Matilda clicked on an employee profile of a shaggy man, his face almost completely obscured by thick hair and a scraggily beard.
“The janitor?” Oliver asked.
“Sure,” Frankie said, studying the picture. “Could be anyone under there.”
“It says he’s only been working at the school a few months.”
“What happened to the old janitor?”
“Good question,” Matilda said, typing away again.
Frankie’s mom called from downstairs, asking the kids if they wanted dessert.
“Go ahead,” Matilda said. “This might take a while.”
Twenty minutes later, the boys returned with a dessert plate for Matilda.
“Any luck?” Oliver asked, handing her the plate and a fork.
“Take a look,” Matilda said with the half of her mouth that wasn’t full of apple torte.
Oliver and Frankie looked at the laptop screen. It was an article from the local paper with a picture of a hardscrabble but very happy old guy in a casino holding a giant novelty check over his head.
Frankie read the article aloud: “ ‘Local school janitor Eldin Scruggs wins 2.3 million dollars after placing several long-shot bets at the Mirage Sports Casino in Las Vegas.’ ”
“No way,” Oliver said, reading over Frankie’s shoulder. “This says he quit his job at the end of the school year and moved to the Bahamas.”
“Imagine the odds?” Matilda said with a smirk.
“We’ve found him,” Oliver said. “We’ve found Preston Oglethorpe.”
Not so very far away, Preston Oglethorpe sat at his table, picking distractedly at his dinner.
Beep!
He paid his watch little mind.
“They’re close. A week?”
Preston looked up. The Nicola Tesla portrait had come awake.
“Less,” Preston said. Then, “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” the portrait responded. “I just wasn’t talking.”
“That’s a bit of an understatement. You’ve haven’t said a word in months.”
“There was no need,” he said dismissively. “You already weren’t listening to Marie. No sense in piling on. I get it, though. I know a bit about what it means to have an enemy.”
“Exactly!” Preston said. “And you beat your enemy. You won the War of the Currents.”
“Did I?”
“Of course you did. Your science was vastly superior to Edison’s. The whole world uses alternating current. You know they’ve got electric cars named after you now?”
“I died alone, Preston,” Tesla said bluntly. “Half-mad and entirely broke. I isolated myself. I pushed the world away from me. I allowed my enemy to define me. Whatever happens, don’t let that man define you.”
Preston looked down, the words weighing on him. “Are you telling me to call this all off?”
“I’m telling you that when this is all over, it’s time to come out of hiding,” Nicola said. “The life of the mind, no matter how brilliant, is no substitute for living. When it’s time, let the world back in, Preston.”
Preston started to respond, but Nicola had already clicked off, and the portrait screen was dark once again.
“This is it?” Oliver asked.
“According to the school records,” Matilda answered.
They stood in front of Henry’s Market.
“This is where we got the jam and the beef jerky,” Oliver said to Matilda.
It was also the home address listed on the shaggy janitor’s school employment file.
Business at the market had not let up—if anything, Henry’s jams had gotten even more popular in the last few weeks. There was practically a line out the door.
“Is this a joke?” Frankie said.
“I think it’s a message,” Matilda said. “I’m just not sure if the message is ‘you’re getting close’ or ‘you’ll never find me.’ ”
“What do we do now?” Oliver asked. “If Preston Oglethorpe doesn’t live here, how do we find him?”
“We go old school. Low tech. Find him at school and tail him home.” Matilda’s eyes narrowed. “It’s time I teach you guys to front and follow.”
“Front and follow?” Oliver repeated dubiously.
“It’s a pretty simple technique,” Matilda said. “When you’re following someone, the best approach is to have someone in front of the person and someone else behind. That way the person you’re following doesn’t get ahead of you, and you can trade off with your partner every so often so you don’t get spotted.”
“There’s three of us,” Frankie observed.
“And we’ll need it,” Matilda said. “Our subject has a car and we’ll be on foot.”
They started the next day after school. Matilda watched the janitor’s car, a beat-up Oldsmobile Cutlass, and followed it out of the school parking lot around five o’clock. When it came to the first turn, Oliver and Frankie were already half a block down the street in either direction.
The first day, they got lucky and the Cutlass caught all the red lights, making it easier for Matilda and the boys to keep up with it. They made it about a mile before the car got away from them.
The next day, Matilda stayed at the school and texted the guys when the Cutlass was on the move. This time Oliver and Frankie started at the intersection where they lost the Cutlass the day before, making it about a half mile this time before losing the car. It was painstaking and exhausting, but it would have been worse had Frankie not been in such great shape from walking and running with Archie. Though he hadn’t quite achieved the legs of a marathoner, his speed and stamina had come a long way in the last several weeks.
By the third day, they had tracked the Cutlass to the warehouse district, losing it in the middle of a dense patch of old, possibly abandoned brick buildings.
“It’s gotta be one of these four here,” Oliver said later, pointing to the grid map Matilda had spread out across Frankie’s bed.
“I agree,” said Matilda. “Our janitor’s been keeping a pretty consistent schedule, so I figured tomorrow I’d come with you guys. We can wait him out here, in between these buildings,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map. “It’s got the best sight lines.”
The boys nodded. They were all silent for a moment.
“So, tomorrow we meet Preston Oglethorpe,” Frankie said.
“Yeah,” Oliver said, but there was no excitement in his voice. “Tomorrow, then.”
Matilda’s expression was grim as well.
Frankie looked at his friends, confused. “Hold on,” he said. “I thought this was good. This was what we wanted, right?”
“It is,” Matilda said measuredly. “But we can’t assume that Oglethorpe is going to help us.”
“Why not?” Frankie said. “Hasn’t he kind of being doing that all along? Helping us get what we want?”
“Yes, he has,” Matilda conceded. “But that’s only been for a couple of months. He’s been hiding from George Kaplan for over a year. If he has to pick one over the other …”
“He might not pick us,” Frankie said, completing the thought. “So, are you saying we shouldn’t go tomorrow?”
“No,” Oliver cut in. “She’s just saying don’t get your hopes up. We don’t know why he’s been doing any of this.”
“And if this guy is as bad as George Kaplan?”
“It’s our only play, Frankie,” Matilda said.
“Either way, at least we can make him pick.”
Oliver came home from Frankie’s to find George Kaplan setting the dining room table.
“Oliver, you’re just in time!” Mr. Kaplan said as Oliver walked in the room. “You can help us celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?” Oliver managed.
“I got another marketing job,” Oliver’s mom said, coming in from the kitchen with a pan of lasagna. “Mr. Sullivan, George’s friend, has more work for me.”
“He was very impressed with this
last project,” Mr. Kaplan added. “Your mom really knocked it out of the park.”
“I was kind of surprised,” Oliver’s mom said. “Mr. Sullivan, he’s not very forthcoming. Doesn’t say much at all, actually.”
“He’s more of an introspective personality,” Mr. Kaplan explained.
Oliver had seen crime movies about cops who had to go undercover and pretend to be bad guys. It was always brutal for the undercover cops, living two different lives, pretending to be different people all the time. Oliver really felt for them. Just pretending that he didn’t know someone else was pretending was making his stomach do backflips.
“Wow,” Oliver said. “That is great. Congratulations, Mom.”
“Thanks, honey,” his mom said, hugging him.
“This is just the beginning, Oliver,” Mr. Kaplan said, giving Oliver a little wink. “I see great things on the horizon for you and your mom.”
Matilda knocked on the door to her dad’s office. He was closing some files on his desk when she came in to say good night.
“Sleep tight,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
Matilda spied her father’s travel suitcase up against the wall. “Another trip,” she said.
“Yeah, last minute.” He sat back in his chair knowingly. It was time for Matilda’s five questions.
“How long?”
“A day or two. Quick.”
“Flying or driving?”
“Driving.”
“In state?”
“No.”
Matilda nodded. She had two questions left. She looked over and saw the Big Trouble in Little China movie poster hanging on the wall. “Dad, you moved around a lot when you were a kid, huh?”
“Yeah, a few times,” her dad answered. He wasn’t sure if they were still doing the five questions. “When Grandpa Joe was doing contract work for the Navy, we bounced around the country a bit.”
“Have you ever lived in the same place twice?” Matilda asked. “Like, have you ever gone back to live in one of the places you lived before?”
Her dad thought about it. “No,” he said, looking off to the side the tiniest bit. “Not yet anyway.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Matilda had thought her dad lying would make what she had to do easier. It didn’t. She’d done a lot of things with her computer that were, frankly, illegal, but she’d never felt bad about any of them before. This was something different.
When Matilda went to bed that night, she didn’t go to sleep. Instead, she waited until she heard her parents go into their bedroom. Then she waited some more.
And some more after that.
At two o’clock in the morning, she snuck out of her room and down the stairs.
Her dad’s office was unlocked, and his laptop lay on the desk, just like always. It was password protected, of course, as was his sign-in to the FBI’s criminal database, but Matilda had memorized all her parents’ various passwords when she was seven.
She was now, electronically at least, impersonating a federal law enforcement officer. If she got caught, she suspected the fact that the officer in question was her father wouldn’t matter.
Matilda uploaded the picture of George Kaplan’s bogus driver’s license into the database’s facial recognition program. Once the upload was complete, she received an estimated response time of twelve to fifteen hours.
By tomorrow afternoon she’d know who Kaplan really was. If all went well, she’d know where to find Preston Oglethorpe, too. And then she’d tell her dad everything.
After tomorrow there’d be no more secrets.
Pulling Back the Curtain * JoJo’s * The First Box * Dayton * Kidnapped! * RUN * The Last Beep * Trapped * Everything’s Coming Up Kaplan * Preston Lets Go
“Found it,” Frankie called from around the corner.
Oliver and Matilda followed him down an alley across from an old brick building that was a little smaller than the other industrial complexes that dominated the warehouse district. It wasn’t abandoned necessarily—it had all its doors and windows and looked maintained—but certainly overlooked.
A breeze blew down the alley. A blend of summer and fall air, warmth and coolness rode the same current, as if the breeze could go either way but hadn’t decided yet.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Oliver asked, a lump forming in his throat.
“I saw the Cutlass pull into the rear loading dock,” Frankie said.
Matilda, meanwhile, was already casing the building. “There’s a door over here. It’s unlocked.”
Oliver looked at his friends warily. Now that they had trailed their janitor here, he sensed that none of them really knew what to do next. Still, they had come this far and didn’t have time to waste. It was already past five and soon their parents would be wondering after them.
Oliver nodded to Matilda, and she opened the door slowly, quietly. She and the boys stepped inside, staying close to the doorway.
Oliver didn’t know where to look first. There were computers and screens and scientific equipment, machines that hummed and whirred in strange melodies of computation, old school blackboards filled with the kinds of mathematical equations that look like a foreign, alien language.
“It’s like the Bat Cave for nerds,” Frankie said.
Beep!
The sound came from the far end of the warehouse. Then, from the same direction, the flush of a toilet, and before they could decide whether to make a run for it or not, a man stepped out from a small, makeshift bathroom.
“Um, hello,” the man said. “You’re right on time. Well done. My name is, um, Preston Oglethorpe.”
He was a gangly, skittish man in faded tweed pants and a clashing, wrinkled dress shirt that had what appeared to be soup stains on the collar. Oliver knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help comparing this man to George Kaplan, the sinister impostor who was deceiving his mother.
Worse, Oliver found a part of himself preferring the impostor. Because despite telling Frankie not to get his hopes up yesterday, Oliver had done exactly that. Deep down inside, he’d wished that finding this man would make everything okay again. That if they could somehow team up with Preston Oglethorpe to stop Mr. Kaplan, then Oliver would no longer be a chump for believing in things like heroes and families and happy endings. But one look at the sad and tattered man, and Oliver knew that such hope was just another lie. Only this time it was one he told himself.
Preston Oglethorpe approached the kids but wasn’t sure whether to offer his hand or not, so he gave them each an awkward little half wave of greeting.
“Make yourselves at home, children,” came a woman’s voice from behind them.
“Whoa, hey!” Frankie exclaimed, wheeling around. “Who said that?”
“No need for the histrionics, young man,” said Marie Curie, looking down at Frankie admonishingly from her portrait.
Frankie was dumbstruck. “You’re a … talking picture?” he said finally.
Albert Einstein popped onto another screen. “Well, Preston, for your sake I hope this one isn’t the brains of the operation.”
Frankie startled again, looking at Albert with a mix of confusion and irritation.
“Don’t mind him, son,” Leonardo da Vinci chimed in. “He can be a bit of a jerk.”
Matilda, Oliver now noticed, had taken no interest whatsoever in the talking portraits, or in Preston Oglethorpe himself. Instead, she paced slowly around the room like a detective casing a crime scene, her attention finally centering on the massive flowchart covering the far wall.
JoJo’s Bar and Grill was not much to look at. A glorified shack with the structural integrity of a child’s pillow fort, JoJo’s sat in the middle of a gravel lot on the industrial side of town.
The inside was even less impressive. It was dark and there were germs on the floor that were probably old enough to vote. The filth wasn’t in or on JoJo’s, the filth was JoJo’s. It was probably the only thing keeping the whole place together.
The customers were a gruff, hardscrabble crowd, with lots of worn leather biker vests and chewing tobacco. Billy and Mrs. Gonzales were probably the only two people there under sixty.
It was the most interesting place Billy Fargus had ever been.
“I gotta good feeling about tonight,” Bad Becky said approvingly as they made their way to the assortment of low pallets in the far corner of the room that would be the stage. “A real good feeling.”
“Hey,” Frankie said, pointing to Marie and Leonardo. “How come you two can speak English?”
“What part of artificial intelligence don’t you understand?” Albert replied.
“One more crack out of you and I pull the plug, Einstein,” Frankie said.
While Oliver and Frankie were still at the front of the warehouse, gobsmacked by talking pictures, Matilda scanned the massive flowchart on the back wall, searching for the one answer that was more important to her than all the others. A dreadful suspicion she’d tried to ignore ever since she’d first seen that old photo with Preston Oglethorpe, Oliver’s mom, and her dad.
It was almost too much to take in. Countless hand-drawn boxes with arrows connecting them this way and that, each one labeled with a simple word or phrase scribbled inside. Some boxes were bigger than others. Some were crossed out. Some had multiple arrows either feeding into them or feeding out. Some were dead ends.
The chart seemed to be organized chronologically, more or less, from left to right. Matilda quickly spotted a large box labeled “CARDAMOM.” Two arrows led out of that box to two other, smaller boxes that read “JAM” and “JERKY.” The arrows leading out of those boxes led to other boxes, “LUNCHROOM” and “THE DOG.” Matilda’s eyes scanned forward to an array of other boxes, some with words she recognized but others, like “SHADY GLADES” and “JOJO’S,” that she didn’t.
She found boxes predicting her discovery of the black Lincolns, her fake flu, and when she’d cornered Oliver after school to warn him he was being followed. Nearly everything they’d done over the last several weeks was up there on the wall.
Connect the Dots Page 11