“Stale cookies are still cookies.” Jaime took a couple of cookies and a glass of water. “Thanks, uh, man.”
Tess wasn’t hungry, but she took a cookie, and Theo did, too. Lance clomped back into the kitchen, where he started banging around pots and pans. If he had the ingredients, Lance could make cookies, beef stew, vegetable soup, or pancakes; you never knew which. Normally, just the thought of an empty suit of armor whipping up a batch of pancakes would make Tess laugh, but now . . .
She put the water and cookie on top of a stack of papers, her stomach clenching and unclenching in its own interpretative dance of catastrophe. When she went back downstairs, her parents would tell her to stop worrying so much, that worrying didn’t solve anything. But worrying was supposed to keep bad things from happening—that was the entire point of worrying. You said to yourself, I hope I don’t die in a bizarre accident with a revolving door, and you didn’t, see? Because you worried about it.
She felt as if she had been smacked in the face with a revolving door. A stale cookie wasn’t going to fix that.
But what would?
What could?
Tess said, “Well, I can’t say I didn’t expect this.”
“That your Lance would need some oil?” Jaime said.
“That Slant would eventually get our building,” Tess said. “That he’d want to destroy it.”
“I didn’t expect it,” said Theo. “Not in our lifetime. It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“An affront to decency?” Tess said. “An affront to humanity? An affront to every living creature in the known and unknown universes?”
“It’s pretty bad,” Jaime said. He took a bite of a cookie, raised his brows, and popped the rest of the cookie into his mouth. “I wish we could do something.”
“Like what?” said Theo.
The cat banked off the window, flipped in the air. Jaime wandered around the apartment, sipping his water, picking up framed photographs and putting them down again, pressing middle C on the baby grand piano that Grandpa used to play before he got sick. Tess almost explained about Grandpa, about where he’d gone, but Jaime was examining a Duke map of New Amsterdam, 1664. Next to that was another map that showed New York City under British occupation from 1776 to 1783. And then a drawing of the Tombs, a fortress prison on Centre Street built around 1830 in the style of ancient Egyptian architecture, right next to the Five Points neighborhood.
Jaime leaned in to look more closely. “What is this place?”
“That’s the Tombs courthouse and prison,” Tess said. “The building’s still there. It’s where my mom works. But the neighborhood around it was torn down a long time ago. It was mostly immigrants living in cruddy buildings that were sort of sinking into the ground. Lots of crime and stuff. The Morningstarrs were immigrants, too, and when they first came, that’s where they lived. Later, they fought to get the place cleaned up, the people fed, schools built, things like that.” She nodded at a portrait of the Morningstarrs on the opposite wall. In it, the twins looked like two cotton swabs—long faced with wispy tufts of white hair.
“Not everyone wants poor people fed and educated,” said Jaime.
“Or living in decent housing,” said Tess. Again her stomach accordioned in, accordioned out. She imagined the people of the Five Points who had just arrived in America, whole families crammed into a single hot and dirty room, the stink of Collect Pond, fouled with factory runoff and waste, seeping in through the racked walls. She hoped that Idahovians were against fouling ponds with factory runoff. She hoped they supported decent housing.
Jaime moved from the drawing of the Tombs to a framed newspaper clipping hanging lopsided. “‘New York Sun, 1855,’” he read. “‘Morningstarrs leave first clue in city-wide treasure hunt.’”
Theo recited, “42, 1, 2; 42, 20, 7; 42, 1, 10; 42, 2, 17; 42, 2—”
“Stop showing off, Theo.” Tess waved her hand. To Jaime, she said, “He remembers every number he hears and likes to remind everyone.”
“I remember studying the first clue in grammar school,” said Jaime. “It’s a book cipher using an Edgar Allan Poe story.”
“‘The Purloined Letter.’ From a magazine called The Gift. My grandpa has a couple of copies of that magazine, too,” Tess said, pointing. “Right on that shelf.”
Jaime wandered over to a nearby bookcase, scanned it, and pulled out the magazine, the pages of which were laminated.
“The first number is the page number, the second number is the line number on that page, and the third number is the word in that line,” Theo said.
“‘It begins, as everything does, with a lady. Her book holds your keys,’” said Tess. “We know. Everybody knows.”
Theo said, “But did you know the word begins doesn’t actually appear in the story, only the word begin?”
“What does it matter?” said Tess.
“Details always matter,” Theo said. “Like the fact that the Morningstarrs used that story in the first place. They could have used the Constitution. The Bill of Rights. The Bible. Something by Dickens or Melville or even a recipe for a cake. They could have used anything. But they used a detective story about something hidden in plain sight, which pretty much describes all the clues they left.”
“They used a detective story because they had a sense of humor,” Tess said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Theo.
“I thought they were real sticks in the mud,” Jaime said. “Never laughed. Never smiled.” All three of them looked again at the portrait of the Morningstarrs, who seemed to be glowering at them the way eagles eyed their prey.
Tess crossed her arms. “It’s just a theory my grandpa was working on. He said that anyone who designed machines the way they did had to have a sense of humor.”
“They designed the machines the way they did because they thought people would accept them if they looked more like natural creatures,” said Theo.
Tess waved him off. “You sound like a history book.”
“Thank you,” said Theo.
Jaime leafed through the magazine, counted down the lines on the pages. Then he said, “That’s your grandpa’s thing, right? Studying the Morningstarrs? Trying to solve the Cipher?”
“It was his thing,” said Tess.
“What happened?” said Jaime.
“He just gave up, that’s all.”
Remarkably, Theo still had the energy to roll his eyes. “It’s not like he could help it.”
“Yeah, well,” Tess said, knowing she was being unfair, even awful, but still wanting to argue. Her mind raced with what-if questions, each worse than the last.
“Stop catastrophizing,” Theo said.
Jaime looked from Theo to Tess. “Is that a real word?”
“I am not catastrophizing,” snapped Tess, annoyed that Theo could read her so easily.