“Chip?” Jonah repeated.
Chip held up a letter.
“It’s addressed to me, and there’s no return address,” he said. “But it’s not like the others.”
He was right. This letter was in a smaller envelope, the kind used for invitations. And Chip’s address wasn’t typed but written—in firm grown-up handwriting, like a teacher’s.
“Open it!” Katherine said excitedly. “Let’s see what this one says!”
Jonah turned to glare at his sister—what was wrong with her? Wasn’t she scared at all? How could she act so thrilled when he felt almost paralyzed with dread?
Katherine missed his glare because she was snatching the envelope out of Chip’s hand, ripping the letter open.
“Whoa,” she breathed.
“What is it?” Jonah asked. He discovered he wasn’t completely paralyzed. He could crane his neck and peer over Katherine’s shoulder.
The letter was on a piece of generic white paper. Unfolded, it said:
You contacted me at 8:35 p.m. on Monday, October 2. I was not at liberty to discuss anything with you over the phone. If you call back, I will deny that I sent this letter. I will refuse to tell you anything more. But if it is safe, I will meet you in conference room B at the Liston Public Library at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 7. Then we can talk.
Do not attempt to contact me otherwise. This is the only way.
There was no signature.
SEVENTEEN
“Angela DuPre,” Katherine said.
“Wh-what?” Jonah stammered.
“That’s who this is from,” Katherine said confidently, waving the letter in Jonah’s face. “Remember, Chip, she was the only one from the witnesses list who seemed kind of, I don’t know, regretful about hanging up on us. Isregretful a word?”
Jonah didn’t care about words right now.
“Well, it could have been—what was that other woman’s name?—Monique Waters?” Chip suggested.
“Oh, no,” Katherine said. “That womanloved hanging up on us. She was cold.”
“And the air traffic controller talked to you, not me,” Chip said, “so he wouldn’t send me a letter—”
“And this is definitely a woman’s handwriting. Definitely,” Katherine said.
Jonah was getting annoyed with their little junior detective routine.
“So are you going?” he asked. “On Saturday?”
Chip and Katherine both stopped talking. Both of them froze with their mouths hanging open. It wasn’t a good look for either of them.
Then Katherine laughed.
“Of course,” she said. “We have to!”
“This is a complete stranger,” Jonah said. “She won’t even sign her name. She won’t talk to you on the telephone. She sounds crazy. This is how people end up getting kidnapped.”
“But she’s got information,” Chip said. “She might know who I am.”
Chip sounded so plaintive, Jonah couldn’t argue anymore.
“If you’re going to kidnap someone, you wouldn’t ask to meet at the library,” Katherine said. “That conference room B—that’s where we used to have Brownie meetings when I was a little kid. It’s, like, glass on three sides. And you have to walk through the whole library to get to it. It’s safe.”
Jonah shrugged. He felt strangely dizzy, just like he had that time in Florida when he’d gotten caught in a riptide, and the flimsy little flutter kick he’d learned at the Liston Pool had been no match for the forces carrying him out to sea.
Jonah’s dad had jumped in and saved him that time.
He can’t save me now,Jonah thought despairingly.We can’t tell Mom and Dad anything about this. Can’t tell them we’re meeting a stranger. Can’t tell them we’ve been calling strangers. Can’t tell them we took pictures of a secret file…
“Besides,” Katherine was saying. “There’ll be three of us together, and no one adult could kidnap three kids.”
“How can you be so sure that she won’t bring anybody with her?” Jonah asked, at the same time that Chip said, “What if seeing all three of us scares her off? She sounds a little paranoid—I think it has to be just me.”
“Well, we’re all going,” Katherine said. “There’s no question about that!”
They didn’t get a chance to call any of the kids on the survivors list that afternoon—or the next—because they were so busy debating their strategy for meeting with Angela DuPre (if that was really who’d written the letter). Saturday morning, Jonah had a soccer game and Katherine had a piano lesson, but by two o’clock they were both in Chip’s driveway, on their bikes, waiting. Jonah focused on balancing carefully, lifting his toes from the concrete on first the left side, then the right. He could straddle the bike for seconds at a time without touching the ground.
As long as he concentrated on that little game, he didn’t have to think about the fact that he and Katherine and Chip were about to do something incredibly stupid and probably dangerous as well.
“You didn’t really leave a note, did you?” Katherine asked, breaking Jonah’s concentration and forcing him to slam his right foot down to the ground to keep from falling.
“I did,” Jonah said.
Katherine rolled her eyes.
The note was Jonah’s attempt at caution. They’d told Mom and Dad only that they were riding their bikes to the library. But in his desk drawer, Jonah had left a detailed note—a letter, really—explaining that they were meeting a woman named Angela DuPre (or possibly Monique Waters) and if for some reason they didn’t come back, someone should track her down. All the information about possible kidnappers would be on Chip Winston’s computer.
Katherine and Chip thought he was crazy for being so careful.
Katherine sighed, blowing the air out in a way that ruffled the hair on her forehead.
“Wish Mom could have driven us,” she said. “Nobody rides bikes anymore.”
“I do,” Jonah said.
“Girls, I mean,” Katherine said. “All my friends think bikes are babyish. No one had better see me.”
She looked around anxiously. The street was deserted.
Riding bikes versus being driven had caused a huge debate. Chip thought if they had a parent drive them, they’d have to explain why they had to be at the library exactly at three o’clock, rather than after their moms got through at the grocery store, or before their dads started watching the football game. And Jonah thought that if they had to make a quick getaway, it’d be ridiculous to stand there in the library lobby calling a parent, “Uh, yeah, I’m ready to be picked up. Do you mind not waiting until halftime? There’s kind of a murderous psychopath chasing me….”
“What do you really think is going to happen?” Katherine asked.
Jonah shrugged. She’d been asking him that question for two days. And he’d never been able to explain that, exactly, even to himself. He didn’t truly believe that they were about to face a murderous psychopath. He just had a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach that wouldn’t go away.
The garage door of Chip’s house began rising, revealing Chip and his bike. Chip was grinning.
“Time for some answers!” he proclaimed. Jonah thought maybe Chip was trying to sound like the donkey fromShrek —carefree, glib, and full of wisecracks even in the face of danger. But it wasn’t a very good imitation, because his voice cracked.
“First we’ve got to ride all the way over there,” Katherine complained. “What is it—two miles? Three?”
“We don’t have to go,” Jonah said.
“Of course we do,” Chip said, pushing off and sailing out into the street.
Jonah let Katherine follow Chip, and then he sighed and brought up the rear. It was weird how responsible he felt for the other two: plaintive, pitiful, confused Chip; naïve, gung-ho, enthusiastic Katherine. He and Chip were both equally tall and gangly—it wasn’t like Jonah had any extra muscles for fighting off attackers.
There’s strength in numbers, he told himself, peddling h
ard to catch up.
They passed the BP station where the high-school band boosters were having a car-wash fund-raiser; the grocery store where Mom was right now buying peanut butter and milk and bread, like it was any Saturday afternoon; the neighborhood that, according to a quick Google search they’d done, contained the Robin’s Egg Lane where Daniella McCarthy’s family would soon be moving. They got to the library by two thirty.
Chip was looking at his watch before he even slipped off his bike.
“I’ve still got to wait another half hour?” he said. “I thought the ride would take longer than that.”
“This will give us a chance to case the joint,” Katherine said. Jonahknew she’d gotten that line from a movie. “And enough time to man our stations.”
Deciding how many of them should be in conference room B at three o’clock had sparked their longest and bitterest debate. They’d eventually reached a compromise: Chip would be the only one actually in the conference room. But he’d secretly have his cell phone set on speaker phone in his lap, and he’d call Katherine, who’d be hiding out in the magazine section. She’d hold the cell phone up to both her ear and a walkie-talkie, broadcasting to the other walkie-talkie in Jonah’s hand. Jonah would be in the nonfiction section, near the conference room. He’d be pretending to read, facing away from the conference room, but he’d secretly have a mirror hidden in his book, directed over his shoulder, so he could see what was happening to Chip every single minute. The walkie-talkie–phone combo would let him hear everything that was going on in the conference room. So at the first hint of danger, he’d be able to storm in and save Chip.
They’d planned everything. None of them, even once, had said, “This is ridiculous! Walkie-talkies? Mirrors hidden in books? We’ll look like fools!” Jonah thought maybe that was proof that, underneath it all, the other two were every bit as scared as he was.
They leaned their bikes against the bike rack and tiptoed into the library. They peeked into conference room B—no one was there—and tested out the cell phone–walkie-talkie setup.
“Spy One to Spy Two,” Katherine said, giggling into the walkie-talkie. “Over.”
Jonah switched the walkie-talkie function toSEND .
“Katherine, it works, but, so help me, you’ve got to remember—you’re not supposed to do any of the talking!”
At two fifty-five, Jonah flipped the hood of his sweatshirt up so it covered the walkie-talkie pressed against his ear. He pulled a book off a nonfiction shelf at random—it was something about tax codes. He positioned Katherine’s makeup mirror in the book, angled it just so…yep, there was Chip’s face, anxious and pale on the other side of the conference room’s glass wall. Jonah moved the mirror up and down and side to side, scanning the whole room. He switched the walkie-talkie toSEND again.
“Katherine, tell Chip to stop fiddling with the cell phone,” he whispered urgently. “He’ll give us away.”
Seconds later, in the mirror, Chip jerked upright. He put his hands flat on the conference room table, on top of the printouts of the survivors and witnesses lists he’d brought from home. He raised an eyebrow at Jonah. Over his shoulder, Jonah gave him the thumbs-up signal.
Katherine’s giggle sounded in Jonah’s ear again.
“Remember your theory about this woman actually being Chip’s birth mother?” she whispered. “You can cross that one off your list!”
Jonah started to say, “Why?” but then he remembered thathe needed to be silent too. Over the walkie-talkie, he heard a static-y version of Chip’s voice: “Oh, hello. Are you the person who reserved this conference room for three o’clock? The one who’s willing to talk?”
Frantically, Jonah angled the mirror, turning his tax code book almost sideways. There. A woman, walking into the conference room. Oh. A tall, statuesque, well-dressedblack woman. Very dark-skinned—definitely not Chip’s birth mother.
“Chip Winston?” the woman was saying.
“Yes,” Chip said cautiously. “And you are—?”
The woman stopped in the conference room doorway and looked back over her shoulder. Her eyes seemed to meet Jonah’s in the mirror. She laughed.
“Before we begin, I’ll have to ask you to turn that cell phone off,” she said. “And tell your friends to turn off the walkie-talkies. I appreciate their ingenuity, but they might as well come on in and listen in person.”
“I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chip stammered.
“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” the woman said. “I’ll have to remember that. I’m talking about the girl in the magazine section, in the purple shirt, and the boy in the tax section, readingYour Guide to the IRS upside down.”
Jonah blushed. He started to turn the book around, then realized that that made him look even more guilty. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Katherine standing up, rushing toward the conference room. He waved his arms at her, trying to send a telepathic message,No, no, go back! Pretend you’ve got nothing to do with me or Chip! Act normal! Don’t give anything away!
Katherine ignored him. She reached the door into the conference room and began shaking the woman’s hand.
“Katherine Skidmore,” she introduced herself. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for letting me join you.”
Katherine made it sound like they were going to be sitting around eating sugar cookies and drinking lemonade.
“Come on, Jonah,” Katherine said. “She’s got us figured out.”
Jonah whirled around.
“But I don’t have to go in there, do I?” he muttered through gritted teeth. “I can stay out here if I want to. So I can run for help if anything happens.”
Jonah was surprised to see that the woman’s dark eyes were sympathetic.
“You’re the one I want guarding the door, then,” she said. “Watching out for trouble. You can watch from the outside or watch from the inside. I don’t care.”
She looked around, scanning the rows of bookshelves around them. No one was in sight.
“I’m Angela DuPre,” the woman said, holding out her hand to Jonah. “You can call me Angela.”
Hesitantly, Jonah moved forward to shake her hand. He stepped in through the glass door behind Katherine and Angela, and pulled the door shut. But he didn’t sit down at the table when the others did. He stayed by the door. Angela nodded respectfully at him, as if she approved of that choice.
“A little advice,” Angela said, a hint of laughter in her voice. “The next time you do a stake-out, don’t enter the building together.” It was Jonah she looked at now. “I got here at two. I’ve been watching the three of you for the past half hour.”
Jonah’s face burned.
“I guess the walkie-talkies were a stupid idea,” he mumbled.
“Oh, it was creative,” Angela said. “I would have left you to your spy games if it weren’t for the range on those things—I didn’t want our conversation broadcast to every trucker passing by on the highway. Or…others who might want to listen.”
She no longer sounded amused. Her eyes looked haunted.
Katherine was glaring at Angela.
“Oh, that’s right,” Katherine said, almost in the same snarly cat-fight voice she used when she was mad at her friends. “You’re afraid to even talk on the phone.”
“I have my reasons,” Angela said softly, and somehow that shut Katherine up.
“But it’s safe to talk now?” Chip asked eagerly, leaning forward. “You can give us answers?”
Angela gave another cautious look around, through the glass walls into the library, then through the windows into the parking lot. Jonah realized for the first time that Angela had taken the one seat in the room that backed up to a solid brick wall. Even if Jonah weren’t guarding the door, she’d made sure that nobody could sneak up on her.
“You’re curious about your adoption, right?” Angela said. “What makes you think that I know anything about it?”
Quickly, Chip explained about the list of sur
vivors and the list of witnesses, shoving the papers over to her so she could look for herself.
“See, Jonah’s name is on the list of survivors too,” Katherine chimed in. “Mine isn’t. I’m not adopted, but I’m the one who took the pictures.”
Oh, good for you! Braggart!Jonah thought. Angela glanced at him just then, and Jonah could swear she knew what he was thinking. She smiled at him.
“I can tell you what I witnessed thirteen years ago,” she said. “Even though I’m not supposed to discuss it with anyone. You’ll probably think I’m crazy, anyhow.”
Chip was leaning so far forward now that Jonah was afraid he might fall out of his chair.
“You know where I came from?” Chip asked. “Wherewe came from?”
Angela was shaking her head, frowning ruefully.
“Not where, exactly,” she said apologetically. “But I think I might have a pretty good guess about when.”
EIGHTEEN
“When?” Chip repeated numbly.
Jonah was thinking that maybe English wasn’t his native language, after all. Maybe he’d spent his first few months of life hearing some other language, and maybe that was why he couldn’t make Angela’s words make sense in his head.
Katherine started laughing.
“Oh, thanks,” she said sarcastically. “That makes everything as clear as mud.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “We already know the ‘when.’ Chip and Jonah were both adopted thirteen years ago.”
“Twelve years, ten months and, uh, four days, to be exact,” Chip said.
Angela narrowed her eyes, looking at Katherine.
“Perhaps you’d like to hear my story before you dismiss it?” Angela asked.
“Please,” Jonah said, and he was proud of himself, that he’d managed to say that much when he was feeling so jangly and strange.
Angela looked down at the table, and it occurred to Jonah that maybe she was nervous too. Nervous, talking to a couple of kids? That didn’t make sense either.
“Thirteen years ago,” Angela began softly, “I worked exactly one day at Sky Trails Airlines.”
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