The tackler was the “janitor” from the FBI, the one who’d told Jonah to look at the file on Mr. Reardon’s desk.
“Jonah! Chip! Run!” the tackler called urgently, struggling with the man in the boots.
What good was that? There was nowhere to runto , except out the door where the men were fighting. The booted man reared up, almost breaking the tackler’s grip.
Katherine shrieked.
“The window!” Angela said.
She rushed over to the outer wall and began tugging on the window handle. Chip jumped up and helped her. The window opened inward, making a narrow V with the wall. Chip dived out through the small space, barely missing landing in a holly bush.
Katherine followed him quickly, executing a gymnastic-like move at the end, when she flipped over onto her feet.
“Jonah, come on!” she yelled in through the open window.
Jonah looked back at the men struggling on the ground. What would happen if he stopped holding the door?
“Go!” the tackler called over his shoulder.
Jonah ran for the window, skirting the table. He looked back once and saw that the men had rolled into the conference room. He still couldn’t see the booted man’s face, but he had a general impression of bulk, of muscles. He wasn’t sure the tackler could hold him.
“You go first, Angela,” Jonah said.
The name seemed to trigger a reaction in the tackler. He jerked his head back, looking over the top of the conference table.
“Angela DuPre,” he called. “We have wronged you in time. We owe you—”
The tackler’s head suddenly disappeared beneath the table. The booted man must have pulled him down. There was a sound like someone’s head clunking against the floor, and the table lurched sideways.
“Angela?” Jonah urged.
He held out his hand to help her out of the window. She was wearing a skirt; she probably wouldn’t want to go headfirst.
Angela drew back.
“You go on,” she said. “I’ve been waiting thirteen years for something like this. I’m going to stick around and get some answers.”
“But they’re dangerous!” Jonah protested. He couldn’t see the men at all now, but he could hear them, grunting and punching and slamming into the chairs and the table.
“Probably. That’s whyyou need to get out of here,” Angela said. She pushed him toward the window. He grabbed on to the frame, spreading his fingers against the glass to brace himself as he slid his feet out.
“Go, Jonah!” the tackler called from beneath the table. “Hurry! And Jonah—I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—”
That was all Jonah heard, because he was out the window now, and the tackler was still using that low voice of hushed urgency. Jonah looked back, and he could see the tackler clearly now, under the table. He had one hand pressed into the other man’s hair, holding his head down. With his other hand, the tackler was frantically waving Jonah away. His mouth formed the words, “Go! Go! Now!” But Jonah couldn’t really hear him.
Jonah spun around and ran. He quickly caught up with Chip and Katherine. Without even speaking, all three of them ran for the bike rack, scooped up their bikes, and took off, pedaling furiously.
They were halfway down the bike path before Jonah’s mind kicked into gear, letting him think again instead of just acting on reflex.
He immediately slammed on his brakes.
TWENTY
Katherine was the first to notice that Jonah wasn’t keeping up, that he wasn’t pedaling hysterically toward home alongside her and Chip.
“Jonah!” she called over her shoulder from several bike-lengths ahead. “What are you doing?”
“I have to go back!” he yelled. “We can’t just leave Angela like that!”
“But—she’s a grown-up! She told us to go!” This was Chip arguing now.
“She—”
Jonah decided he didn’t have time to stand there and argue. He whirled around and began pedaling back toward the library just as desperately as he’d been pedaling away from it.
Grown-ups can get kidnapped too, he thought.And she’s a little nutty, she’d probably trust anyone who pretended to believe her crazy theories…. Her theories arejust craziness, aren’t they?
Jonah couldn’t think about that right now. He focused on trying to pedal faster. By the time he reached the library, his legs were aching and he was gasping for air. He dropped his bike on the sidewalk and slipped in the door just ahead of a mother pushing a baby stroller and holding a toddler’s hand and taking infuriatingly slow steps, with a play-by-play commentary: “That’s right, you push the button for the automatic door opener and then the door will open, and…”
Jonah dashed through the lobby, past the check-out desk.
“Young man! No running in the library!”
It was a librarian, one of the women his mom always said hello to when she stopped in. Jonah thought maybe this librarian had been in charge of story hour when he and Katherine were preschoolers.
“I just—the conference room—men fighting—danger—”
That was all Jonah could manage, with his lungs threatening to burst.
To her credit, the librarian stopped yelling and sprang into action.
“Show me,” she said.
She rushed along behind Jonah, practically running herself.
They dashed through the stacks, past the magazine section where Katherine had hidden before, past the nonfiction shelves with all the thick books about taxes. Then, finally, Jonah could see into the conference room and—
It was empty.
“Angela?” Jonah called.
He pushed his way into the conference room. Not only was the room empty, but all the chairs were lined up perfectly around the table. And the table was exactly centered in the room, as if it had never been knocked off-kilter by struggling men. The window was closed. The only sign that anything had happened here was a smudge on the glass wall—probably Jonah’s own fingerprints, smeared against the glass when he’d scrambled out a window.
“Just what did you think was going on in here?” the librarian asked. She had her eyebrows raised doubtfully.
Just then Jonah saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to peer out the window, and there was Angela. She was walking briskly through the far end of the parking lot.
“That’s the woman!” Jonah exclaimed. “The one who was in danger—”
While Jonah was watching, Angela stepped into the cluster of pine trees on the other side of the parking lot. She turned and lifted her hand in a way that might have been a wave at Jonah. And then she just…vanished.
Jonah hadn’t known that it would look like that. He’d heard Katherine’s description of the janitor appearing and disappearing; he’d heard Angela’s description of the plane doing the same thing. But he hadn’t understood how strange it would be, how it would set every nerve in his body on edge and make him question all sorts of basic tenets about how the world worked. Could gravity be tampered with too? Could…time?
Jonah blinked and stared and stammered, “But—but—” and then he at least had the sense to shut his mouth, because the librarian was looking at him oddly. Already his brain was trying to supply explanations for him—She just stepped behind a tree…. You just blinked and thought you saw something odd—the same kind of explanations he’d tried to use to account for Katherine’s story, for Angela’s. The kind of explanation anyone else, casually glancing out a window, would have accepted without a second thought. But his glance hadn’t been casual: he knew he hadn’t blinked, not while Angela was disappearing. He understood now what Angela had meant when she had said, “I know what I saw. I trust my own eyes.” The scene had been clear and distinct, and he really had seen Angela vanish into thin air.
“Where is this woman?” the librarian asked. “I don’t quite see—”
“She??
?s gone.”
The librarian narrowed her eyes at him and tilted her head suspiciously.
“So, what was this?” she asked. “A dare? Your audition for drama club? If so, I heartily recommend you for whatever part you’re trying out for, because you really had me convinced—you hadme running through the library.”
“I wasn’t lying!” Jonah protested. “There really were two men in here fighting, and they seemed dangerous, and—”
The librarian tapped her chin, her eyes narrowing further.
“How did you see what was going on in this conference roombefore you ran in the front door?” she asked.
“Um, through the glass? From outside?” Jonah said, which did have a grain of truth to it. Still, his words came out sounding like a question.
“Someone did mention that they thought they heard a girl scream back here, but we thought it was just one of those computer games….” The librarian seemed to be talking mostly to herself. She reached out and grabbed Jonah’s arm. “Come with me. We’ll do a search through the library and you tell me if you see either of those men.”
Meekly, Jonah let himself be led back through the magazine section, past the row of computers, past the reference desk, through the little-kid section where the mother with the toddler was asking with exaggerated patience, “What will it be?Curious George orThe Cat in the Hat ?”
In the YA section, some kids from school were playing on the computers, and they pointed and giggled when they saw Jonah being paraded around, his arm trapped in the librarian’s grip.
“I don’t see either of the men now,” Jonah said, his face burning with shame. He just wanted to get out of the library, away from the librarian. He could see Chip and Katherine standing hesitantly by the front door, as if they weren’t sure if they needed to come and rescue him or not.
The librarian let go of his arm.
“I think you did seesomething ,” she muttered. “You really were looking carefully for those men.”
And Jonah had been. Even when the kids from school had been laughing at him, he’d made sure that he peered down every aisle between the bookshelves, every nook of the little-kid reading area.
The men were nowhere in sight.
“Oh, well,” Jonah said, trying very hard to keep his voice from shaking. “Nothing’s wrong now. Can I just go?”
The librarian regarded him thoughtfully.
“Go on, then,” she said.
Jonah could feel her eyes on him as he went to join Chip and Katherine. Walking out the door, he felt robotic, because his body was doing something so normal—one foot stepping in front of the other, hands held out to shove against the door—while his mind was zipping and zooming and alighting on one strange thought after the other.
“What happened?” Katherine asked. “Is Angela okay?”
“Angela…” Jonah had to struggle so hard to focus his mind, to concentrate on the one precise moment of memory that his brain kept trying to transform into something normal and acceptable, something that would fit with everything else he already knew about the world. He wouldn’t let his brain do that; he wouldn’t stop trusting his own eyes.
“I saw Angela,” Jonah said. “I don’t know if she’s okay or not. I think she went into a time warp.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Not you, too!” Chip complained.
“I’m sorry!” Jonah said. He bent over, bracing his hands against his knees, trying to pull more air into his lungs, a delayed reaction to all his frantic pedaling and running. As soon as he could, he looked back up at Chip. “I’m notsure that’s what happened. I’m not sure of anything anymore. But Ithink that’s what happened, because it makes the most sense.”
“The most sense?” Chip repeated in amazement. “That’s thebest explanation you can come up with? A time warp?”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” Jonah said. The edges of his vision were a little blurry even now, but this was a normal feeling.Oxygen deprivation , his mind automatically labeled it. He felt the way he did after he’d played an entire soccer game as midfielder, running up and down the field for a solid hour. He’d felt this way after the soccer game this morning.
Oh, jeez, he thought.I played that soccer game and then I rode my bike like a maniac—no wonder I feel so dead. No wonder I’m seeing things. I mean, not seeing things. Seeing someone vanish. Or, wait…maybe she wasn’t really there in the first place?
His thoughts got so tangled that his mind gave up trying to revise his memory of seeing Angela vanish. It had happened. Period.
“Katherine,” he gasped. “When you said you saw the janitor disappear—I shouldn’t have made fun of you. I didn’t know….”
“You believe me now?” Katherine asked. “Why?” Comprehension dawned on her face. “Angela disappeared, didn’t she? And you saw it….”
Jonah nodded.
“I’ll show you.”
He started to stumble over something—it was his own bike, where he’d dropped it in the middle of the sidewalk. He picked it up, and then it was nice to have the handlebars to lean on as he led Chip and Katherine through the parking lot, over to the cluster of pine trees. He dropped his bike again by the curb.
“She was right here,” he said, stepping into the pine needles. “I saw her. And then she took one step forward”—he took a step—“and she was gone.”
Jonah rocked back on his heels, stepped forward again. He felt nothing different in either place. There was no temperature change, no wind howling furiously around some time portal. In both spots—before his step and after—he felt just a gentle breeze, the sunshine warm on the back of his neck, the pine needles soft beneath his feet.
“Guess the time warp only wanted Angela, not you,” Chip said mockingly, but there was an edge of fear in his voice.
“Or—someone’s protecting you,” Katherine said.
Jonah looked at his sister. She was in the middle of pulling her hair back, capturing it in a ponytail. Jonah was surprised to see how red her face was. She had a ring of sweat where her bike helmet had pressed against her head, and the sweat was trickling down her cheeks. He was amazed that she was willing to be seen in public like this.
“Didn’t you notice,” she began in an oddly strangled voice, “how, when those men were fighting, the cute janitor guy yelled out, ‘Jonah! Chip! Run!’? He didn’t saymy name. He didn’t say Angela’s.”
“You think those guys were fighting overus ?” Chip asked. “Why not you, too?”
“You’re the babies from the plane,” Katherine said. “I’m not.”
Jonah thought about this. The fight and the fleeing had happened so fast, all he had were jumbled images in his head. But the janitor/tackler had seemed to be trying to protect them.
“How did he know our names?” he asked. “Mine, I guess from Mr. Reardon’s office, but—Chip’s?” He remembered something else. “And he did recognize Angela. I don’t know if you two heard, because you were out the window already, but he called her Angela DuPre. And he said—he said—” It was such a struggle to remember, “—something like, ‘We have wronged you.’ No, ‘We have wronged you in time. We owe you.’”
“’In time’?” Chip whispered.
Katherine sat down on the curb, her elbows propped on her knees, her face caught in her hands.
“That whole plane thing did kind of ruin Angela’s life,” she said. “I mean, refusing to talk on the telephone? Having everyone think she’s crazy?”
Chip sat down beside Katherine.
“What does the janitor guy have to do with the plane?” he asked. “And who was the guy he was fighting with? What did he want to do to us?”
Jonah stiffened.
“Beware,” he quoted. “They’re coming back to get you. That’s what the letter said. That’s who they were warning us about!”
He looked around frantically. What if the man tried again, sometime when no one was around to protect them?
Katherine shook her head, her ponytail fli
pping back and forth.
“Really,” she said disgustedly, “if the cute janitor wanted to warn you, he should have provided a few more details. Names, dates—something you could go to the police with.”
“The police would never believe this,” Chip groaned. “Idon’t even believe it!”
Jonah could feel the sweat rolling down his back. But it wasn’t leftover sweat from all his biking and running. It was new sweat, panicky sweat, proof that his body thought he should be completely terrified.
“Well, here’s what we need to do,” Katherine said, tossing her head emphatically, her ponytail whipping out behind her. “We need to call all the other kids on the survivors list again and see if they’ve had any experiences with some guy trying to catch them or some other guy trying to protect them. We need to gather some data—see if any of them have ever seen someone just vanish into thin air.And we need to warn them, to let them know what we know.”
“But we don’t know anything,” Chip said.
“We know about the plane,” Katherine said. “We know where Angela thinks the plane came from. We know what janitor boy looks like. We know what one of your letters means.”
Tallied up that way, Katherine’s plan almost sounded reasonable. She sounded as calm as Mom always did, dealing with a crisis. One time, when Jonah was little, he’d dropped a glass and it had shattered on the kitchen floor. And Mom had been there immediately, telling him in her most soothing voice, “Yes, Jonah, I see that there’s glass all over the floor and I see that you’re barefoot, and that is a little bit scary. But if you just stand there like a statue, I’ll pick you up and you’ll be fine and then I’ll sweep up all the glass….”
Jonah had escaped without a single cut. If Katherine could master that same voice now, he was willing to let her take control.
“All right,” he said.
Chip shrugged. “Whatever.”
All three of them retrieved their bikes and began walking them back toward the bike path. Chip and Katherine hadn’t played a soccer game or pedaled quite as frantically as Jonah had earlier, but neither of them seemed any more eager than he was to speed home. They rode slowly, each of them stopping at various points to say, “If there really is such a thing as time travel…” or “if we really are from the future…” or “if that plane was a time machine…”