Theo sighed. “What’s weird is that this has been too easy.”
“Easy?” Jaime said. “A man built like a fridge just tried to send us to jail.”
“What I mean is that it took years for people to solve a single clue in the original Cipher. We’ve solved a bunch already. The odds of that seem astronomical. As if . . . as if the Cipher wants to be solved.” He tugged on his lip, as if he were about to pull it up and cover his whole head with it, wrap up his body, and roll into traffic, because what he and Tess had just said was too ridiculous, too fantastical and impossible and a million other un-Theo-like things.
A shiver danced up Tess’s spine. She stepped in closer to her brother and to Jaime. “We should be more careful. We can’t talk about this with anyone else. We can’t let on. We can’t let anyone overhear us, either.” She checked behind them to see if they were being followed. Nine turned and checked, too.
“Well, that doesn’t look obvious at all,” Theo grumbled.
“Let’s figure out what we need to do next,” Jaime said.
“I’d like to figure out how Slant keeps getting all these artists and supermodels to marry him,” said Theo. “He looks like he colors his hair with shoe polish.”
Tess didn’t bother to point out the irony of Theo “The Hairball” Biedermann talking about anyone else’s hair. She was still thinking about this, her mind conjuring up everything from government spies to foreign agents to hostile aliens disguised as human beings to minions of Slant, all with ridiculous hair, when they entered the lush green of Central Park, all gently rolling hills and tufts of trees. They got three pretzels with mustard and sat on a park bench to eat them. A slight breeze lifted Tess’s braid, and she smelled pretzels, hot dogs, and the faintest scent of zoo. The Rollers were here, too, picking up refuse left from picnics and impromptu baseball games and rolling it away. A bunch of teenagers played exo-ball, their metal exoskeletons allowing them to leap over one another’s heads and crash into one another while laughing like hyena-wolves. Nine watched them leap, rapt.
Jaime pulled out his sketchbook, on which he had written the words from the painting:
The Other Hamilton shows you the shape of things.
“This sounds more like a riddle than a cipher,” Theo said.
“Hamilton like Alexander Hamilton? Who’s ‘the Other Hamilton’? And what’s the shape of things? What things?” Jaime said.
“I don’t know,” said Tess. She gave the sketchbook back to Jaime and took her pretzel from Theo. There was nothing like a New York City pretzel. She wondered briefly if she should be worried about what they were made out of—recycled cardboard? school paste?—and then decided she didn’t want to know. Theo had a smear of mustard on his upper lip. Neither Tess nor Jaime informed him of it.
Jaime set the sketchbook aside and consulted his phone. “Alexander Hamilton is buried in the graveyard at the Trinity Church. I say we try there first.”
“But we’re not looking for Alexander Hamilton, we’re looking for the Other Hamilton,” Tess said.
“His other half, maybe?” said Jaime. “His wife is buried there, too. And his kids.”
“Huh,” said Theo. “Maybe. It’s worth checking out, anyway.”
“The Morningstarrs liked to be cryptic, didn’t they?” said Tess. “Get it? Buried? Cryptic?”
“And you say my jokes aren’t funny,” said Theo.
“The mustard on your face is funny,” said Tess.
It was early afternoon, so the Underway only had a scattering of people. A woman buried in shopping bags. Two more teenagers with Starrboards. A man in coveralls who was fast asleep sitting up. Jaime took out his sketchbook and drew the car and the people, simple, quick lines that somehow captured them all.
“Where did you learn to draw like that?” Tess asked.
“My dad.”
“Your dad? But I thought he was some kind of engineer?”
“He is. But he also paints, watercolors mostly. He’s not much of a talker, but he paints pictures of the things he does and things he sees and sends them to me. I have paintings of test tubes and landscapes and monkeys and street fairs and all kinds of stuff—wait, I have one with me.” He dug around in his side pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. Tess opened the folded paper—so soft, the way paper gets when it’s handled a lot. Inside was a painting of a windswept red desert, a camel trekking across the sand, reins held in the hand of a tall woman. She was wearing a long white cloak and looking back over her shoulder, dark curls escaping the hood.
“It’s beautiful. Different from your stuff, but I like it.”
“Yeah,” said Jaime. “Me, too. He thought about being an artist when he was young but . . .” He shrugged. “Mima’s parents, my great-grandparents, brought her to Florida from Cuba when she was my age. She says they had it rough for a while. She’s practical. She wanted my dad to be comfortable. She wanted him to have a real job.”
“Being an artist isn’t a real job?”
“Not like being a doctor or scientist or engineer is.”
“I guess,” said Tess. “Who’s the lady? She’s pretty.”
Jaime paused. “My dad likes to put my mom in his paintings sometimes.”
“That’s nice,” Tess said.
Jaime nodded, refolded the drawing. On the back of the paper, Jaime’s dad had written Be good to Mima. Home soon.
Jaime saw what she was looking at and then said, “He’s never home soon enough.”
Tess worried her fingers in Nine’s fur. She had questions the way she always had questions: How much did Jaime miss his dad? How much did he miss his mom? Was it harder to miss someone who was forced to leave you or someone who chose to? But their stop came soon enough, and Tess shook her questions out of her head. They filed out of the train and walked the short distance to the Trinity Churchyard. According to Jaime’s phone, the church had three burial sites—the churchyard at Wall Street and Broadway, the Trinity Church Cemetery on Riverside Drive, and the churchyard at St. Paul’s Chapel. The graveyard itself might have been spooky if it hadn’t been so sunny and warm, and if there weren’t so many tourists crowding the walkways, reading the old cracked stones, the strange markers with skulls and wings.
The biggest crowd surrounded Alexander Hamilton’s grave, not only because he was Alexander Hamilton—a Founding Father of the United States, chief of staff to George Washington, face on the ten-dollar bill, and dopeface who managed to get himself killed in a duel by the vice president of the United States—but because his was a sizable monument, with four pillars and a sort of obelisk-like triangle on top, flowers and coins left all around it. A tour group took rubbings of the markings on the tomb.
Theo said, “Hamilton wasn’t that old when he died. Who knows what he could have done if he hadn’t dueled with Aaron Burr.”
“What happened to Aaron Burr?” said Jaime.