The Empress's Tomb (12 page)

“Once the ship got to New York, where did the men
take them? Can he describe the building?” If the building had an entrance to the Shadow City, I might be able to recognize it.

“He says that he never saw the outside of the building. It was too dark when they arrived. They were taken to a basement, and each person was put into a tiny wooden pen.”

“What about the people who kidnapped him? Can he tell us what they looked like?” asked Kiki.

Oona listened and then turned back to us. “He says the guards had tattoos. Dragon tattoos.
See
, I was right. My father and the Fu-Tsang are behind this.” Without waiting for us to comment, she spoke softy to Yu. He shook his head furiously in response.

“What did you just say?” I asked Oona.

“I told him I would pay to send him back to his family in Taiwan,” she replied. “But he refused to go. He says he has to stay here to save the others.”

“Tell him we plan to help,” said Kiki. Oona relayed the message and Yu smiled, closed his eyes, and succumbed to his exhaustion.

“Well, one thing's for certain,” I said as Oona stood up. “We'll have plenty to talk about over dinner with your dad.”

It will happen to everyone at some point. A secret you've kept carefully hidden will be revealed at the worst possible moment. Your classmates may discover that you were born with a tail. Your mother may find out what you were
really
doing all those times you claimed to be babysitting.
Your next-door neighbor may learn that you enjoy entertaining large groups of people when your parents aren't home. Whatever your secret may be, you'll need to act fast to repair the damage.

I recently found myself turning to one of the best PR men in New York for his advice on a delicate matter of my own. A counselor to celebrities and politicians with some very sick secrets, he's a master at restoring reputations. Here's what he told me:

If you've done something wrong, take responsibility and apologize. Nothing will defuse a situation faster than showing a little remorse. However, less upstanding readers may take a tip from the celebrity world and offer a
non-apology.
Rather than accepting blame for a terrible offense, apologize for a minor one. (For instance, instead of saying,
“I'm sorry I called that prosecutor a [fill in the blank],”
try
“I'm sorry I skipped lunch and let myself get so crabby.”
See the difference?)

These days, cell phone cameras and the Internet can take humiliation to a whole new level. So the moment your secret comes out, imagine you're living your life on camera—and act accordingly. That means no temper tantrums, no acting out, and no spontaneous confessions.

Relax. If people think that they have the power to upset or embarrass you, they'll never leave you alone. Greet their taunts with a pleasant smile or a blank stare.

This is what brothers and sisters were born for. It's not very nice to point out that your siblings' past crimes have been far more heinous, but it can make you look like a saint in comparison. Don't take this tack if your siblings are listening.

Show how misunderstood and maligned you've been by impersonating Mother Teresa. If you've been grounded, use your free time to do some
spring-cleaning around the house. If you've been labeled a bad seed, try volunteering at a local animal shelter. Everyone looks innocent when surrounded by puppies.

Most people have the attention span of a dim-witted gnat. If you refuse to make a soap opera out of your secret, it will probably be forgotten faster than you think.

Someone was banging on my bedroom door. I rolled over and pressed a pillow against my ears, hoping the noise would go away.

“Ananka, you're late for school!” my father yelled. “Get out of bed and unlock this door!”

In an instant, my eyes were open and I was fumbling for the alarm clock. It was 9:16. I leaped from my bed and ran for the door.

“Ananka!” my father bellowed again as the door swung open, and I caught the full force of his shout in my right ear. He cleared his throat and his voice assumed a normal volume. “Good. You're dressed.” I looked down and realized I was still wearing the clothes I'd had on the night before. When I'd climbed back into my bedroom window at four o'clock in the morning, I hadn't had the energy to throw on pajamas.

“I've got to change,” I mumbled, weaving down the hall toward the bathroom.

“You don't have time for that. Go on. Get going,” my father snapped, failing to see that I was wrinkled and dirty. “If you're fast enough, you won't miss your second class.”

My mother, still wearing her bathrobe, blocked my exit. Her eyes traveled from the Marble Cemetery mud caked on my boots to the dust that coated my black T-shirt. She grabbed her purse from the table by the front door and rooted around inside.

“Take this,” she said, slapping a hairbrush into my hand. “And here's some reading material for the ride to school.” She held out a glossy brochure. On the cover was a picture of a teenage girl milking a cow with one hand and holding a textbook with the other. “I'm making the call today,” my mother announced as she pushed me out the door.

On my way uptown in the back of a taxi, I tried to stay calm. But one look at the brochure I'd been given made it perfectly clear that life as I knew it would soon be over.

THE BORLAND ACADEMY

Television. Video games. Drugs. With so much competing for our children's attention, it's no wonder that many young people today are failing to live up to their academic potential. At the Borland Academy, we have created a unique environment stripped of the distractions of the modern world. Located 130 miles outside of Burp, West Virginia, and set deep in the stunning Appalachian Mountains, the
Borland Academy is both a working farm and a well-respected academic institution. Students divide their time between classes developed to broaden their minds and farm chores designed to enhance their self-discipline. Freed from the negative influence of popular culture, students are able to spend their weekends acquiring a newfound appreciation for hard work and the simple pleasures of nature. The results of our approach speak for themselves. Last year, three Borland Academy students were accepted at Yale, and two of our handcrafted cheeses were awarded blue ribbons at the West Virginia State Fair.

Ideal for underachievers and children with a history of violence, the Borland Academy is designed to give each and every student the personalized attention he or she needs. Children are supervised twenty-four hours a day, and our professional nursing staff is authorized to dispense pharmaceuticals if necessary.

I had lived in New York City my entire life. I'd never seen a cow up close, and I had no intention of learning how to craft prizewinning cheeses. My mind was filled with a thousand plans at once. If I emptied my personal bank account, I could go into hiding. Get my own apartment. Attend public school. Fight crime at night, sleep late on the weekends. By the time my cab pulled up in front of the Atalanta School for Girls, I was convinced that it was time to assert my independence. I still had my share of the money the Irregulars had made from the treasures we'd
found in the Shadow City. I would have gone straight for the bank if Principal Wickham hadn't been waiting for me on the sidewalk outside the school gates. As I slid out of the taxi, I wondered how a woman who weighed less than a sack of laundry and was older than the Empire State Building could make me feel like a naughty toddler with a soiled diaper.

•     •     •

“Good morning, Ananka.” The principal took in the sorry state of my appearance. “Your mother phoned to say you were on your way. She thought it might be a good idea if I escorted you to class.”

“I'm sorry, Principal Wickham,” I mumbled.

“So am I,” she said, leading me up the stairs and into the school. “You know what this means, don't you?”

“Yes, I read about the Borland Academy on my way to school.”

The principal laughed, though I saw nothing amusing about my plight. “I know the founder of the academy,” she said. “Not a very pleasant man, but I'm impressed that he's finally found a way to combine his passions for academics and animal husbandry. Your mother seems to think that the Borland Academy offers the kind of environment you need, but I must admit that I'm not convinced.”

“You're not?” I felt a second surge of hope.

“No. In fact, I'm planning to plead your case. Don't ask me why, but I believe you could be an asset to Atalanta. You
were
warned, however, so I will have to punish you. I think two weeks of after-school detention should
suffice. You can stay until six each evening, working on an essay I assign you.”

“Thank you, Principal Wickham,” I gushed.

“Don't thank me yet.” Principal Wickham delivered me to the door of the chemistry laboratory. “You have plenty of work to do if you intend to find your way back into
my
good graces. Your mother tells me you've read a great deal about New York. In two weeks' time, I expect you to deliver a twenty-page paper on one aspect of the city's history. Choose your subject wisely. It must be good enough to impress Mr. Dedly. Otherwise, I'm afraid you're heading for an F in his class, and if that should happen, I won't be able to save you from Borland. So report to the library after your last class, Ananka, and please … do try to stay out of trouble.”

•     •     •

Inside the laboratory, I strapped on a pair of safety goggles and tied a black leather apron around my waist. My lab partner, a studious girl named Natasha with no talent for chemistry, was dumping liquids into a glass beaker and barely acknowledged my arrival. I stared at the wisps of sulfurous smoke that began to rise from the mixture and wondered how everything could have gone so wrong. My friends were keeping secrets from me, my mother was watching my every move, I couldn't seem to get any sleep, and I wouldn't even have time for lunch. In two hours' time, while my classmates ate (or pretended to eat), I would be on a reconnaissance mission in Central Park, across the street from Lester Liu's mansion. I was
risking my freedom for a girl who couldn't be bothered to tell me the truth.

While Natasha scrambled to douse the flames that had started shooting from her beaker, I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket. There, in Oona's handwriting, was the address of Lester Liu's building on Fifth Avenue. I was tempted to bail and let Kiki, Oona, and Betty plan the operation on their own. But there was something about the address itself that had me intrigued. The epiphany came as my frantic chemistry teacher arrived with a fire extinguisher that belched mountains of snowy-white foam across the burning workbench. Lester Liu lived in the Varney Mansion.

•     •     •

In August, the Varney Mansion had made the news when a piece of the building's marble facade had crashed to earth, taking out a taxicab and narrowly missing a prize Pomeranian owned by Mrs. Gwendolyn Gluck, one of the city's most prominent socialites. Before police could seal off the area, a second sheet of marble had flattened a mailbox, and the statue of a naked goddess that had guarded the doorway for a hundred years had slipped and shattered on the sidewalk. In the excitement that followed, the goddess's severed head had disappeared. Three days later it was found in Queens, affixed to the hood of a tricked-out Trans Am.

Had the building in question been any other, few people would have cared. Old and leprous, New York loses chunks of itself on a regular basis. But in the cafés and
drawing rooms of the Upper East Side, it was whispered that the mansion on Millionaires' Row was being destroyed—not by time but by the ghost of Cecelia Varney.

When Cecelia Varney was born to one of New York's richest men, the newspapers labeled her
The Luckiest Girl in the World.
When she died ninety years later in her family's mansion, she was known to the city as
The Hermit of Fifth Avenue.
What happened in between has been the subject of two TV movies and an off-Broadway musical, but nobody knows for sure. At age thirty-four, the stunning socialite suddenly divorced the third in a series of gold-digging playboys. She then shocked her famous friends by dumping them in favor of little-known psychics and frequenting séances rather than nightclubs. On the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday, without any warning, Cecelia Varney locked herself up in the mansion with two trustworthy servants and a pair of six-toed cats (a birthday present from her friend Ernest Hemingway). She never left the house again, and it was said she was still there, buried somewhere in the basement. The one servant to survive Ms. Varney was spotted hailing a cab as the undertaker arrived. It was the last time anyone saw her.

The day Cecelia Varney's obituary ran in the
New York Times,
real estate brokers began stalking the mansion like hungry hyenas. Not only was the house among the most magnificent in New York, it was said to be filled with Ms. Varney's priceless collections. Over the course of fifty-five years, she'd spent her family's entire fortune without ever setting foot inside a store. Men who were sworn to secrecy—and paid well to keep their word—made deliveries
in the dead of night. Rumor had it that Ms. Varney had hoarded countless artworks long thought to be lost or destroyed, and everyone in town wanted a peek at her treasures. Unfortunately, her will made it clear that neither the house nor its contents could be disturbed. Everything belonged to the seventy-six cats (all descendants of the original pair) that roamed the rooms at will.