“Absolutely,” she said. She narrowed her eyes. “We’ve got a lot more to look up and figure out.”
Thirty
Chess
“Would you mind helping your brother and sister do their homework?” Ms. Morales asked Chess as soon as they got back to her house. “Natalie and I need to have a little talk.”
“Uh, sure,” Chess said.
Finn and Emma did not need his help with homework. Sometimes when Chess was stuck on a math problem, Emma helped him.
But Finn, Emma, and Chess all plopped their backpacks down beside the huge table in the kitchen and began taking out folders and books. Ms. Morales held on to Natalie’s arm and steered her past them toward her office.
“Seriously, Mom?” Chess heard Natalie grumble. “Are you sure you don’t want to put me in handcuffs, too?”
Behind Ms. Morales’s back, Emma gave Natalie a thumbs-up and made a zipper motion across her lips. As soon as Natalie and Ms. Morales were in the office and Ms. Morales shut the door, Emma scampered after them.
“That office is soundproof, remember?” Chess called softly. “It’s not going to work to press your ear against the door. Besides, you’ll get caught.”
Emma’s shoulders sagged and she stopped following.
“But I want to know everything!” she complained, slouching back toward the table. “Can we really trust Natalie? Did Mom tell Ms. Morales anything she’s not telling us? Has Ms. Morales heard anything new from Mom besides those stupid automatic texts?”
“I trust Natalie,” Finn announced, his pencil hovering over a worksheet. “And Ms. Morales, too. They’re nice.”
Finn would probably think a murderer was nice.
Or was it that even a murderer would be nice to Finn?
Chess patted the back pocket of his jeans.
“Natalie . . . gave me something,” he said slowly. He wasn’t sure what to do. “In the car. She said it was . . . in case her mom is so mad she sends Natalie to her dad’s and Natalie doesn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Or to see us again at all. But I think maybe . . . maybe . . .”
“Just tell us what you’re talking about!” Emma demanded. She put her hands on her hips and whipped her hair over her shoulder sort of like Natalie always did.
Chess dug out a pair of wireless earbuds and held them up for Finn and Emma to see.
“Natalie wants you to listen to music?” Finn asked.
“No,” Chess said. He pushed his hand a little deeper into his pocket and pulled out the other object Natalie had given him: a phone. “She says her mom keeps burner phones around just, well, just in case someone needs them. So she gave me one. She said she’d set hers to call me if there’s something she wants us to overhear. And with these earbuds . . .”
“The earbuds mean she’ll call you and we can listen secretly! Without Ms. Morales knowing!” Emma’s eyes lit up. “Ooo, I like Natalie, too! I like the way her brain works!”
But is Natalie really trying to help us—or just trying to get back at her mom? Chess wondered. Is it really a good idea for us to hear whatever Ms. Morales is going to tell Natalie?
Still, he handed one of the earbuds to Emma. He stuck the other in his own ear.
“None for me?” Finn said, making a pouty face.
“Sorry, Finny,” Chess said. “There are only two. Anyhow—”
“I know, I know,” Finn said. “I’m too young. It might scare me. Don’t you know I’m brave? Don’t you know I want to help get Mom back as much as you and Emma do?”
It hurt the way he said that—as if he’d already grown up too much. Already Finn had changed from the eager, bouncy, silly boy he’d been two days ago. Even his face seemed less rounded and babyish, his cheekbones more noticeable than his dimples.
You’re imagining things, Chess told himself. He wanted to tell Finn, Don’t think I’m babying you. I’m not even sure I’m old enough to deal with all this.
But he just said “Sorry” and ruffled his brother’s hair. Then he held a finger to his lips, because the phone in his hand began vibrating. He hit the button to answer, and he heard a burst of sound from the earbud. At first, it was just an indistinct noise, but he twisted the earbud slightly in his ear, and then he could make out words.
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!” Natalie was protesting to her mother. Her phone was probably buried in her pocket but set on the speaker function—that was why everything sounded so muffled.
Chess double-checked to make sure he had the phone in his own hand set to mute any noise he, Emma, or Finn might make.
“Natalie, you know every woman I help is someone in a dangerous situation,” Ms. Morales said. “That means we need to be extra cautious about . . .”
Chess hoped Emma was listening closely to hear what they needed to be extra cautious about, because he blanked out for a moment.
So even Ms. Morales realizes Mom is in danger?
Then he remembered what Natalie had said the day before, thinking that Mom was running away from a dangerous boyfriend. That was probably all Ms. Morales meant. Chess knew she was wrong about that danger.
“. . . I trusted you to help these kids, to be aware of issues they wouldn’t understand, and this is what you do? Sneak away to a dangerous area to meet up with a bunch of older boys?” Ms. Morales was asking.
“Mom, I did not walk through that other house just to go meet those boys!” Natalie said, and even through the earbud, Chess could tell she was gritting her teeth. “I wasn’t looking for them! They said hi, I said hi—it was a one-minute conversation! I don’t even know them!”
Chess noticed that she didn’t tell her mom that the boys had known her. That they’d called her by name.
“And you had little kids watching you—were you trying to show the Greystone kids that it’s okay to talk to strangers?” Ms. Morales asked.
“Mom, it wasn’t like that!” Natalie protested. “We were lost! My phone wouldn’t work! We—”
“And it never once occurred to you to just turn around and walk back through the tunnel to the Greystones’ house?” Ms. Morales asked, her voice rising with incredulity.
“Mom, that tunnel wasn’t . . . the secret room wasn’t . . . Did you know Mrs. Greystone had that secret place—whatever it was—attached to the basement of her house? At first I thought it was just a panic room, but . . . didn’t it seem really, really weird to you?” Natalie asked.
“People have panic rooms all the time,” Ms. Morales said stiffly. “There are houses I’ve driven by for years, and I didn’t know they had panic rooms until the owners listed the house to sell.”
“And those panic rooms you’ve seen—are they like the one the Greystones have?” Natalie asked, her voice rising. “Are they connected to a completely different house on a completely different street?”
“Well, no . . . not that I’ve ever seen before,” Ms. Morales admitted.
“How well do you even know Mrs. Greystone?” Natalie challenged, and Chess felt that something had changed. Now it was Natalie interrogating Ms. Morales, not Ms. Morales interrogating Natalie.
Good for you, Natalie! Chess thought, even as he listened more intently.
“How well do I know . . . Mrs. Greystone was in PTO with me for years,” Ms. Morales said. “She was always quiet, but she was one of those people who, if she volunteered to do something, she did it. On time, and the right way. And she didn’t complain about it, or ask a million questions that were so annoying I started wishing I’d just taken care of everything myself.”
Chess felt a little proud of his mom.
“And that was enough to make you volunteer to take care of her kids for who knows how long?” Natalie challenged. “Didn’t you ever think that she might be tangled up in something really strange and awful, and—”
“Yes, I did think she might be tangled up in something really strange and awful,” Ms. Morales countered. “And that’s why I offered to help. Because I don’t think it’s something that’s her fault
at all. I pray you never learn this directly for yourself, Little Miss Superior, but lots of times people—especially women—get caught up in awful situations they didn’t cause, that they need help getting out of. Think about it. Why would I help someone who doesn’t need it?”
“Mom, I put up with you inviting all sorts of people into our house. People you trust just because they’re women and children,” Natalie said. “There was the kid who broke my laptop, the one who stole my favorite jeans—”
“That you might have lost yourself,” Ms. Morales interrupted.
Natalie just kept talking.
“And, you know, that woman who cried all the time.”
“She had good reason to cry,” Ms. Morales said, her voice tense.
“Don’t you think the Greystone kids are different than the others we’ve had here?” Natalie asked. “Not as . . . scared all the time, maybe?”
Chess thought about the careful way Ms. Morales had shepherded the three of them through the school parking lot, as if she was hiding them from some unknown danger. As if they were supposed to understand. He hadn’t been scared then.
But he was now.
“Some people hide things better than others,” Ms. Morales said. “I wouldn’t have pegged Kate Greystone as the type to get involved with a dangerous man, either. But there was always something about Kate. Something . . . mysterious. And sad. She never talked about her husband or her past.”
“See, Mom? Not everyone goes around telling anyone who will listen what a scumbag their husband used to be,” Natalie said. “You should learn from that, and—”
“Natalie, Kate Greystone isn’t divorced,” Ms. Morales said. “Her husband died. Years ago. Before they moved here.”
Moved? The word caught oddly in Chess’s brain. Everything had changed after Dad died. There’d been a period of time when it felt like the sun burned out, like nothing Chess ate had any flavor, like he spent weeks doing nothing but lying on his bed, staring up at his ceiling. One morning he’d awakened, and the ceiling he opened his eyes to was different: smooth and white and peaceful, instead of swirled and shadowed and cobwebbed. And he got up, and he remembered going to find Mom and hearing her explanation: “Do you like our new house? I didn’t want to disturb you kids any more than I had to, so I brought you here while you were sleeping. Do you like your new furniture? Everything is new. It’s a new start. I promise you, we’ll be happy here. Everything will be better.”
Had Chess been too busy thinking Nothing could be better without Dad to ask any questions? Or to listen to anything else Mom said that day?
Chess’s mind worked strangely thinking about anything from the time surrounding Dad’s death. Maybe it was just because he’d only been four; maybe it was because Mom never talked about certain memories. Maybe he’d been too sad to remember everything.
But Chess was pretty sure they’d just moved from one house to another, not from one town to another.
So why did Ms. Morales make it sound like we moved from an entirely different place?
Now that he thought about it, wasn’t it weird that Mom had moved them in the middle of the night? Without warning them ahead of time?
Or had Mom warned them, and Chess just didn’t remember?
“Don’t forget anything,” Mom had told him just a few days ago—practically the last words she’d spoken to him before she vanished.
But what if he’d already forgotten something important?
What if he hadn’t remembered what he was supposed to from the very beginning?
Thirty-One
Finn
“Finally,” Finn exploded as soon as he stepped out into the hall. It was 10 p.m. exactly—Finn had watched the numbers change on the digital clock in his room.
“Shh,” Chess said, falling into step with him and looking around nervously. Then he crouched beside Finn. “Listen, Finn, it’s really late for you to still be up, and this is the second night in a row. . . . Maybe you should just go back to bed and get some sleep. Emma and I can tell you everything we find out in the morning.”
“Except you wouldn’t tell me everything, if you thought it was going to scare me,” Finn said. He could feel his lower lip start to jut out, like he was just a sulky little kid. He forced himself to keep his lip in, stand up straighter, and stare Chess right in the eye. “I want to help, too. I . . . I have to.”
Chess’s face was shadowed; it wasn’t possible to see how he was going to answer.
“Finn comes with us,” Emma said, stepping between her brothers. “We don’t leave him behind.”
And then she ruined everything by adding, “Even if he falls asleep in one of those chairs down in the office, he stays with us.”
I won’t fall asleep, Finn told himself. I’ll never sleep again, if that’s what it takes for me to help find Mom.
But he couldn’t help himself: He let out a jaw-cracking yawn.
He hoped it was too dark in the hall for Emma or Chess to notice.
The three of them tiptoed along, with Natalie joining them right at the top of the stairs. She held two laptops under her arm.
“Extras,” she whispered. “So we’ll all have something to work on.”
Natalie isn’t saying I should just go to sleep! Finn thought, and he climbed down the stairs walking alongside her.
But when they got to the office, the other three kids went right to work, and Finn wasn’t sure what he should do. He stood in front of one of Natalie’s laptops—he wasn’t tall enough to reach it if he sat down—and he stared at the Google drawing of the day, which seemed to be a bunch of men and women staring at a computer. It was probably something about computer history that Finn didn’t know about, but he wasn’t going to ask the others.
Mom would just tell me, he thought. If Mom were here, she would have known I didn’t know, and I wouldn’t have to ask, and . . .
Finn couldn’t let himself think about how everything would be better if Mom was there.
He sneaked a peek at the computer Emma was working on: She had Mom’s letter full of gibberish up on the screen and she was muttering to herself, “Substitution code? Is the key maybe part of the code? Would it be numerical, since Mom would know I’d look for a number pattern?”
“Hey, Emma,” Finn said. “Why don’t you email me Mom’s letter, and then I can work on it over here? Maybe I’ll see some clue to help you.”
It took Emma a million years to turn her head toward Finn. Sometimes she got like that when she was thinking hard.
“Hmm?” she said slowly. “Oh, um, Mom put some sort of coding on this letter so we can’t email it anywhere. Or copy it. Or print it out. I already tried to email it to myself, to have a backup copy, and it wouldn’t work. Maybe I could do some extra research to figure out how to unlock all that, but . . .”
But Emma thought it was more important to work on solving the code herself.
And maybe she was right. Finn didn’t know much about codes.
Finn turned toward Natalie, who had called up a picture of the Greystones’ house on her computer. She tugged on Chess’s arm.
“This is your address, right?” she asked.
You could have asked me! Finn wanted to shout at her. Instead, he just said quickly, before Chess could answer, “It is. Why?”
“I’m looking around the area on Google Street View to figure out exactly where we ended up today,” Natalie said.
“How does that help us find Mom?” Finn demanded.
“Well, if we find out who owns the empty house that’s connected to yours by that tunnel, then maybe we’ll know who might have, uh . . .”
Finn saw Chess put his hand over his mouth. Was Chess signaling Natalie to be quiet, so she didn’t scare Finn?
Finn had to prove he was brave enough to hear anything.
“You think our mom was kidnapped?” Finn asked, trying so, so hard to keep his voice from wavering on the last word. “Maybe by someone from that other house? Or by the ‘criminal’ those boys
were talking about?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Natalie said, spreading her hands wide, as if to show how much she didn’t know. “I can’t find anything about some fugitive criminal being caught, or about any kidnappings around here. I thought it might help to find the address of that house we were in, but there’s no house on any street near yours that matches what it looked like.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Finn protested. “Do you know about Google Earth? Where it’s like you’re looking down from above? Just look for the fences that were around that house!”
Natalie ran her finger over the touchpad, making the view on the screen race up and down the Greystones’ street. All the houses there looked exactly like they should: totally familiar.
“I don’t know, Finn, maybe the Google pictures of the other street were taken so long ago, those fences weren’t built yet,” Natalie said.
“But those fences looked really old,” Finn said, remembering the mismatched, faded wood. “Like, even older than me!”
“Yeah . . . ,” Natalie said absently, switching to a broader view of the neighborhood.
Finn glanced toward Chess again, hoping his older brother noticed how Finn had had that whole conversation with Natalie without falling apart at the thought of Mom being kidnapped.
But Chess still had his hand over his mouth.
Then Finn saw what Chess had written in the search box on his computer: “Andrew Greystone obituary.”
Finn’s stomach twisted.
“You’re looking up something about our dad?” Finn asked Chess, and this time he had no control of his voice. “Why? What’s an oh, obit . . . uh . . .”
“Obituary?” Natalie finished for him, snapping her head toward Chess’s computer. “You mean the news story from when he died? Let’s see.”
But Chess had already X-ed out of that screen.
“Never mind. It was just . . . something I wondered about,” Chess said. He seemed to be breathing hard.
“You mean, you’re looking for who all is listed as survivors? So maybe you can find relatives you haven’t met who might have more info about your mom?” Natalie asked. “That’s smart.”
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