“Ignominy!” said Theo.
At Jaime’s surprised laugh, Tess said, “Sometimes Theo talks like a dictionary. Anyway, for a dude that was born in the 1750s, Hamilton wasn’t the worst. He created our banks and stuff. And he was supposed to be an abolitionist.”
“Hmmm,” said Jaime. “Unlike Jefferson, who talked about people being equal but still had slaves.”
“Right?” said Tess. “But Hamilton didn’t trust the poor even though he’d grown up dirt poor. Which is strange when you think about it. Why would hate yourself?”
Theo said, “Grandpa Ben always told us that great people are capable of doing terrible things and that we shouldn’t ever forget it.”
“But I wonder if that’s what happens when you grow up,” said Tess.
“What do you mean?” said Jaime. “You turn evil?”
“No. And I’m not talking about everyone. Just that some people have all these convictions; they know what’s right and wrong, but they get too old and too tired to follow through. They give up. Or maybe they get so scared and selfish that their convictions get twisted to serve them instead of serving the world and the people in it.”
“Meaning you turn evil,” said Jaime. “That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard.”
“Well, I could be wrong,” Tess said.
“When she says ‘I could be wrong,’” Theo said, “she means ‘I could not possibly be wrong.’”
“My grandmother is like that,” said Jaime.
“I knew I liked your grandmother,” Tess said.
“Speaking of wrong, we’re looking at the wrong grave,” Jaime said. They turned to look at a line of grave markers near Alexander Hamilton’s monument. The largest was for his wife, Eliza. The marker said:
ELIZA
DAUGHTER OF
PHILIP SCHUYLER
WIDOW OF
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
BORN AT ALBANY
AUG. 9TH 1757
DIED AT WASHINGTON
NOV. 9TH 1854
INTERRED HERE
Jaime did another search on his phone. “Says here that Eliza Hamilton spent the rest of her life after Alexander’s death fighting for his legacy. She founded orphanages in New York City and Washington, DC.” Jaime looked up. “Well, she doesn’t sound too evil.”
Tess glanced the graveyard and lowered her voice. “Look at all the people taking pictures of Alexander Hamilton’s grave, and nobody’s over here.” But Tess still didn’t know how the marker would show them “the shape of things.” The stone itself wasn’t unusual. So they tried the graves of the other, other Hamiltons, Hamilton’s children, but there wasn’t anything unusual about those grave markers either.
Tess drifted back to the grave of Eliza Hamilton. It made sense to her that the Morningstarrs would use this marker for a clue. Not only was Eliza overlooked, she was trying to make sure her husband wasn’t. She was trying to do the right thing. And wasn’t that what Theresa Morningstarr was wondering about in that first letter sent to Grandpa Ben?
Tess wanted to do the right thing, too. She wanted to solve this mystery. Not just for herself and her home, but because Grandpa Ben couldn’t.
She moved closer to the grave marker. She ran her gaze over every inch of the stone but still didn’t see anything unusual.
Except . . .
She dropped to her knees and squinted. Underneath the inscription was a small . . . circle? She traced it with her finger. No, not a circle.
“What is it?” said Theo.
“An octagon,” she whispered. Then leaned back on her heels and frowned. “Does that mean anything to you guys?”
“Nope,” said Theo.
“Nope,” said Jaime.
Tess got to her feet, worried the end of her braid. “It has to mean something. I think the Cipher wants us to remember this lady. To think about the things she did, things that were important but didn’t make her famous.”
Jaime held up his phone. “She was known to take orphan children into her own home even though she was broke.”
“Too bad she’s not here right now,” Theo said. “She could take us in. We’re homeless now, too.”
The joke just hit Tess like a brick.
Home.
Less.
She was homeless. They were homeless. Which of course was the reason why she was here in the first place, because Slant had stolen their home from them, snatched it away like a robber grabs a purse. Yes, she’d spent twenty-four hours imagining her family in a split-level in Idaho, crammed in a car, floating in a boat on a shark-riddled sea, and farming alpacas in New Mexico, but it was the first time she’d heard someone say it so plainly, so baldly, so technically. Home. Less.
Nine mrrowed and Tess patted the top of her domed head, rubbed her striped ears, tried to relax, tried to make her own joke. “Homeless orphans. We’re like something out of Dickens.”
“I . . . ,” Theo began, then stopped, index finger pointing at nothing, nowhere. Then he tapped his cheek, one, two, three.
“What?” said Jaime.
“What?” said Tess.
“Look up ‘Octagon, Dickens, NYC’ in your phone,” Theo said.
“Okay,” said Jaime, typing, “but I don’t see—Oh!” He stared as his phone for a long moment, reading.
They should have gotten a phone for their birthday—why hadn’t they gotten a phone for their birthday? “What does it say?” Tess said.
Jaime held out the phone. The first entry on the screen said, Octagon, New York City, an award-winning Manhattan landmark. Out loud, but not loud enough for the other tourists to overhear, she read: “‘The Octagon was built as a stunning island retreat in 1841. Designed by architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and built with handsome stone quarried from Roosevelt (formerly Blackwell’s) Island itself, the Octagon’s signature rotunda was so striking that English novelist Charles Dickens praised it as “remarkable,” and “spacious and elegant.”’”
“Yes!” Theo said. “Dickens made a trip to New York in the 1840s and wrote about the Octagon in American Notes for General Circulation. My grandpa used to read it to me.”
Jaime blinked. “My grandmother read me The Cat in the Hat. In five different languages, but still.”
“The Octagon wasn’t a retreat at all,” Theo continued. “It was the entrance to the New York City Lunatic Asylum.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Theo