“My name. You know it.” She tapped his chest with her book. “You were following me.”
Enough of this, he thought, and slapped the book from her hand. It slammed into the stone of the building and dropped into the thin crust of snow on the ground.
“Oh,” said Miss Ava, eyes widening.
“Oh,” he said, taking another step closer. “I have a few questions for you.”
“Oh?” she repeated, reaching up and laying a small hand on his shoulder. She ran that hand down the length of his arm, curling her slim fingers around his pinky. Her full lips parted. As if she wanted to kiss him.
Then he heard the snap of his pinky as she broke it.
He only had time to emit a strangled squeal before she kicked him in the kneecap and swept his feet out from under him as easily as if she were tumbling a puppy.
“That,” she said, with a click of the tongue, “is no way to treat Penelope. Or me, for that matter.” Her eyes shifted in the dim light, pupils shining like gunmetal.
He scrabbled backward, pinky burning, shattered kneecap screaming. How could such a slight girl have wounded him so badly, and so fast? “Wait . . . wait . . . you can’t . . .”
She advanced on him, floating in that strange way of hers. “And yet, I did.”
“This cannot be real.”
“Oh, I’m as real as anyone. And I am always and forever a lady.” Miss Ava bent close, smiling at him with gleaming pearly teeth. “Would you like to see what kind of lady I am, Mr. William Covington Hanover? The others didn’t like it, but perhaps you might.”
“No,” William huffed, barely able to get the words from his throat because his heart had crawled up inside it. “No. Leave me be. I won’t bother you anymore.”
“It’s no bother.”
“Please,” William said, exactly what Lord Something-or-Other had said before the serving fork had found its mark. “Please.”
She opened her mouth wide and William squeezed his eyes shut, sure she would tear him to bits, roll him up, drop him in a deep dark hole.
Instead, she screamed, a loud, piercing, ladylike shriek. “Help me! Oh, won’t somebody help me!”
His eyes flashed open in confusion.
Miss Ava Oneal scooped up her book and slapped his face with it, punctuating each word, “Cad! Beast! Ruffian!”
One minute the street was dark and empty; the next, coppers boiled out from the alleys and the woods and poured down the streets, as if they’d expected some trouble, as if they’d expected this trouble.
He was wondering how far one could run on a ruined knee when a copper shouted, “Get him, lads!”
It was no use, they were coming, they were here. William Covington Hanover—murderer, thief, and not much of a ruffian—threw his arms over his head. As the clubs rained down, the last thing he saw was Miss Ava Oneal. She brushed the ice from the cover of her book, straightened her skirt, and stepped through the doorway of 354 West 73rd Street, taking with her all the secrets of the Morningstarrs, and every one of her own.
NEW YORK CITY
Present Day
CHAPTER ONE
Tess
The city had many nicknames: Gotham. Metropolis. The Shining Starr. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. These nicknames were not always accurate. For example, why would anyone refer to a city as an overlarge piece of fruit? Also, the city did sleep, but it slept the way a cat does, eyes half open, watchful, ready to spring at the first sign of fun, or danger.
That morning, a very different kind of cat was getting ready to spring. The cat in question lived in the Biedermann family’s cluttered apartment at 354 W. 73rd Street and kept her sock collection underneath the Biedermanns’ coffee table. This was not normally a problem for the Biedermann family, except when they had guests or when their feet were cold.
Today, they were having guests. They were also having a problem.
The cat—a large spotted animal that would have looked more at home on a South African savanna than in the living room on the Upper West Side—had the business end of a striped sock gripped firmly in her teeth. She was growling. The lanky girl sitting on the floor gripping the other end of the sock growled right back.
“Seriously, Tess?” said Mrs. Biedermann.
“This . . . is . . . my . . . favorite . . . sock . . . ,” Tess said, her dark braid whipping like a tail against her olive skin. The cat’s striped tail lashed in kind.
Tess’s twin brother, Theo, who was standing at the kitchen counter, poking at his favorite alphabet cereal with the back of a spoon, said, “The cat’s winning.”
Tess said, “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t need to clean up the stupid socks if those people weren’t coming to see your stupid tower.”
Mrs. Biedermann rifled through a briefcase the size of a suitcase. “It’s not a stupid tower. And stop saying things are stupid.”
“It’s the wrong tower,” Tess said.
Theo Biedermann had built a scale model of the Tower of London—a model that took up the Biedermanns’ entire dining room—for a national Lego contest (he won). Now, a week into summer vacation, school officials were finally coming to interview Theo, to congratulate him for his prize (even more Legos) and to photograph the tower for the school website. Mrs. Biedermann thought they should clean up the cat’s sock collection before the people arrived, but the cat, Nine, had other ideas. So did Tess.
Theo still didn’t look up from his cereal. “You don’t have to wear your favorite socks, Tess. No one’s going to interview you.”
“You should have built the Morningstarr Tower,” Tess insisted, bending her legs and putting her weight on her heels for leverage.
Theo looked up from his cereal. “Hey! I spelled Fibonacci! Oh, hold on, the i is floating away.”
Nine—who, oddly enough, didn’t seem much interested in the names of mathematicians spelled out in wheat products—flattened her striped ears and nearly yanked the sock out of Tess’s hands. Tess held fast. Behind them, the morning news hosts on the TV blah-blah-blahed about new parking regulations, about Great Britain negotiating with China for more all-weather solar panels after an especially rainy spring, about new water pipelines, about the best work-to-evening outfits for women, about a new guacamole recipe with peas.
“Peas,” said Tess to the cat, “do not belong in guacamole.”
“Mrrow,” said Nine, pulling harder.
“Next up on the program,” yapped the TV host, “we’ll be headed to a surprise press conference with philanthropist and real estate developer Darnell Slant. A man with a plan to move New York City into the twenty-first century!”