“Nothing, Mrs. Cruz.”
“Good! Jaime is in his room drawing his pictures.” She saw Nine and immediately her voice got an octave higher: “Hello! Are you a kitty?” In response, Nine pranced around her ankles.
Tess went to Jaime’s room, which was a shrine to every superhero of every type of comic book ever written. Enormous floor-to-ceiling bookcases were packed with figurines: Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Wonder Woman, Wasp, Captain America, Hulk, Supergirl, Super Indian. And those were only the ones that Tess remembered. There were hundreds of others, probably packed in some of the boxes that littered the bedroom floor.
Jaime looked up from his drawing—the Octagon as it would be viewed from the top of the stairs. Jaime had captured the place perfectly. There was a figure at the bottom of the stairs, barely sketched in.
Tess said, “Who’s that?”
“Nobody yet,” said Jaime. “Are you okay?”
“Theo says I have that zombie look.”
“Now that you mention it . . . ,” Jaime said.
Tess bent to see Napolean and Tyrone in their cage. Napolean was curled up in a tight ball, napping, while Tyrone was a blur of fury on her wheel. Nine was mesmerized.
“She’s not going to try and eat my hamster-hogs, is she?”
“No. She just likes to be intimidating.”
“So does Tyrone.”
“Who’s Tyrone?”
“The hamster-hog. When she’s mad, she poops green.”
Tess slumped in the chair by the window. There was a Morningstarr seal on the molding, but this one was on the upper right side, freshly painted white as the rest of the trim. “Theo has one of these seals by his window, too. But his is on the bottom of the sill.”
“Yeah,” said Jaime. “Mima says that certain apartments have the seals on the window moldings, sometimes two or three seals, and certain apartments don’t. And some of the seals are on the left or right, some in the middle. She thinks that all the windows had them at one time, and probably a lot more of them, but people pulled them off or painted over them or whatever.”
“Huh,” Tess said. She stood to touch the seal, the raised star encircled by a sun. She’d been seeing this seal her whole life, but suddenly it seemed weird that some of the windows had the seals, and some of them didn’t.
“Toss me your pencil,” Tess said.
He did. She jammed it into the wood.
“Hey! What are you doing?” said Jaime. “Mima is going to kill me!”
The seal that had looked like nothing so much as a stamp in the molding, popped out of the frame. Tess hefted the piece in her hand, scraped some white paint off with a fingernail, revealing a flash of silver.
It had the look and the weight of a coin.
“How many of these are left in the building?”
Jaime stared at the coin in her hand. “I don’t know.”
“We need to find out. And we’re going to need something else, too. It’s not going to be easy to get.”
Jaime said, “What’s not?”
“Your grandmother’s key ring.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jaime
Jaime said, “Oh, sure. And while we’re at it, let’s steal Thor’s hammer.”
But he was only half listening. This morning, his dad had called to talk, the first time Jaime had had a real conversation with him in weeks. If you could call it a conversation. Jaime’s dad was there, smiling, tanned dark from all his work in the Sudanese sun, but what he was saying was terrible. “You’ll love Hoboken! My friend Jorge said the apartment is even bigger than it looks in the pictures I sent you. Did you see? Three bedrooms! The building is new, so that’s less work for Mima. Fewer repairs.”
“Mima doesn’t want less work,” said Jaime.
“Sure she does,” said his dad. “She’s getting older.”
“So now she’s some frail old lady?”
“What? When did I say that? I just said she’s getting older.”
“And that means we should just let Slant take the building that Mima has lived in for most of her life? Let him push us right out of the city?”
“Stop whining. If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for the people who don’t have beautiful new apartments,” his father said. “Did I tell you the math and science academy is right at the edge of town?”
“Math and science academy?”
“It’s so close you won’t even have to take a bus.”
“I like the bus!” Jaime had roared, which was dumb, because he didn’t really care about taking the bus. But his dad was talking about this move like it was nothing because, for his dad, it was nothing. His work assignments took him all around the world and he loved every minute of them, was always trying to get Jaime to come to Egypt or Brazil or Russia or wherever, like Jaime could jump into a whole different world, just like that. His dad could never understand wanting to stay put. Every move was an adventure.
But Jaime wanted to have his adventures here, right here, on this skinny island, in this ramshackle building. What’s a superhero without his city? What is he supposed to protect, if not his home? It didn’t make any sense to Jaime. Which is why he said the thing he couldn’t have known, shouldn’t have said:
“Mom would have understood.”
The video quality was good enough to show the slight twitch at the corner of his dad’s eye, the only indication of pain he ever showed. “Yes,” he said. “Your mom understood a lot of things.”
“Papi,” Jaime began.
“It’s late. I need to eat my dinner. Look at the pictures of the apartment. Maybe it won’t be such torture, eh?”
And the video cut out.
Jaime dragged his attention back to Tess. Her knee was bouncing and her cat was frantically rubbing against it, trying to make her stop. “There are a bunch of these around building, I know it,” she was saying. “And I bet they’re not in random places. They’re in some sort of pattern. The clue in Penelope isn’t the inscription, it’s those seals drawn around the inscription.”
Jaime tried to remember what Mima had said about the seals. “All of them are located on the windows in the front of the building. And they’re only on the middle floors.” He closed his eyes and pictured the entire front wall of 354 W. 73rd, as if it had been torn free from the rest of the building—seven rows of windows, five windows across. There were seals in Tess’s apartment, Jaime’s apartment, and the hallway on the fifth floor, but Mima had also found seals on the third and fourth floors. He turned to a fresh page in his sketchbook and drew the rows of windows to show Tess where the seals had been found.
“We could ask your grandmother to let us into the apartments facing the street to check it out,” said Tess.
Jaime groaned. “Even if she agreed, which she wouldn’t, there’s no way she’s going to let us gouge things out of the window frames. But we can go knock on doors. Ask if anyone needs a patch or something.”
“I don’t think we want to tell anyone what we’re up to. Even if they could be trusted, we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”