by Bob Bannon
XXIV
They stayed most of the night, until the fire was under control. Jonah told the F.B.I., who showed up only shortly before the fire broke out, that he and his father were locked in La La’s Hair Salon but his father was unconscious when he made the decision to go for help out the backdoor, because he had used the backdoor at Vineyard Clothing before, but forgot that the door locked from the inside and he couldn’t get back in. He had been trying every door and that’s when he walked back around to this side of the mall where he found Emma.
The Sherriff approved Jonah going home with the MacIntyre’s for the rest of the night and Doctor Wong took Emma home. There would be more questions for everyone tomorrow and possibly the day after that. The Federal authorities were not at all happy with the local police station’s handling of the situation.
For a week later, they were all questioned at length and recorded for the record. The story Emma and Eric told both together and then separately played out nicely. Both said they hadn’t seen Jonah or his father, but they hadn’t moved in the direction of the beauty salon.
Their parents were completely confounded by the situation or why any one of them would be taken by terrorists. The story came up about Doctor Havensby’s arrest warrant, which completely floored Mrs. MacIntyre. She told the authorities she had only spoken to the man a few times over the phone and that he seemed completely normal, if only a little hasty to get off the phone. Doctor Wong had never even heard of him. Athena Stapleton, who told all of her interviews from a hospital bed, said her statements about Nickolas Havensby had already been recorded the first time around and she hadn’t seen him since. She didn’t know Jonah, or any of the others involved. She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In truth, she had been forcibly taken from her home, but artfully distanced herself from the entire situation claiming to have been dropping her youngest grandchild at the dance and having no other information or knowledge of the men who had taken her to the mall.
The F.B.I. explained that there was a television and a smashed wireless router at the scene and that both seemed to be jury-rigged into the emergency electrical system, but everything they found was stolen from inside the mall. They never mentioned a laptop. The armored vehicles were stolen property and not even a fingerprint was recovered when both were found at equidistant points on the opposite ends of town.
Mrs. MacIntyre insisted on being in the room while Jonah was being questioned, since he didn’t have a parent available. Barring that, she’d be more than happy to call her attorney. The authorities relented. Jonah wondered if they would spill his secret, but then he wondered if they even knew. They seemed far more interested in his father and seemed satisfied that he didn’t know anything about his father’s illegal activities. He told them the actual truth about growing up, even about living up on the highway turn-off, another shock for Mrs. MacIntyre.
He explained that his father made him promise never to tell anyone where they lived and that he only told Eric the truth a few days ago and that’s where they were when Eric got in trouble. Jonah realized the story fed into the government’s plot against his dad, but he couldn’t come out and say his father had been missing and he’d been wandering around town for months either. Mrs. MacIntyre proclaimed it a terrible burden to put on a boy.
When the authorities checked out the house and saw the destruction, they deduced that fire must be the way these terrorists cover their tracks. First at the house, and then at the mall. Since no body was found anywhere in the mall, their only conclusion was that Doctor Havensby was working with the terrorists for money. The newspapers made the same connections for weeks afterwards, until the investigation suddenly and mysteriously dried up again.
Yes, something had ripped the security gate from its hinges, but it happened so fast that no one could be sure what it was. Eric said he simply saw someone running down the hall and called out for help. He had no idea something would barrel through and tear the gate apart. But if he ever saw it again, he’d thank it. Strangely, that part of the story never made it to the press.
The F.B.I. played a game of cat and mouse with Mrs. MacIntyre for almost three weeks with regards to Jonah’s custody. They claimed he should be put in the foster care system for his own benefit. Every time he heard the words ‘foster care’ his mind inserted the words ‘high security lab’. He couldn’t get over the feeling they were going to push hard until they got him, but then again, no one even gave him a sideways glance. Was it possible that all this pressure was coming from somewhere higher up? Then again, how many people could have possibly been in on his secret?
Nevertheless, the terrorist story as well as his father’s story made the rounds in the national newspapers and he was too high-profile now to simply disappear, locked away in a government lab. People all over town would wonder where he went and what had happened to the boy with the oddly different eyes. Emma and Eric had become local celebrities at school. Not that Emma needed the boost, but Eric loathed the glare of the spotlight.
In the end, Mrs. MacIntyre was awarded temporary custody of Jonah Havensby until his father could be found and the mystery of his disappearance solved, under the condition he begin school immediately and Mrs. MacIntyre could provide a proper bedroom. She immediately had her decorator out and parceled out a small portion of her insurance settlement with the mall to re-do the second floor of the garage into a bedroom apartment for both he and Eric – on the condition that the minute any serious rules were broken, Eric would be right back to his old room.
A month later, everything seemed to die down and Jonah had settled into the ninth grade alongside Eric and Emma, although she seemed to keep a little bit of a distance in the wake of things. He had a feeling she had considered what she’d seen and couldn’t handle it, or maybe Doctor Wong might be feeling a little overprotective, which made it slightly awkward now that he was seeing quite a bit of Wendy MacIntyre.
As he approached his tree-house on a sunny, oddly warm, Saturday afternoon, Jonah noticed that the now-rusting pet carrier was still exactly where Adam had tossed it over by the large rocks. As he went to move it, he was stunned to see his same, scrawny, downstairs neighbor come trotting out of it. Even though Jonah was still on the other side of the creek, Grouchy reared up and gave him a suspicious look.
“You’re still here?” Jonah asked in surprised. “You know, I’m never going to understand you,” he added as he walked to the tree-house shaking his head in disbelief.
He noticed that the ladder was down and there was a bike tucked behind the long vines covering the trunk of the tree. Something he had shown Eric how to do, but he had Eric’s bike, which he parked right next to the other. It could only be one person.
He climbed to the top of the ladder and stepped onto the patio of his tree-house and took the time to pull up and secure the ladder. He ducked his head inside the door and saw no one there, so he walked the length of the patio. When he turned, he saw her. She was wearing a light blue sweater and dark blue jeans. The fur-lined boots she perpetually wore all winter hand been replaced with white sneakers. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She was enjoying a small patch of light through the trees with her back against the wall.
Without opening her eyes, she smiled and said “Sorry. Eric showed me where it was. You don’t mind, do you?
“No. Not at all, actually. But if you’re going to start hanging out, you should know it’s safer to pull the ladder up after you,” Jonah said with a big smile on his face as he joined her sitting in the sun.
“Sorry,” she said again. “I guess I don’t know the rules. I guess I don’t know a lot.” She said it a little more pointedly than it sounded in her head, and then looked at him. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
“I’ll tell you everything,” he said, looking her dead in the eye. “Everything I know, anyway.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes in the sunlight, leaning his head back against the wooden wall. She was sitting so clo
se, she dropped her head on his shoulder. Her hand trailed the length of his arm and she coiled her fingers around his.
He began with a tale about ‘dangerous men’.
END
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading my first novel.
Hopefully, there will be more tales of Jonah and the search for what happened to his father soon.
Writing a novel can be a daunting task, seeking to publish it is a nerve-wracking experience.
It took me a year to complete ‘Jonah Havensby’ and then spent months researching the ins and outs of submitting to agents, longer still to select the agents I wanted to approach. Instead of blanketing a random list, I took some very good advice and looked up those agents who accepted Young Adult and/or Science Fiction novel and I had a few kind rejections.
(To those aspiring authors, I tell you that a rejection is still high praise in that it means an agent took the time to look at your submission and reply. Even if you receive many of them, I still say you should continue to submit to other agents until you find the one that works best for your material.)
Finally, I read an agent’s interview which listed off a few things she thought the current market just wouldn’t be interested in, shape-changers among them, and I decided then and there that I would electronically publish my first novel and allow the audience to decide what the current market would be interested in. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you liked this book, please leave a review. Reviews not only help other readers to determine if a book is for them, they also help Amazon determine how much attention a book is receiving and, therefore, how much attention Amazon will give the book.
Reviews also immensely help authors become better story tellers.
Whether your review is positive or negative, it helps the author to know what you liked and what you didn’t so, hopefully, those thoughts are put forth when writing their next novel.
Thanks again! And I look forward to your comments.
Bob Bannon - author
[email protected]
Table of Contents
SECTION I
SECTION II
SECTION III
SECTION IV
SECTION V
SECTION VI
SECTION VII
SECTION VIII
SECTION IX
SECTION X
SECTION XI
SECTION XII
SECTION XIII
SECTION XIV
SECTION XV
SECTION XVI
SECTION XVII
SECTION XVIII
SECTION XIX
SECTION XX
SECTION XXI
SECTION XXII
SECTION XXIII
SECTION XXIV
AUTHOR’S NOTE
