None of them seemed capable of making a complete sentence, of following any of the “ifs” to a logical conclusion.
That’s because there aren’t any logical conclusions, Jonah told himself. He’d read time-travel books, he’d seen time-travel movies, and they’d always seemed wrong to him. Couldn’t the people just keep going back again and again and again, keep changing time until it turned out the way they wanted it to? And there was some paradox he remembered hearing about, something about a grandmother—oh, yeah, time travel had to be impossible because, otherwise, you could go back in time and kill your own grandmother. But if you killed your own grandmother, then you wouldn’t exist, so you couldn’t go back in time, so your grandmother would be alive again, but then you would also exist again, so you could go back and kill your grandmother, but then you would never be born….
Jonah’s head hurt just thinking about it.
They reached Chip’s house and actually parked their bikes neatly in the driveway. Even though they’d ridden slowly, Jonah was still drenched with sweat.
“Hey, I’m really rank,” he said. “Unless you want me stinking up your whole basement, I’d better take a shower before we start calling people.”
Katherine sniffed.
“Uh, me too,” she said. She didn’t have Mom’s authoritative voice anymore; she just sounded embarrassed.
“Okay,” Chip said. “But hurry back.”
He sounded like he didn’t want to be left alone, but he was too ashamed to say so.
Jonah and Katherine took their bikes back to their own garage.
“You can have the shower in Mom and Dad’s bathroom,” Katherine said, not quite looking at him. This was a gift on her part—probably a sign that she felt sorry for him—because Mom and Dad’s bathroom was bigger and nicer than the one between his and Katherine’s rooms. Usually she’d dash into the better bathroom ahead of him, slamming the door shut, jabbing the lock, and shrieking, “Ha, ha, ha! Beat you! You snooze, you lose!”
“Thanks,” Jonah mumbled.
He didn’t care about where he took his shower right now.
In the shower he stood under the pounding spray for a long time after he’d soaped and rinsed off. The hot water felt good, even though Mom and Dad were always nagging about not wasting water and energy.
“You kids should be concerned about the future,” Mom always said, “because you’re going to have to live there….”
“Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. Was that what this was about? In so many of the time-travel books and movies he’d seen, people came back from the future to warn about global warming or stuff like that. What if he and Jonah and the other kids were supposed to deliver some message about how people needed to make big changes now to save the world in the future?
“Lots of people are already talking about global warming,” he said aloud, even though he wasn’t sure whom he was talking to. “Nobody’s going to listen to me.”
Also, if this was an environmental thing, what were the two sides fighting over? Did the janitor just want him to stay here to deliver his message? Did the other guy want the world to end?
Jonah wasn’t enjoying his shower anymore. He shut off the water, stepped out, and pulled a towel from the rack. Distantly, he heard the phone ringing. Then it stopped ringing—Dad must have gotten up from watching the Ohio State game to answer it. Jonah knew Katherine would still be in the shower because she always took forever. Then she always had to spend another eternity drying her hair—she’d be doing well to make it back to Chip’s house before midnight.
“Jonah?” It was Dad, shouting up the stairs. “Chip’s on the phone. He says it’s urgent. Can you get the phone up there?”
“Sure,” Jonah said.
He wrapped the towel around his waist and went for the phone in his parents’ bedroom.
“Got it, Dad,” Jonah yelled. He heard the click that meant Dad had hung up downstairs. “Hello?”
“They’re gone,” Chip said, his voice cracking.
“What’s gone?”
“The lists on my computer—the survivors list, the witnesses list, the files where Katherine and I were keeping checklists about who said what—it all disappeared. But the rest of the computer is fine. How could that be?” Chip’s voice arced toward hysteria.
“Calm down,” Jonah said. “Maybe you just deleted something by mistake. Did you check in theDelete file?”
“Not there.”
“Didn’t you have everything backed up?”
Silence. Evidently Chip didn’t.
“But you made printouts,” Jonah reminded him.
“I left them at the library,” Chip groaned. “I didn’t get them back from Angela before we climbed out the window—did you pick them up? Did Katherine?”
Jonah thought about this. He could remember the papers lying on the table in front of Angela, right before the first man slammed against the door. What had happened to the lists after that? When he’d run around the table to get to the window, had the breeze lifted the pages slightly into the air? After he’d climbed out the window and glanced back, had the papers been sliding across the table, as the fighting men jolted it from below? Why hadn’t he paid more attention? And why hadn’t he simply grabbed the papers as he ran?
“There wasn’t time!” Jonah said, his voice unnecessarily surly.
“Maybe if I call the library,” Chip said desperately, “maybe somebody found them—”
“Don’t bother,” Jonah said. “They weren’t there when I went back.” He was sure of that detail.
“Do you think Angela took them?” Chip asked.
Jonah shrugged, forgetting that Chip couldn’t see him.
“What good does that do us?” Jonah said. He didn’t want to speculate about where Angela might have gone with the papers. A new thought occurred to him. “Doesn’t Katherine still have all the pictures stored on her cell phone?”
“She deleted them after we downloaded everything,” Chip moaned. “She said they took up too much space, and she was worried that your parents might see them, because sometimes your mom borrows that phone….”
This was true. Mom had been having trouble with her own phone battery.
Some of Chip’s despair was beginning to infect Jonah.
“Then we don’t have anything left from those lists at all?” Jonah asked, his own voice edging toward panic. “Nothing?”
“I still have Daniella McCarthy’s phone number on my cell,” Chip offered.
“But no one else’s?”
“I used our home phone for everyone else,” Chip said. “Katherine told me I was being mean, trying to rack up all those minutes on my cell.”
And you actually listened to her?Jonah wanted to scream. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut.Stay calm , he ordered himself.
“Your parents,” he began slowly. “If they don’t want to talk about you being adopted—do you think they might have deleted those files? Do you think if maybe you go ask them—?”
“My parents never look at my computer,” Chip said bitterly. “They don’t care. The only people who knew about those files were you and Katherine and me. And I didn’t tell anyone. Did you? Did Katherine?”
“No,” Jonah said automatically. But he still had his eyes squeezed shut, and it was as if he had his memory displayed on the backs of his eyelids: he could see his own hand sweeping across a page, writing out, “All the information is on Chip’s computer, in the basement at his house.”
“Oh, no,” Jonah said. His eyes sprang open again, and he caught a glimpse of his own stricken expression in his parents’ dresser mirror. “The note. The note I left for my parents when we went to the library, just in case something happened…”
“Did they read it?” Chip asked, horrified. “You think they came over and erased my computer files? Would they do that?”
“No….” But Jonah took the phone and rushed down the hall to his own room. The note was still hidden in the top drawer of his desk, right beside t
he mysterious letter,Beware! They’re coming back to get you. He thought about the casual way Dad had shouted up the stairs about the phone call—Dad hadn’t seen this note. And Mom was still out running errands. She hadn’t seen it either.
Then he remembered the man at the library, struggling under the table as Jonah scrambled out the window.
Go, Jonah! Hurry! And Jonah—I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—
“Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. “It was one of them.”
“Them who?”
But Jonah was peering suspiciously around his room. It looked like usual, the NBA poster a little crooked on the wall, the blue bedspread slightly rumpled, the closet door open a crack with his shoes half-in and half-out. It was all so familiar. But it had been invaded at least twice now, that he knew of. The very air seemed to crackle with danger.
Except—was it really dangerous right this minute? If people could just appear anywhere they wanted (and he was still trying to get his mind around that idea), why didn’t someone just grab him now? Why hadn’t they taken him back with the plane, or during any one of the thousands of seconds of his life since then?
Maybe time travel wasn’t so easy.
Be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—
Seen later. Monitored…Maybe the next word after that would have beenlater too. Maybe, if time travel even existed, there were limits to it. Maybe it was something about the rotation of the earth, or sunspots, or something bizarre like that. So anything written down was dangerous, because it could be seen at any time. And other things, things that could be monitored were cell phone pictures, and computer hard drives, and…
Jonah gasped.
“Chip, I can’t tell you anything right now. Not over the phone.”
“Why not?” Chip demanded. “This is crazy—you’re starting to sound like Angela.”
“What if Angela’s right?”
TWENTY-TWO
Jonah, Chip, and Katherine slumped in various chairs in Chip’s basement.
“Is this safe?” Katherine asked. “Talking together here now?”
“I don’t know,” Jonah said miserably. “How long do sound waves stay in the air?”
“I can check online,” Chip said. He turned around to the computer and began to type in,How long do…
“Chip, someone could check your search record, find out that you asked that question,” Jonah objected.
“So what? I could just be doing science homework,” Chip said. But he stopped typing. The wordsHow long do stayed on the computer screen.
How long do we have to figure everything out?Jonah wondered.How long do we have before someone appears out of nowhere and carries us away?
He’d finally told Chip and Katherine about seeing an intruder in his room, the night they’d first gotten the lists of witnesses and survivors. Then he’d explained his theory about how someone—the janitor? The janitor’s enemy?—had found out about Chip’s computer files from the note in Jonah’s desk. And how, if he—whoever “he” was—could find Jonah’s note and Chip’s computer files, then that person could just as easily tap their phones. For all Jonah knew, someone could have gone back in time to tap their phones ten years ago, but was listening to their conversations fifty years in the future.
Jonah was beginning to feel hopeless. How could you resist someone with that kind of power?
“All right,” Katherine said briskly. “Let’s assume that talking is safe because, if it isn’t, we can’t do anything. Chip, do you have any paper?”
“Katherine, I told you—they can read anything we write down!”
Katherine rolled her eyes and reached down to pull a sheet of paper out of Chip’s printer. She snagged a pen out of the middle of a stack of computer games and dodged Jonah’s hands when he tried to pull the pen away from her.
“I know, I know,” she said impatiently. “I’ll destroy the evidence as soon as I’m done. I’ll eat the paper if I have to. But we have to get organized!”
She bent over the computer desk and wrote two headings on the top of her paper:What we know andWhat we think . She drew a line down the middle of the page, dividing the two topics. UnderWhat we know , she wrote,JB gave us witnesses/survivors lists . And then underWhat we think , she added,So JB’s probably not the one who took them away .
“JB?” Chip asked.
“Janitor boy,” Katherine said. “I would have called him CJB for ‘cute janitor boy,’ but that’s just my opinion, and probably not how you and Jonah think about him, so—”
“Katherine!” Jonah growled through gritted teeth. He pointed to the list. “Focus!”
Katherine grinned triumphantly, not looking chastised at all. Dimly, Jonah realized that she may have beentrying to aggravate him, to jolt him out of his gloom. She shook her wet hair gleefully, sending out drops of water all over the paper.
Wait a minute—had Katherine really agreed to come down here to Chip’s without blow-drying her hair first? Jonah hadn’t noticed before, because he’d been so freaked out. But this undoubtedly meant that Katherinedidn’t have a crush on Chip. Or, if she did, she thought this mystery was more important…
Jonah decided to apply his brainpower to Katherine’s list instead of her love interests.
“JB was trying to protect us from E,” he said, pointing to theWhat we know column. “AndE stands forenemy .”
Nobody argued with him.
“Okay,” Katherine said after a pause, and wrote it down.
“We need another category,” Chip said. “What we don’t know—why was JB protecting us? What did E want to do with us?”
He pulled out another sheet and handed it to Katherine. None of them commented on the fact thatWhat we don’t know got a whole sheet of paper, whileWhat we know andWhat we think got only a half sheet apiece.
JB tried to warn Jonahwent into theknow category, but they all agreed thatthe phones are tapped only qualified forWhat we think .
“Angela vanished into thin air,” Jonah said. “Know.”
He was glad that Chip didn’t challenge that one.
Without asking, Katherine addedinto a time warp? andwith our lists underWhat we think .
“And then underWhat we don’t know , you can add about a billion questions,” Chip said. “How? Why? How did she know the time warp was there? How did she go through it today when she’d been studying time travel for thirteen years and hadn’t gotten anywhere?”
Katherine chewed on the pen thoughtfully.
“I bet JB helped her,” she said.
“But Jonah would have seen JB if he’d been there with her,” Chip objected.
“Maybe he told her how the time warp worked,” Katherine said. “Or…maybe he was invisible.”
Invisible?Jonah thought.We’ve got to worry about invisible people too?
“Angela didn’t look upset or anything,” Jonah said. On the contrary, when he pictured her stepping into nothingness, re-living that moment he’d already re-lived so many times already, he thought she’d had an excited expression on her face. Or…determined. “But—maybe we should call her. Just to make sure. And to see if she has our lists.”
“Call her?” Chip asked. “Fifteen minutes ago, you wouldn’t even talk to me on the phone!”
“I know, but if we’re careful about what we say, just kind of hint that we want to meet with her again, to find out what happened, to see if she has our lists…. Hand me the cell phone, Katherine,” Jonah said.
Katherine dug the phone out of her pocket and handed it over.
“We don’t have her phone number anymore, remember?” Chip said.
“I’ll call information,” Jonah said. He was already starting to punch in numbers.
Katherine scrunched up her face, like she was thinking hard.
“She lives on Stonehenge,” she said. “Stonehenge Court or Street or somethin
g like that—I remember thinking that someone involved in a mystery should have a mysterious address like that.”
“Thanks,” Jonah said. To the operator, he said, “I need the number for an Angela or A. DuPre on Stonehenge—DuPre—D-U-P-R-E.”
“Thank you,” the operator said. And then, a second later, “I don’t have a listing for any A. or Angela DuPre anywhere in the city.”
“But I know she’s there!” Jonah protested.
“Maybe her number’s unlisted,” the operator said. “Or she just uses a cell phone. Lots of people are doing that now, and they’re not in the directory.”
It would be like Angela to have an unlisted number,Jonah thought.
“Thanks anyway,” he said, and cut off the call.
Chip and Katherine were staring, like they were worried about him now.
“It doesn’t matter,” Chip joked. “She’s probably not back from the time warp anyhow.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Katherine said. “You could go through a time warp, and stay in the other time for thirty years, and then return just a split second after you left.”
“I was still watching a split second after she left,” Jonah said grumpily. “She didn’t come back.”
Not being able to find Angela’s number bothered him more than it should have. It was like he didn’t have control over anything.
“Okay, then,” Katherine said, with forced cheer. “How about all the stuff Angela told us about the plane and the babies? And—her theory about you two being from the future?”
“That’s all impossible,” Chip said. “Isn’t it?”
And yet, they’d sort of begun treating it like it was real, like they believed it.
“Why would anyone come back from the future to now?” Jonah asked. “What’s happening now that matters? And here—in Ohio?”
“Yeah,” Katherine said. “If you’re going to go back in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. Or John F. Kennedy. Or, you keep theTitanic from sinking. Or you stop 9/11. Or—I know—you assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to start World War II.”
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