Walls within Walls (18 page)

“Kissing Post! What?” Patrick said loudly. The Irish couple chuckled.

“Kissing Post? Interesting,” said CJ as he looked again at their copy of the map.

“Do you think that's the answer?” Brid asked Eloise.

“Of course,” said Eloise. “It just has to be those lips! I remember my father telling me the whole story. That was the reunion area for families. There were tearful, kissing reunions, and people in that day called it the Kissing Post. How did I ever forget that?”

“Well, it has been seventy years,” said CJ.

“So, it's the lips?” Brid asked again.

“Hey, mister,” Patrick interrupted the tour guide. “Can we get right to the Kissing Post?”

“Uh, no,” said the perplexed guide.

With that, the Smithforks and Eloise simply walked away from the group, leaving the guide looking confused. They followed Brid's map up an enormous set of steps, down a long hall, and out a back door that led to a wide patio structure.

“Oh, my goodness,” Eloise said as she rubbed her fingers against the regal columns. She grabbed Patrick by
the lapel of his Saint James's blazer and planted a mushy kiss on his cheek.

“So, I guess you're saying it's the lips,” he said, wiping his cheek. “That has to be the next symbol on the map.”

Eloise smiled and kissed him again, this time on the other cheek.

CJ held his breath every time the phone rang that night. He was nervously anticipating the head of his school trying to get in touch with his mother and her absent children; but the phone remained silent. By nine
PM
he started to think they had actually gotten away with skipping school. That feeling lasted until he went to delete the emails from his father's computer.

Immediately he saw the email Patrick had sent the school. It read:

CJ's heart fell. This wasn't even close to something that the head of the school would fall for. Worse, there was a reply, not from the headmaster, but from someone called Bruce Smithfork's Mobile.

Of course, CJ thought. His father had taken a PDA with him. Of course he was able to see exactly every email coming or going from his computer, even though he was 7,500 miles away. Not only was Patrick busted, but so were Brid and CJ. CJ opened the reply email:

Now what? CJ admitted to himself that it wasn't even Pat's fault. He blamed himself for trying this stupid trick. He should have known Patrick would have felt left out.

They were just so close, so incredibly close to the treasure, with five of the seven answers under their belts. They had a musical note, the general's star, the Mercury caduceus, the joyful girl, and the kissing lips. The sixth poem was about a trolley car. How hard could it be to determine where trolley lines had once run? CJ read the poem again:

This clue had to be the easiest one yet. The map contained four different locations for trolley cars, and most of them were along Third Avenue. With the help of Eloise, CJ felt certain they could solve this in one day. Then, they would only have to solve clue number seven before sending Pat back into the wall to push the correct symbols.

At that moment Brid walked into the room wearing her silky Peace and Love pajamas, and holding a fuzzy stuffed elephant.

“I've been reading that trolley car poem again,” she said. “I like the part about people being brothers, but
not looking into each other's eyes. I mean, on the bus or subway we are all smooshed together, but no one looks at anyone else. We all pretend the other people aren't there.”

“Yeah, well, get this, too: we are about to be grounded when Dad comes home,” CJ said.

“What? Right when we're making so much progress? There's no way we can stop.”

“Well, it looks like we don't have to stop, at least not until Friday night. Read this.” CJ pointed to the screen in front of him.

Brid studied her father's email. “Maybe we should just take the rest of the week off,” she said.

“Week off from treasure hunting?” asked CJ.

“No, week off from school.”

“You are crazy.”

“Think about it. Once Dad comes home, and we're grounded, he'll make us tell him everything. Once we do that, it's all over.”

“Not necessarily. Dad might find it really interesting,” CJ said.

“Oh, really? Is that what you want, a bunch of grown-ups telling us that all the things we've been doing are too dangerous, and we need to let professionals handle it?”

“Professionals?”

“Yeah, like the police. Once Dad hears that Mr. Torrio came into our apartment, he and Mom will act like we're
in danger. They'll call the police.”

“You have a point,” CJ said, rumpling his hair. He wished he knew what to do.

“Please, CJ, please let's just miss school for the rest of this week, get this mystery solved, and get in trouble with Dad on Saturday. We can be grounded on Sunday and back to school on Monday. By then, we won't care, because we will have done something that people haven't been able to do for seventy years.”

“Scratch that—something that
grown-ups
couldn't do for seventy years.”

“You see my point,” said Brid.

“I don't know—we're already in trouble. I'll sleep on it. When we wake up in the morning, I'll give you my answer.”

But by the next morning, the unbelievable had happened. Brid woke first, as always. Her room was so bright and cold she thought she had left her windows open. Actually, it was just bright because the morning sun reflected off the November snow. Not just any snow, but enormous, light, slippery snow, the sort that got school canceled. Could it be?

She ran to her dad's office and checked her school website. Nothing. She turned on the radio, which had started to announce school closings, but not for the Mockingbird School for Girls. Brid remembered another girl saying they rarely had snow days since most girls walked to
school. She hit the refresh button on the school website. There was a new message: Mockingbird School would open three hours late. But then she heard a beautiful thing on the radio: “Sun shall give way to more clouds, and an even thicker blanket of snow will fall by afternoon. Prediction of eight to twelve inches.”

There was no way the schools would open. She hit the refresh button again.
Bingo!

“Mockingbird School for Girls shall be closed today and possibly tomorrow. Please check the website for updates.” She went to the Saint James's website. “School closed today,” it read.

She ran into CJ's room. “No school today!” she sang. “Blizzard today,
no school
! It's a sign from Mr. Post that we were meant to solve the mystery.”

Just then Patrick walked in.

“No school today, Patrick. Yippeeeee!”

Pat's eyes grew wide. He stuck both index fingers in the air maniacally and swiveled his hips. “Oh yeah! Oh yeah! Let's go sledding in the park!”

“Are you crazy? Let's go find Marie Antoinette's necklace, or maybe a Fabergé egg, or Louis the Fifteenth's medallions!” said Brid.

“And bricks of gold!” shouted CJ.

Suddenly, Anne Smithfork stuck her head into the room. “Kids, you have a day off today, and I feel much better. Let's all go sledding in Central Park!”

The room turned uncomfortably silent.

“All this time in bed has given me a chance to think,” she continued. “I miss the way we used to be—together all the time. When Daddy comes home, I'm telling him I want things to be like our old life. We don't need fancy furnishings. All that shopping and decorating takes up too much time and money. Maricel just called in sick, and we don't even really need Charlize the homework helper. I want to be the one to help with homework!”

CJ broke the silence. “No, Mom, you've been great. It just takes a while to settle into a new place. Right, guys?”

Brid and CJ looked nervously at each other, while Patrick hugged his mother. “Sure, Mom,” Pat said. “We'd love to go sledding with you, but you were really sick. Today is your first day out of bed, and we like that lady from downstairs a lot. She can take us sledding.”

CJ couldn't believe how smart Patrick was. It was the perfect response.

“No really, kids, I feel much better. Maybe we can just build a fire in the fireplace and read books, stay in our pajamas all day.”

“Um, maybe for a little while,” Brid said, not wanting to make their mom suspicious. Besides, she still looked so pale that Brid felt certain she would get tired soon, and she was right.

A few hours later, Anne was back in bed; Eloise had
come to relieve her. They all sat in Bruce Smithfork's office passing around a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels and looking at internet photos of old New York City trolleys and elevated trains. Outside, the snow had finally stopped falling, but the sky was still gray and ominous.

“Did you take the el a lot?” Brid asked Eloise, referring to the defunct elevated train lines.

“You know, children, I remember being on a trolley with my father, but it didn't look like this. I'm even starting to wonder if I have the right city in mind. When I think of a trolley, I think of San Francisco, not New York. And Guastavino never worked on any trolley system, right, CJ?”

“That's right. This clue may be harder than it looks,” said CJ, as they pored over the enormous list of Guastavino buildings on the floor.

“Wait,” Eloise said. “We used to take a trolley car to Queens. We usually would drive our motorcar around town, but my father would sometimes take the trolley to get to his food plant in Queens, and I would often go with him. I remember the feeling of being high up, looking over Manhattan and Queens. Oh dear, where were we?”

CJ was typing furiously, searching for clues on the internet about a trolley to Queens. “Listen to this!” he shouted. “In 1909 the Queensboro Bridge opened and transformed Queens. It once had been a rural area,
and because transportation to Manhattan was difficult, Queens was mostly farmland until then.”

“I've been on that bridge,” said Eloise, “but there are no trolleys in this town anymore.”

CJ continued. “Originally the bridge had two trolley lines to go back and forth from Manhattan to Queens, with stops in Roosevelt Island and Long Island City. Trolley service ended in 1955.”

Brid was already looking at the map. “Where is the Queensboro Bridge?”

“Down at Fifty-ninth Street,” Eloise replied. “We—”

CJ kept reading out loud. “And on the Manhattan side was a marketplace under the bridge, lined with Guastavino tile.”

“Got it,” Brid said, pointing to a trolley on the map. “Symbol number six is officially the trolley car on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Can we go visit?” she asked Eloise.

Eloise looked out the window at the mounds of snow. “Of course, dears. We'll be just fine on that bus!”

The Smithfork children and Eloise were in a café, sipping hot cocoa with big plops of whipped cream. Above them soared an expansive ceiling, a Guastavino ceiling, that looked golden in the late afternoon sunlight that poured in through the enormous glass windows. Minutes before, they had found the exact trolley spot—with the tracks still in place—on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. They could have walked across the bridge if it hadn't been for Carron's stroller. Eloise thought it was too far for both her and the toddler while snow was on the ground. When they spotted the Guastavino tiling under the bridge, they followed it until it led them to the side of a giant grocery store. They agreed that the trolley symbol located at Fifty-ninth Street on the map corresponded to clue
number six, and they all felt smug with satisfaction and sugar.

Sitting back on their chairs, the young detectives spread the next poem and the map before them. It was time to solve the final, seventh clue. Jumpy with anticipation, Brid focused on the poem. “So what exactly does this mean?” she asked as she read the poem aloud.

They couldn't agree about what that poem meant. Eloise kept thinking it sounded familiar.

“The big question,” Eloise said, “is who was placed in a monkey's cage?”

“And the other question is, where do we find a monkey's cage?” Brid added.

“Duh,” said Patrick, “the zoo.”

“Yes, except there are two zoos: one in the Bronx and one in Central Park,” Brid replied.

“But the map behind the wall is of Manhattan, not the Bronx,” CJ said.

“I remember this!” Eloise said suddenly as she wiped
whipped cream off Carron's mouth. “This is the poem of outrage, the poem about Ota Benga.”

 

 

“Otta whatta?” said Patrick, who was trying to eat the frosting off a cupcake with a knife and fork. Eloise had introduced the kids to a whole new way of eating, one involving lots of sugar. As long as they used proper etiquette, it didn't seem to matter to her what they were eating.

“Ota Benga. He died before I was born, but my father was greatly moved by his terrible treatment and often told me his story.”

“What story?” Pat asked.

“Ota was a Pygmy, from a tribe of very short people who lived in the Congo, in Africa, where there was terrible violence and a lot of tribal warfare.”

“Sort of like now?” asked CJ.

“Yes, but this story is most upsetting. I may not be getting my facts straight, but it went something like this: there was a man who was hired to go and buy Pygmies in the Congo, to bring them to some fair in the United States.”

“You can't buy people!” Brid said indignantly.

“One would think,” Eloise said. “Anyway, this man returned with a Pygmy he claimed to have rescued from slavery. His name was Ota Benga, and he was in his twenties and very short. He had filed his teeth into very sharp points, so he looked fierce. People came from all
over to see him. But when the fair was over, nobody felt responsible for taking Mr. Benga back to his homeland. Some people at the American Museum of Natural History offered to let him live there. They even made some sort of molding, or cast, from his likeness. They have it displayed still.”

“Ota Benga lived in the museum?” Pat asked.

“Not just any museum—some of the structures there were done by Guastavino, remember?” Brid said.

“Tell us more about Ota Benga,” CJ said.

“He lived there for a while, but then he threw something at a rich lady, a donor to the museum, Mrs. Guggenheim, and she almost got konked on the head.” Eloise laughed.

“You mean like the Guggenheim Museum near our apartment?”

“Exactly. Museums don't like it when their donors are treated badly,” Eloise said.

“Did he hit her with a dinosaur bone?” Pat asked hopefully as his siblings laughed.

“After that, they needed another place for this young man to live, and in 1906, they moved him to the Bronx Zoo,” Eloise finished. “Might I add that Guastavino built the domed ceilings of both the Museum of Natural History and a part of the Bronx Zoo—the elephant hall, I believe.”

“You can't live at the zoo,” Brid said.

“Worse than that, Ota Benga slept in a hammock in the monkey cage and was on display for the whole world to see. My father couldn't bear to see animals in cages, never mind a person.”

“Did they ever release him?” Brid asked sadly.

“They did after some people protested. The poem got printed in
The New York Times
, which angered even more people about Ota's situation. After all that bad publicity, they released him, and he eventually found work in a factory down south.”

“That's a pretty horrible story,” said CJ, looking outside, where the snow was falling once again. “I'm surprised your dad would want to end this whole treasure hunt with such a sad poem.”

“Well, it is sad, but think of the variety of these poems my father has chosen as poems with lessons. There are poems of enjoyment, poems about music and happiness, poems about how to navigate life, poems of bravery and commerce and making decisions at a crossroads.”

“Eloise, it's almost like your dad was telling you how to live your life through some of his favorite poems,” Brid said dreamily.

“Yes, it's a bit like that,” said Eloise. “Except it took me so long to get the message, there isn't much of my life left to be lived. I should have met you children decades ago.” Nobody bothered to say the obvious thing, that the Smithforks weren't alive decades ago.

Brid spoke first. “If we find this treasure, you can change how you live your life. You'll certainly have more money to do things with.”

“Children!” Eloise stood up. “Have you looked outside?”

The children looked out the window, but all they could see was white.

The waitress walked over to them. “Sorry to interrupt, folks, but the storm's getting worse, and we're closing early. We're all worried about being able to get home.”

“Oh my goodness, you're right!” Eloise said. “We need to be going, too. Look at this weather!”

There was a rustling of jackets being put on and a chorus of zippers being pulled up.

Brid looked down at Eloise's feet. She was wearing rubber booties. “Eloise, don't you own any snow boots?”

“And when exactly do you think I would be out in the snow? No, I don't own any snow boots,” Eloise said, a hint of worry in her voice. “I guess we should just ride north on the bus, up to the nineties, and then walk across to Fifth Avenue.”

Several minutes later, as they stood at the First Avenue bus stop, they realized that there was almost no traffic, and no sign of a bus. The few cars they saw were moving slowly, sliding on the snowy avenue.

CJ surveyed the deserted streets and wished he had
remembered his gloves. “We should probably head to the subway,” he said. The three long blocks to the subway seemed endless. Stepping carefully down the gray, slushy steps at Lexington and Fifty-ninth Street, nobody spoke at all. The steam from the subway pushed warmer air into their faces, and they were relieved to hear the sound of a rumbling train.

As quickly as they could, they made their way onto a train just as the doors closed. For a moment they felt giddy with relief, until Brid said, “This is the downtown side. We need to go uptown.” She glanced over at Eloise, who looked as if another round of going up and down subway stairs might be too much for her.

“Oh, dear children, how foolish of me to not be more careful. I'm a terrible babysitter.”

“Eloise, you're my favorite babysitter,” Patrick said as he leaned into her side.

“Let's get off at the next stop and switch trains,” said CJ. “It's not a big deal.”

The train was eerily silent, moving with the speed of a turtle. Carron had fallen asleep in her stroller. The conductor made an announcement, but nobody could understand what he was saying, because the radio was filled with static. When they finally pulled into the Fifty-first Street station, Patrick ran ahead onto the train platform while Brid stood blocking the door, waiting for Eloise and CJ to come with the stroller.

Bing bong
, came the warning that the train was about to move again.

“Hurry up!” said Brid.

But the brakes of the stroller were locked. Brid instinctively released the doors so she could help, and they suddenly slammed shut.

As the train started to move, Brid realized they were the only people still in their car. “Don't worry,” she said to Eloise. “We'll get off at the next stop.”

“Where's Patrick?” Eloise exclaimed.

CJ ran to the window to look back at the platform, just as the door between cars opened and Pat made his way back to the group.

“Why are you guys always trying to lose me?” he asked, smiling. “I had to jump back into the next car right before the train pulled out.”

Eloise clasped her hands in relief. “I'm getting too old for all this excitement.”

This time the train moved much faster, whipping along past Grand Central, then past stops farther south. They passed by Twenty-third Street and Union Square without even slowing. “Are we headed to Brooklyn?” Brid asked CJ.

But then the train slowed, its brakes screeching and squealing until it simply stopped. The doors opened, but they were clearly between stations. As they sat there,
looking puzzled, the lights went out, and they were thrown into a world that was almost completely black. The silence was so surprising and eerie that Pat thought it was actually hurting his ears to not hear any noise. “Umm, shouldn't we tell someone?” he asked in a soft voice.

“Tell who?” CJ snapped back.

“I don't think the train people know we are on here. Do you think they do?” Pat asked timidly.

“I think we should all just wait,” Eloise said evenly. “We are safe and dry in here, and maybe we should act like Carron and doze a bit.” In the shadowy light, CJ could see Eloise adjust her scarf a bit tighter around her face.

Brid was scared, but she said nothing. They sat for an extremely long time, the only sound from Patrick, who was zipping and unzipping his jacket.

After an hour had passed, CJ's heart was really thumping. Eloise had fallen asleep. There had to be a conductor, right? Using his softest voice so as not to wake Eloise and Carron, CJ said he was going to take a look around. He decided to take Patrick with him, afraid of what excitement his brother might drum up in his absence.

“We'll be back shortly,” he told Brid, taking Patrick by the hand. “Just do not leave this train car.” He flipped open his cell phone. It emitted the tiniest light.

“Okay,” Brid said in a meek voice, feeling very alone with the sleeping bodies of Eloise and Carron. After her brothers left, she sat and thought about her lists of clues. They had everything they needed; now she could identify all the symbols Patrick would need to push on the map behind the wall, once they were safely home again.

Home. She was surprised to hear her own thoughts call Manhattan home. Yes, she didn't have any real friends yet, and the schoolwork was hard, but she was beginning to like living around so much history. She was even having some ideas about how to fix up her new bedroom, or about using the silver room as a clubhouse. And despite the coming punishment, she was happy her dad was coming home. As she comforted herself with these thoughts, she released herself into sleep, a sleep that would last for many hours.