The next morning, Theo, Tess, and Jaime met in the lobby to head over to Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island. There were several ways to get onto the island: Underway; bus; cab. And the best way to get onto the island was not under it or even across to it, but over it.
They got off the Underway and walked to 59th Street and Second Avenue, where they found the Roosevelt Island Tramway Plaza. Unlike the Underway trains, which ran on tracks both below and above the city streets, the tram was a trolley car suspended from wires slung over the East River from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island. For the same cost as an Underway ride, you could traverse the East River and see the city from the air.
After a ten-minute wait, Theo, Tess, Jaime, and Nine boarded the tram, a red car attached to the wires above with a large silver clawlike contraption. Luckily, Roosevelt Island wasn’t that popular a destination, so there were only a few tourists scattered about, and none with nonsensical T-shirts. The tram pitched a bit and then began its ascent. Tess was quiet, after a big fight with their mother over the fate of Lance, which she won, but only temporarily. Jaime was busy with one of his sketches, a black superhero with lightning coming from his ears. Theo’s muscles and nerves relaxed as the frantic sounds of traffic—the squeals of tires, the horns, the sirens—got farther and farther away. Even the gentle sways of the tram in the wind didn’t startle him. The tops of apartment and office buildings came into view, the water towers perched on top of them like spaceships drawn by children. Alongside the tram, the 59th Street Bridge was so close that Theo, not prone to imagining such things until recently, envisioned the people who had built it more than a hundred years ago sitting on the girders, legs dangling as they ate their lunches. In the distance, the spires of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Morningstarr Tower spiked the clouds beyond the endless rows of buildings. Below, the East River, greenish when you stood close to it, shone like a silvery ribbon.
“Remember the first time we took the tram?” said Tess finally. “With Uncle Edgar and Grandpa? What were we? Four or five?”
“Yeah,” said Theo. “I remember that you asked if there were sharks in the East River and Uncle Edgar told you that story about that great white shark in New Jersey.”
“Uh, what shark in New Jersey?” said Jaime.
“You don’t know about the shark in New Jersey?” said Theo.
“No, I don’t, and even if I did, you would tell me anyway, so why don’t you just tell me?” said Jaime.
“In 1916, a great white or a bull shark—people still argue about which—killed a bunch of people on the Jersey Shore before swimming into the Matawan Creek, where he killed two more people.”
“A shark can swim into a creek? Seriously?” said Jaime. He turned to Tess. “Now I understand why you’re so obsessed with sharks.”
“After that, Tess wouldn’t even swim at the Y.”
Jaime added a shark to his drawing.
The car began its descent toward Roosevelt Island. Jaime quickly sketched the view from the tram—the buildings, the Queensboro Bridge, the river like a ribbon complete with a shark fin sticking out of it. Theo remembered another story Uncle Edgar had told on that first tram trip, one about a submersible shaped like a shark, with the saw-toothed skin of a shark, built by the Morningstarrs. Grandpa Ben had laughed and said, aside from some mentions in a couple of old letters, no substantial evidence of that submersible had ever been found—no plans, no prototypes. Uncle Edgar had replied, “Maybe because the Morningstarrs didn’t want it to be found.”
But the Morningstarrs, as brilliant as they were, couldn’t have known the future, couldn’t have been certain that the clues they had so carefully hidden in the buildings and the streets and artifacts wouldn’t be destroyed by progress or chance. The Tredwell House could have been knocked down for a drugstore, the Waddell painting stolen or spray-painted by deranged men wearing Take-a-Bite-Out-of-Gotham-City shirts. Blackwell’s Island, a dumping ground for criminals and mentally ill people, was now a land of apartment buildings and schools and parks. It was just luck that one of the few original structures left on the island from the time of the Morningstarrs was the Octagon.
It seemed crazy to rely on luck, but one of Grandpa Ben’s favorite questions was this one: Isn’t there a fine line between brilliance and madness?
Maybe if the Morningstarrs could rely on luck, Theo could, too.
If he could persuade himself to believe in luck.
Which he didn’t.
To reach the Octagon, Theo, Tess, and Jaime took a twenty-minute bus ride to the northern tip of the island. They stood in a parking lot in front of a beautiful rotunda made of blue-gray stone, two large boxy wings flanking either side.
“It looks brand-new!” said Tess.
Jaime showed them some old pictures of the Octagon on his phone, so run-down that it was barely recognizable. “How do we know what to look for when so much of the original has been replaced?”
“Remember what Slant’s minions said to us when we caught them prying that tile off the wall?” Tess asked. “They said they would use the artifacts to decorate the lobby of the new building. Maybe they did that here, too.”
“Anything really significant would have been given to a museum,” Theo said.
“Then maybe someone can tell us which museum,” said Tess. “Come on.”
They walked up the steps and into the building. Inside, the design was spare and modern, with a flying staircase spiraling all the way up the walls of the rotunda, culminating in a skylight at the very top. Everything was polished wood and marble. If there were clues or artifacts still in the Octagon, you’d never know it.
A couple that Theo’s mom would have called “posh” sat on a couch looking through some documents with a man in a suit. More posh people stood staring at paintings hung on the walls of the rotunda. A blond woman smiled toothily at them from behind a desk. “Hello! Can I help you? Oh, wow, pretty tiger-lion, but we don’t allow pets in the building.”
“She’s not a pet,” said Tess. “Well, she’s not just a pet. She’s a service animal. And we’re just looking around.”