The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  And I had to get out.

  I had to run.

  Chapter 13

  “When you’re in danger,” Amanda had whispered when we were kids, playing games, following strangers at the grocery store, “think in opposites. When you want to run so badly you can feel the muscles in your legs actually starting to twitch? That’s when you need to make your body perfectly still.”

  Boy, did I want to run now. It was like I’d already experienced it, so vivid was my understanding of what the hand clamping down on my shoulder would feel like—rough, not like a teacher, but like someone who didn’t care that I was a kid.

  This might be my last chance to make a break for it.

  But I forced myself to stand still by reading the quotes in front of me. I picked up my camera to take a picture and I noticed that some of the words carved into the wall were glowing when I looked at them through my camera’s lens. Just like at the Washington Monument, the letters had been treated in a way that was not visible to the naked eye. I snapped a picture of the inscription—the words, The eyes of the world are upon you, were highlighted—like some sort of blacklight chalk, not visible except through a camera’s lens . . . but what did the highlighting mean? I read the inscription in its entirety in an attempt to understand.

  D-DAY JUNE 6, 1944

  YOU ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK UPON THE GREAT CRUSADE TOWARD WHICH WE HAVE STRIVEN THESE MANY MONTHS. THE EYES OF THE WORLD ARE UPON YOU. . . . I HAVE FULL CONFIDENCE IN YOUR COURAGE, DEVOTION TO DUTY, AND SKILL IN BATTLE.

  –General Dwight D. Eisenhower

  I had to read through it three times before it penetrated my panicked brain, but for some reason, once I understood it, the quote gave me courage. My dad had told me about D-Day, so I knew it was the turning point in the war, with 5,000 boats transporting 150,000 men to the French shores in one day. Nine thousand of those men died before sunset.

  The idea of the scene at the beach—the men leaping off the boats under machine gun fire, rushing the embankments topped with gun towers made of reinforced concrete (okay, I’ve seen Saving Private Ryan)—made the three park rangers seem a little less terrifying.

  Sort of. They were still watching, though at least the jogger was gone. It was everything I could do to hold still long enough to evade their notice. I made sure to keep my head down. My hands were shaking, and I guessed that my whole body looked alert and tense—not good.

  What had that quote said? The eyes of the world are upon you.

  That’s exactly what I’m worried about! I wanted to scream. Slowly, not breathing, I inched backward and forced myself to walk not toward the nearest exit, but away from it, strolling as if I was looking at the memorial. The second ranger from the front of the memorial began heading in my direction. Was he wondering why he hadn’t had a chance to check me out on my way in?

  Opposite, opposite. I didn’t correct course. I didn’t shy away from him. To keep calm, I counted the columns in my head over and over. And when he was close enough to me to really see, I pulled out the last trick that was up my sleeve. I stared. At the Washington Monument in the distance. Hard. I made my whole body tense up. This was a subtle equivalent of the old, “made you look” trick.

  He bought it. For a hair of a second he looked where I’d been looking. But when he looked back to wonder why I’d been staring—and it was quick, it’s not like the Washington Monument was on fire—I was gone. I’d used the moment his attention was focused elsewhere to slip between two columns—finding to my relief that a pavilion in the middle of the row of columns was open in the back. Before I exited the memorial through this lucky doorway, I looked back toward the guard, keeping myself hidden behind a column. I had a good view of his clipboard, which I was expecting to hold another giant picture of Amanda.

  But instead I saw a series of smaller images. There was one of Hal. One of Nia. One of Callie. And one of me.

  Seeing my own face—and those of the other guides, knowing that we were all being hunted now—my breath caught in my throat. Not that I wasn’t already scared.

  But I didn’t have time. Because there was one last picture on the board blocked by the ranger’s shoulder. I was waiting for him to turn so I could see it. Soon enough, he did turn, and there was a picture of Amanda’s sister. The one Thornhill had told us to come to Washington to find. He’d called her Robin, and I knew that was the name she was born with. But when I knew her, she had been Ravenna.

  In the picture she was wearing a high ponytail, a white vest, and a black-and-white-striped skirt. She was smiling forthrightly at the camera, her big blue eyes open wide. When I’d met her she’d been a ninth grader, like I was currently, and now she would be in college. But the years that had passed didn’t matter. I’d have known her anywhere. The same wide eyes, open forehead, a smile that was hard to resist. Robin was adopted, but still, she and Amanda looked a lot alike.

  I remembered the last time I saw Ravenna. It was just before Amanda’s family left Pinkerton. She’d come home from cheerleading practice, all excited to have been elected team captain. What was she doing with her picture next to ours—how did the rangers know that she might be here too?

  As soon as I was out of the view of the rangers, I broke out into a run, all the panic I’d been fighting inside the monument boiling over within me. When I didn’t see Callie, Hal, and Nia right away, I could feel my breath coming faster.

  How stupid, I thought. If there were fake rangers inside the monument, of course some would have been patrolling the outside of it. Callie, Hal, and Nia had probably walked right into them. I’d been worried for myself, but actually it was they who hadn’t been safe.

  Nia’s hissed “Zoe” was the happiest sound I’d heard that day. I turned to see her crouching in an alcove that must have led to some kind of service entrance to the monument. Hal and Callie were there too, ducking behind the little wall. I ran to join them, and not a minute too soon.

  Peeking over the wall, I heard and then saw the two rangers from the monument walking by.

  “Oh no,” Callie said, seeing them. “Those rangers—they’re the guards from the airstrip. Didn’t you notice the one with the tattoo on his face? That’s hard to miss.”

  “Right,” I said, seeing the tattoo for the first time. “I guess I was doing everything in my power not to register them—I never got a good look at their faces.”

  I saw the guard’s face now, though. The one with the tattoo was the angry, jittery one—the Nirvana guard. The guard we’d seen eating crackers and sleeping on the job was the other, the one holding the school pictures of the four of us and Robin.

  I explained that having the Official’s guards disguise themselves as park rangers was better than having the Official be able to commandeer actual rangers.

  Nia understood right away what I was getting at. “Can you imagine how easy it would be for them to capture Amanda if they had access to law enforcement in the city?”

  “Was Amanda out here?” I breathed.

  They shook their heads. “She wasn’t inside the monument either,” I explained. I told them about the photographs. About the jogger who seemed impervious to my ability to hide.

  Callie drew her arms around her body like suddenly she felt cold.

  Hal ran his hands through his hair. “This is getting—” he began. “This is all getting so real.”

  Nia pursed her lips. Her eyes narrowed into slits. Her signature glare. “I don’t like whoever is doing this to us,” she said. “And to Amanda.”

  “Me neither,” I said, but I let the rest of what I wanted to say drift away, because I’d just noticed something carved into the wall.

  For a second I wondered if it was a mistake.

  “Look at that,” I said, pointing.

  Nia nodded quickly. “I was wondering about that too,” she said. “I have a feeling about it. When I touch it, I don’t know—it’s like I can feel Amanda here somehow.”

  I put my fingers on top of the carving, a simple cartoon of a fa
ce peering over a wall next to the words KILROY WAS HERE.

  “I know what this is,” Nia said.

  “Care to explain?” Callie inquired.

  “ ‘Kilroy was here’ is a famous piece of World War Two graffiti,” she began. “A ship inspector named Kilroy chalked it on boats he’d inspected. The thousands of soldiers who were transported to war on those boats remembered it and started putting it everywhere. By the end of the war the words ‘Kilroy was here’ had been scrawled, engraved, painted, and otherwise applied to hundreds of thousands of locations in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific—in village churches, on cave walls, in prison cells, in bombed-out barns and submarine bunks and foxholes.”

  “That’s cool that they included it in the monument,” Hal said.

  “I know,” I said. “And it’s also really cool that they hid it.”

  “Yes, it is cool,” Callie said. “Maybe you guys should actually join the History Club for real. But me? I’m more interested in why Nia had a feeling about it.”

  Nia shrugged. “I don’t know. It wasn’t a feeling that was very strong. Mostly what I was thinking was that Amanda would have liked this—a cartoon face carved in a hiding place where everything else is so formal and grand.”

  “Let me see something,” I offered, lifting my camera to my face. I explained how the words inside the monument had glowed when I’d done this. Sure enough, Kilroy was here glowed in the same way.

  “Look,” Hal said. There were old dead leaves collected in the alcove, piled up against the back of it, right under the Kilroy cartoon. As Hal kicked the leaves away, we saw some more graffiti. Newer graffiti. Graffiti all four of us understood instantly.

  Chalked onto the wall were drawings of a bear, a cougar, a night owl, and a chameleon. The shapes of their bodies were elongated in the drawing, so that they twisted into one snakelike shape—a vine, or maybe a string worked through an invisible maze.

  “This is from Amanda,” I said. I could hear the sound of triumph in my voice. Nia nodded.

  “How could that be, though?” said Callie. “How could Amanda have known we’d end up here?”

  “Maybe she left this drawing to show us a safe place to hide,” I offered.

  “But we wouldn’t have seen the drawing until we’d already found the hiding place,” Nia said. When she is figuring things out, she has a hard time keeping the arrogance out of her voice—though she isn’t arrogant deep down.

  Hal only shrugged. “Maybe she figured we would. Maybe it was farfetched but she went with it.”

  “Everything with Amanda is farfetched,” Callie said.

  “Wait!” Hal pointed at Nia. “Do you still have the D.C. postcard?”

  She pulled it out of her pocket and passed it to Hal.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the V mark we’d noticed before. “This V is right where we’re hiding.” He pointed with his finger and scrutinized it, but it was still hard to know if the shadow on the outside of the monument was an alcove.

  “But we didn’t figure that out,” Nia said. “No one could have.”

  “And yet we’re here,” said Callie. “We found it.”

  “She knew we would,” I said. “It’s the only place to hide. She knew that I’d figure out how to keep us from being seen. Or that you would, Hal. She knew Nia would be drawn to the Kilroy. I think these guys are really close on her heels and she just wants us to know that she is still with us. She can’t come out here, but she is close. Or maybe that’s what I want to think.”

  For a minute, as we digested this new understanding, we all just sat staring at the animals drawn on the wall. I knew we needed to keep moving, that it wasn’t safe to stay at the monument too long, but still, I didn’t want to go.

  “They’re beautiful, you know that?” said Hal, pointing to the chalked drawing. “It reminds me of Thornhill’s car. I mean, on the one hand it was an act of desperation, a message, a clue, a start to all of this. And on the other hand, it was a work of art. Everything she touches just seems to radiate with Amanda-ness.”

  Nia sighed, and I recognized in the sadness of that sigh my own sadness about Amanda. I missed her. All of this would seem less scary, and I would feel less lost, if only she were here.

  “When I was with her,” Callie said, blushing, “everything felt like it was going to be okay. Everything that I thought was bad about myself seemed, well, seemed kind of cool.”

  Hal traced a finger along the outside edge of Amanda’s swirled drawing and without thinking about it too much, I followed the train his finger left in chalk dust. The overall shape. Was it important? Was it a letter? It was hard not to follow the animals’ eyes, all of which were directed toward the ground, as if they were looking for something to burst from a cavity in the earth.

  Just as I was about to suggest that maybe we should try to break open the alcove’s door, or look for a key, or something, Hal kicked aside the last of the leaves collected on the grate, and exclaimed, “Hey, guys, look, I just found five dollars!”

  “Really?” said Callie.

  “How often does that happen?” said Hal. “I’ve found quarters and stuff, but I don’t think I’ve ever found a five-dollar bill lying on the ground.”

  “It’s found money,” said Callie. “That’s good luck.”

  “I guess,” said Hal.

  “Or maybe it’s more than good luck. Maybe Amanda left it here,” Nia said. “Maybe it’s part of the clue.”

  “But what does it mean?” said Callie.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Can I see it?”

  Hall passed me the bill. I smoothed it out across my knee. A five-dollar bill. I looked into Abraham Lincoln’s chiseled face, his impassive gaze, his firmly set mouth. And then I turned the bill over, and there it was, as plain as day.

  “I’ve got it,” I said, and showed them what suddenly seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Got what?” said Nia.

  “Yeah,” said Hal. “What are you talking about?”

  Pinching the bill on both sides, I put my hands together and drew them apart again quickly so that I could hear the paper snap.

  “Check this out,” I said. “Look right here!”

  It was so obvious to me, I couldn’t understand at first why Hal, Nia, and Callie were looking at me with blank faces. “Don’t you see?” I went on. “It’s a picture of the Lincoln Memorial. Amanda must be waiting for us there.”

  “That’s the Lincoln Memorial?” Callie asked.

  “It looks so familiar,” Nia said. “I thought it was the Parthenon.”

  “That’s because your mom isn’t Greek,” I said. “It may have been inspired by the Greeks, but if you had pictures and little replicas of the Parthenon surrounding you since birth, you’d never be confused. And the Lincoln Memorial, my friends, is something like three hundred yards over there.”

  I pointed, and without even having to speak a word, Nia and I erased the chalk with the sleeves of our jackets, and the four of us started off.

  As we speed-walked alongside the reflecting pool that separates the World War II Memorial from the Lincoln Memorial, I couldn’t help thinking of a scene in that ’90s movie my mom likes to watch when it comes on TV—Forrest Gump. When Forrest is speaking at a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, love-of-his-life Jenny runs through the reflecting pool in her eagerness to reunite with him. Part of me wanted to jump into the pool too, I was in such a hurry.

  But if you had a list of ways of remaining unnoticed in our nation’s capital, jumping into a fountain would not be on it anywhere. “Slow down,” I warned the others. “We’re supposed to look like tourists, remember?”

  We slowed our pace and walked in silence.

  I snapped a few shots with my camera as we were walking, partly to make it look like we really were tourists and partly out of habit.

  I scanned through the pictures I was taking, and in one of the images I’d just shot, I saw something in the top right corner. Something
that gave me pause.

  Highlighting that quadrant of the picture and then zooming in, I was able to make out the shape that had looked like nothing more than a slash of black before.

  It was a jogger. The one from the Memorial. She was running, but the light was shining on her face and I could see she’d been looking. At us. She’d been watching. She knew where we were.

  I looked up, scanning the path where she’d been running but it was empty now except for a little girl riding a bike, and her dad jogging along at her side.

  Chapter 14

  Here’s the thing about the Lincoln Memorial. It is simply very large.

  The columns alone are forty-four feet tall, and as you climb the five flights of steps on the front of the building, you feel smaller and smaller. Once you get inside, forget it.

  Abraham Lincoln was the tallest president in history to begin with, but this statue is nineteen feet taller than he was in real life. I was so jittery I would have felt intimidated by a life-size sculpture of a squirrel.

  Fortunately, the only park ranger we saw was talking to a bunch of old people, and there was no clipboard in sight.

  I scanned the crowd for Amanda. If you’re looking for someone in a wig, suddenly everyone’s hair looks fake. It testifies to her penchant for elaborate costuming that I spent a good minute looking at an old man wheeling around an iron lung before ruling out the possibility that it could be her.

  “If she’s here, she’s hiding,” Nia said, keeping her voice low. Callie nodded tensely, and we all started to walk around and among the gigantic pillars.

  “Look at the words through your camera,” Hal said, and I lifted it to my eye, snapping pictures.

  “Do you see anything?” Callie asked.

  I did. In two different places, some of the words I was reading glowed in a way that matched what I’d seen before. In the line, It is fitting and proper that we shall have here a new birth of freedom, the words, we shall have here a new birth of freedom were highlighted.