.”
“They should,” said Aunt Esther. “Back when I was a casting agent, I heard plenty of non-dulcet tones, believe me.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, years ago,” she said, shooing away a spider. “If you wanted to, you could get voice-over work when you’re older.”
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind,” said Jaime, heading for the front door. “Gotta get home now.”
Aunt Esther added, “Or you could keep on doing what you’re doing.”
Something about her tone made him pause with his hand on the knob. When he asked her the question, he felt as if he were asking every question he’d ever had, would ever have. “And what am I doing?”
“Why, everything you can, dear,” Aunt Esther said. “Everything you possibly can.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Karl
Miles away, in the Hoboken building Jaime was not yet able to call home, a determined little girl raced her tricycle down an empty hallway, a security guard hot on her heels.
The little girl’s legs pumped, her breath came sharp and fast.
“Stop!” yelled the guard.
She did not stop. She would not stop. Her name was Zelda “Cricket” Moran, and she was unstoppable.
The security guard would learn this soon enough.
Karl the raccoon clutched the rims of his basket with one of his tiny but strong hands. With the other hand, he held up the empty bag of cheese curls, hoping to catch Cricket’s attention, but she was currently preoccupied.
Alas.
Karl wedged the empty bag in the side of the basket, closed his eyes, and let the breeze waft through his whiskers. Even with all the shouting, it was a pleasant-enough ride. Karl enjoyed these little adventures with Cricket. Never a dull moment, that was what he always said. Well, he would have said it, if he cou
ld talk. Too bad that the people who engineered him hadn’t bothered to shape the fine muscles of his tongue and jaw so that he could form words. How surprised everyone would be. He had so many delightful stories to tell, so many opinions on a wide variety of topics. Child-rearing! Horticulture! Cookery! Politics! One day, he would figure a way to write his thoughts down. But he was the patient sort and was willing to wait until Cricket got her own computer. In the meantime, being her traveling companion was a fine occupation. He was well cared for, happy and comfortable, and there were cheese curls aplenty.
Just not at the moment.
Karl scratched his furry belly, rolled over to look behind Cricket’s shoulder. The security guard was still chasing them, red-faced and furious, stomping like a movie monster. He was making quite the spectacle of himself. Cricket had a talent for bringing out the—what was the term?—ah yes, the berserker in people. She said something or did something, and suddenly they snapped, gibbering gibberish and jerking their arms around like broken toys.
For example, just this afternoon, Cricket and Karl were exploring the building, taking note of all entrances and exits, suspicious persons and/or happenings, as was their habit. While the security guard was making his rounds, Cricket took the opportunity to search his desk, which was when she found what she called a “wiggle worm.” Cricket declared the thing EXTREMELY SUSPICIOUS and confiscated it, telling Karl that she was going to bring it back to their apartment for further study. But before they could do that, the security guard came back, saw the wiggle worm in Cricket’s hand, and the berserking—and this not-so-merry chase—began.
Now Cricket took a right turn so hard that the back wheel of the tricycle came off the ground, then slammed back down, rocking Karl in his basket. They careened past startled residents in bathing suits heading for the rooftop pool, a pack of glum teenagers with black makeup reminiscent of Karl’s own raccoon mask, a pair of dads in unfortunate Bermuda shorts. Cricket jerked the handlebars right again, and they circled back around to the lobby, where they almost ran over a tall boy with short, tidy dreadlocks and glasses. Jaime, his name was.
