The morning they were supposed to go to the Tredwell House, her mom took one look at Tess and said, “One of those nights?”
It had been one of those nights, and it hadn’t. Yes, she was so wired and tired that her nerves felt like a marmoset-mongoose had been chewing on them, but it was a small price to pay if they had actually found a new branch of clues to solve the Cipher. But of course she couldn’t say that. Not yet. Today they would try to find the next clue, if there was one. Only then could they be sure they were on to something new, something no one else had found before.
“I’m okay,” Tess said to her mom.
“Did you try meditation?” her father asked.
She’d tried her favorite guided meditation video for an hour. She’d organized her underwear drawer by color. She’d tried counting backward from one million. When the sun rose that morning, she was on number 937,582.
“I tried,” said Tess. “But sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t sleep either,” said Mr. Biedermann. “Your mother, on the other hand, was snoring up a storm.”
“I wasn’t snoring,” said Mrs. Biedermann.
“How would you know?” said Mr. Biedermann.
When they finally harnessed Nine and met Jaime in the lobby, Jaime was the one who seemed sleepy. Even his short ’locs looked a bit droopy.
“My grandma was online this morning looking for jobs. She already has an interview for next week. And my dad texted and said he was calling a friend to see if he can get us another apartment. In Hoboken.”
“Nobody’s moving to Hoboken yet,” said Tess. “Or Idaho.”
“What’s with you and Idaho?” said Theo.
“What’s that?” Tess said.
“Idaho?”
“No, that.” Tess pointed at the strips of yellow caution tape X-ed over a metal panel by the mailboxes. “Who put that there?”
“I bet it was those two creepy guys who served the eviction notices,” said Jaime.
“Stoop and Pinscher,” Theo said.
“Don’t tell me those are their names,” said Jaime.
“I won’t, then,” said Theo. He was silent for half a second, then blurted, “Stoop and Pinscher really are their names.”
“Ignore him,” Tess said. “Do you have the letter?”
Jaime patted his side pocket. “Right here.”
To get to the Tredwell House, which was now called the Merchant’s House Museum, they walked over to 72nd and Broadway to catch the number 2 to Times Square. Today, the Guildman in the glass box was gaunt as a skeleton but with eyes like precious stones. He scanned the car, looking for rule breakers and troublemakers. For a second, the Guildman’s amber eyes seemed to lock on Tess’s. She held her breath, but he quickly moved on. Nine nudged her hand. She exhaled slowly and then took three more deep cleansing breaths.
At Times Square, the train stopped, and the three of them ran up the stairs to catch the N. This train started underground but climbed steadily upward into the air until they were riding high above the city streets. Below the tracks, people and cars darted like silverfish, but everyone’s eyes were on the Morningstarr Tower, glass panels gleaming, spire needle sharp and poking into the clouds, Underway tracks curled around the base. Tess didn’t say what she was thinking, what they all were thinking, that it was only a matter of time until Slant got his hands on the Tower, too. What would it look like with the word SLANT slapped on the front of it, blinking in neon? Nothing that Tess ever wanted to see.
They got off the train at 8th Street and walked five minutes to a four-story redbrick row house with green shutters and a door painted a dignified cream. An elegant wrought-iron fence matched the railing leading up the stairs. Two fixtures that maybe once held lightbulbs stood on either side of the entrance. It was a pretty house, but nothing on the outside screamed “clue!” Unless you were a student of history—or one of Benjamin and Annie Adler’s grandkids—you wouldn’t know that 29 East 4th Street was one of the few remaining nineteenth-century structures still standing in New York City. The building right next door was plastered with demolition notices. Which made Tess mad all over again, the nimbus of outrage buzzing in and around her head. She marched up the steps, threw open the door, and burst inside.
Dozens of people already crowded the narrow front hallway, including an entire troop of Morningstarr Scouts, all wearing matching red shirts and beanies, all looking like a flock of birds. Everyone turned to stare first at Tess, then at Nine, then at Jaime and Theo behind her.
“Welcome to Tredwell House,” said a beige young man in a boxy beige suit like an envelope. His name tag said Colton. “As I was saying, Tredwell House was purchased in 1835 by a wealthy merchant named Seabury Tredwell for eighteen thousand dollars. That’s about half a million dollars today.”
“Not a lot for New York City,” grumbled a middle-aged man with a fake orange tan and the kind of smooth, unwrinkled face Tess’s dad liked to call “well preserved” and her mom liked to call “pickled.”
Colton, the tour guide, said, “It used to be that there were many, many row houses of this style here and all over the city, but what makes the Merchant’s House unique is that it’s the only one left standing.”
One of the Morningstarr Scouts, a short girl wearing a patterned headscarf under her beanie, said, “Are there any ghosts in here?”
“Ah, I’ll get to that in a minute,” said Colton. “First, I want to tell you about Seabury Tred—”
The girl said, “Everything is better with ghosts.” The other Morningstarr Scouts nodded.
“Seabury Tredwell,” said Colton, perhaps just a little too loudly, “came to New York City in 1798 when he was eighteen years old. In 1820, when he was forty years old, he married twenty-three-year-old Eliza Parker.”
“Ew!” said the Morningstarr Scouts.
“Ew?” said the middle-aged man. His wife socked him. Or maybe it was just a random woman who found him irritating.
“They had eight children—Elizabeth, Horace, Mary, Samuel, Phebe, Julia, Sarah, and finally Gertrude, who was born in this house in 1840. Only three of them ever married,” said Colton. “The oldest daughter, Elizabeth, wedded a prominent lawyer named Effingham Nichols in 1845. He was one of the people involved in the Union Pacific Railroad before it collapsed due to the competition from the Morningstarrs.”