“But I don’t have anything,” Tess said.
“You have everything you need,” Grandpa said, nodding wisely. “You just don’t know it yet.”
But they didn’t have everything they needed, not according to Edgar Wellington. Theo wished he could ask Grandpa about all the other companies competing with the Morningstarrs to modernize and expand New York City, about the trains that caused so many accidents that the people of Brooklyn demanded a tunnel be built. And he wished he could talk about all the rumors about the tunnel after it was sealed: that pages from John Wilkes Booth’s lost diary were buried there. That German terrorists were making bombs down in the tunnels during the First World War. That bootleggers had taken over the tunnel and made gin in the 1920s. That spies hid in the tunnel in the 1950s. That a whole locomotive might be buried in the rubble. He wished he could ask: What do you think we’re looking for, Grandpa? Is this the end of the line? Is the real treasure of the Morningstarrs buried in this tunnel? Is Tess right, and the treasure has been waiting there for us to discover? Or are we somehow creating the puzzle ourselves, building it out of the choices we make?
But Theo didn’t ask any of this. He played checkers with Grandpa while Tess took Nine around to the other patients in the sitting room, letting them pet the cat. One very old man held on to Nine and cried into her fur. He missed his dog so much, he said. The younger woman sitting next to him said that he’d never had a dog.
The man kept crying. “I miss the dog I never had.”
“You can’t miss what you never had,” said the woman, irritated.
“Yes, you can.”
Could you miss what you never had? Theo wasn’t so sure. One of his earliest memories was unwrapping a Hanukkah present from his grandfather and finding a paper dictionary so heavy that he could barely lift it. His mom asked his grandfather why Theo couldn’t just use the internet, but Grandpa said the paper version was better because you could write in it. You could interact with the words, make them your own. Every time he came upon a word he didn’t know, he and Grandpa Ben would look it up. When he got older, they would write sentences using that word in the margins. “The boy’s bathroom was as fetid as a swamp.” “I am all agog to hear your latest story.” “He used several malapropisms when he said that Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel.” Grandpa Ben showed him three-letter words useful for crossword puzzles: ore, era, zuz.
But one day, he lost the book. Or rather, the book was taken. He and Tess were playing with the dumbwaiter, putting things inside it and sending them for a ride through the building—one of their mom’s frying pans, a cactus, even Nine (who liked it so much she rode it ten times in a row). They put Theo’s dictionary in the dumbwaiter, but when the dumbwaiter returned, the book was gone. They put Nine in the dumbwaiter to find the book, but then Nine was gone. They ran and told their mother, who called Mrs. Cruz, but Mrs. Cruz had no idea where the items disappeared to. Tess was in tears over Nine, until Nine showed up on the roof, basking in the sun. They never did find that book.
Grandpa Ben said that the building sometimes did that—“borrowed” things it liked and offered other things as gifts. Grandpa said he’d buy Theo another dictionary, but Theo knew it wouldn’t be the same. Mrs. Cruz locked up the dumbwaiter and disabled the power. No one had used it since.
Theo missed his dictionary still. And he didn’t see how you could miss something as ordinary as a dictionary in the same way, if you’d never spent hours sitting with Grandpa Ben, poring over the new words, tasting them on your tongue, then pressing those words into the paper, shaping them into sentences that you made up yourself, with your grandpa laughing at your malapropisms.
“Young man!” said Grandpa.
“What?”
“Isn’t it your turn?” He tapped the edge of the checkerboard.
“Yes. Right.” Theo made a move. Grandpa grinned and jumped a black checker over three red ones, though Grandpa was supposed to be playing red.
After a couple of hours, Grandpa Ben, tired from all the checkers and the chatting, yawned, his white head drooping.
Theo’s mom stood, kissed Grandpa on the cheek. “Okay, Dad, I think you need to go back to your room and get some rest. We’ll be back soon.” She motioned for an aide. A round woman with milky skin and a pouf of blond hair came over and took the handles of Grandpa’s wheelchair.
“I’ll take it from here,” the aide said.
“Thanks so much, Gladys,” said Mrs. Biedermann.
Gladys began to push the chair, then stopped. “Oh! I meant to ask you if you got the letter.”
“What letter?” Mrs. Biedermann asked.
“There was a letter that your father needed help mailing a few weeks ago, but he wanted to mail it to himself. Or at least, to his post office box. I figured that since you were the one picking up his mail, he meant to send it to you. I hope you got it. He was very agitated about it. Made me cross out the address and rewrite it more clearly so that it didn’t go to the wrong place. Said it was top secret. For his eyes only. Or yours.”
“Trust no one,” Grandpa whispered as he fell asleep.
All the way home, Tess gripped Theo’s wrist tight enough to crush the bones. Grandpa Ben had sent the original Morningstarr letter to himself. But where did he get it? Who sent it to him? When he told Tess she had everything she needed, was he talking about the letter?
Theo’s mind was spinning by the time they got home to find Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher in the lobby. The two men had some sort of metal detector that they were sweeping across the tiles.
“You’re not going to find anything,” said Theo. “People have been scanning and x-raying and examining this building for decades.”
“Not with this device, they haven’t,” said Mr. Stoop. “This is a new invention. A modern invention. Notice the elegant design?”
“Elegant?” said Tess. “It looks like a plate attached to a stick.”
“Right. It looks exactly like what it’s supposed to be and not a . . .” He twirled his hand in the air.
“A grasshopper?” offered Mr. Pinscher.
“Or a cockroach,” said Mr. Stoop.
“Who would design a scanner to look like a cockroach?” Tess said.
“Who indeed?” said Mr. Stoop. When Tess stared up at the man, frowning hard, and Nine growled, Mr. Stoop’s smile only got wider. Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann glared and steered Tess and Theo toward the elevator.
Theo sifted through his conversations with Grandpa Ben. Did a man come to see him to ask about 354 W. 73rd Street? It was possible. Grandpa Ben had lived in this building longer than anyone else they knew, and had had family that had lived there long before him. Grandpa Ben would be the person to ask, if a man had questions.
A man so tall Grandpa’s neck hurt looking up at him.
Mr. Stoop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE