(He hadn’t grown out of the dreams.)
He stepped into the pitch-black of the closet and closed the door behind him. He found a metal panel with numbers. (What was this doing in the closet of the Tredwells?) But he turned the flashlight on and tucked the end between his teeth, light facing the panel. With the screwdriver he’d brought, he removed the metal panel, revealing the wires underneath. He pulled a wire cutter from his pocket (why was he carrying wire cutters?), unclipped and reclipped, cut and spliced; and soon enough, the back of the closet yawned and he was stepping into the chill air of the archives.
But this was not the archives.
(Why would this be the archives?) This was not anywhere he recognized.
(Why couldn’t he wake up?)
Instead of standing inside, he was standing outside, in the middle of a cobbled street, the gray scrim of moon shining on foul water pooled in the gutters. On either side of the street, shabby two-story taverns leaked out-of-tune piano music punctuated by raucous bursts of laughter. A horse-drawn carriage clattered down the street, splashing him with mud and who knows what else. He yelped and tried to wipe it off, getting noxious muck all over his hands.
“Well, well, well. What are you supposed to be?”
Theo whirled around. A man wearing some sort of costume—a long coat, short pants, a rumpled hat—leaned in doorway, picking his nails with a knife.
“I said, what are you supposed to be?”
Theo said, “Excuse me?”
“Excuse you? Excuse you?” The man sauntered toward Theo. He was so ripe with sweat and grime and cheap wine that Theo slapped his hand across his nose and mouth and cursed his sense of smell.
(Wake up.)
The man twirled the knife in Theo’s direction. “What kind of togs are those?”
“Togs?”
“Togs! You got cole in them pockets?”
“Coal? I don’t understand.”
“Cole! Coin!”
Theo backed up a step and bumped into another costumed man who smelled as bad as the first one, maybe worse. “Who’s this, Reggie? A new friend a yours?” the second man said. The second man shoved Theo into the first one. The first man pushed him into the second, and the second man caught him as he staggered, laughing as Theo struggled to get away.
(Wake up!)
A third man—jacket torn, hair greasy, teeth black—tottered into the road, grinning a Halloween grin. “What’s this? One of the swells come to the Five Points?”
“The Five Points?” said Theo, so surprised he stopped struggling for a second. “But the Five Points neighborhood doesn’t even exist anymore!”
“Five Points is all around you, boy!”
Theo thrashed in the man’s arms, looking for something, anything he recognized. The closet he had stumbled out of. The Morningstarr Tower in the distance. But . . .
“Where’s the Tower?”
“Tower?”
“The Tower! It should be right over there!”
“There ain’t no tower! Boy thinks he’s in a fairy tale!”
“I do not believe in fairy tales. The Morningstarr Tower.”
“The what?”
“The Morningstarrs. A man and a woman. Really rich and important. They built all of New York City!”
“Nobody named Morningstarr around here.”
“They made the Cipher! If you want cole, coin, whatever, you have to solve the Cipher! It’s a treasure hunt!”
The man holding him shoved him to the stones. “There ain’t no tower. There ain’t no Morningstarrs. And if there’s a treasure, you’d best be telling us where it is before we hush you right here.”
(Wake up.)
“I don’t know where it is!” said Theo.
(Wake up!)
“I’m trying to find it!”
“WAKE UP!”
“I have to find it I have to find it I have to find it—”
He sat up. He was not in the archives. And he was not in the Five Points. He was in his bed, sheets twisted around him, his mom leaning over him.
She said, “It’s okay, Theo. It was just a dream.”
“What . . . what time is it?”
“About two in the morning.”
“Oh,” he said, and flopped back down on his pillow.
“Are you okay?” she said.
Yes. No. “This has been a really weird day.”
“What were you dreaming about?”
“I broke into a house.”
“Really?”
“Really. I had tools and everything.”
“Wonder who exposed you to that sort of criminal activity.” She smiled in the dark.
“And then I was in the Five Points neighborhood and ran into a bunch of really smelly, really dirty guys.”
“Five Points?” She sat on the edge of the bed. “You mean the gang area downtown, from the eighteen hundreds? I think your grandfather read you too much Dickens when you were little.”
“Maybe.”
His mother straightened the twisted sheets, draping them over him. “Where did you guys disappear to all day?”
“Museum.”
“Anywhere else? The society maybe?”
“How did you know?’
“I talked to Edgar about donating some of your grandfather’s collection to the archives. He mentioned you’d stopped by. He was worried. He said you got upset.”
“Me? I didn’t get upset. Tess got upset.”
“He said you seemed upset.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
She nodded. “What are you trying to find?”
“Nothing,” he said too quickly.
Her expression didn’t change. “Uh-hmm,” she said. “You can look as hard as you want for . . . whatever you want, but I don’t want you guys getting hung up.”
Too . . .
. . . late.
“We’re not getting hung up,” Theo said.
“You might need to manage your expectations.”
She didn’t say, No one has been able to solve the Cipher, not even my father. She didn’t say, The Cipher is just a story to lure the tourists and make New York seem like a place where dreams come true. She didn’t say, What’s done is done, and we need to get more boxes. But she didn’t have to. Theo picked at the plaster seal on the window molding.
“Theo, if you keep playing with that, Mrs. Cruz is going to have to spackle it again.”
“If Slant is going to knock down the building anyway, what difference does it make?”
His mother gazed at him another moment, expression unreadable. Then she stood, pressed a kiss on his forehead. “I think we should both get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
“Good night.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Did you catch them? The ones who stole the coins?”
“Not yet,” she said. “These things take a while. Can’t skip any of the steps in an investigation.”
“But soon you’ll catch them?”
She smiled. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Right. Tomorrow.”
And then it was tomorrow. Another day, another society, this one the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, 170 Central Park West at 77th.