Caught (Missing) (2 page)

This also cut off the possibility that they could call Andrea, the girl Jonah liked. Not that she liked him the same way.

Though she might someday, after she figures out how to deal with the
results of her own time travels,
he reminded himself.
Or maybe . . .

Katherine tugged impatiently on Jonah’s arm. Clearly, she wasn’t going to let him just sit around thinking.

“Come on. Let’s walk to Chip’s house,” Katherine said, pulling harder. “We’ll make sure he’s okay, and then all three of us can figure out what’s going on.”

Jonah frowned. He couldn’t suggest walking to Andrea’s as well, because she lived a lot farther away.

Anyhow, he could think of a few problems with Katherine’s idea.

“Do you really think we should leave school?” he asked.

Katherine rolled her eyes.

“What—are you afraid time will unfreeze all of a sudden, and you’ll get caught playing hooky?” she asked.

Well, yes, that was pretty much what Jonah was afraid of. It was terrible that he’d managed to survive all sorts of life-threatening situations in three different centuries and yet still had to worry about following school rules.

“Coward,” Katherine taunted him.

“Boy crazy,” Jonah mocked her.

But, to prove that he wasn’t actually a coward, Jonah stood up and dashed out the classroom door ahead of his sister.

The stopped time seemed even freakier outside. A trio of Canadian geese coming in to land on the pond in front of the school were just suspended in midair. Some woman—was that Rusty Donavan’s mom?—had evidently been driving over the speed bumps in the school turnaround a little too fast, and her entire minivan was frozen an inch or two off the ground.

“I don’t like this,” Katherine muttered as they walked down the sidewalk.

“We’ve seen time stop before,” Jonah said, with more bravado than he actually felt.

“Yeah, in other people’s time. In the past,” Katherine said. She tilted her head back and called out loudly toward the sky, “Nobody’s supposed to go messing around with
my
time, you hear?”

Her time,
Jonah thought. It bothered him that she hadn’t said “our.” But why would she? Katherine wasn’t adopted like he was; she wasn’t a missing child of history like him. She could be sure that their parents were her real parents; she could be sure that the twenty-first century was exactly where she belonged.

Jonah couldn’t be sure of any of that. He didn’t have any idea when or where he really belonged. He had no clue whose DNA he shared.

He looked around nervously, all his worries about the stopped time getting mixed up with his fears about finding out who he really was.

No, not just mixing,
he thought.
Multiplying.

Katherine playfully whacked him on the arm.

“Stop freaking out!” she told him. “Nobody’s going to catch us! You know those rumors about how Mr. Richey stands out here watching for kids who sneak out? None of that’s true. Kayla told me that Marina told her that Abdul told her that Mr. Richey started those rumors himself!”

Mr. Richey was the assistant principal.

Jonah slugged her back.

“What about Second catching us?” he asked, rounding the corner of the building. “Or Gary and Hodge? Or—”

Suddenly Katherine jerked back on his arm, barely stopping him from slamming into somebody frozen in
place, pressed against the side of the building.

No, make that two somebodies.

Kissing.

“Is that . . . one of the cafeteria ladies?” Katherine asked, peeking beneath a hairnet.

“And . . . the janitor?” Jonah asked, recognizing the olive-colored shirt and the side of a gray-streaked beard.

Katherine gingerly pulled up the employee ID tags from the cafeteria lady’s apron and the janitor’s shirt pocket.

“Norma Jones and Martin Jones,” she read out loud. “Oh, I bet they’re married! Isn’t that romantic? They’re both, like, sixty, and they’ve probably been married forever, and they still sneak out in the middle of the day to—”

“Gross everyone out,” Jonah finished. He tugged on his sister’s arm, pulling her away from the kissing couple. “They really should hide better than that.”

“Do you suppose they met on the job, like, forty years ago?” Katherine asked as they walked on. “Do you suppose he figured out she was in love with him because she kept giving him double servings of the Johnny Marzetti?”

Jonah saw what Katherine was doing. She was yammering on and on about the cafeteria lady and the janitor to distract herself from scarier questions. Katherine had done the same kind of thing when they’d been in
danger in 1483 and 1485 and 1600 and 1611. But Jonah wasn’t any good at yammering. The scary questions kept flooding his mind:

Are
we in danger?

Are Andrea and Chip and Alex and all the other missing kids from history roaming around unfrozen and terrified and in danger too?

If JB couldn’t answer us, does that mean he’s in danger somewhere else?

Who stopped time?

If JB isn’t around to watch over us and keep us safe, then is somebody else maybe keeping track of our every move?

Somebody . . . malevolent?

They pressed on, Jonah barely listening to Katherine’s babbling. He stopped paying much attention to their surroundings, either, because it was too unnerving to see so many frozen people and frozen cars and frozen birds and even frozen smoke, hovering above chimneys. Automatically he turned out of the neighborhood surrounding the school. He stepped off the sidewalk to cross the lane leading to the library.

And then, out of nowhere, a car sped toward them, so suddenly that Jonah could only think in spurts:

Why isn’t it stopped like everything else?

Why isn’t it stopping now?

Is it going to run over us?

Jonah dived off to the side of the lane, into the ditch that ran along the street. He hit the ground shoulder-first but immediately rolled back up into a crouch. He strained to see where Katherine had gone. Why wasn’t she diving into the ditch beside him? Had she just dived in the other direction, landing in the ditch on the other side of the lane?

No. Katherine was still standing in the middle of the lane. She’d put her hands on her hips and was squinting toward the speeding car as if she could stare it down.

“Katherine!” Jonah screamed. “Move!”

Katherine didn’t even turn her head. The car kept speeding toward her. Closer, closer, closer . . . There wasn’t time for Jonah to save her.

And then at the last moment the car stopped, right beside Katherine.

Katherine flipped her hair back and glanced over her shoulder toward Jonah.

“Did you really think
Angela
would do anything to hurt us?” she asked.

“Um . . . er . . .”

For the first time, Jonah looked to see who was driving the car. It was a tall, statuesque African-American woman: their friend Angela, the only adult in the twenty-first century who knew about the time-travel trips Jonah and Katherine had made. Who, actually, was the only adult from this time period who had taken any time-travel trips of her own. At one point she’d been the only adult involved with the whole time-travel mess whom Jonah trusted.

Embarrassed, Jonah stood up and tried to brush dirt and dried grass off his shirt.

“Hi, Angela,” he said sheepishly. “I couldn’t see who was driving. And it looked like you were coming right toward us. I guess my perspective was a little off . . . .”

“No worries,” Angela said. “Better safe than sorry.”

But the right corner of her mouth inched up ever so slightly.

Jonah wondered how ridiculous he’d looked, diving into the ditch.

Then a new thought struck him—a good distraction.

“Wait—how’d you get a car to work in stopped time,
when I couldn’t even make a phone call?” he asked.

“Elucidator,” Angela said, holding up a black rectangular device that seemed to be attached to her dashboard with a cable. It looked as if she were just charging a cell phone. But Jonah knew that this was one of those times when looks were deceiving. Elucidators were like that. They always took on the appearance of some ordinary object: a rock in the fifteenth century, a candleholder in the seventeenth, a cell phone in the twenty-first. But Elucidators had provided a way for Jonah to communicate across time, to turn invisible when it was too dangerous for him to be seen, and to travel through time in the first place.

Elucidators were great—when you knew how to use them.

“JB gave you your own Elucidator?” Katherine asked, a hint of jealousy in her voice.

“Only so I could watch out for the two of you,” Angela said. “Only to be used in case of emergency. Like now.”

Any trace of humor was gone from her voice.

“So call him already,” Katherine said. “Make him tell you what’s going on!”

Angela shook her head grimly.

“He’s vanished,” she said. “Him and Hadley and every other time agent I could think of to call. Last I heard
Hadley was dealing with some new crisis in the past. But I don’t know where any of them went.”

“They weren’t going to make any more trips to the past,” Jonah said stubbornly. “Not until it was safe.”

Angela frowned at him.

“Hadley said it wasn’t safe for them
not
to go,” she murmured.

Angela’s eyes flooded with tears, and Jonah remembered that Angela and Hadley had become . . . what was that stupid term that Katherine used sometimes for kids who had crushes on each other? “Special friends”?

Jonah grimaced. He had too many other problems to try to figure out grown-ups’ relationships.

“Hey, hey, I’m sure Hadley and JB and the others will have everything under control soon,” Angela said, misinterpreting Jonah’s grimace. She made it sound as if he were some little kid who had to be comforted.

Even if it meant lying.

Katherine flapped her hands, as if trying to fight the unnerving stillness around them. Or as if she could wave away all the dangers of the past and present.

“Can we talk about all this on our way to Chip’s house?” Katherine asked impatiently. “Come
on,
Jonah, get in the car.”

Jonah noticed that Katherine hadn’t exactly stopped
to ask Angela if she minded taking them to Chip’s. But Angela was already reaching around to unlock the car’s back door.

Jonah scrambled up and jumped in. Katherine slid in on the passenger side in front.

“Hurry!” Katherine begged as Angela shifted the car into gear.

Angela hit the gas, urging the car faster, faster, faster . . .

All the way to twenty-five miles per hour.

“I don’t think you need to worry about obeying speed limits right now,” Jonah said.

“The Elucidator is probably defying several laws of physics just to get the car to move at all,” Angela said. “This is the best I can do.”

Jonah realized that his notion of the car as speeding toward him and Katherine before had been a relative thing. It had only
seemed
to be going fast because everything else around them was completely still.

And it did feel wrong to be moving inside the car—more wrong than when he and Katherine had just been walking. It was as if even the air molecules around him were fighting against the motion.

Is it because the air molecules are traveling with us?
Jonah wondered.
Or are we displacing them and then they go back where they belong after we pass by? Or . . .

Those kinds of problems always tied his brain in knots, even without the complication of stopped time.

The strain showed on Angela’s face, too.

“You drove like this all the way from your house?” Jonah asked. Angela lived on the other side of the city.

Angela shook her head.

“Only the last mile or so was in stopped time,” she said. “I was already on my way here. Hadley told me to come find you two when he left for the past.”

“What—were you going to show up at school and pretend to be our long-lost aunt or something?” Katherine asked.

“I was still figuring out a good story,” Angela said. “I don’t think the ‘aunt’ thing would work very well.”

“White kids can have African-American aunts! It happens all the time!” Katherine protested, her voice going a little squeaky. Typical Katherine—she got upset when she thought people were being racist or sexist. Even when they weren’t, actually.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t help the story,” Angela said with a shrug.

Jonah was still caught on something else Angela had said.

“Hold on,” he interrupted. “You said Hadley and JB wanted you to watch over me and Katherine. Why us?
Why not Chip or Andrea or any of the other missing children from history? Or—is someone else watching over them?”

“You and Katherine have traveled through time a lot more than any of the other kids,” Angela said. “You’ve had the most contact with JB. That puts you in the most . . .”

Jonah was pretty sure that the next word she was going to say was “danger.” But then she glanced over at Katherine and in the rearview mirror toward Jonah.

“Oh, you know how those time agents are,” Angela said, her tone suddenly too light and teasing. “They’re always so concerned about being logical and fair, and keeping things balanced and equal. But you
know
you’re their favorites.”

“But—,” Katherine began.

“Do I turn here to get to Chip’s, or is it the next street?” Angela asked.

For the rest of the way to Chip’s, Angela acted as if she needed the most specific directions ever. Did “turn after the blue house” mean the light blue house on the corner or the turquoise one farther down? Was Chip’s house five or six houses away from Jonah and Katherine’s house?

“When JB said you should watch over us, did he mean—,” Jonah tried once.

“What?” Angela said, swerving up onto the sidewalk to
avoid a stopped car blocking the street. “Sorry, Jonah, I’ve really got to concentrate on driving. This is like something from a car-chase movie, where you have to keep going from lane to lane.”