Lindbergh froze. So did every cop in the room.
“Did he do it?” Lindbergh asked in the iciest voice Jonah had ever heard. “Am I facing my son’s killer?”
Jonah stared at JB.
You understand English! Jonah wanted to scream at him. You know how to speak it! Don’t you know speaking German just makes you look guilty? Don’t you know you’ve got to get out of this?
JB didn’t even seem to have heard what Lindbergh said. The boy was rolling his head around as if he was the one in anguish.
The translator repeated Lindbergh’s question for kid JB in German.
“Didn’t you see the broken rung on the ladder? Didn’t you all figure out what happened? How the kidnapper slipped and dropped the baby?” JB asked. Jonah had to remind himself that the answer was still in German; that was why neither Lindbergh nor any of the policemen reacted.
Before the translator had a chance to explain to the others, JB began clutching his own head, tearing at his own hair.
“It’s my fault he’s dead,” JB said. “I never thought it would work this way.”
The translator told Lindbergh this part of what JB had said.
Instantly Lindbergh lunged across the room, aiming for JB. He had his fists up, ready to pummel JB.
Jonah couldn’t watch. He slid off to the side and slipped down into a crouch.
Why would JB say that? He wondered. How could he not know I’m still alive, still back here in the time cave? Isn’t that what he warned me about?
Jonah leaned back against the hard rock wall and tried to figure everything out.
JB can’t just be acting, Jonah thought. He really seems to believe he saw Charles Lindbergh’s son die. Saw me die.
What would make him think that?
Maybe JB thought he really did see me go back in time with him and Angela? Jonah thought. Maybe he thought I rejoined my own tracer when the original kidnapper was carrying me down the ladder?
Jonah could kind of see how this might have happened. It’d been dark. Maybe Gary and Hodge had snatched Jonah out of time so quickly that JB really did believe he’d fallen from the ladder and been killed. Maybe the original kidnapper had reacted as though that was really what happened.
But if I vanished from my original time period because of Gary and Hodge kidnapping me from the other kidnapper, what’s keeping me from ending up back there right now? Why isn’t the monitor sending me back like it did JB and Angela?
There had been a moment during his time travel through the 1600s that Jonah still hated thinking about. One of JB’s former employees had forced time itself to unravel by making it possible for two copies of the same person to appear at the exact same moment. It broke all the rules; it practically destroyed all of time. Was something like that happening now?
Only maybe I vanished twice, rather than appearing twice? Jonah wondered.
He didn’t understand. He had to go back to watching the scene on the monitor.
Lindbergh was practically beating up kid JB, and the police were standing back and watching. It went on and on—until finally one of the policemen pulled Lindbergh away from him.
“We’ll need to have a trial,” he said apologetically. He was apologizing to Lindbergh, not JB. “The world will have to see that we do things fairly here in America.”
“This man killed my son!” Lindbergh raged.
“This is what I deserve!” JB said, still in German. His battered face was starting to swell; one of his sleeves hung in tatters from his arm.
JB, what are you talking about? Jonah wondered. What’s wrong with you?
“What’s the murderer’s name, anyway?” one of the policemen asked the translator. “We’ll want to get the news out instantly that we’ve found our man. We’ll need his address, too.”
The translator asked JB the same thing all over again in German.
JB kept his head down, as if in shame.
“I am Tete Einstein,” he said. “I live in Zurich, Switzerland. I’m the son of Albert Einstein.”
The translator told the others what JB had said.
“Albert Einstein’s that scientist in Germany with the crazy ideas,” the translator said, suddenly looking queasy. “How could this be his son?”
“Is it possible we’re dealing with an escapee from an insane asylum?” one of the policemen asked. “Is it possible he had nothing to do with the kidnapping—he just wandered onto the grounds with the rest of the curious public and made up a story to get into the house?”
“But why would he confess to killing the son of America’s greatest hero?” one of the other officers asked. “Right to Colonel Lindbergh’s face?”
“Is that confession proof that he’s guilty—or just proof that he’s totally nuts?” another officer asked quietly.
Jonah had other questions.
“What are you thinking?” he yelled at kid JB’s image on the screen. “Why would you tell them that identity?”
It was almost worse than JB admitting that he was a time traveler from the future. Why hadn’t JB just come up with a convincing lie?
Is it because he’s back in the twentieth century for the third—no, fourth—time around? Jonah thought, horrified. Did going back again and again trigger something? What if he really has forgotten that he ever became anyone besides Tete Einstein?
Why else would he tell the police he was Einstein’s son?
Jonah forced himself to calm down and think about dates. In another time hollow, in what seemed like an entirely different lifetime, he’d been able to watch virtually every moment of the lives of Albert and Mileva Einstein and their family. It wasn’t actually a different lifetime: Tete Einstein had been born in 1910. Mileva Einstein had secretly sent him into the future when he was a teenager, so that would have been sometime in the 1920s.
It would have had to have been the early 1920s, Jonah thought. Before Lindbergh’s flight, or else JB wouldn’t have been able to go back to that time period with Angela and me. He would have been the one left behind in the time cave here, and Angela and I would have been doomed because we wouldn’t have had an Elucidator with us to save us.
Jonah shivered, even though it wasn’t possible to feel cold in a time hollow. He went back to concentrating on dates. He caught a glimpse on the screen of a notebook one of the policemen was using, with a date written clearly at the top: March 1, 1932.
So JB—as Tete Einstein—was supposed to be twenty-two in 1932, Jonah thought. Not thirteen.
How messed up could time get from JB returning to part of his original time period as a teenager instead of the young adult he was supposed to be? And then—how could he have told policemen who he was? What if they took him seriously and tried to double-check? Jonah wondered if it wouldn’t be the best thing in the world if everyone just thought kid JB was crazy. Especially if JB started trying to explain his strange age with time travel.
Then Jonah remembered the mental institutions he’d seen Tete Einstein in during the original time he’d watched of the Einsteins’ lives.
He really hoped the mental institutions in America were better than the mental institutions in Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. But he kind of doubted it.
Angela, where are you? Jonah wondered. Please tell me you’re off somewhere finding an Elucidator so you can rescue JB and come back for me. Or come back for me so we can rescue JB together.
Jonah looked around the cave. No Angela. She wasn’t showing up anywhere on the monitor screen, either.
He remembered how the two women had been hustled out of the room.
Katherine would be standing here telling me, “Duh, Jonah, women weren’t allowed to do much of anything back in the early twentieth century,” Jonah thought. That was why Angela was making such a big deal about that one woman finding a way to become a pilot when she was both female and black. Cut Angela some slack—she’s probably having a terrible time finding any way to get help!
Thinking about the black
female pilot Angela had told him about also made Jonah notice: Every single face he’d seen in the Lindbergh house was white. Every single police officer was male.
Well, if anyone can succeed as a black female in the 1930s, it’s Angela, Jonah thought loyally.
She still didn’t show up back in the cave.
Jonah went back over to the car where his parents still slept.
“What am I going to do?” he asked them.
Nobody could actually hear him, so he let himself say what he really wanted to say.
“Mommy? Daddy?” he whimpered. “What am I going to do?”
TWENTY
Jonah thought about trying to figure out how to open the door of the time cave and go back to the twenty-first century. But that would just set time in motion again. His parents would wake up, and he didn’t know what he could tell them or how he would keep them out of trouble.
Weeks ago Jonah would have rushed to do this anyway. It would have been action. It would have been something to do.
But how could Jonah open the door and let in all sorts of unknown dangers, when he might still learn more in the safety of the time cave? Even if he did end up having to open the time cave, shouldn’t he know everything he could before he did it?
Jonah winced and grimaced and ground his teeth and tried to think of some other plan.
And then he walked back to the monitor and went back to watching the Lindberghs agonizing over their missing son.
He saw kid JB led offscreen, and everyone else rejoining their tracers, time closing over the hole JB had made in it—had JB done that on purpose? Or just because he really was as confused and mentally ill as the original Tete Einstein?
Jonah couldn’t tell. He didn’t see anything else of JB, and he never heard anyone else mention him again. Evidently once the police decided he was crazy, they lost interest in him.
Jonah didn’t see any sign of Angela, either, even though he watched for her devotedly. He was constantly scanning shadows and hiding places.
I’ll just wait until I see Gary and Hodge show up, he thought. No matter when they kidnapped me, I know they eventually met with Charles Lindbergh. Because they were the reason he came to kidnap Katherine. I have to hear what they told him.
But in the meantime all Jonah could see was Charles and Anne Lindbergh despairing and hoping and despairing again, and desperately trying anything they could think of to get their son back.
It was so hard for Jonah to watch, because that was exactly how he felt about getting Katherine back.
Days passed on the monitor screen. A week. Two weeks. A month.
Lindbergh was dealing with 1930s gangsters now, tough-talking criminals who promised him they could find out who the kidnapper was; they could find the boy for him. Lindbergh made it known that he was perfectly willing to pay the ransom—he’d do anything to get his son back safely. Lindbergh worked with a go-between who followed a trail of clues to a meeting in a cemetery. Lindbergh was everywhere in the investigation, actually telling the police what to do.
That’s how I would want to be, Jonah thought. That’s what I really want to be doing, searching for Katherine.
Anne Lindbergh could do nothing. Jonah heard her and Charles talking about how she was pregnant with their second child, and so she needed to rest and take it easy. But not having anything to do just made the ordeal worse for her. She cried and wrote letters and journal entries about how helpless she felt. The letters and journal entries were heartbreaking in how hard she was trying to hold on to hope.
And . . . that’s more what I’m like, Jonah thought. She can’t do anything but hope and write. I can’t do anything but hope and watch.
Sometimes Jonah had to take a break from what was happening on the screen. He figured out how to pause it. At first all he could think of to do instead was go visit his sleeping parents. But then he started playing around with the other monitor screens as well, the ones showing the other missing children from history and their stories.
Oh—stupid me! he thought one morning—or afternoon—or, really, who knew what time of day it was? If the monitors zap people back to any time period they haven’t visited already, why don’t I find someone’s time to go back to that’s at least quasi-safe, and I’ll glom onto the Elucidator of whoever returned them to history? If it’s JB as an adult, he’ll understand! He’ll help me!
Jonah thought hard about this theory and eventually picked Ming Reynolds. Except for the people Jonah himself had been involved in returning to and then rescuing from their original time, Ming was the only one whose original identity Jonah knew anything about: She was a minor Chinese princess from some time period thousands of years ago.
I definitely wasn’t in that time period originally, Jonah told himself excitedly.
He set up the monitor to watch her original life. Tingles of excitement spread through him as he watched the first scene start.
Are those . . . water buffaloes she’s standing beside? he wondered.
He saw Gary and Hodge steal her away; he saw JB—the real JB! The adult!—carry her back, letting her second cousin get one glimpse of her beside the water buffaloes. And then he saw JB yank her back out of time as the water buffaloes began stampeding.
Jonah’s heart pounded and he started breathing hard, like he thought he’d need to run away from the water buffaloes any instant.
But the rock of the time cave stayed firmly beneath him. The water buffaloes stayed only on the screen.
So . . . is it only the monitor screen connected to the Lindberghs that can pull people back in time? Jonah wondered.
He became a little reckless, calling up the original time periods for every single one of the other thirty-five missing children from history. He saw fires, floods, plagues, more stampedes. Also: secret stabbings and secret shootings and, once, a secret beheading by guillotine in the middle of the night. He rewatched the stories where he knew the ending because he’d been present: the 1485 battle where Chip and Alex were supposed to have perished; the 1903 plague that was supposed to have killed Emily; the 1918 squad of assassins that had meant to kill Daniella and Gavin. He saved the 1600s for last, because that was when JB’s former employee, Second, had nearly ruined all of time. Even in those cases Jonah watched Andrea, Brendan, Antonio, and Dalton escape all over again, free and clear.
None of those viewings sucked Jonah back into another time. He didn’t expect it from the scenes he’d already witnessed in person, but he was surprised that the moments he was seeing for the very first time didn’t pull him back. And he was surprised that starting a familiar scene a second too early or lingering in it a second too long didn’t change anything either.
At least I’m seeing everything about how Gary and Hodge operated, kidnapping children, Jonah thought. At least I’m seeing all the creative ways JB managed to safely return and rescue those kids, even when Katherine and I weren’t involved.
It wasn’t until he had watched the very last kid’s story that Jonah realized something big:
Of the thirty-six missing kids who had been on the time-crashed plane at the beginning of Jonah’s modern life, all but one of them had already been safely returned to and then rescued from their original time period.
Jonah was the only one left.
TWENTY-ONE
What does that mean? Jonah wondered. Why didn’t JB ever tell me I’m the only one who hasn’t resolved his earlier life? When did all the rest of the kids have a chance to go back in time—was it before or after I was in 1918? Was it when Gavin and I were recovering from our bullet wounds?
Jonah didn’t have answers to any of his questions.
He went back to watching the Lindberghs’ desperate lives.
He wasn’t the only one: There were crowds outside their home, journalists from all over the world breathlessly covering every new lead.
On April 1, 1932, a month after the kidnapping, the Lindberghs received their tenth ransom note. This one told them to have their money ready
the very next night.
Jonah watched Charles Lindbergh climb into a car with fifty thousand dollars in a wooden box. Another car followed with an additional twenty thousand—the ransom demands had gone up.
The man who was acting as go-between for the Lindberghs, Dr. John Condon, began following a clue hunt through the Bronx: Go to a flower shop on Tremont Avenue and look for the next instructions under a rock. Walk to the intersection at the edge of St. Raymond’s Cemetery.
Lindbergh stayed a few hundred feet away from Condon, watching.
“Ay, Doctor,” a voice called to Condon from the cemetery.
Condon froze, halfway across the street. Then Jonah saw him start running toward the cemetery. He was a heavy man—he didn’t seem capable of running fast. Jonah saw a second man waiting for him in the shadows.
My kidnapper? Jonah wondered. Is it really him or just someone trying to steal the Lindberghs’ money?
It had to be that Jonah-as-the-Lindbergh-baby was still somewhere in the world in April 1932. If Gary and Hodge—or anyone else—had pulled him out of time by this date, then the monitor would suck him into the past, just as it had kid JB and kid Angela.
Wouldn’t it?
Jonah missed some of what the shadowy man in the cemetery was saying to John Condon. Condon gave him the box containing the fifty thousand dollars, and the shadowy man gave him an envelope that he said contained an exact description of where the Lindbergh child could be found.
“Give me your word that you’ll wait six hours before opening the directions,” the shadowy man said.
“I will,” Condon said, nodding with great sincerity.
Condon took the directions back to Charles Lindbergh, who was waiting in the car. Jonah couldn’t believe they made no effort to follow the man in the cemetery.
The camera—or whatever was giving Jonah the ability to watch the entire scene—let the man from the cemetery disappear back into the shadows as well.
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