“Uh . . . something like that,” Chess muttered. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t find anything. I guess maybe eight years was too long ago.”
“Try looking up some other relative,” Natalie suggested. “Maybe one who died after your dad?”
“All our other relatives died before Chess was even born,” Finn said, and his voice came out too loud this time, as if, even though they were in a soundproof room, he was trying to wake Ms. Morales.
He really wouldn’t mind if she did wake up, and came down and took care of him.
But the other kids would be mad.
Natalie and Chess kept talking about dead people. Finn stared at his own blank computer screen, the picture of the unknown computer programmers seeming to taunt him about everything he didn’t know, everything he was useless at helping the other kids find out.
I might as well be asleep, he thought. Or, no—I might as well be kidnapped myself, like those kids in Arizona who started this whole mess. . . .
He knew it wasn’t fair to blame the kids in Arizona for their own kidnappings—and it wasn’t like that was even connected to Mom’s business trip or her weird texts. But hearing the news of their kidnappings had been the start of everything weird; it had marked the first day that Finn felt strange about anything.
I bet those kids were rescued a long time ago, and we didn’t even bother looking it up, he thought. If I found out that they’re home safe, and back with their parents . . . well, that would be like proof that we’re going to find Mom again, too, and everything’s going to be okay.
Painstakingly—because he hadn’t really learned how to type yet—he keyed in “Rochester, Emma, and Finn” and added the words “kidnapped” and “news.”
The first headline that came up said, “Gustano Parents Beg for Kidnapped Children’s Safe Return.”
Okay, that did not make Finn feel better.
He reached for the laptop, ready to close out the whole screen and pretend he’d never seen it. But maybe he was too tired to operate a computer properly. His finger dragged across the touchpad, bringing to life a video that took over his whole screen. Instinctively, he slammed the lid of the laptop down, shutting off his view.
But that didn’t shut down the sound.
“Please, we just want our children back,” a woman’s voice cried out.
Finn froze. On either side of him, Emma and Chess snapped their heads toward Finn’s computer.
“Is that Mom?” Emma said.
“How do you have a recording of Mom’s voice?” Chess asked.
Emma reached past Finn and lifted the laptop lid again.
And there on the screen was Mom’s face.
Thirty-Two
Emma
“Does Mom have an identical twin she never told us about?” Emma asked.
She was so glad her brain supplied that explanation, because otherwise, she would have had to believe she was hallucinating. The woman in the video on the computer screen looked and sounded so much like Mom. It was hard to believe it wasn’t Mom—a version of Mom, anyway, who had gotten her hair cut a lot shorter, so it curled around her ears like a pixie cap, and who’d been out in the sun a lot more, so her skin was tanner, maybe even a little leathery.
A version of Mom, maybe, who lived in Arizona.
“You say that woman looks like your mom? She’s identical, even?” Natalie asked. She squinted at the computer screen in front of Finn, her eyes scanning the words at the bottom of the news report. “But . . . she’s the mother of some kids who were kidnapped way out in Arizona?”
“Kids who have the same names and birthdays as us,” Finn informed her. He turned to face Emma. “If you think this is Mom’s twin . . . does that mean we have cousins with the exact same names as us? Can that happen?”
“And Mom never told us any of this?” Chess asked. His voice came out sounding wild, like even calm, easygoing Chess was on the verge of panic. “That day when we saw the news about those kids being kidnapped—wouldn’t she have said we were related? That she knew them?”
“There’s a lot Mom never told us,” Emma said. And this was another fact. But it wasn’t a comforting one.
“I don’t understand anything!!” Finn complained. The corners of his mouth trembled, and his eyes filled.
Quickly Emma slid her arm around Finn’s shoulders.
“We’ll figure this out, Finny,” she said. “We’ll figure this out, and we’ll rescue Mom, and, and those other kids will be found, and . . .”
Chess wrapped his long arms around both Finn and Emma. But he didn’t say anything else.
Natalie took a step toward the three Greystones, then looked at all of their faces and took a step back.
“Mothers!” she said.
“Our mother had a logical reason for whatever she did, whatever secrets she kept,” Emma said. “I’m sure of it. And she left us a letter to explain. . . .”
“In a code you can’t figure out,” Natalie said scornfully.
Emma couldn’t look at Finn to see if his eyes were still swimming with tears, or if the tears had started rolling down his cheeks. Because if she looked, it might make her eyes flood with tears, too.
Really, there wasn’t anything Emma could look at right now.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Maybe . . . maybe you and your family are like, I don’t know, royalty from some other country,” Natalie said. Her voice was soft now, like someone telling a fairy tale. “And your mom and her twin sister went into hiding, to keep you safe. In totally different states. But they gave you and your cousins royal names to keep the connection alive—that’s why they’re the same. And . . .”
Maybe Natalie meant her little fantasy story to be comforting. Maybe she thought Emma had gone through one of those little-girl phases where she wanted to be a princess, like all the other girls when Emma was in kindergarten. Maybe Natalie thought Chess and Finn had secretly seen themselves as knights and noblemen.
First of all, Emma wanted to say, I dressed up as a scientist in a lab coat for Halloween in kindergarten, when the other girls were wearing princess crowns. And secondly—do you think there’s any ending to that story that doesn’t put Mom and Finn and Chess and me in danger, too?
Emma couldn’t say that in front of Finn.
Maybe she wasn’t capable of saying it aloud, regardless.
“What does the kidnapped kids’ dad look like?” Chess asked. “Did you find any pictures or video of him?”
Curiosity was enough to make Emma open her eyes again.
Chess thought about their dad a lot more than she did. Emma knew that. For her, their dad was like the unknown in a math problem that you didn’t have to solve for. She didn’t know that much about algebra yet, but it seemed that sometimes there were x’s and y’s both in a problem, and you only needed to find the value for one of them. She didn’t have a single memory of Dad from when he was alive, and he was gone now, and nothing would bring him back. And Emma had Mom and Chess and Finn, and that was all she needed.
Except, she didn’t have Mom anymore, either.
And apparently the Arizona kids’ dad was still alive, since she’d seen the word “parents” at the bottom of the computer screen.
Chess began fast-forwarding through the video of the Mom-twin. (The Mom-clone? The Mom-double? The Mom-who-wasn’t-Mom?) Emma hadn’t really wanted to listen to any more of what sounded so much like Mom’s voice, weighted down so heavily with worry and fear. But the sped-up video made the resemblance seem even clearer: That was exactly how Mom tilted her head when she was upset. That was exactly the way Mom’s face developed twin worry lines on her forehead—and then the worry lines erased—when she was trying to sound more optimistic and cheerful than she actually felt.
Maybe Emma hadn’t fully understood before that there were times when Mom was only pretending to look and act and sound optimistic and cheerful?
The camera angle shifted in the video, zooming out, then zooming in ag
ain on a dark-haired man standing next to the Mom-who-wasn’t-Mom. The tagline below said, “Arthur Gustano, father.”
“He’s not as tall as Daddy was,” Chess murmured, and Emma wondered if he knew that he’d said “Daddy,” not “Dad.”
“You were a lot smaller eight years ago,” Natalie said, almost apologetically. “So it’s not really—”
“That man is only a little taller than his wife,” Chess said. “And our dad was a lot taller than Mom. I know that. From pictures I’ve looked at . . . recently.”
“Yes, but you don’t actually know that that woman is the same height as your mom,” Natalie said. “I mean, okay, sure, you say she looks and sounds like your mom, but even if they’re twins—or just sisters—then—”
“Shut up,” Finn said.
And this was crazy. Finn never told people to shut up. He never sounded that fierce and hurt and angry.
He turned his head side to side, peering back and forth between Emma and Chess, like they were the only other ones in the room.
“Is that what our daddy looked like or not?” Finn asked, his voice trembling.
“Chess?” Emma said, even though she’d seen plenty of pictures of their father before and should have been able to answer.
“No,” Chess said decisively. “I mean, brown hair, brown eyes—yeah, that’s the same. Or similar. But this guy’s nose is bigger and his face is blockier, and his hair’s straighter. And listen. His voice isn’t anywhere near deep enough.”
Chess even remembers what our dad sounded like? Emma thought, and she felt a stab of something that might have been jealousy.
The man on the screen inclined his head toward his wife.
“Nobody who hasn’t gone through this could imagine what a nightmare this is,” he said. “How could anybody be so cruel? Our children are innocent! They—”
Some heartless news reporter in the crowd in front of the man called out, “But is there any reason you can think of that someone would be trying to get revenge on you and your wife? Any reason that—”
“There is no reason for any of this,” Mr. Gustano snarled. “Are you asking if my wife and I have ever done anything that would lead to our kids being taken? No. We are ordinary, law-abiding American citizens. We’re blameless. Our kids are blameless. But nobody could deserve this horror. My kids should be in school right now, drawing pictures in art class and playing tag on the playground and . . . and . . . not . . .” He looked straight at the camera. “Please, if you can hear this, if you have any humanity in your hearts at all, don’t harm my children. Just let them go. Let them come home.”
He buried his face in his wife’s shoulder. She stared out at the reporters, then it felt like she was staring out at Emma, Chess, Finn, Natalie, and anyone else who might be watching. And her steady gaze was so much like Mom’s that Emma got chills.
“That is all we have to say,” the Mom-twin snapped, then gently guided her husband out of the camera’s range.
Emma shoved the laptop sideways, toward Natalie.
“Natalie, you have to find out everything you can about those kidnapped kids and their parents,” she said. “Finn, Chess, and me—we can’t watch anymore. It’s too hard. And we need all three of our brains for figuring out Mom’s code.”
“Even mine?” Finn asked. He sniffled. “You really think I can help—”
“Help solve this?” Emma asked. “Finn, I know we can do this together. Because we have to. There isn’t any other choice.”
Thirty-Three
Chess
Emma sounds like Mom, too, Chess thought. She sounds exactly like Mom when she’s telling all of us what to do.
A memory tugged at Chess’s brain, one that was so painful and from so long ago that he could only reassemble bits and pieces of it. Maybe it wasn’t even real. Or maybe he just wanted to convince himself it hadn’t happened. He could remember lying on the floor—playing with his red toy car again, maybe. Only, was it after they’d gotten the news that Dad had died? This wasn’t part of his usual memories about Dad’s death. Maybe it was a few days later. Maybe he’d stopped playing. Maybe he’d been screaming and pounding his fists on the floor. Or just lying still, too sad to move. And then Mom was there, picking him up. And he’d cried to her, “I want Daddy back! Make him not dead!”
And Mom had murmured, “Oh, Chessie, I want that, too. But we don’t have that choice. It’s not possible.” She’d smoothed back his hair and hugged him close and whispered, “Other choices, though . . .”
The next thing that had happened was that Mom laughed. It had startled Chess, and somehow, even though he was only four, he’d understood that the laugh wasn’t a happy one. But he’d been too young to understand what a laugh like that could mean instead, and that had frightened him.
He hadn’t understood Mom’s next words, either: “What am I talking about? I have to do this. There isn’t any other choice.”
There isn’t any other choice. He heard the words the way Mom had said them eight years ago, and the way Emma said them now, and the tone was exactly the same. Both of their voices were full of determination—determination fighting with fear. With the determination winning.
It was that similarity that had jarred loose Chess’s memory.
“We’re all like Mom,” Chess said dazedly. “All three of us. We’re all . . . well, not Mom-twins, but . . . mini-Moms, anyway.”
Emma, Finn, and Natalie all snapped their heads toward Chess. All three of them looked puzzled, and Chess realized their conversation had moved on while he’d been stuck in the past, stuck hearing echoes of Mom’s voice in his head. He flushed, realizing how dumb he sounded. He expected Finn to protest, What are you talking about? I’m not like Mom! I’m not a girl!
But Finn, for once in his life, wasn’t rushing to talk. He just looked up at Chess, so trustingly, as if he thought Chess had figured out something big, and he was waiting for Chess to explain.
Ohhhh . . . Maybe I did just figure out something big, Chess thought.
“Mom says we’re the only ones who will be able to read her letter,” he said, pointing to the computer screen Emma had been poring over before they’d heard the voice like Mom’s. He stretched out his arm so his fingers brushed five words in particular in the few lines that were understandable: Only the three of you . . .
“Because you’re the ones she’s mailing that letter to,” Natalie said with an annoyed flip of her hair over her shoulder. “She’s only sending it to you three, so—”
“No,” Chess said. Somehow he found that he didn’t care anymore that Natalie had been a Lip Gloss Girl in charge of everything at school, and nobody ever challenged her. “That’s not what this means. She wants us to be the only ones to know what’s in this letter, and so she put it in a code that only we can read. Because we’re the only ones who would know the key.”
“You mean, it’s going to be something with math,” Finn said glumly. “Because Emma’s a math genius. Mom knows Emma can solve any math puzzle. I can’t help, after all.”
“No,” Chess said again. Would he have to disagree with everyone until he got them to understand? He saw Emma recoil, and he tried again. “I mean, yes, Emma’s a math genius, but so are other people. If it’s just some tricky math answer, we could send it to the head of, I don’t know, MIT, and he could solve this.”
“Or she,” Emma said. “Do you actually know if the head of MIT is a man or a woman?”
“I don’t,” Chess admitted. “There are lots of things I don’t know. But ever since . . . since Mom left, all three of us have been saying things like, ‘Oh, Mom would never do that,’ and, ‘We know Mom loves us. She . . .’” The words stuck in his throat, but he forced them out. “‘She would never abandon us unless she thought she had to.’”
“You’re saying we’re all experts about Mom,” Emma said, finally catching on. “And you think that’s what’s going to matter, solving this code.”
Chess saw Natalie start to open her mouth
, and just from the way she twisted her face, he knew she was going to say something like, But you didn’t know she was going to vanish! Or, You didn’t know she had a look-alike twin in Arizona! (If that’s even a twin. You don’t know for sure.) Or, You didn’t know she had a room that spins and a secret tunnel under your house! You’re not very good experts! And Chess was going to need to stop her from saying any of that.
But before Natalie or Chess could speak, Finn said, “I know Mom smells like apples. Some guy—or woman—from MIT wouldn’t know that.”
And the way he said it—Chess’s heart squeezed. Finn could just as easily have said that Mom smelled like sweat and grass and gasoline when she came in from mowing the yard, or like pumpkin pie when it was Thanksgiving, or like rosemary-mint shampoo when she’d just washed her hair. But all that would have been true of lots of moms.
Their mom did smell like apples. Even when she hadn’t been around apples. It was just how she was.
Chess saw Natalie shut her mouth. He stopped watching her and turned back to Emma.
“I didn’t always pay much attention when you kept talking about codes all the time last winter,” Chess said. “But wasn’t there one kind where you had to know a quote from the Bible or a line of poetry or some other phrase, and that’s how you could figure out the solution to the code?”
“You think that’s the kind of code Mom used,” Emma said. Her eyes lit up. “And you think that the key to this code is some phrase that Mom says all the time, that only the three of us would know.”
“Yes.” Chess felt triumphant, almost as if they’d already solved the code and found Mom.
“Then you don’t actually need me at all,” Natalie said, bitterness in her voice. “Because I wouldn’t know any of that. Don’t mind me—I’ll just be over here listening to parents sobbing about their kidnapped kids.”
And you think that’s a tougher job than listening to Emma, Finn, and me talking about our missing mom? Chess wanted to shout at her. Or than being us, trying to remember everything we can about Mom, when we already miss her so much?
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