JB turned his head slowly toward Jonah. Jonah remembered how, when he’d first seen JB as a thirteen-year-old, Jonah had thought that all the girls in middle school would be in love with the other boy. But maybe that wouldn’t be the case now. JB’s hair was a total mess, and his shirt was ripped and hanging from his arms in shreds. He also looked a little . . . wild-eyed.
Angela’s hair was just as messed up, and one of her sleeves was ripped, probably where Jonah himself had torn it. But her face at least still looked normal.
“The problem is . . . ,” JB began slowly, “the only time I can think of to go to is when Lindbergh’s son was kidnapped.”
Jonah gulped, but tried to hide it.
“So?” he asked, trying to put on an air of bravado. He could tell by the other two kids’ faces that they could see right through it.
“So, if you are Lindbergh’s son—and that seems right; maybe you are—you wouldn’t be able to live through that time period again,” JB said.
“But with his tracer . . . ,” Angela began. She stopped, then froze as if she’d just thought of something horrible. She brought her hand up toward her mouth. “Ohhh . . .”
“I’m not talking about when Gary and Hodge kidnapped Lindbergh’s son, leaving behind a tracer that Jonah could join with, if that’s who he is,” JB said. “I’m talking about the kidnapping in original time. When I can’t remember what happened next.”
Jonah wanted to say So? again. Because if they were talking about going to a time where Lindbergh’s son was still present, that wasn’t Jonah’s problem. He wouldn’t end up there.
Angela was still grimacing.
“So the monitor might suck the two of us back into the past but leave Jonah right here?” she asked JB. “Because he can’t be duplicated in time?”
JB nodded. He seemed to be struggling to keep his gaze on Jonah’s face. Jonah thought that he could still see the real JB in that gaze—regardless of his age, regardless of his memory problems, regardless of that whole other life he’d lived as Tete Einstein. JB was still trying to do his best for Jonah.
“But . . . but . . . ,” Jonah began. No matter how scared he was, he couldn’t let the other two chicken out because of worrying about him. “This is a time hollow. You’d vanish and then, to me, no time at all would pass before you’d be back! With an Elucidator! And then we could find Katherine, and—you’ve got to do it!”
JB turned and looked at Angela. She shrugged and nodded.
“I think he’s right,” she said quietly.
JB made a rueful face and stood up.
“And anyhow, I’ve got my parents to keep me company!” Jonah said, trying to make a joke. He looked toward the car, where Mom and Dad still sat, totally unconscious.
JB took a deep breath and walked unsteadily toward the keyboard in the wall. He typed something quickly, and then stood back to watch the monitor’s screen.
The screen was dark and empty.
No, not empty, Jonah thought, starting to make out shapes in the darkness. It’s just showing nighttime. And this night looks cloudy and moonless.
He could see a ladder leaning against the side of a house—a kidnapper’s ladder, maybe?
Instinctively Jonah reached out to hold on to JB and Angela.
They were already gone.
EIGHTEEN
Jonah reeled away from the monitor.
“What?” he cried. “I am Charles Lindbergh’s son?”
Somehow he’d never quite believed it. But maybe any other identity besides Jonah Skidmore would have seemed wrong to him. At various times Katherine had suggested that maybe he was really John Hudson from 1611 or Alexei Romanov from 1918, and those possibilities had quickly been disproved—maybe Jonah was just used to not knowing his original identity.
“I’m Charles Lindbergh Jr., or the third, or whatever it said on that list,” Jonah said out loud. Not knowing about the “junior” or “third” part made it seem even more preposterous for him to claim that identity.
Jonah looked around quickly, expecting kid JB and kid Angela to be back right away. He didn’t want them to think he was losing it, talking to himself.
They weren’t back yet.
Jonah waited a moment, or what would have been a moment if time could actually pass in a time hollow.
Kid JB and kid Angela still didn’t come back.
“Um, was there maybe something JB forgot about traveling back and forth to a time hollow?” Jonah said aloud. “Is there something I’m forgetting?”
His words echoed a little off the rock ceiling of the cave. But JB didn’t come back to answer him. Neither did Angela.
“Okay, maybe it’s just taking you two a little longer than you expected to find an Elucidator, and your lives haven’t been in danger to let Angela’s voice zap you back,” Jonah said, even though he knew that wasn’t how time hollows worked. JB and Angela could spend decades in the past, in Lindbergh’s lifetime, and still come back to the time hollow without Jonah perceiving that any time had passed.
“Guys?” Jonah said, which was truly ridiculous, because it wasn’t like he thought the other two had come back and were just hiding from him.
He didn’t want to, but he forced himself to look back at the monitor screen before him.
He could see two shapes now at the bottom of the ladder—the kidnappers? His old enemies Gary and Hodge?
Was Lindbergh’s son—I mean, me—was I kidnapped twice? First by whoever kidnapped me in original time, then by Gary and Hodge? he wondered. Or was that how Gary and Hodge messed up time, by kidnapping me before the original kidnapper had a chance to?
Jonah peered closer at the shapes beneath the ladder. They were standing up now: one tall person, one not so tall, maybe even kid-size. . . .
Oh, Jonah realized. It’s JB and Angela.
The taller person—kid Angela—seemed to be looking around frantically, whipping her head back and forth.
“Let’s get out of here!” Jonah heard her hiss. “Before they think we’re the kidnappers!”
Had one part of his kidnapping already happened? Had Jonah missed seeing it?
But if Gary and Hodge already kidnapped me, why wouldn’t I have been zapped back there with Angela and JB? Jonah wondered. Is there something I’m missing?
Jonah suspected that he was missing lots of things that he needed to pay attention to. Maybe JB would explain something to Angela that would help?
Kid JB’s reply was a pained, “Unnhhh . . .”
Okay, that’s not helpful, Jonah thought.
Angela seemed to be thinking the same thing, because she muttered, “We don’t have time for this. Climb on my back.”
Was JB hurt somehow? Or stricken by a much worse case of timesickness than Angela?
But why would that be? Jonah wondered.
Jonah couldn’t tell if JB was helping at all as Angela lifted him up and started carrying him piggyback. She seemed desperate to get away from the ladder.
Both of Jonah’s friends disappeared into the shadows at the edge of the screen.
“Follow them! I want to see where they’re going!” he yelled at the screen, as if he had any control over it.
The scene in front of him shifted, but it didn’t follow JB and Angela. Instead the viewpoint zoomed upward, focusing on a window above the ladder.
Jonah couldn’t have said how much time passed before he heard a woman cry from beyond the window, “The baby! Where’s the baby?”
So I have already been kidnapped, Jonah thought despairingly. By someone, anyway.
He backed away from the monitor and stumbled over to the car where his parents—his real parents, his twenty-first century adoptive parents—still sat, still knocked out. They were still thirteen-year-olds, of course. Even unconscious, kid Dad had a goofy look on his face, and kid Mom wore the fierce, determined expression that made her look like Katherine.
“You’re still my real mom and dad,” Jonah told them in a choked voice. “No matter
what.”
But what had adopting Jonah ever done for them? It was the reason their real, actual biological daughter, Katherine, had been exposed to danger again and again and again, in one century after another. It had to be the reason behind Katherine being kidnapped. And adopting Jonah had been the first step toward how Mom and Dad were now: zapped back to being teenagers and tranquilized and left behind in a time hollow.
If JB and Angela didn’t come back, it was quite possible that Mom and Dad would be stuck this way forever.
“You should have adopted some normal kid from your own time period,” Jonah told Mom and Dad. Since they couldn’t actually hear him, he could say anything he wanted. “You would have been better off.”
In his sleep, kid Dad made a fist, and almost without thinking Jonah tapped his own fist against his dad’s.
Ohhh, Jonah thought in agony. Dad was even the one who taught me how to do fist bumps. He and Mom have done so much for me.
“I promise,” Jonah said, his voice cracking, “I will do everything I can to get Katherine back. I will do everything I can to get you two back to normal—to get our family back . . .”
But there was only one thing Jonah could think to do that might help: He had to go back to watch the scenes of his original family in despair over losing him.
He gritted his teeth and went back to the monitor.
He wasn’t sure how much time he’d missed watching, but the scene on the monitor had shifted. Now he was watching a large group of people in what seemed to be a child’s nursery. Several policemen bent over an empty crib, examining large safety pins in a blanket on the mattress. Two women stood in the doorway, one hiding her face in her hands and sobbing, the other looking numb and stunned and shell-shocked. It took Jonah a moment to realize that this woman was crying too. Her tears streamed down her face so silently that she didn’t even seem to be aware of them. The loud-sobbing woman was wearing some kind of an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform; the silent crier wore an expensive-looking dress.
Is that Charles Lindbergh’s wife? Jonah wondered. The kidnapped baby’s mother? My birth mother?
She looked so anguished it was impossible not to feel sorry for her. But Jonah felt no burst of recognition, no sense of deeper connection.
Across the room Charles Lindbergh was standing next to the window and addressing another cluster of uniformed policemen. The viewpoint zoomed close enough that Jonah could read the words on their badges: NEW JERSEY STATE POLICE.
“This is where I found the ransom note,” Lindbergh was telling the officers.
Jonah jerked back.
Ransom note? he thought. Gary and Hodge wouldn’t have asked for ransom.
That meant that, regardless of Gary and Hodge’s involvement, the original kidnapper had already been there.
The beginning of what could have been a hysterical laugh gurgled in the back of Jonah’s throat.
Lucky me, getting kidnapped twice! I must be the only famous missing kid from history that so many people wanted that badly, he thought. How much ransom money did the original kidnapper think he—she? They?—could get for me?
This time the monitor actually seemed to know what he wanted to see: The viewpoint zoomed in closer to where Lindbergh was holding out a piece of paper with messy, scrawled handwriting and an odd pattern of circles and holes at the bottom. Jonah could read the note about as well as if he’d been holding the note himself. It was something about having fifty thousand dollars “redy” in precise amounts of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills. Then it said:
After 2–4 days
we will inform you were to deliver
the mony.
We warn you for making
anyding public or for notify the Police
The child is in gut care.
Indication for all letters are
Singnature
and three hohls.
Okay, so I was kidnapped by someone who couldn’t spell, Jonah thought. And—concerned about my intestines? What does “gut care” mean?
“I deduce that the kidnapper was a German speaker,” one of the policemen said. “The pattern of spelling mistakes—‘gut care’ would mean ‘good care,’ right?”
The man looked at Lindbergh like he was expecting the famous man to look immensely impressed.
“I don’t know German,” Lindbergh said coldly.
“That pattern of circles and holes at the bottom,” another policeman said. “Does he mean that that will be the sign on all ransom notes, so you know that it’s come from the actual kidnapper?”
Jonah was no expert, but these didn’t seem like very talented cops.
Why aren’t you dusting for fingerprints? he wondered. Why aren’t you all wearing gloves and being very careful not to disturb anything in the crime scene? Why aren’t you looking between the window and the crib for loose hairs that might belong to the kidnapper?
Surely they had fingerprinting back in the early twentieth century. Even if they didn’t have ways to test hairs for DNA matches, surely they’d at least be able to look for hair color and length.
Wouldn’t they?
Jonah heard shouting from outside the open window. One of the policemen leaned out and seemed to be listening. Jonah could tell that the man wouldn’t have done this in original time: A tracer version of the man still stood there, peering at Charles Lindbergh.
Did Gary and Hodge change something to cause that shouting and the policeman leaning out the window? Jonah wondered. Or was it JB and Angela?
Jonah couldn’t hear what was being said down below, but he could make out the reply from the policeman in the window: “Bring him in!”
The policeman turned and spoke quietly to Charles Lindbergh.
“My men have found . . . well, we’re not sure right now if it’s a suspect or a witness,” he said. “It is your choice whether you stay for the interrogation, but you might want the ladies to remove themselves in case anything unpleasant is revealed.”
Lindbergh turned, creating another tracer, another change from original time.
“Betty?” he said, looking at the woman in the nurse’s uniform, whose sobbing had diminished slightly. “Could you take Anne back to her bedroom?”
Lindbergh crossed the room, separating entirely from his tracer. He hugged the woman Jonah thought must be his wife.
“Anne, we’ll find him,” he said. “I’m certain of it. Kidnappers don’t leave ransom notes unless they intend to keep their victims alive.”
Lindbergh’s wife—Jonah’s birth mother?—seemed too numb to respond, but she let the other woman lead her away.
And if Katherine were here with me now, she’d be furious at how the women are shoved away, as if they’re too fragile to hear anything unpleasant, Jonah thought.
Thinking about Katherine, Jonah wondered if maybe he himself was too fragile to be exposed to anything else unpleasant.
He forced himself to keep his eyes trained on the screen anyhow.
The room was aglow with tracer lights now: the tracer versions of both women still lingering in the doorway, the tracer versions of Lindbergh and the police officers still hunched over the crib or the ransom note, even as the real versions of all the men turned expectantly toward the door. Jonah could hear dozens of feet tramping up the stairs. A policeman burst into the room, ahead of the rest of the crowd.
“The young man we found will only speak in German,” he said breathlessly. “None of us know German—is there anyone here who can translate?”
“German, just as I suspected,” said the policeman who’d tried to interpret the ransom note. He sounded quite proud of himself.
Before anyone had a chance to claim any German translation skills, the rest of the pack of policemen from down below reached the room.
At the center of the pack, manhandled by the burliest of all the cops, stood kid JB.
“Noooo,” Jonah moaned.
Kid JB looked even wilder than ever, his hair in total disarray, his clothing st
ill torn from the mob scene in Paris. He was screaming something in German, the same phrases over and over again.
Lindbergh and all the police officers were staring at him blankly, clearly not understanding.
Thanks to the translation vaccine Jonah had gotten before one of his trips to the 1400s, Jonah could understand perfectly.
He just didn’t understand why kid JB was screaming it.
Because what kid JB was saying was, “The child is dead! He’s dead, I tell you! I saw him fall myself!”
NINETEEN
Jonah had to clutch the rock wall beside him, just to hold himself up.
JB, I’m right here, he thought. I didn’t die!
Did kid JB think he was telling the truth? Or was this some kind of elaborate lie—a way to force the time agency to come back and rescue him and Angela before they did any more damage to time? Was this JB’s way of trying to get help for Jonah and Katherine and their parents in the twenty-first century?
Why wasn’t the time agency intervening to stop him?
Jonah just couldn’t see cautious JB trying something so radical and extreme. And mean. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wouldn’t be that reckless. Would he?
And where was kid Angela? What had happened to her?
On the screen Lindbergh seemed to be responding to the strain in JB’s voice, even if the man didn’t understand the words.
“Get a translator,” Lindbergh snapped, with the tone of someone who was used to being obeyed.
A man in civilian clothing was hustled into the room, and his face went pale when he heard what JB was saying. The man appealed to the policeman who seemed to be most in charge.
“Perhaps I could translate just for you, and then you can decide what to share with Colonel Lindbergh?” the translator asked.
“I want to know everything going on in this investigation!” Lindbergh commanded. “This is my son we’re talking about!”
And that’s why he’s trying to protect you, Jonah thought.
The translator was a skinny guy, and probably seven or eight inches shorter than Charles Lindbergh. But Jonah thought the man was incredibly brave. He looked at Lindbergh, looked at the head policeman, and then said flat out, “He says he saw your son fall. He says your son is dead.”
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