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Chapters (47)
  1. Cover
  2. DEDICATION
  3. MAP
  4. EPIGRAPH
  5. New York City
  6. New York City
  7. CHAPTER ONE
  8. CHAPTER TWO
  9. CHAPTER THREE
  10. CHAPTER FOUR
  11. CHAPTER FIVE
  12. CHAPTER SIX
  13. CHAPTER SEVEN
  14. CHAPTER EIGHT
  15. CHAPTER NINE
  16. CHAPTER TEN
  17. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  18. CHAPTER TWELVE
  19. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  22. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  23. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  24. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  25. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY
  27. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  36. CHAPTER THIRTY
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  42. Sunrise in Gotham Senior Living Center
  43. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  44. BACK ADS
  45. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  46. BOOKS BY LAURA RUBY
  47. ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Jaime didn’t even have to look it up in his sketchbook. They all knew what the writing on the wall of the Smallpox Hospital said:

BURY ME RIGHT NEXT TO LOUIS MG,

THE MOST TALENTED MAN IN THE WHOLE OF THE CITY.

“We can start by identifying this Louis guy,” said Jaime.

“If he was so talented, why haven’t we heard of him?” Theo said.

“Remember that the clues mostly concern people and places and things that history has forgotten, right?” Tess said. “So maybe this guy was popular in the time of the Morningstarrs but has been overlooked or disregarded since then.”

“Hmmm,” said Jaime. “So if we do some searches for Louis online, maybe with 1850 dates, we can find something.”

They left the pool to the splashing, flexing teens and went back to Jaime’s apartment. By then, their suits were completely dry, so they pulled their street clothes over them and sat down to work at Jaime’s computer. In the search box, they put “Louis MG” “New York City” and “1850.” They came up with a Louis Vuitton exhibit, some comedian named Louis buying an apartment, and a whole bunch of listings on a whole bunch of other Louises, none of them particularly talented or even alive during the time of the Morningstarrs.

“‘Bury me,’” said Jaime. “Maybe that’s the clue.”

“Could be,” said Theo.

Jaime added “cemetery” to the search terms. They combed through the results, but nothing stood out.

“Maybe take out the date,” said Theo. “It might be too specific.”

So Jaime did. The first listing to pop up was an article called “The Most Famous Residents of New York City’s Cemeteries.”

“This might be something,” Jaime said, tapping the screen.

Just then, there was a knock at the door. Jaime got up to answer it, weirdly expecting the group of teens to be standing there, asking him for the sunscreen or maybe wondering what they should call the redhead’s pimple. (Roy, Jaime thought. Roy is a good name for a pimple.)

But it wasn’t the teens—it was Cricket and her mother. Her mother was holding a box using only her fingertips, as if she would like to burn what was inside or maybe drop it from a plane into an active volcano.

“Hi, Jaime,” Mrs. Moran said. “I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”

“Sure,” he said.

“What do you know about bugs?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Candi/Ashli/Toni/Tammi/Lori/Laci/Lu

On the seventeenth floor in a glass tower in Manhattan, a group of women assembled to have their hair and makeup done for the day.