Mrs. Biedermann gave Tess a flat mom stare. “I thought you were going to the post office.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Tess said. She grabbed Nine’s leash from a hook on the wall, and Nine bounded over like any dog might have. Tess hooked the leash to Nine’s harness. She checked her back pocket for her keys, slung a messenger bag over her shoulder, and then walked to the door. Paused. What she did not do, would not do, was turn and glance around the spacious, sunny apartment as if it were the last time she’d ever see it. She would not make a comment about rent control, or about how they’d never be able to afford another apartment this size or any size in Manhattan or any other borough, or how they’d be banished to the wilds of New Jersey or maybe even Idaho if Slant got his way. She didn’t say a word about her mother being forced to commute two or three or seventeen hours on a train to get to her job as a New York City detective, or complain that they would never see her and therefore forget what she looked like. And Tess did not worry aloud that her dad might be unable to find a new job as a school counselor in the suburbs of Idaho and would likely dissolve into a morass of self-pity during which he wandered around their ugly split-level, wearing the same pair of Cheeto-stained sweatpants for weeks on end, his hair getting larger and larger until they were forced to shear it and knit scarves for cash.
Because if she turned and glanced around the apartment and voiced any of her fears, Theo would roll his eyes again, and call her a girl—as if that were a bad thing to be—and her mother would take her by the shoulders and tell her she had nothing to be anxious about, and her dad, who had gone on a coffee run and was due home any minute, might tell her she was “catastrophizing.”
Well, maybe she was catastrophizing. But catastrophes happened every day, didn’t they? A person ought to be prepared. And to be prepared you had to imagine all the possibilities. Tess was very good at imagining the possibilities.
Nine nudged her hand. Tess stuck her tongue at her brother, and then she and Nine slipped out of the apartment and into the hallway. Mrs. Cruz, the building manager, worked hard at maintenance, but the building was showing its age: the plaster crumbling a bit in the corners; the decorative tiles with their distinctive star patterns chipping; the solar glass in the hall windows wavy enough to shatter the sunlight into rainbows; most of the Morningstarr seals, plaster medallions stamped with a star within a sun, missing from the window moldings.
But even with its flaws, this was not just any building. This was one of the five original buildings built by Theresa and Theodore Morningstarr, and therefore it was like no other building in the world (the Tower of London included). It contained all sorts of memories, all sorts of stories. She pressed her ear against the plaster as if to hear them.
Behind her, a small voice said, “You’re not talking to the walls again, are you?”
Tess turned. A little girl, about six years old, stared at her from her perch on her oversized tricycle. She had bronze skin and black pigtails that stuck out like antennae. Her mouth and chin were smeared with something purplish.
“Hi, Cricket. You’re not pretending your finger paints are lipstick again, are you?”
“Why would I do that?” said the girl.
“Well, why would I be talking to the walls?” Tess said.
“My mom says you act funny because nobody pays attention to you but that I should always be nice.”
“Okay.”
Cricket slid the heart charm on her necklace, zip-zip, zip-zip. “I do not enjoy being nice.” She flipped a switch on the handlebars and beep-beep-beeped the trike in reverse, all the way back down the hall till she disappeared around a corner.
“Who enjoys being nice?” Tess said to the now-empty hallway.
Nine chirped at Tess, then glanced at the elevator.
“Right. Sorry, Nine.” She stabbed the down button. The elevator opened, and Tess and Nine stepped into the car. She pressed the button for the first floor, the marking so worn you couldn’t read the number anymore. The elevator twitched slightly and then began to move. The building itself might be plain, but the elevator was anything but. It was an electromagnetic elevator, which meant it could go horizontally as well as vertically, and did. Every time she got on, the elevator took a different path to its destination, sometimes going straight up and down, sometimes taking a series of lefts and rights, sometimes zigzagging all over the place. Theo said the building was as big as it was simply to accommodate the strange paths of the elevator, a terrible waste of space, even if the elevator itself was cool. But Tess thought it was more than cool—it was magical. What if the doors opened onto a floor she had never seen? A world she had never seen? The elevator could go very, very fast, too, dropping straight down from the top floor to the first so quickly that the passengers experienced a moment of weightlessness, though this happened rarely, as if the elevator somehow understood that this wasn’t going to make everybody happy.
Tess braced herself just in case, but the elevator was in a leisurely mood and took only one left and two rights before dropping straight down and setting itself gently on the first floor. The calm ride settled her nerves, and she was smiling when she walked toward the double doors, happy to see the same inlaid tile floors and cameo walls that her mother had grown up with, and Grandpa Ben had grown up with, and so on.
And she smiled wider still when she stepped out into the summer sunshine. Tess even smiled at the little clots of tourists taking pictures of the cornerstones and the address plaque, checking their guidebooks and maps, trying to figure out the Old York Cipher for themselves. They always came to one of the original buildings first, not that it would help them. No one had ever found a clue in one of the original buildings; that would be way too obvious, and the Morningstarrs were anything but obvious. But Grandpa Ben said that when he was a kid, you could barely get in and out of the building with all the tourists everywhere. Now there were just a few scattered groups, and most of them looked bored.
“It says here that the Old York Cipher was a gift to the city of New York from Theresa and Theodore Morningstarr, and that the first clue is at the Liberty Statue,” said a white woman in white pants and a terrifying Hawaiian-print shirt.
The portly, pasty man with her grunted. “Then why didn’t we go to the statue like I wanted to?”
“Because they already solved that clue. And a bunch after that. And then they got stuck.”
“I just wanted to see the darned statue. And who’s they?” said the man.
“People.”
“What people?”
“People! The Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society.”
“Cyclist Society? I’m not getting on a bicycle. We just had breakfast.”
“Cipherist.”
“What’s a cipherist?”