The answering machine clicked on, Dad’s normal adult voice asking callers to leave a message. After the click, a frantic male voice came on, begging, “Michael? Are you there? Did you oversleep? Did you forget the call with the Chinese? I’m not getting through on your cell phone. This is so not like you—”
Jonah walked over and picked up the phone.
“Mr. Wilson?” he said, because he was pretty sure this was Dad’s boss. “This is Jonah Skidmore, Michael’s son. My dad’s been trying to call you, but something was messed up—it wouldn’t even go to voice mail.”
“Put him on now,” Mr. Wilson ordered.
Jonah looked over at kid Dad, who was shaking his head, panic spread across his face.
“That’s the problem,” Jonah said. “He woke up this morning with a really bad case of laryngitis. He’s been gargling with salt water, but he still can’t even whisper.”
“Tell him to try,” Mr. Wilson growled.
Jonah held out the phone to Dad and mouthed, Fake having laryngitis, but Dad just backed away, shaking his head even more violently.
Jonah whispered into the phone instead, “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson. This is a disaster . . .”
“I can’t hear you,” Mr. Wilson said. He sighed. “I’ll let the Chinese know we have to reschedule. Stay home and try habanero peppers. That always works for me. You’ve got to get over this soon!”
Jonah hung up the phone. Both his parents were staring at him in astonishment.
“Everyone should be the hero of his own dreams,” kid Dad complained. “But I just acted like a scaredy-cat and my own kid had to take over. This dream is really starting to suck.”
Then he clapped his hand over his mouth and glanced guiltily at kid Mom.
“Oops,” he said. “We aren’t supposed to say words like ‘suck’ in front of the kids. Speaking of the kids . . . where’s Katherine?”
No way was Jonah going to try to explain that one.
“Maybe your dream will get better if you go back to bed,” Jonah said.
“Oh,” Dad said, wrinkling his brow. “I didn’t think of that.”
“I’m going upstairs too, for a minute,” Mom said. “I think I’ll be able to deal with all this better if I’m not scared the whole time that my clothes are going to fall off.”
“That’s—” Dad started to say.
Kid Mom’s hand shot out and covered his mouth.
“You are not saying a word about that,” she said. “Not until you’re a grown-up again.”
Jonah barely waited until they were out of the kitchen before he had the phone back in his hand. He was pretty sure Mom planned to come right back, so he didn’t have much time. There was exactly one grown-up he knew in the twenty-first century who understood about time travel—exactly one grown-up he could call who might be able to help.
Oh, please, I hope she’s still a grown-up, Jonah thought, quickly dialing the number. Like Dad’s boss, not like Mom and Dad.
Angela, the woman he was calling, had seen a plane crash-land thirteen years ago carrying baby Jonah and baby Chip and baby Gavin and thirty-three other infants who’d been stolen from history. The people kidnapping them—two men named Gary and Hodge—had intended to carry the babies on to the future, but those plans had been ruined.
So was Angela’s life. She’d become obsessed with figuring out the mystery behind what she’d seen, and it had taken thirteen years before she’d gotten anything resembling an answer.
She’d also had to risk her life to help Jonah and Katherine and the other kids.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang.
“Crud!” Jonah exclaimed, hanging up.
Next he tried calling his friend Chip. Chip hadn’t been on as many time-travel trips as Jonah, but in Chip’s original identity—which he at least knew, and had relived part of—he’d been a king of England in the Middle Ages. Jonah could use a king helping him out, even if that king had gone back to being a seventh grader stuck in the middle of Ohio.
Talking to Chip would be a little bit complicated, since Chip was also Katherine’s boyfriend. But maybe Jonah wouldn’t tell him she was missing. Maybe Jonah would just ask if Chip’s parents were still adults or if they were thirteen-year-olds too.
Chip’s phone went straight to voice mail, meaning he was probably already at school and he’d shut it off. All the kids Jonah knew would be at school now. There wasn’t anyone who could help him.
“What should we do now, Kath—?” Jonah started to say automatically, because with just about every single time-travel dilemma he’d ever faced, he’d had Katherine right there beside him, helping out. In practically the only time-travel moments he’d had without Katherine, he’d had Albert Einstein’s wife at his side, and she was pretty smart herself.
This time Jonah was on his own.
Jonah went back into the living room and stood in the exact spot where Lindbergh and Katherine had been the moment before they vanished. Maybe he’d get lucky and some random force would zap him to the same place they’d gone, and he’d be able to rescue Katherine that way.
Jonah could just hear what Katherine would say about this plan: Yeah, right, Jonah. Like that’s going to work.
Jonah sank down onto the recliner and sat back in despair. Something poked against his back.
He sat up again and turned around. There, stuck in the crack between the cushions, was a little piece of paper that Jonah hadn’t noticed before. Jonah pulled it out.
It was just a scrap, the bottom half of some sheet that seemed to have been torn out of a small notebook. At the top it held the words “identify Skidmore children,” with a checkmark beside them.
Charles Lindbergh was checking things off a list in a notebook! Jonah remembered excitedly.
Had Lindbergh come back? Just to leave this bit of paper?
Jonah remembered how furiously Katherine had been flailing about in the moment before Lindbergh carried her away. In all her squirming, could she have knocked this bit of paper loose from the notebook without Lindbergh noticing? And then, was it possible that Jonah hadn’t noticed it either, because he was swinging his arms around trying to find an invisible Lindbergh and Katherine—not looking for scraps of paper and other easily overlooked clues?
Jonah decided this was probably exactly what had happened.
He flattened the paper out on his knee and eager started reading the rest of it.
Grab Skidmore girl was the next item on the list, and it was checked off. So, too, was the next sentence: Reset her chronophysical age to exactly thirteen years and three months.
“What?” Jonah was so surprised he actually spoke aloud.
Why would it matter if she’s eleven or thirteen? he wondered. And why that exact “thirteen years and three months”?
Something struck him: Jonah himself was exactly thirteen years and three months old.
But Charles Lindbergh didn’t even try to grab me, Jonah reminded himself. It wasn’t like he wanted Katherine and me to be the same age.
But now both Mom and Dad were probably thirteen years and three months too. Or close to it. Jonah hadn’t asked either of them to be that precise about their current ages—and maybe they didn’t even know—but Mom had talked about feeling like she should be in seventh grade. And Dad had said he was the same age as Jonah. Maybe he really was exactly the same.
What’s the big deal about being thirteen and three months? Jonah asked himself. And if Charles Lindbergh had wanted to change Mom and Dad, too, wouldn’t he have put them on this checklist? Or was changing them just . . . an accident?
Jonah saw that there was one more line written at the very bottom of the page, the only line that hadn’t been checked off. But it didn’t explain anything about Mom and Dad. It made Jonah forget that he needed to worry about them.
Because the last line said, Take Skidmore girl to Gary and Hodge to seal the deal.
SEVEN
Jonah dropped the scrap of paper and it fluttered down to the fl
oor.
“Nooo,” he moaned.
Why would Gary and Hodge want Katherine? he wondered.
Gary and Hodge were kidnappers, sure, but Jonah had never heard of them trying to kidnap anyone who wasn’t a famous missing kid from history. Katherine wasn’t famous. She wasn’t from any foreign time period. And she wasn’t missing—at least, she wasn’t before today, Jonah thought with a pang.
Gary and Hodge just wanted to make money, and lots of it. Though they claimed that they ran a charitable adoption agency, what they really did was sell famous missing kids from the past to rich families in the future, so those families could brag about who their kids were.
Katherine’s no one to them, Jonah thought. They would say she doesn’t have any value. Except . . .
Except Katherine had foiled or helped foil a lot of their plans. On her last trip through time, for example, she’d played a huge role in preventing Gary and Hodge from carrying off Alexei Romanov and Maria and Anastasia Romanova, part of the last royal family of Russia.
But I’ve ruined their plans too, Jonah thought. If this is about revenge, or if they’re just trying to get her out of the way so she won’t mess up any more of their plans, why didn’t they have Charles Lindbergh grab me at the same time as her?
Jonah tried to think the way Gary and Hodge thought, even though he hated it.
Is it because they still think they can make money from kidnapping me and carrying me off to the future? he wondered. So they need me to stay right here for now? Is that why they took her and not me?
This still left lots of confusing details that Jonah didn’t understand. What did Gary and Hodge plan to do with Katherine once they had her? What did it mean that delivering her was supposed to “seal the deal” for Charles Lindbergh? Why hadn’t Gary and Hodge just kidnapped her themselves—why had they used Charles Lindbergh to do their dirty work for them? Who was Charles Lindbergh, anyway?
Jonah couldn’t answer those questions, and anyhow he could hear Mom coming back down the stairs. Quickly he picked up the scrap of paper and tucked it into his pocket. He could tell by the sounds of her footsteps that Mom was practically running—Mom didn’t run inside the house, did she?
So maybe it’s really Katherine, after all, magically returned? Jonah thought hopefully.
It wasn’t Katherine who rounded the corner into the living room—it was kid Mom in Katherine’s clothes, which was an even more disturbing sight than kid Mom in too-big clothing. Jonah had seen pictures of both of his parents when they were kids, of course, so he should have recognized them from the very start. But Mom-as-a-teenager and Dad-as-a-teenager belonged in old, faded pictures where they wore funny-looking clothes and hairstyles from the 1980s: both of them in high-waisted pants with their shirts tucked in, Mom with her hair pulled into a ponytail that dangled down on one side of her head only . . . Jonah and Katherine used to love laughing at those pictures.
Seeing kid Mom in a pair of Katherine’s running pants and a baby-blue sweatshirt that said CHEER! was just plain wrong.
Evidently Mom thought so too.
“I never realized how much of Katherine’s wardrobe is pink and/or sparkly,” she said, making a face. “This was the best I could do. I feel ridiculous. You know I was a total tomboy when I was a kid, don’t you?”
Jonah hadn’t remembered that. But the talk of clothes made him think of something else.
What was Katherine even wearing when she disappeared? He wondered. He had a vague sense that it was something pink—or maybe purple?—but if this had been a normal kidnapping and he’d needed to describe her clothes for the cops, he would have been useless. Mom probably remembered, but he wasn’t going to ask her. He needed to keep her from finding out that Katherine had vanished.
Jonah realized that kid Mom seemed to still be waiting for him to answer.
“Huh,” he grunted, figuring Mom could interpret that however she wanted.
She bounced impatiently on the balls of her feet, which was something else that normal adult Mom would never do. Whenever Jonah or Katherine did something like that, she ordered them, “Stop fidgeting.”
Jonah bit his tongue to avoid saying that to her. He needed to figure out a way to get her to go hang out upstairs with kid Dad so Jonah would be free to . . . well, do something to get Katherine back and restore both parents to their normal ages.
“You can’t go in to work today,” Jonah said. “So . . .”
“Duh,” Mom said, rolling her eyes.
Real adult Mom would never have done that to Jonah. Not in a million years. Jonah was speechless.
“Sorry,” Mom said instantly. She rubbed her forehead. There was something too adult about the gesture. Now she looked like a teenager playacting adult behavior. “I just feel so weird . . . like I don’t know how to act. But I do have a plan!”
“Uh . . . good?” Jonah said doubtfully.
“First we need to get you and Katherine to school,” Mom said.
Now, that sounded like Jonah’s real mom. The world could be on the verge of ending, and she’d still think skipping school was a crime.
What if Mom and Dad being teenagers again is a sign that the world is ending? Jonah wondered.
He’d seen problems before that had left all of time and the whole universe teetering on the brink of collapse. Having Mom and Dad suddenly become thirty years younger was every bit as strange as the messes he’d faced then.
But I managed to fix those earlier problems, he reminded himself. Well, with Katherine’s help. And sometimes other people’s help as well. . . .
Jonah felt lonely all over again. If he had real, normal, adult Mom in front of him, maybe he would just break down and tell her everything and wail, Mommy! Figure out how to get Katherine back! I can’t!
But real, normal, adult Mom had vanished. The thirteen-year-old girl standing in front of him looked like someone else he needed to protect.
“Katherine left in time to make the bus,” Jonah said. Surprisingly enough, this actually wasn’t a lie. Katherine had vanished in plenty of time to get to the bus stop. Jonah was just leaving out the fact that that wasn’t where she’d gone.
Jonah could tell that kid Mom was trying to do the same narrowed-eyed searching gaze that adult Mom could always use to get Jonah to break down and admit, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ll tell you the truth—the whole truth!”
But kid Mom’s searching gaze had absolutely no effect on Jonah. After a moment she gave up.
Emboldened, Jonah added, “And I really do feel too sick to get to school today, after all. You’ll have to call and tell them I’m going to be absent.”
“I can’t call the school sounding like this!” Mom protested. “They’ll think I’m you pretending to be me!”
I don’t sound like a thirteen-year-old girl! Jonah wanted to protest. But he didn’t think it would help his cause.
“Pretend you have laryngitis,” he suggested instead.
To his surprise Mom nodded approvingly. He followed her into the kitchen again as she dialed and then spoke quickly into the phone in a fake-hoarse voice. As soon as she hung up, he went for the next stage of getting both parents safely out of the way so he could figure out how to fix everything that had gone wrong that morning.
“You look tired,” he told Mom. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get some rest? I’m sure when you wake up, everything will be normal again . . .”
He’d underestimated kid Mom. Her cheeks flushed, and she shook her head stubbornly.
Who would have guessed that, as a kid, Mom was just as exasperating as Katherine?
“No, Jonah,” Mom said. “I’m going to figure out what’s going on here.”
“How?” Jonah challenged.
“First I’m going to find out how widespread this is,” she said. “I’m going to go out and knock on our neighbors’ doors and see if anybody else is suddenly the wrong age.”
It wasn’t the worst idea Jonah had ever heard. He probably would have done
the same thing, if the only problem he’d known about was his parents’ messed-up ages. (How many other problems were out there right now besides the ones Jonah knew about?) Maybe if Jonah let Mom focus on the whole age thing, he could focus on getting Katherine back?
But kid Mom looked so young . . . and vulnerable . . . and unprotected.
“How about if you stay here and I go out knocking on doors?” Jonah suggested. “You can take it easy, and—”
“I am not going to ‘take it easy’!” Mom said through gritted teeth. “I am not going to deal with something bizarre and incredible like this by sitting around playing Angry Birds on my cell phone!”
“Is that what Dad is doing?” Jonah asked weakly.
Kid Mom nodded.
“It’s like Home Alone up there,” she said.
At least he’s staying safe inside the house, Jonah thought. He sighed.
“Maybe we should both go out knocking on the neighbors’ doors,” he suggested.
It would give him a chance to grill Mom about exactly who Charles Lindbergh was. And maybe after just a few houses Jonah could convince her that her plan was pointless, and maybe she would come back to the house and relax by trying on Katherine’s other clothes—er, no, not if Mom had been such a tomboy. Maybe he could talk kid Mom and kid Dad into going down into the basement to play Ping-Pong. The basement would be a safe place for them, wouldn’t it?
Mom was already over by the shoe caddy by the back door, grabbing her running shoes.
“Oops, these are too big too,” she muttered. She pulled out a pair of Katherine’s, held them beside her feet, and complained, “And these are too small. I feel like Goldilocks.”
Jonah was hoping no shoes meant that Mom would have to stay inside. But before he could suggest that, she began pulling on Jonah’s second-best sneakers.
They fit.
“I’m going, with or without you,” Mom said.
Jonah scrambled to catch up.
By the time he had his own sneakers on his feet, Mom was already out the door. She was walking slowly, though, looking around suspiciously as she rounded the corner of the house toward the front yard.
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