For Jonah himself recognized the two men sitting in the dusty airfield office, ready to meet with Charles Lindbergh.
The two men were Jonah’s enemies Gary and Hodge.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Don’t trust them!” Jonah yelled, even though of course Charles Lindbergh couldn’t hear him. “They’re liars and cheats, and—and kidnappers! They’re kidnappers, your worst enemies! They kidnapped your son, or they will, or—well, I don’t know how the timing works, but you can’t trust Gary and Hodge!”
Jonah was surprised at how much he wanted to keep yelling.
You should be relieved, he told himself. You’ve been waiting for ages for Gary and Hodge to show up. Finally! Now you have your chance to see what deal they offered Lindbergh, how they got him to kidnap Katherine.
But how could Lindbergh kidnap any other parents’ child, after what he’d been through himself?
Jonah forced himself to shut his mouth. He forced himself to keep watching Lindbergh and Gary and Hodge on the screen.
And . . . he watched as the door finished its swinging arc, coming to a stop firmly against the wooden frame of the doorway.
Okay, readjust the camera angle, Jonah thought. In the hours and hours and days and days Jonah had already watched, the camera had almost always jumped automatically to the best viewpoint. But now, in the one moment Jonah wanted to watch the most, the camera seemed stuck, trained on nothing but the closed door.
What are they saying? Jonah wondered. Can I hear even if I can’t see?
Jonah pushed his ear close to the screen, as if he were right there beside the real door and putting his ear against the wood were possible.
He still couldn’t hear anything.
What? Why not? Who’s controlling this? he wondered.
What if it was Gary and Hodge?
The door stayed firmly shut, shutting Jonah out.
Jonah kicked the rock wall beneath the monitor’s screen. This didn’t help: It only jammed his toe.
“This isn’t fair!” Jonah yelled.
He thought about how JB hadn’t really seemed to understand how the monitors worked; how even JB hadn’t known that this particular monitor would be capable of plunging viewers back into the past.
JB was having memory problems, Jonah reminded himself. He couldn’t even remember my original identity.
But what if there was a different reason that JB hadn’t understood the monitors? What if they’d been sabotaged from the very start?
What if the only reason kid JB hadn’t been more concerned about that was because he already had so many problems of his own?
Why would Gary and Hodge want me to see some of the scenes with Charles Lindbergh but not others? Jonah wondered.
Just then the camera angle finally changed. It was almost like the camera zoomed through the door—Jonah had seen that effect in movies. He wasn’t going to worry about how it had happened from a technical sense. He just stared hard at Gary and Hodge and Lindbergh, and tried to figure out what he’d missed.
“Yes,” Lindbergh was saying as he nodded his head eagerly.
Oh, thanks a lot! Jonah thought. All I get to see is Lindbergh agreeing to help Gary and Hodge, but I don’t know their exact deal!
“We thought as much,” Hodge said. His voice and his smile were so full of smugness that Jonah clenched his fists.
It’s not possible to punch him—you’d just destroy the monitor, Jonah reminded himself.
“Yeah,” Gary said, smirking. “What he said.”
Was it Jonah’s imagination, or did Gary look slightly less muscular than the last time Jonah had seen him? Did he and Hodge both have more lines in their faces, more gray in their hair?
Jonah had last seen Gary and Hodge in 1918, but Jonah knew he shouldn’t expect the two men to look fourteen years older in 1932. For them, it could be five seconds later—or fifty years.
They don’t look fifty years older but . . . maybe a decade or two? Jonah guessed. How much trouble have they stirred up since the last time I saw them?
How much had happened that Jonah didn’t know about?
Gary and Hodge were leaning back in their chairs—they looked relaxed and comfortable and completely at ease. But Lindbergh was hunched over a table, writing something down.
“This is my checklist,” Lindbergh said, holding up a small notebook that Jonah recognized. It was the same one Jonah had seen Lindbergh holding in the Skidmores’ living room, right before Lindbergh grabbed Katherine and vanished.
“Did I leave anything out?” Lindbergh asked Gary and Hodge.
Jonah peered eagerly toward the screen. The camera quickly focused on four lines at the bottom of the page:
Identify Skidmore children.
Grab Skidmore girl.
Reset her chronophysical age to exactly thirteen years and three months.
Take Skidmore girl to Gary and Hodge to seal the deal.
“What about the rest of the checklist?” Jonah shouted at the screen in frustration. “I already know all that!”
The camera angle didn’t change.
“Good so far,” Hodge said. “What did you write on the back?”
On the back? Jonah thought.
Had he looked on the back of the sheet of paper he’d picked up in his own living room? Jonah started rifling through his own pockets; then he remembered that he’d changed clothes before going back to the 1920s. He’d left the scrap of Lindbergh’s checklist in his twenty-first-century blue jeans. Jonah kept his eyes on the monitor and scooped up his untidy bundle of clothes. Without looking, he began searching through his jeans pockets.
On the screen Lindbergh flipped the paper over, showing the back of it to Gary and Hodge.
The camera stayed focused on the bottom half of the back of the page—the blank bottom half of the back of the page. Jonah had no idea what was written at the top of the back of the page.
“Are you trying to drive me crazy?” he yelled at the screen.
Simultaneously he found the scrap of paper in his own pocket. The back of the scrap he’d managed to carry away was equally empty.
But is it important to know that there’s more on his checklist after he takes Katherine to Gary and Hodge? Jonah wondered.
He dropped the note and his clothes and went back to focusing intensely on the monitor.
“Very good,” Hodge was saying as he nodded approvingly at the portion of the list Jonah couldn’t see. “You carry through your part of the deal, we’ll carry through ours.”
Lindbergh tucked the notebook and a stubby pencil into the jacket of his flight suit.
Oh, that flight suit, Jonah suddenly realized. That’s the exact same one Lindbergh was wearing when he kidnapped Katherine.
But wasn’t Lindbergh supposed to appear in the Skidmores’ living room first dressed in a 1930s suit and fedora?
“Give me the navigational device and I’ll take my leave,” Lindbergh was saying to Gary and Hodge. He shook hands with both men, and Hodge handed him a rectangular black device—an old-fashioned camera, maybe?
“The Elucidator,” Hodge said, sounding almost as formal as if he were making an introduction. “Remember, when you get to the twenty-first century, it will take on a different appearance, to match the technology of that time. But it will still be able to follow your commands. The commands we have agreed upon, anyway.”
Jonah half expected Lindbergh to ask for operating instructions, but he simply tucked the Elucidator inside his jacket, alongside his notebook.
“I should like to leave as soon as possible,” Lindbergh said.
Gary looked at his watch.
“This timing works,” he said.
Lindbergh nodded, took a step forward—and vanished.
Jonah didn’t even have time to blink before Lindbergh was back, firmly placing his shoe in the exact spot he’d been stepping toward.
His hair was more windswept than before, and he was glancing around frantically. But the main difference�
�the main proof that Jonah could see that Lindbergh had actually been away—was that now Lindbergh carried some sort of bundle in his arms.
And the bundle was crying.
TWENTY-FIVE
Lindbergh traveled through time and succeeded in getting his baby back? Jonah thought numbly. He got me back—even though I’m still right here in the time cave?
Jonah was confused. Deeply confused, actually.
But . . . Lindbergh kidnapped Katherine, not me, Jonah thought. Unless . . . he kidnapped Katherine and did everything Gary and Hodge wanted, and took Katherine to them in some other time period. And then after that he went off into my future and grabbed me and took me back to the 1930s? And I haven’t seen him grab me yet, but I’m seeing the results of him grabbing me?
Jonah shook his head, not sure he understood even yet.
The odd thing was, for a moment it seemed as if Gary and Hodge were confused too. Both of them were staring at the crying, squirming bundle in Lindbergh’s arms. Gary sprang up from his chair and exclaimed, “What? But that’s not—”
Hodge put a warning hand on Gary’s arm.
“Tell us . . . about your adventures,” Hodge practically purred to Lindbergh. “Did you have any trouble adjusting to the plane?”
Plane? What plane is he talking about? Jonah wondered.
Lindbergh turned his head toward Hodge’s voice. Jonah was willing to bet that Lindbergh was slightly timesick, and his vision hadn’t swung into focus yet.
Hodge reached his hand up toward Lindbergh’s jacket.
“Or perhaps you are weary from your trip and would prefer to let the Elucidator reveal everything about your travels?” Hodge asked. His voice arced higher, competing with the crying baby, who was getting louder and louder.
Lindbergh shoved Hodge’s hand away, a gesture that was just shy of being rude.
“It’s . . . more fun to tell everything myself,” Lindbergh murmured, shielding the baby in his arms from Hodge. He turned slightly, almost as if he was trying to keep the baby’s face hidden. “Just . . . give me a minute. Just . . . let me soothe the baby first.”
However the time travel worked out, if that’s really the baby version of me in Lindbergh’s arms, I’ve got incredible lung power, Jonah marveled.
“My colleague and I have extensive experience keeping children quiet,” Hodge said, and Jonah wondered if Lindbergh heard the menace in those words.
Because you’re kidnappers! Jonah wanted to yell. That’s where you got all your experience!
Hodge was reaching for the baby in a sneaky way—a way that would almost force a fight over the baby if Lindbergh didn’t let go.
Lindbergh clutched the baby tighter to his chest.
“I think I could be excused for not wishing to let the child out of my sight,” Lindbergh growled.
“Oh, all we’re asking is that you share the sight,” Hodge said smoothly. “And—don’t you think the child will be happier without being so tightly bundled?”
He feinted to the right, then stepped quickly to the left, knocking the blankets the opposite direction from where Lindbergh seemed to expect. Three layers of blankets peeled back from the baby’s face, revealing it clearly.
Jonah had seen his own baby pictures, of course. When he and Katherine were little, Grandma Skidmore had been big into scrapbooking, and so she’d given them all sorts of albums full of their own photos. There was one in particular that Katherine had called “The Book of Us,” which she’d demanded that Mom or Dad “read” every night at bedtime for a solid year. Jonah probably hadn’t looked at that album since he was five, but it didn’t matter. Those pictures were engraved in his memory and probably always would be. He could close his eyes and see himself at four months, at six months, at nine months, at a year . . . He’d had thick hair and long eyelashes and, even back then, a distinct dimple in his chin. And when he was four or five, he’d thought it was funny that in his baby pictures he had so much hair and Katherine, in hers, had none.
Katherine as a baby had been as bald as a cue ball.
So was the baby that Lindbergh held in his arms on the screen back in 1932.
So—for some reason Lindbergh shaved his kid’s head when he stole him back? Jonah wondered. He shaved my head?
Jonah was being ridiculous.
If Jonah had his own baby pictures memorized, he knew the ones of Katherine just as well. She’d barely even started to grow hair until she was six months old, and her eyes were little and squinty, and her nose was often wrinkled up as if she wasn’t quite sure she trusted the world yet. And, even though he was never ever allowed to say this when he was four or five years old, she’d actually been a rather ugly baby.
The baby Charles Lindbergh held was absolutely, positively not the infant version of Jonah.
Instead that baby was absolutely, positively, definitely, without question his sister Katherine.
Duh, duh, duh, Jonah thought, disgusted with his own stupidity. You saw right on Lindbergh’s checklist that he was supposed to bring Katherine to Gary and Hodge. You know time travelers can play around with age. Why didn’t you figure out right away that Lindbergh was holding baby Katherine, not baby you?
Jonah knew why he hadn’t figured that out—why he hadn’t wanted to figure it out. As long as he’d thought that Lindbergh had carried off Katherine exactly as she’d been back in her regular time in the twenty-first century, he’d been able to believe that she had a decent chance of rescuing herself. (Maybe he’d even been half counting on her coming and rescuing him?) Though he’d never quite admit it to her face, Katherine was smart and brave and resourceful—a true hero, or heroine, whatever. If anyone could escape on her own from a time-traveling kidnapper from another century, it’d be her.
But that was Katherine as her real self, a feisty almost-twelve-year-old.
Katherine as an infant would be like any other baby: helpless. Totally dependent.
Absolutely incapable of rescuing herself or anyone else.
Jonah was so busy being horrified that it took him a moment to realize that Gary and Hodge seemed equally outraged by the sight of baby Katherine.
“I thought you understood our directions!” Hodge was bellowing at Lindbergh. “This is not where we told you to bring that baby!”
“What else did you mess up?” Gary growled, towering threateningly over Lindbergh.
“Put the baby down before you start fighting!” Jonah screamed, even though no one could hear him. “Don’t let Katherine get hurt!”
But no one started throwing punches. Lindbergh just stood there, tall and confident and peering defiantly back at Gary and Hodge.
“I have been dealing with mobsters and gangsters and the criminal element since March,” Lindbergh said quietly. “I paid ransom money for a child who’d been dead for weeks. I followed tips and leads and promises of certain help that turned out to be absolutely worthless. I have met many, many untrustworthy men. Why should I trust you? I have seen proof now that you’ve harnessed the power to travel through time. But I have not seen any proof that you can bring my child back and deliver him to me. I think you can understand why I’d like that proof before I finish the rest of the checklist.”
Whoa, dude, Jonah thought, so stunned by the force of Lindbergh’s words that he actually took a step back from the monitor. Jonah wished that just once, in any of his dealings with Gary and Hodge, he’d been able to muster up even a fraction of that quiet authority.
On the screen Gary and Hodge were gazing frantically back and forth between each other and Lindbergh and baby Katherine.
“If that baby’s presence in this time period ruins—” Gary began.
“No, no, it’s what happened at the point of contact that we need to worry about,” Hodge interrupted. “We had that calibrated down to the nanosecond.” He held his hand out to Lindbergh. “Give me your Elucidator so I can check.”
“I’m sure you have navigational devices of your own that you can consult,” Lindbergh said
calmly. “Did you not tell me that you could spy on me anywhere, anytime?”
Defeated, Gary and Hodge both looked down at their watches.
Oh, those are their Elucidators, Jonah realized.
Both men were silent for a long moment.
“I’m sure you’ll see that after I changed the girl’s age, I traveled back twelve years and eleven months in time, just as you told me to,” Lindbergh said. “The girl—what did you call it? She un-aged? Un-grew? Anyhow, I watched her change on the trip through time until she returned to being a baby.”
He made Katherine thirteen years and three months old and then went back twelve years and eleven months to turn her back into a . . . four-month-old baby? Jonah thought confusedly. Why? Why those exact numbers? My current age and . . .
Jonah had to force himself to finish the thought.
. . . and the age I was when I crash-landed on that airplane with all the other missing children from history.
So had Gary and Hodge wanted Lindbergh to meet them with Katherine on the airplane, maybe?
Was that why they’d asked if Lindbergh had had trouble adjusting to the plane?
Wouldn’t they know whether Lindbergh had met them or not?
Jonah shook his head, starting to get lost in confusion again.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t just tell me to make the child four months old from the very start, rather than using the time travel to change her age,” Lindbergh was saying with a shrug. “Since you told me ages don’t have to change with time travel. And I saw the proof of that, bringing myself and this child through the better part of a century.”
“The un-aging works best if it’s done in conjunction with time travel,” Hodge muttered. “One second taken away in chronological age as a person travels a second back in time . . . until he or she reaches the right age . . . The body likes that. There’s less chance of permanent brain damage, especially when we’re erasing such a large portion of someone’s life.”
So there is a chance of permanent damage for Mom and Dad and JB and Angela? Jonah agonized. Their un-aging wasn’t done naturally!
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