Alexander Hamilton #2

Chapter 1
The Holland Tunnel

October arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, with bright blue skies, puffy white clouds, and perfect, cool autumn temperatures. The leaves on the trees along Bellevue Avenue began to turn red and gold and orange, and the tourists who clogged the streets all summer were gone, taking with them the traffic and crowds. For most children, October in Newport was idyllic. But not for Maisie and Felix Robbins. They wanted to be back in New York City, in their apartment at 10 Bethune Street, with their parents still married and their lives the way they had been before the divorce six months earlier had changed everything.

That was why early on that beautiful October morning, when other children were down the road playing softball or out on the bay sailing or with their families buying apples and pumpkins in nearby Tiverton, Maisie and Felix sneaked down on the dumbwaiter from their -third-​-floor apartment where they lived and into Elm Medona. The seventy-room mansion had been built by their great-​great-​grandfather Phinneas Pickworth and was filled with tapestries from the Middle Ages, marble fireplaces imported from France, ceilings trimmed with real gold leaf, and the Pickworth symbols of peonies, peacocks, and pineapples painted and carved and etched into every inch of wood, canvas, and silk. Elm Medona technically belonged to the local preservation society now, but family members could still live in the apartment included on the grounds. The mansion had a room called The Treasure Chest, and in that room, stacked and nestled and leaning against one another, were artifacts and curiosities of all kinds: feathers, seashells, rocks; wands and sticks and canes; pieces of glass and string and paper; sealing wax, fountain pens, scales, compasses, tarnished silverware, dried watercolors, maps. The items in The Treasure Chest appeared to be limitless. Everywhere Maisie and Felix looked, they found yet another thing that caught their attention.

A few weeks earlier, they had gone into The Treasure Chest and found a letter with a list of names on it. Somehow, that letter brought them back in time to Clara Barton’s farm in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1836. Even though they had spent the night there, when they returned it seemed like little time had passed at all. Although they weren’t sure how they actually time -traveled—​-or how they got -back—​-what Maisie and Felix wanted was to do it again. But with a new school and so many new things to think about, they couldn’t find the right time to go to The Treasure Chest. And this time they wanted to go back six months and land in their old beds in New York City.

Even though it was a Saturday, their mother had gone to work at the law office. Back in New York, she had spent three years going to NYU Law School, giving up her dream of becoming an actress and starring in a Broadway musical. Now she had her chance to prove herself. Fishbaum and Fishbaum was one of the oldest law firms in Newport, and their mother felt lucky to have this job. As a result, she had prepared them that she would work long hours and weekends. She had to.

They waited for her to leave, then met in the hallway between their rooms. The apartment where they lived was the former servants’ quarters, but it was easy to get into the mansion below and go unnoticed. The -century-​-old house was so big that when they went there alone at night, their voices echoed and their footsteps seemed to thunder as they walked across the vast marble floors.

Just like the last time, Felix climbed into the dumbwaiter in the kitchen and let Maisie send it down into the mansion’s basement. This time, though, he wasn’t at all afraid. Instead, he concentrated on their mission. Last night, their father had called from Doha, Qatar, where he’d gone to work at a new art museum, and the sound of his voice had made Felix’s chest ache in such a way that he wondered if he might be actually having a heart attack. He didn’t think kids had heart attacks, but Felix found himself gasping for air as his chest tightened, all the while his father described the compound where he lived and the camel market and the sand dunes that sung.

When his father hung up, Felix found himself even more certain that The Treasure Chest had to bring him and Maisie back to their small apartment in New York City, back to where they all belonged. Now, he wrapped his arms around himself like a hug as the dumbwaiter creaked downward. He closed his eyes and imagined their old block with the supermarket on one corner and the diner that his father said had the worst coffee in New York City on the other. He pictured the long corridor that led to their apartment, the row of locks that lined their front door, the way the lights in the small foyer came on as soon as someone stepped inside.

Maisie’s voice interrupted his concentration. “Are you going to live in there or something?”

Felix opened his eyes. The dumbwaiter had come to a stop. Out its small window, the white-tiled Kitchen gleamed at him.

A mantra, Felix decided. He needed a mantra to keep himself focused.

“Home,” he whispered to himself. Home. He repeated it as he pushed open the door and waited for Maisie to join him. Home. Home.

“Home?” Maisie said, peering into his face. Like the last time, she had followed him down in the dumbwaiter. She stood three inches taller than her twin brother and had a way of looking down at Felix that made her seem powerful.

“My mantra,” Felix explained.

Maisie considered the idea. “That’s good,” she said finally. “But do you think we should be more specific? Like, repeat our address or something?”

Felix shrugged. “Home just feels right,” he said.

She grinned at him. “Home it is then, little brother.”

At seven minutes older, Maisie liked to remind Felix at every opportunity who was born first.

They walked up the stairs and into the Grand Ballroom, both of them whispering home, home, home over and over. The early morning sun came through the stained-glass window at the landing of the stairs, sending blue and gold light onto the polished marble floor.

“It looks different in daytime,” Maisie said, pausing to look up at the window with its peacock pattern.

Felix stopped, too, following her gaze.

“Pretty,” she said.

“Phinneas Pickworth commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to make this window for Elm Medona,” Felix said in a deep voice, reciting the words the Woman in Pink had told them when they’d taken a tour of the mansion. The local preservation society had arranged a VIP tour for them with a special guide, even though Maisie and Felix quickly forgot her name and called her the Woman in Pink because she was covered in the color from head to toe. She had led them through every room, giving excruciating details about everything in them. “Notice how his favorite symbols are incorporated in the window. The -peacock—-”

“The pineapple,” Maisie added.

“And the peony,” Felix said.

“How posh!” Maisie giggled.

They both laughed and continued across the ballroom to the Grand Staircase, Maisie’s arm hooked into Felix’s. Halfway up they paused again, this time to look at the -black-​-and-​-white picture of their -Great-​-Aunt Maisie and her twin brother, Thorne, as children. They had grown up here at Elm Medona. -Great-​-Aunt Maisie had lived in the servants’ quarters on the third floor until she’d had her stroke and moved into an assisted living facility.

They both peered at the -mischievous-​-looking boy in the picture, with a prominent cowlick and slightly too large ears.

“No one ever mentions him,” Maisie said.

Felix shivered inexplicably.

“I -wonder—-” Maisie began.

But Felix interrupted her. “Remember our mantra?” he said. “If we lose our focus, we could end up who knows where.”

“Right,” Maisie said.

They continued up the stairs. At the top, Maisie gently ran her hand along the green wall until she felt the spot to gently push. The wall opened and slowly spun to reveal the hidden staircase that led to The Treasure Chest. Even though they had done this very thing before, Felix couldn’t help but gasp. A secret staircase! Hidden behind a door!

“Should I go up alone, like last time?” Maisie said.

When they’d traveled to the Barton farm in 1836, Maisie and Felix had repeated everything exactly as the first time they’d sneaked inside. That first time they’d realized the power of The Treasure Chest, something mysterious and terrifying and thrilling had started to happen: Loud noises and the smell of gunpowder had filled the room, and suddenly Maisie and Felix had found themselves lifting off the ground. But then their mother had arrived home, startling them enough to stay in place. When they tried again a few days later, they’d been careful to repeat everything they’d done and said.

“I don’t think so,” Felix said. “I think we can both go inside and choose an object and see what happens.”

“That seems too easy,” Maisie said.

“Well,” Felix said thoughtfully, “we’ll need to find something that looks like it belongs in New York, I think.”

Maisie shook her head. “There must be more to it than that.”

“Let’s try it this way,” Felix said.

“Okay,” Maisie said reluctantly.

That decided, they climbed the secret staircase and went directly to The Treasure Chest. Maisie unclipped the red velvet rope that kept the room -off-​-limits, and they both stepped inside.

“Smells like the Museum of Natural History in here,” Maisie said, sniffing. “I didn’t notice that last time.”

Felix glanced around the room, trying to take it all in. “So much old stuff,” he said. “It’s kind of like a museum.”

Maisie picked up a jade box, bringing it close to examine it.

“No!” Felix shouted. “Don’t just start picking stuff up! For all we know, that could take us to China. We need to focus.”

Maisie replaced the box hesitantly.

“You want us to just close our eyes and say ‘home, home, home’ and hope it works?” she said, her eyes blazing.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Maisie couldn’t help herself. She needed to touch the objects. Her hands lightly skimmed a small gold telescope, a creased map, seedpods, an arrowhead.

“We need to find an object that will help us get back home,” she said. “Remember how Clara needed that letter? Somehow we need to pick up -something . . . I don’t -know . . . New Yorky.”

“Maybe,” Felix said again, even more uncertainly.

Maisie walked slowly around the room. She was sure that somewhere among all these things was the perfect object, the very one that could get them back to Bethune Street.

A drawing caught her eye. Not a regular drawing, but one drawn in faded ink on thin, white paper. Maisie picked it up. Immediately, she realized that it was a blueprint for a long structure of some kind. It had two side‑-by‑-side tubes and a series of fans and ducts in a pattern along the top.

“Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel,” Felix read over her shoulder.

“That’s funny,” Maisie said. “There is no Hudson River Tunnel. There’s the Lincoln Tunnel and -the—-”

“Put it down!” Felix shouted at her.

Startled, Maisie dropped the blueprint, which fluttered to the floor, landing opened on the Turkish carpet.

“Did you see the name on those?” Felix said, -wide-​-eyed.

Maisie shook her head,

“Clifford Milburn Holland,” Felix said.

“The Holland Tunnel?” Maisie said. That was the tunnel their family took whenever they left Manhattan and headed south to Cape May, New Jersey, where they sometimes rented a little house near the beach.

Felix pointed to the blueprint. “1920,” he said.

Maisie squinted at the signature and the date beneath it. “Wow!” she said, bending to pick it up again.

“Are you crazy?” Felix said. “That will bring us back to 1920.”

“Look at all this stuff, Felix,” Maisie said, sweeping her arms. “It’s all old. No matter what object we pick, it’s older than this year. Older than probably this century.”

She was right, Felix realized, his heart sinking. Phinneas Pickworth had collected everything in this room. Of course none of it would do them any good.

“But maybe if we can just get back to New York, we can find our way to the time we want,” Maisie was saying.

“I don’t know,” Felix said. “What if we get stuck in the wrong decade? What if that’s what happened to -Great-​-Uncle Thorne? What if he went somewhere and never came back?”

“Look, I don’t know how we’ll do it,” Maisie said, smoothing the creases in the blueprint. “I just think we can figure it out. We time traveled, didn’t we? And we got back, didn’t we?”

“But that was just luck or something.”

Maisie remembered their mantra. She looked at that beautiful drawing of the Holland Tunnel, and she thought about all of them, a family, sitting in their parents’ beat‑-up silver Volvo with its broken -air-​-conditioning. Her legs stuck to the seat with sweat and her lips tasted salty. By the time they got through the Holland Tunnel, she and Felix were already asking for snacks and drinks and wanting to know how much longer before they got to Cape May. Maisie always wore her bathing suit under her clothes so that she could get into the ocean that much sooner. Sometimes her father lifted her onto his shoulders and carried her into the water that way. She could feel how slippery his skin was and how tightly his hands gripped her ankles as they made their way forward. She could see the small, -quarter-​-sized bald spot on the top of his head with his pink scalp showing through.

Felix sighed and took hold of the opposite corners of the blueprint. He believed that they both needed to hold the object in order to time travel.

“Home,” Felix whispered.

Maisie smiled. “Home,” she whispered back.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe tug on it?” she said finally. “Remember we kind of yanked on that letter.”

Felix tugged. Then he tugged harder. Something was different. Wrong somehow. The air did not feel electric or special. The room didn’t seem to quiver. There was just the musty museum smell and the rough paper in his hands and his sister’s shallow breaths.

“I know!” Maisie said brightly. “We were standing over there. Maybe that spot is magical.”

Felix followed her to the spot where they’d stood holding the letter for Clara Barton.

“Home,” he said softly.

“Home,” Maisie repeated.

He closed his eyes and yanked, just like he did before. He held his breath. Then he opened his eyes.

Felix and Maisie had gone exactly nowhere.