The Map of Stars, page 20
So he nodded and took photos when Detective Biedermann led them on a tour of the building, said hello when she introduced them to this officer or that detective. And yet the whole morning, his whole body screamed, LET ME OUT OF HERE. Not just because the old, musty building with its creepy crypt vibe gave him the jitters—though it did—but because he wanted to be alone with Tess and Theo. He wanted to get a closer look at the locket around Tess’s neck; he wanted to ask them what they thought of Lora Yoshida, if they thought she had recognized Ava Oneal from Jaime’s drawings. He was almost certain she had. And he was even more certain that she’d given them the locket because she had recognized Ava. But did that mean she knew where Ava was? Were they friends? Could a seemingly immortal superhero woman have friends?
And what about what Lora had said before she left: Who can find justice in the Halls of Justice? Those were the same words that were on the scroll they’d found. Did that mean that Lora Yoshida herself was the next clue in the Cipher? Or that the locket was? And if either of these things were clues, then wasn’t that proof that the Morningstarrs had known what would happen in the future? That they had known that Tess and Theo would be at this place at this time, that they had known Jaime would be at this place at this time, that Jaime would show Lora Yoshida his sketches and she, in turn, would offer up the locket? And if the Morningstarrs knew the future—how? Because they’d built a machine to predict it?
Or—because the Biedermann twins really were the Morningstarrs.
The Tombs, the twins, Lora Yoshida, Ava Oneal, the locket, the feel of Ono in his pocket, Detective Biedermann’s careful explanations of her job, the sheer weight of history made his legs slow, his feet heavy, as if he were wading through a sea of something dense and suffocating. He had once read about a wave of molasses that had swept from a collapsed tank in Boston in the early twentieth century. The wave reached twenty-five feet high, moved at thirty-five miles an hour, and killed twenty-one people. Jaime imagined drowning in molasses, the thick sugary scent of it, the sticky fluid sucking at your limbs and filling your nose and mouth and swallowing you down down down down . . .
“Look down and you’ll get a nice view of the city,” Detective Biedermann was saying.
They were standing on the Bridge of Sighs. Jaime looked out the window, looked down. The street cut a wide path below them; the blue sky above wore a silvery lace of clouds. How many people had stood right where he was standing and sighed, wanting more than anything to go home?
“What do you three want for lunch?” Detective Biedermann asked them.
“I don’t care,” said Tess. Her hand was at her throat, and Jaime knew she was thinking about the locket, maybe even feeling its shape under her fingers.
“Theo? Jaime? Opinions?”
Jaime spoke for them both: “Whatever you’d like, Mrs. Biedermann.”
“Since when do you guys not have an opinion about lunch?”
“Since today, I guess,” said Theo.
“Today has been a lot,” said Detective Biedermann. “The whole summer has been a lot, I know. For all of you. And maybe I shouldn’t have let you sit in on that interview.”
“Oh no,” said Tess. “We’re glad you did. It was really interesting.”
It was Detective Biedermann’s turn to sigh. She tugged thoughtfully on her lower lip; Jaime now understood where Theo might have picked up that gesture. She let go of her lip and said, “I don’t always like everything I have to do.”
“Nobody does,” said Detective Clarkson. “Right?”
They all stood there, thinking about not liking what you have to do, and doing it anyway.
Detective Clarkson said, “I vote for falafel. Who’s with me?”
They didn’t get back to the twins’ house until dinnertime, and didn’t get a chance to talk about Lora Yoshida, the locket, or anything else until after they’d eaten Aunt Esther’s homemade corn chowder, salad, and crab cakes, plus Fig Newtons for dessert. They helped clean up the dishes and then ran to the twins’ room with Nine on their heels. Once the door was closed, they all fell on the nearest surface: the beds, the floor.
“I feel like I’ve been hit with a wave of molasses,” Jaime said, spread-eagled on the rug.
“Me too,” said Theo.
“Oh no,” said Ono. Nine sniffed at Jaime’s pocket. Jaime set Ono in front of the cat. The cat mrrowed and Ono burbled back. Ono waddled away and Nine bounded after it, both of them making happy buzzing noises.
Tess, however, had already sat up and taken off the necklace given to her by Lora Yoshida. Even though it was still light outside, she turned on a lamp and held the locket under it.
“Anything on it?” said Jaime. He was going to get up and look for himself, but he was too comfortable on the floor. Or too flattened to move.
“No,” said Tess. “It’s plain on both sides.”
“Open it,” Theo said. “Maybe there are pictures inside it.”
“Pictures of a baby Darnell Slant, all pink and jolly?” said Jaime.
“Ugh,” said Tess. “Darnell was never a baby.”
“Everyone was a baby once,” Jaime said. “Even Darnell.”
“You’re feeling sorry for him?” said Theo.
“No,” Jaime said. “I’m feeling sorry for myself. I’m tired and I think my brain is broken.”
“Yeah?” Tess said, trying to pry open the locket. “Who broke it? Lora? My mom?”
“You. You two broke it.”
Tess stopped struggling with the locket. “What do you mean?”
Jaime, still too comfortable to get off the floor, rolled over to look at her. “I mean that I think there are two possibilities here. One, the Morningstarrs could tell the future. They knew exactly when our old apartment building would be destroyed, knew precisely when and where we would have to be in order to follow the clues. Some of the objects involved in steps of the Cipher didn’t even exist until after they were dead. Maybe they built a machine that could let them see the future. Maybe a supercomputer or something, something that could predict things.”
“What’s the other possibility?” Theo said.
“You know what the other possibility is,” Jaime said. “You’re them. Or they’re you. Both.” He struggled to sit up. “Which means—”
Theo clapped his hands to his face. “Don’t say it.”
“Which means they—you—had some way to travel through time.”
“Or maybe this is all a dream,” said Theo.
“We’re not going to know until we know,” Tess said.
Theo said, “My sister, the human fortune cookie.”
“But you have to admit it’s true,” said Tess. “Ugh, I can’t get this open.” She put the locket on the side table and flung herself back on her bed.
Jaime lay down, too, looking at the ceiling. The twins had pasted fluorescent stars up there, and in the lamplight, they looked slightly greenish. Tiny alien stars. Next to him, Nine and Ono chased one another around the room. When Nine cornered Ono, a tiny propeller erupted from the robot’s head, and it hovered in the air like a helicopter.
“Did you know Ono could do that?” said Theo.
“Ono can do a lot of things,” Jaime said. Then he sat straight up. “I forgot to tell you! What I was going to tell you when you called earlier!”
“What?” said the twins.
“You have to promise to keep it a secret, though. Because I promised Cricket.”
“Who are we going to tell?” Theo said. “We only talk to you.”
“Y’all need more friends,” said Jaime as lightly as he could, though secretly he was pleased. “It’s about Karl.”
“Karl? Is he okay?” Tess said.
“Uh, I think so,” said Jaime. “He’s little different now, though.”
Theo asked the same question Jaime had asked when Cricket came to see him: “Different how?”
“Well, he learned how to write, for one thing.”
Now Tess and Theo both sat up. “Write? What do you mean, write?”
“I mean he knows how to write. With a pen and paper. English. Words and sentences and paragraphs.”
Theo said, “That’s not—”
“Possible?” said Jaime.
But Tess would not hold on. “Well, what did he say—I mean, write?”
“He said he was kidnapped by a man of ill intent. Those were his words.”
“‘A man of ill intent’?”
“Some kind of scientist who was experimenting on animals. Mixing and matching characteristics, it seems. Blending them. Making hybrids.”
“Hybrids?” Tess said. They all looked at Nine, who was leaping to catch Ono, her open mouth a smile.
“Yeah,” Jaime said. “And not like the friendly pet ones everyone has. Spider-wolves and other kinds of things.”
“Spider-wolves?” said Theo. “Who would want to make a spider-wolf?”
“Why would you want to make a spider-wolf?” Tess said.
Jaime said, “Remember that hand monster thing those creeps Stoop and Pinscher had at 354 West 73rd? What if that hand thing came from the same place? And what if it’s the same person who had that lab at North Brother Island?”
“With the giraffe-owary,” Theo said.
“Was Karl kept on the island?” Tess asked.
“No, he said it was somewhere in Manhattan, I think. He couldn’t say where, exactly. Except that it was very far, and that he walked day and night, even traveled on a boat, to get back to Hoboken and his family.”
“Poor Karl,” said Tess.
“He said his only friend at the lab was a ‘dear fellow’ named Octavius. An octopus with fourteen legs.”
“Stop it,” said Theo.
“That’s what he said. He said that this scientist did experiments on all of the animals, maybe animals that were already hybrids. He’s not sure what the scientist did to him, or he didn’t want to say. He wrote that whatever it was, it was ‘deeply unpleasant.’”
Theo made a gargling sort of noise.
“You broke his brain,” Tess said. “Do you think that they had a chance to experiment on Karl? Is that why he could write in complete sentences?”
“I think the doctor might be making weapons,” said Jaime. “Living weapons.”
“What for?” said Tess.
That was what Jaime kept asking himself: Why would you need an octopus with fourteen legs, or a raccoon who wrote like a nineteenth-century novelist?
“I don’t know,” Jaime said. “Here. Cricket let me take a picture of one of the pages.”
In the photo, a sheet of paper was covered with tidy, tiny script:
I know not what motivates this villainous man, only that he is relentless in his efforts, and quite connected. Numerous people visited the lab, people the doctor referred to as “investors” in their presence, and “necessary evils” after they departed. It seems that these visitors were funding the doctor’s experiments, so he was obliged to tolerate their visits and even demonstrate some of his accomplishments. One man in particular seemed to be fascinated by all the poor creatures trapped in this gulag of nightmares and suffering. He visited again and again, asking all manner of questions, offering more and more funding. The doctor gifted him with two rats, Lev and Igor, that he had taught to drive tiny, rat-sized cars. (Do not feel too sorry for Lev and Igor, however. They bite.)
“An investor. Do you think Karl is talking about Slant?” Tess asked.
“Could be,” Jaime said. “Karl didn’t know his name.”
“Maybe they’re building some kind of animal army?” Theo said.
Jaime said, “Maybe they’re expecting some kind of . . . war.”
He hadn’t known what he was going to say before he said it, and his own words hung in the air like a fog, obscuring everything.
War.
War.
War.
WAR.
“Oh no,” said Ono, touching down on the night table where Tess had tossed the locket. It snatched up the necklace.
“Hey!” said Tess, then jumped.
“What?” said Jaime.
“Ono got it open! How did you do that?” Tess said.
“Land of Kings,” said Ono, offering her the locket.
“Well, what’s inside it?” Theo said.
Tess looked down at the locket, up at Jaime, down at the locket again. Then she held it up, the platinum face of the locket winking. “There’s a picture in here.”
“What kind of picture?”
“Maybe it was torn from a newspaper? It sort of looks like Ava,” Tess said.
“Let me see,” Jaime said. He got up and took the necklace from her. Inside the locket was a fuzzy black-and-white picture of an elegant black woman, hair pulled back tight, a proud tilt to her head. At first glance, he thought he was seeing a picture of Ava Oneal, too, but no, the brows had a slightly different shape, and so did the angle of the nose and the jaw.
It could have been Ava’s sister, but it wasn’t.
He knew who it was.
He knew.
When Jaime exhaled, it sounded like the sighs of every man and woman who had ever crossed a bridge from before to after, every person who had wondered if what they had lost would ever be found again.
“It’s my mother,” Jaime said. “This is a picture of my mother.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Ava
Ava Oneal sat on the roof of the Old York Puzzler and Cipherist Society building, legs dangling over the side. She knew that they were looking for her—the police, Slant’s people, their minions, the minions of those minions—but she didn’t care. Let them look. Let them catch a glimpse of her booted feet as they turned their heads to the sky above. People like that had been looking for her for more than a hundred fifty years, and would look for a hundred fifty more. If she didn’t want to be caught, they would never catch her.
Never again, that is.
She lifted her legs and pulled her knees in tight, enjoying the chill of the night air on her skin. This was the only time she dared go outside without her gray coat, and she reveled in the darkness, inhaling the barely perceptible touch of dew that would jewel the grasses of the parks in the morning. Here in the heart of the city, the stars were barely visible, but the bright face of the moon smiled down at her. As much as she loved the sun, she loved the moon more. Its energy was serene, calming, like a doting mother’s. Not that she remembered her mother. Not that she remembered herself, her own name, her true one. As with so many others before her, her past had burned away till there was nothing but ashes in the wind.
“Ashes in the wind,” she muttered out loud. “That’s a good name for a book.” And then she said, “My dear, you’re becoming quite melodramatic in your dotage.”
Melodramatic or not, it was true, however, that her past had burned away. But it had drowned first. At least, that was the story she’d been told when she was just a small child in Baltimore, when she had screwed up the courage to ask the cook where her mother was.
“Fell into the river and didn’t come back up,” the cook had said. “A long time ago.”
“Where’s my daddy?”
“What do I look like, your family Bible? Now hurry up and fetch that pail of water I asked you for.”
Ava could still feel the weight of that pail of water, the dampness seeping into her clothes and her shoes because she couldn’t keep the liquid from sloshing no matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard the cook would slap her for bringing a half-empty pail. She didn’t ask about her parents again for years, until the lady of the house took a liking to her, pulled her out of the kitchen, and had her educated alongside her own daughters, little white girls with butter-blond hair and blue eyes. The lady liked to tell her guests that she didn’t have slaves or servants, she had family. And then she would ask Ava to read a Bible verse or recite her letters for the entertainment of the lady’s company. When Ava began to compose poetry, the lady sent it to the local paper, where it was published. The lady held salons for other ladies, who would sip tea and nibble sweets while Ava performed her poems and recited psalms: “The Lord is my shepherd,” and “I know all the birds of the mountains and Zīz is mine.” These same ladies would compliment her speech and her manners, her poetic talent and her pretty brown face. They complimented one another on their open minds and open hearts.
Until she turned fifteen, and the lady who didn’t have slaves or servants declared that she had made a match for Ava, a perfect match.
Ava was confused. “A match?”
The butter-haired girls clucked like a brood of chickens. “You’re getting engaged, silly!”
The lady of the house explained that the match in question was a coachman at a nearby estate, and that they had made arrangements to buy him.
“Buy?” said Ava. “But . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. Her match was enslaved just as she was, and they would be expected to marry and have babies, who would also be enslaved, who would grow up and learn their letters, perform for guests, and never be allowed to leave—unless the lady wanted them to, unless the lady made other “arrangements.”
“But, madam, I’m too young to get engaged,” she said.
“Nonsense! We’ll wait a respectable amount of time for the wedding, to be sure, but you are quite old enough.”
“Your daughters aren’t yet engaged,” Ava said. “And they are two and three years older than I am.”
“Yes, but my daughters are a different matter entirely. They are far more delicate than you are. They are ladies. Their father will not allow them to get engaged before they are twenty.”
Delicate. The word tripped off the lady’s tongue, tap, tap, tap. Ava had never wanted to be delicate before. That was when she had asked, “What if my father returns, and doesn’t want me to get married? What if he thinks I’m too delicate?”
The delicate girls clucked again. The lady simply looked confused. “Stop talking such nonsense. And you’re strong as an ox.”
An ox.
Ava didn’t take much with her when she ran away. Just two spare gowns and some underclothes, a sheaf of poems she couldn’t bear to part with. She lost the poems almost immediately, when she had to splash through a swamp to avoid some blackbirders hired to find her. And she tossed the dresses soon after. She stole some shirts and pants from a clothesline, hacked off her hair, and rubbed dirt on her face, then made her way into the seething stew of New York City. People hiring at the pubs and docks couldn’t tell if she was black or white, boy or girl, and maybe they didn’t care as long as she was strong enough to do the work she was hired to do—rough work like shoveling out stables or unloading fish when the boats came in. But she didn’t mind the work, not the sore muscles or the blisters or the smell of horse and dirt and fish on her skin. The city was a place a person could disappear, even a small and wiry black girl with curiously formal speech. And when a ship heading out to sea needed a new swabbie, she took the job and left her old life on the shore.
