“Well,” said Theo, “That doesn’t look like much of anything.”
“But even if the key refers to certain lines, we don’t know which word is important in the line,” Jaime said.
Tess said, “Sometimes there’s a pattern. Maybe it follows the 741776 code? Seventh word, fourth word, like that?”
But when they tried using the seventh word of the first line and then the fourth and first, they didn’t get anything useful.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Tess said. “We’re missing something.”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you back at Grandpa’s apartment,” Theo said. “People have been trying to solve this mystery for more than one hundred fifty years. Even if this is a Morningstarr clue—and we have no idea if it is—it could take decades just to figure it out.”
Jaime didn’t say it, but they didn’t have decades before Slant would take possession of their building.
He went back to the letter. “What if the names are the most important thing about this letter? Miss King. Mr. Munsterberg. Tredwell.”
“I guess we can go to the library and use the computers to look them up,” said Tess.
Jaime stuffed the sketchbook in one pocket, the Morningstarr letter into another, and he fumbled for his cell phone in a third. “I can look it up right now.”
“You have a phone?” Theo grumbled. “We’re not allowed to get one till next year.”
For the name “Miss King,” Jaime got so many results that nothing stood out. “Mr. Munsterberg” yielded an entry about one Hugo Munsterberg, a psychologist who wrote a book about the film industry in 1916. But the name “Tredwell” was different. “‘The Seabury Tredwell House, built in 1832,’” Jaime read aloud. “‘The Tredwell family lived there for a century. It’s a museum now. Everything inside is preserved just as it always was.’”
Nine the cat started to pace and Tess’s knee started to bounce. “What if there’s something important hidden at the Tredwell House?” she said.
Jaime read from the letter in his hands: “A fresh start, a new perspective.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Guys. What if . . . what if there are two trails of clues? The one that people have been following for years, and this one. Like a secret cipher?”
Theo’s hand hovered in the air, as if he didn’t know where to put it. “Huh.”
Jaime wanted to chortle and to chuckle and to roar. He felt like laughing the way you do at a surprise birthday party, the way you laugh when they bring out a cake shaped like Spider-Man.
They got up and shot through the gallery doors, almost mowing down Guffaw Man and his tour group.
Guffaw Man snorted and said, “Are you kids still trying solve the Ciiiii—”
The rest of the word was swallowed up by the wind as they ran right past him and into the bright sunshine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cricket
The morning after Darnell Slant—or rather, his creepy minions—told the residents of 354 W. 73rd Street that they were officially homeless, six-year-old Zelda “Cricket” Moran woke up the same time she always did: 5:22 a.m. on the dot. And she did the same thing she did every single morning: she climbed out of bed and selected her outfit for the day. She was very particular about her outfits, which she matched very carefully to her moods. (This didn’t always please the adults around her, especially on class picture days or family reunions when she insisted on wearing a skeleton costume or a gas mask.) That morning, she put on a pink tutu, striped tights, red sparkle high-tops, her favorite heart necklace—the one that the building had given her—and a black T-shirt with a picture of a skull and crossbones and a snake head poking through the eye socket, because this was the most metal outfit she owned and she was feeling particularly metal.
Since no one else was up, she marched into the kitchen, poured herself a bowl of her favorite cereal—no milk, because milk made everything soggy and soggy was not metal—and ate in front of the TV. When she was done with her breakfast, she spent the next fifteen minutes practicing her crowd-surfing in the front foyer, which was a little difficult because she was by herself. After a while, Karl trundled into the room and tugged on her pigtails as if they were handlebars and he was trying to steer her. He was always trying to steer her. Stop trying to steer, Karl! Or else he was spinning the lock on the pantry door, scrambling to get at the Cheez Doodles. He loved Cheez Doodles.
Cricket got up and unlocked the pantry—silly Karl, the combination was 1, 2, 3—and grabbed a handful of Cheez Doodles. Karl ate them while Cricket put on his harness. Then she walked him around the apartment. Well, Cricket walked. Karl was on his back with his legs in the air, getting dragged along. He looked a little bit dead. That was pretty metal.
Her mom finally shuffled out into the living room. “Cricket, please don’t drag your raccoon around like that. You know how dirty he gets.”
“He likes it, don’t you, Karl?”
Karl scrubbed the cheese from his masked face with his tiny hands but didn’t try to get up.
“Right,” said Cricket’s mom. Her hair was mashed down on one side of her face and her eyes were bloodshot. It wasn’t a good look for her, but it was also too early in the morning for Cricket’s UNBRIDLED HONESTY. At least, that was what her dad would have said. The first time he said it, she had to look in her special word book for the meaning of unbridled. Then she spent the next two weeks galloping around like a horse.
“Who are you today?” her mom asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to anyone over the age of seven,” her mother said.
“I’m a ballerina-spy-deathmetalhead.”
“Lovely,” said her mother, walking into the kitchen area. She opened one cabinet after another, using bad words under her breath. Cricket had looked up some of those bad words in her special word book. She wondered if her mom knew what the words meant. She thought not.
Cricket said, “If you’re looking for the coffee, I used it for my experiments.”
Her mom’s head swiveled toward Cricket like a bobble toy. “Experiments?”
“I was a supermodel-scientist-archvillian yesterday, remember?”
Her mother closed the cabinets, slumped at the kitchen table. “It should be a crime to mess with a woman’s coffee.”
“Are you going to have me arrested?” said Cricket.
“Of course not.”
“Call Detective Biedermann! I would like to be arrested!”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Would, too!”
“Cricket, it’s not even six in the morning. It’s too early for this. It’s always too early for this.”