Found (12 page)

“Not you, too!” Chip complained.

“I’m sorry!” Jonah said. He bent over, bracing his hands against his knees, trying to pull more air into his lungs, a delayed reaction to all his frantic pedaling and running. As soon as he could, he looked back up at Chip. “I’m not
sure
that’s what happened. I’m not sure of anything anymore. But I
think
that’s what happened, because it makes the most sense.”

“The most sense?” Chip repeated in amazement. “That’s the
best
explanation you can come up with? A time warp?”

“You didn’t see what I saw,” Jonah said. The edges of his vision were a little blurry even now, but this was a normal feeling.
Oxygen deprivation
, his mind automatically labeled it. He felt the way he did after he’d played an entire soccer game as midfielder, running up and down the field for a solid hour. He’d felt this way after the soccer game this morning.

Oh, jeez
, he thought.
I played that soccer game and then I rode my bike like a maniac—no wonder I feel so dead. No wonder I’m seeing things. I mean, not seeing things. Seeing someone vanish. Or, wait…maybe she wasn’t really there in the first place?

His thoughts got so tangled that his mind gave up trying to revise his memory of seeing Angela vanish. It had happened. Period.

“Katherine,” he gasped. “When you said you saw the janitor disappear—I shouldn’t have made fun of you. I didn’t know….”

“You believe me now?” Katherine asked. “Why?” Comprehension dawned on her face. “Angela disappeared, didn’t she? And you saw it….”

Jonah nodded.

“I’ll show you.”

He started to stumble over something—it was his own bike, where he’d dropped it in the middle of the sidewalk. He picked it up, and then it was nice to have the handlebars to lean on as he led Chip and Katherine through the parking lot, over to the cluster of pine trees. He dropped his bike again by the curb.

“She was right here,” he said, stepping into the pine needles. “I saw her. And then she took one step forward”—he took a step—“and she was gone.”

Jonah rocked back on his heels, stepped forward again. He felt nothing different in either place. There was no temperature change, no wind howling furiously around some time portal. In both spots—before his step and after—he felt just a gentle breeze, the sunshine warm on the back of his neck, the pine needles soft beneath his feet.

“Guess the time warp only wanted Angela, not you,” Chip said mockingly, but there was an edge of fear in his voice.

“Or—someone’s protecting you,” Katherine said.

Jonah looked at his sister. She was in the middle of pulling her hair back, capturing it in a ponytail. Jonah was surprised to see how red her face was. She had a ring of sweat where her bike helmet had pressed against her head, and the sweat was trickling down her cheeks. He was amazed that she was willing to be seen in public like this.

“Didn’t you notice,” she began in an oddly strangled voice, “how, when those men were fighting, the cute janitor guy yelled out, ‘Jonah! Chip! Run!’? He didn’t say
my
name. He didn’t say Angela’s.”

“You think those guys were fighting over
us
?” Chip asked. “Why not you, too?”

“You’re the babies from the plane,” Katherine said. “I’m not.”

Jonah thought about this. The fight and the fleeing had happened so fast, all he had were jumbled images in his head. But the janitor/tackler had seemed to be trying to protect them.

“How did he know our names?” he asked. “Mine, I guess from Mr. Reardon’s office, but—Chip’s?” He remembered something else. “And he did recognize Angela. I don’t know if you two heard, because you were out the window already, but he called her Angela DuPre. And he said—he said—” It was such a struggle to remember, “—something like, ‘We have wronged you.’ No, ‘We have wronged you in time. We owe you.’”

“’In time’?” Chip whispered.

Katherine sat down on the curb, her elbows propped on her knees, her face caught in her hands.

“That whole plane thing did kind of ruin Angela’s life,” she said. “I mean, refusing to talk on the telephone? Having everyone think she’s crazy?”

Chip sat down beside Katherine.

“What does the janitor guy have to do with the plane?” he asked. “And who was the guy he was fighting with? What did he want to do to us?”

Jonah stiffened.

“Beware,” he quoted. “They’re coming back to get you. That’s what the letter said. That’s who they were warning us about!”

He looked around frantically. What if the man tried again, sometime when no one was around to protect them?

Katherine shook her head, her ponytail flipping back and forth.

“Really,” she said disgustedly, “if the cute janitor wanted to warn you, he should have provided a few more details. Names, dates—something you could go to the police with.”

“The police would never believe this,” Chip groaned. “
I
don’t even believe it!”

Jonah could feel the sweat rolling down his back. But it wasn’t leftover sweat from all his biking and running. It was new sweat, panicky sweat, proof that his body thought he should be completely terrified.

“Well, here’s what we need to do,” Katherine said, tossing her head emphatically, her ponytail whipping out behind her. “We need to call all the other kids on the survivors list again and see if they’ve had any experiences with some guy trying to catch them or some other guy trying to protect them. We need to gather some data—see if any of them have ever seen someone just vanish into thin air.
And
we need to warn them, to let them know what we know.”

“But we don’t know anything,” Chip said.

“We know about the plane,” Katherine said. “We know where Angela thinks the plane came from. We know what janitor boy looks like. We know what one of your letters means.”

Tallied up that way, Katherine’s plan almost sounded reasonable. She sounded as calm as Mom always did, dealing with a crisis. One time, when Jonah was little, he’d dropped a glass and it had shattered on the kitchen floor. And Mom had been there immediately, telling him in her most soothing voice, “Yes, Jonah, I see that there’s glass all over the floor and I see that you’re barefoot, and that is a little bit scary. But if you just stand there like a statue, I’ll pick you up and you’ll be fine and then I’ll sweep up all the glass….”

Jonah had escaped without a single cut. If Katherine could master that same voice now, he was willing to let her take control.

“All right,” he said.

Chip shrugged. “Whatever.”

All three of them retrieved their bikes and began walking them back toward the bike path. Chip and Katherine hadn’t played a soccer game or pedaled quite as frantically as Jonah had earlier, but neither of them seemed any more eager than he was to speed home. They rode slowly, each of them stopping at various points to say, “If there really is such a thing as time travel…” or “if we really are from the future…” or “if that plane was a time machine…”

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 the
Delete
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.”