Lucy looked up at the turquoise expanse of star-washed sky. Only these constellations were backward. The Vanderbilt family, who commissioned the mural on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, would never admit their painter had confused the plans. They pronounced the mural depicted the heavens as seen by the gods, and that suited New Yorkers just fine, since they considered themselves their equals. Or that was how Lucy’s mom put it anyway.
She dismissed a twinge of remorse. She’d left a note on the kitchen counter saying she was hanging out with Claudia (texted Claudia to cover for her), disabled the GPS tracker app her parents had installed on her cell (in case of emergencies, they said), and pedaled Marie Curie to the Eaton train station.
Lucy’s dad had headed into the office before she woke up—schoolgirl error—and Lucy was determined to confront him about the photograph before she worried her mother.
Forty minutes south on the Metro-North, and here she was in the center of it all, looking down at the stars.
Adrenaline coursed through her. Lucy had never been so daring before.
Her favorite part of the station was the Whispering Gallery. On one of her childhood trips to see yet another specialist at New York Hospital, her dad showed Lucy its secrets. Standing at one corner, you could whisper a secret that was telegraphed across the surface of the two-thousand-square-foot chamber, landing in a faraway nook of the vault. Her dad said nobody knew whether it had been built that way on purpose.
Lucy’s heart cramped. Her father always shared secrets with Lucy—he didn’t keep them from her. He would have a reasonable explanation for the message encoded in the photograph. He had to. The alternative was … Lucy wouldn’t think about that. A scientist dealt in facts, not fictions.
Double-checking her phone, Lucy proceeded through the Main Concourse in all of its Art Deco glory, exiting on Forty-second Street and was immediately greeted by the wail of a police siren. She rubbed her temples as they started to throb.
“You can do this,” she said aloud, setting her shoulders. A pigeon cocked a disapproving head at her. Jeez, even the birds in this city were critics. “Stop talking to yourself.” Gah! She’d done it again. Not a sophisticated New York thing to do.
Compressing her lips, Lucy headed uptown. The Sapientia Group was located in an office building nine blocks north on Lexington Avenue.
Bzzz. The phone in her hand vibrated.
U went to the city? Why?
If Lucy told Claudia she was braving all of the sights and sounds of the Bad Apple (as her mom called it) to chase down a string of numbers, her bestie might think Lucy’s last remaining screw had finally come loose.
Needed space. Planetarium, she texted back instead.
Claudia would believe that. Lucy had been talking about visiting the Dark Matter exhibition for ages. Still, the lie made Lucy squirm.
OK … Cole was asking for U at the party. Seemed sad. What’s up?
If Cole was so broken up, he could call her, text her, DM her. Evidently he hadn’t broken each and every one of his fingers, so he had no excuse. Not that Lucy wasn’t tempted to break them for him.
Nothing important. Will explain later.
Another lie. Claudia wouldn’t make a beeline for the principal, but Lucy thought the fewer people who knew about the cheating, the better. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and all that. Lucy also felt foolish. Renewed fury gripped her that she was now lying to her best friend for her boyfriend.
She stormed through gaggles of out-of-town shoppers carrying Big Brown Bags and arrived at the entrance of her father’s office building in no time. She craned her neck as her eyes drifted up the fifty stories to the top of the forbidding tower. Its thorny crown was meant to resemble medieval stonework and it was almost enough to make Lucy believe the city really was Gotham.
She threw her shoulders back.
Carpe diem. Wasn’t that the wisdom that’d been disseminated by guidance counselors and valedictorians since the dawn of time?
Before she could talk herself out of it, Lucy seized the day, striding into the elegant, marble lobby, and approached the reception desk.
“H-hi. My father works here. At the Sapientia Group. I need to see him.”
A fortysomething man wearing a navy suit looked up from the sports pages of the newspaper. His skin was a deep brown and he had a friendly smile.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lucinda Minerva Phelps,” she said formally. Face-palm. Why had she given her middle name? She hated it. Minerva was what you got saddled with when your mother studied ancient poetry for a living.
The man huffed a small laugh. “Phelps? Dr. Victor Phelps’s daughter?”
“The one and only,” Lucy answered, smiling awkwardly. Then a disturbing thought struck her. What if the evil-twin scenario was right?
“I’m afraid you just missed him.”
“I did?”
“He jumped in a cab for JFK about fifteen minutes ago.”
The airport?
“Oh,” said Lucy. Why hadn’t her dad mentioned he was going on yet another business trip? “You’re sure it was Dr. Phelps?”
“’Fraid so. His March Madness picks are terrible,” said the man with another laugh, and indicated the sports page. Drawing his brows together, he said, “Your dad didn’t know you were coming?”
“No, um, I wanted to surprise him.” She shrugged to mask her nerves. “I guess the surprise is on me.”
“Shame. Try him on his cell?”
“I will. Thanks.” Dejected, Lucy turned on her heel and walked back out onto the street. She stared blankly at the passing traffic.
It wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for her dad to drop everything and hop on a plane, but today of all days it galled her. She’d come into the city for nothing. Lucy could call him, of course, but this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have over the phone.
She needed to look her father in the eye.
Someone leaned on a car horn, and Lucy flinched. She clenched her fists.
Maybe her trip didn’t have to be for nothing. There was another clue contained in the photo, after all.
Thirty-fourth and Eighth: the New Yorker Hotel. It was only about a mile away.
Lucy glanced at the entrance to the subway on the opposite corner and heard her mother’s litany of potential seizure triggers loop at the back of her mind. But she wanted answers, and she wanted them now.
The sun was shining; Lucy would walk. She pulled up a map on her phone and retraced her steps toward Grand Central, kept going past the terminal until she hit Thirty-fourth Street, and then turned west.
She was so busy following her own blue dot on the map that she nearly missed it: the Empire State Building. Lucy sighed.
Gazing up with a goofy grin was a stupid, touristy thing to do, but she couldn’t help herself. The midmorning light hit the spire at the top so that it glowed like burnished silver. Another sigh. The romantic in Lucy saw it as a lighthouse, a beacon drawing all the fearless dreamers to the city.
Slam!
Lucy toppled to the sidewalk, bracing herself with her left hand, and sliced her palm on a sliver of glass. The phone in her right hand took the brunt of her weight.
“Hey, watch it, lady!” snarled a preteen on a skateboard sporting a backwards Yankees baseball cap.
Lady? Did Lucy look like a lady? She was eighteen, not thirty-five!
“You watch it,” Lucy called after him, but the brat was long gone, sailing down Fifth Avenue.
And her cell phone was smashed beyond repair.
Expletive. Expletive. Expletive.
This wasn’t Lucy’s first cellular mishap. She was plagued by nonexistent battery life and power surges—although they mostly remained in one piece. Her parents would simply take this as further evidence of her helplessness.
Go home, taunted a turncoat voice. This is no place for you.
Rage bubbled up in Lucy’s chest. She’d already come this far; she wouldn’t back down now. Wiping her bloody palm against her jeans, she continued down the long crosstown blocks that led toward the Hudson River.
As she reached Eighth Avenue multiple towers rose before Lucy’s eyes, stacked on top of one another like a LEGO set; the architecture looked to be from the same era as her father’s office building and the Empire State.
What was so special about the New Yorker Hotel? It couldn’t be as simple as her father having an affair, could it?
Only one way to find out.
Lucy crossed the street, barely avoiding a taxi that might as well be racing in the Indy 500, and was sucked into a whirlwind of frazzled tourists checking in and checking out, carts of luggage, and screeching children. She rubbed her temples again and surveyed the lobby. Admiring the gilded ceiling and mammoth crystal chandelier, Lucy got on line for the concierge. She tried not to eavesdrop on the Midwestern couple ahead of her who were arguing about the exorbitant price of theatre tickets.
Where had her dad jetted off to? Lucy wondered. Did her mom know?
“Can I help you?”
An irritated voice cut into her stream of consciousness. “Um, hi,” Lucy replied. She hadn’t noticed the other couple walk away.
“Hi.” The concierge was a woman in her mid-fifties with dyed-blond hair shellacked to within an inch of its life, overly tweezed eyebrows, and a grimace that said she had no time to waste.
Lucy hadn’t thought through what she was going to say but “3327,” flew out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
The concierge raised a pencil-thin eyebrow.
“The Tesla Suite.”
“Tesla? Like the car?” Lucy wrinkled her nose. Was Elon Musk a frequent guest?
The woman gave Lucy a once-over. “Tesla as in Nikola Tesla, the famous inventor who lived in room 3327.” Her words dripped with disdain.
“Right.” Of course. Lucy had heard of him but … “Wait,” she blurted, stomach flip-flopping. “His name was Nikola?”
“That’s what I said,” the concierge said flatly, and Lucy willed away the tension traveling from her shoulders to her neck. She’d known the electric cars had been named in his honor but she’d forgotten his first name.
Could the Nikola in the message refer to Tesla rather than Lucy? But that still didn’t explain the connection to her father.
“I’d like to see the room, if that’s okay,” she said.
The concierge twitched her nose as she tapped on her keyboard. “The Tesla Suite is available. How would you like to pay?”
Pay? Lucy had fifty bucks in her wallet and she doubted that would cover it.
“Could I just take a look around? See if I want to book it in the future?” She refused to be intimidated by a woman with alien eyebrows. “My father does a lot of business in the city,” she added. Yeah, that sounded plausible.
The concierge canted her head, smiled broadly, and enjoyed saying, “No.” Then she looked straight through Lucy to the elderly woman behind her. “How can I help you, ma’am?”
A flush worked its way from Lucy’s cheeks down her neck. Unceremoniously dismissed, she retreated toward the elevator bank to consider her options.
ACCESS CARD REQUIRED declared an officious sign.
Fantastic. Lucy needed to get into that room. She needed to understand the link between her dad and a long-dead scientist.
In her peripheral vision, Lucy spotted a bellhop helping a large family with their bags into the elevator and, with a sudden burst of moxie, she darted into the center of them. She was tired of playing everything by the book, always asking permission, never stepping out of her comfort zone.
“Thirty-three, please,” she called out as the elevator doors slid shut, hazarding a guess that Room 3327 would be located on the thirty-third floor.
A long moment passed.
With a huff, much to Lucy’s relief, the bellhop swiped his card and hit the button.
Her thundering heart slowed.
What was the worst that could happen?