Trust no one. The thought flared in Jaime’s head as he and the twins finished their snack and headed for the attic room, where many of Benjamin Adler’s notebooks were crammed in boxes. The letter that had started it all, the letter that had been sent to the twins’ grandpa Ben and intercepted by Tess had had the words TRUST NO ONE scripted on the envelope. And they hadn’t trusted anyone with their discovery of the shadow cipher—until Edgar Wellington. Jaime could still feel the Atlantic Tunnel vibrating under his feet, still see the mandibles of the giant metal machine punching through the wall, smell the dust in the air, feel the horror as the machine mowed Edgar Wellington down mere moments after he had betrayed them. The fact that Edgar had lived, the fact that he didn’t seem to remember that day in the tunnel or the days preceding it, the fact that he’d visited the twins and chattered at them as if nothing had ever happened didn’t lessen the strangeness of it, the dread that sometimes backed up in Jaime’s throat, that woke him up in the dead of night.

Jaime shook the thoughts from his head and tried to focus on what Tess was saying.

“Grandpa kept a lot of notes on the Morningstarrs’ associates and guests in this notebook, though I’m sure it’s not a complete list. And sometimes there are just descriptions of people instead of their names.” She dug around in a box and pulled out several leather-bound journals. “I wish they’d had cameras back in the day. Maybe we would have had a picture of someone wearing the dress.”

They each took a journal and started combing through the pages. Some names scrawled in Benjamin Adler’s tiny, crabbed script were familiar. Eliza Hamilton. Edgar Allan Poe. Charles Dickens. Other names weren’t familiar at all, and they had to look them up on the twins’ computer or Jaime’s phone. Still other people were described by what they did.

“‘According to the Sun, a lady cellist, apparently quite talented, played in the drawing room after dinner, September 18, 1849,’” read Jaime. “‘Unusual for the time because the way the cello had to be held was considered inappropriate for ladies.’”

“What wasn’t considered inappropriate for ladies?” Tess said sourly.

Jaime used his phone to search for female cellists of the nineteenth century and found a Portuguese cellist named Guilhermina Suggia, but she was born in 1885, too late to have been a guest or a friend of the Morningstarrs. He also found a French cellist named Lisa Cristiani, who was born in 1827 and died of cholera in 1853.

“She toured all over Europe and Russia. Mendelssohn wrote the ‘Song without Words’ opus 109 for her because he was so impressed by her playing. But I can’t find any information about her being in New York City or even in the US.”