“Oh, I thought I’d keep on with the smart mouth,” Tess said.
“Ha,” he said. “Go on home to your mother. Maybe she’ll arrest you and let the rest of us find some peace.” The door started to close.
Jaime slapped a palm to the surface and said what they should have said in the first place, the truth: “We need to look at your bedroom wall. Under the window. We need to see if there’s a seal there, and we need to take it with us. It might help to solve the Old York Cipher. Or part of it. Maybe.”
The eye blinked some more. It blinked so long that Jaime thought Mr. Perlmutter had fallen asleep blinking. Then, gnarled fingers fumbled with the chain and the door opened.
“Fair enough. Come in, if you must.”
Mr. Perlmutter was stooped over a walker, three hairs combed over his freckled head. He backed up and did a wide turn into the apartment. Tess followed him inside, Theo and Jaime behind her.
“Oh, look. A crowd of teenagers. It’s my lucky day,” said Mr. Perlmutter.
“Thank you for letting us in, Mr. Perlmutter,” said Jaime.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Do what you have to do. But don’t touch anything! I got everything where I want it! Only took me seven decades.”
Jaime ducked into the back bedroom. Another three seals in the middle of the top of the molding. He pried them off, spackled it smooth.
“Thanks again,” Tess said when he got back to the living room. “We’ll get out of your way.”
Mr. Perlmutter maneuvered himself toward a well-worn armchair the color of yams. He carefully lowered himself into it. “Whatever you’re doing, you might want to do it faster. Some of us aren’t getting any younger.”
“Okay, Mr. Perlmutter.”
As they walked out the door and into the hallway, Jaime thought he heard Mr. Perlmutter say, “And some of us have nowhere else to go.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tess
As quietly as they could, they crept into Jaime’s apartment to find Jaime’s grandmother standing in the kitchen, pointing a knife at the three of them. “Have you brought me my key ring and toolbox, you bad, bad children?”
Jaime stopped short just inside the doorway, and Theo slammed into his back. Tess maneuvered around them both.
“Is that dough for pastelitos, Mrs. Cruz?”
Mima made a sharp cut in a sheet of pastry on the table in front of her. “Yes,” she said, “guava and cream cheese. My mother’s recipe. Not that you will have any, because children who steal people’s keys do not deserve any pastelitos.”
“Mima,” Jaime began.
“James Eduardo,” Jaime’s grandmother said, “did you think I wouldn’t hear you swipe the keys from the counter?”
Jaime frowned. “I was quiet!”
“Yes! Like a polar bear is quiet! Or maybe a dinosaur on a Starrboard is quiet!” Mima made another sharp slice in the pastry and then aimed the knife at the kitchen counter. “Keys. Box.”
Jaime pulled the ring from under his shirt and laid it and the box on the counter.
She jabbed with the knife. “Talk.”
“If we talk, can we have some pastelitos?”
“Bad, bad children are not in a position to make bargains, but I will think about it.”
Jaime pulled out his sketchbook and showed her the grids, explained what they were looking for. “There are seals just around the windows in certain apartments.”
“Yes, yes. I know. You could have asked me. I am not so scary. Well, maybe I am. Anyway, why not check the other apartments on all the floors?”
Jaime looked at Theo and Tess. They’d told Mr. Perlmutter the truth. Why not Mrs. Cruz? Didn’t seem like they had anything to lose, not at this point. They didn’t tell her the whole story though, the entire new line of clues. All they said was that the seals near the windows could mean something.
“Mean what?”
“It’s a cipher,” said Jaime, opening his sketchbook. “One that I’ve seen before.” He handed the book to Tess. “What does this look like to you?” On the page, Jaime had sketched what looked like a tic-tac-toe grid with dots.
“It looks like that cipher they had at the archives!” Tess said. “A Rosicrucian cipher?”
“That’s why I remembered it,” said Jaime.
“Rosi-what?” said Mima.
“A type of secret writing used by some secret guilds or clubs. Freemasons, guilds like that,” said Theo.
“Silly men and their silly secret clubs. Who needs a club to feel important? Ben Franklin needed a club? George Washington needed a club?” She rolled her eyes.
Jaime said, “You belong to a bowling league.”
Mrs. Cruz’s dark eyes narrowed, and she sliced another triangle into the sheet of dough. “Did you check all the other apartments for the seals?”
“Are there more seals?” Theo asked.
“No,” said Mrs. Cruz. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand, leaving a stripe of flour. “I would still check the other apartments.”
“Why?” said Jaime.
"Because I would like you to get caught by one of the tenants and have to explain this kooky stuff to them.”
Jaime said, “It’s not kooky.”
His grandmother put down the knife. “The whole thing is kooky. Who leaves the fate of so many people in a puzzle none of the people can solve?”
“Good question,” said Theo.
“We’re going to do it,” said Tess, lifting her chin. “And the Morningstarrs didn’t make a puzzle no one can solve—they made a puzzle only the right people can solve.”
Jaime’s grandmother’s sharp eyes took Tess in. “You can have some pastelitos, but only if you help to fill them.”
They spooned the guava-and-cream-cheese filling onto the triangles of pastry and then sealed the pastry into little pockets and placed them on cookie sheets. After the sheets went into the oven, they sat in the living room and went over their chart. Jaime paged through his sketchbook and found the key he’d seen at the archives:
“Hmmm,” said Theo. “This isn’t quite the same, though. According to this key, the lines in the grid are important. They help form the cipher text. See?” He pointed to Jaime’s name, which Edgar had enciphered using the key, and which Jaime had scribbled in his book.
“But here in this building,” Theo continued, “the seals—or dots—are all technically inside individual squares. So how would this work? A number of letters would look the same.”
“Maybe they wanted to make the puzzle harder,” Jaime said.
Tess said, “Or the lines aren’t important,”
At the same time, Jaime and Theo said, “They’re important.”
Tess’s eyebrows flew up like window shades.
“But maybe not important in this puzzle,” Jaime said. “What if we only need to read the position of the dots?”
They compared the locations of the seals to the locations of the dots on the key. Jaime said, “That gives us A, D, G, L, M, R, S, and Z. The blank spot in the center could represent a vowel, maybe.”