“You mean, he thought your family knew something that the FBI didn’t?” Chip asked. He’d spun around from the computer screen and was staring up at Katherine as if she had all the answers.
“Maybe,” Katherine said, back to her normal voice. “Or he was afraid that we already knew some of that top-secret information he didn’t want anyone to know. Didn’t you notice how it was almost like he wastrying to get Mom and Dad mad? You know how, when people are mad, sometimes they say things they don’t mean to—they reveal too much? That’s what Mr. Reardon wanted Mom and Dad to do.”
Chip was squinting at Katherine.
“How does that explain the ghost?” he asked.
“ThatI haven’t figured out yet,” Katherine said with a little laugh. “But I will.”
She made this whole mess sound as if it was just a challenging math problem, or as if she was working on a scheme to get Mom and Dad to let her stay up late on a school night or have nothing but ice cream for dinner. This was just an intriguing puzzle to her. It wasn’ther life.
“Whatever,” Jonah said, jerking his arm away from Katherine’s grasp. “You can stay here until you figure everything out. I’m going home.”
He half-expected Katherine to follow him out—she washis sister, after all, not Chip’s friend—but when he glanced back, they’d both turned around to huddle over the computer together.
Fine, Jonah thought.See if I care.
When he’d climbed up the stairs to the first level of Chip’s house, he could hear a TV siren blaring from the family room. A woman—presumably Chip’s mom—said unhappily, “You always have to watch the blood-and-guts shows.” Jonah thought about walking back toward the family room, poking his head in, and informing Chip’s parents, “You really ought to know what’s going on, down in your basement. Chip’s looking for a whole other identity that doesn’t involve you.” Instead he turned through the dark dining room and slipped out the front door.
Outside, a new thought occurred to him. Chip had pretty much admitted that he had a crush on Katherine—what if Katherine had a crush on Chip, too? What ifthat’s what this was all about?
Unaccountably, Jonah suddenly felt very lonely. He was walking down a dark street, all by himself, the trees casting eerie shadows across the sidewalk.Hey, kidnappers, he thought,you want to get me back? This would be a great time to snatch me away!
He shivered, even though it wasn’t the least bit cold for October.
I should have told Mom and Dad, he thought.About that second letter, if nothing else.
But he knew why he hadn’t. They would have made a federal case out of it, getting upset, calling the cops…Jonah didn’t want that. Like Katherine, he wanted Mom and Dad to stay normal. And now he really couldn’t tell them, not when they were already so freaked out by the meeting with Mr. Reardon. It would be cruel to spring this on them too.
The street curved slightly, and there was a break in the trees, so he had a full view of his own house. Mom had chrysanthemums planted along the sidewalk and along the front fence—which was actually white picket. Mom and Dad were such believers in all those cliches. The living room bay window curved out invitingly, the lights blazed…home looked like such a safe place. Jonah just wanted to walk in, crawl into bed, pull the covers over his face, and sleep until all the scary things in his life disappeared.
He glanced longingly up at the two second-story windows that looked into his room. The lights weren’t on in his room, but light was spilling in from the hallway, so he could make out dim shapes: his dresser, his desk, the posts of his bed….
One of the shapes in his room moved.
While Jonah watched, a dark shape—no, aperson —eased the door of Jonah’s room shut, blocking out the light, plunging the windows into complete darkness. But then a smaller light—a flashlight? a penlight?—clicked on, hovering over Jonah’s desk.
Jonah took off running.
FOURTEEN
Jonah burst in through the front door.
“Mom? Dad?” he called accusingly. If they were snooping in his room, he was going to be really angry. He hadn’t started flunking out of school as a cry for help—there was no reason for them to search through his things.
Mom peeked out from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Dad and I are back here,” she said.
Jonah sped around the corner, saw Dad sitting at the computer. Dad hastily clicked out of whatever he was looking at, but not before Jonah caught a glimpse of the FBI crest—Thanks, Dad, you really think you have to hide that from me?Jonah decided he didn’t have time to think about that right now.
“Then who’s in my room?” he demanded.
“No one’s in your room,” Mom said, sounding baffled.
Jonah whirled around and rushed up the stairs. He shoved open the door to his room, flipped on the light.
Nobody was there.
Jonah jerked the closet door open; he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He looked beside his desk, behind the door, all the places he’d ever used during hide-and-seek games when he was little.
“Jonah, honey, what are you doing?” Mom asked, appearing in his doorway.
“I thought I saw someone in my room,” Jonah said. “When I was outside.”
Mom peeked into the closet and under the bed.
“There’s nobody here,” she said. She took in a shaky breath. “Really, Jonah, if there’d been an intruder, we would have heard him. You know how those stairs creak.”
Maybe whoever it was didn’t use the stairs, Jonah thought.Maybe he used a ladder at the back of the house….
Or maybe it was someone who could just appear and disappear at will, like Katherine’s ghost.
Jonah didn’t want to think about that. But he also didn’t go to the back of the house to look for a ladder.
Dad walked into the room and laid his hands comfortingly on Mom’s shoulders.
“Jonah, if you’d really thought there was an intruder, you shouldn’t have come rushing up here, putting yourself in danger. You should have called the police,” he said.
Jonah sat down on his bed.
“It was just my imagination, I guess,” he said sulkily. “If I’d called the police, they would have been mad.”
“But you would have been safe,” Dad said.
Mom sat down beside Jonah on the bed. She patted his shoulder.
“You’ve just had a hard day,” she said. “It’s been a little overwhelming for all of us.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said absently.
He was facing his desk, where he’d dumped the contents of his backpack after school, before they’d gone to see Mr. Reardon. Jonah hadn’t been able to concentrate on homework—not enough to do it, and certainly not enough to put it all in a tidy stack—so he had a half-finished math sheet sliding into the paper giving instructions for his next language arts paragraph sliding into a sheet announcing the school’s Halloween dance. But that wasn’t what Jonah was looking at. On top of those papers, Jonah could see another one that was half–folded up, as if it had just been removed from an envelope.
He wasn’t at the right angle to see everything written on the half-folded paper, but he could see a little bit: “Bewa—”
It was one of the mysterious letters he’d received, which he knew he’d left in the back of his top drawer, under his collection of state quarters.
Jonah remembered the tiny light hovering over his desk that he’d seen from outside.
“Are yousure you weren’t in here a few moments ago, right before I got home?” Jonah asked his parents. Suddenly hewanted to believe that they’d been searching through his room, snooping around. It was better than any of the other possibilities.
“Jonah, we weren’t,” Dad said. “Neither one of us has been upstairs since before dinner.”
Jonah could barely remember dinner. He and Katherine had rushed through the leftover chili so they could get to Chip’s house.
Dad was pee
ring at him with a concerned squint, worry lines ringing his eyes.
“Is something wrong?” Mom asked. “I mean, something we don’t already know about?”
Was that the opening Jonah wanted? He did want to tell Mom and Dad about the letters—let them worry, so he wouldn’t have to. But the tale of the letters now involved disappearing ghosts, and Katherine taking cell phone pictures of secret documents with Jonah’s name on them, andwitnesses , as if Jonah had been involved in some crime.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jonah said. He yawned unconvincingly. “I’m just tired.”
Mom and Dad were both still looking at him doubtfully, but it seemed like they were willing to play along.
“Maybe you should go to bed early,” Mom said. Mom was big on the curative powers of sleep. Jonah was surprised she didn’t add, “Everything will look better in the morning.” Instead she said, “I’m glad you came back from Chip’s. Was Katherine with you? I didn’t see her….” She looked around as if, having acted so worried about Jonah, she now had to show the same amount of concern about her daughter.
“She’s still at Chip’s,” Jonah said.
By her face, Jonah thought he could practically see the calculation going on in Mom’s head:Goodness, there couldn’t be anything romantic going on between those two, could there? She’s only in sixth grade, but this is an older boy….
“She’s got the cell phone with her, doesn’t she?” Mom asked with studied casualness. “I think I’ll give her a call, tell her to come on home. It’s almost nine o’clock.”
“I’ll go get her,” Jonah volunteered. He was still a little mad at his sister, but somehow he didn’t want her walking home alone, along the dark street with all its eerie shadows.
Which was crazy, becausehe was the one who’d gotten the threatening letters.
Of course, she was the one who thought she’d seen a ghost….
“Would you do that?” Mom asked. “Thanks.”
Jonah waited until Mom and Dad were out of his room before he tucked the mysterious letter back in his drawer. Then he went outside. He was nearly back to Chip’s house when he saw Katherine, slipping out of the Winstons’ front door.
“Tomorrow,” she was promising Chip. “We’ll solve this. We will!”
Jonah waited until Chip had shut the door, and Katherine was stepping out onto the sidewalk. He hid behind a maple tree and then jumped out just as Katherine was passing by: “Boo!”
Katherine shrieked and then she giggled and then she pounded her fists against Jonah’s chest.
“Ihate you!” she screamed, laughing. “You’reterrible !”
Jonah almost laughed too because it felt so good to treat everything like a joke, to pretend that he wasn’t worried about anything. And, fortunately, Katherine’s fists didn’t hurt at all. She wasn’t hitting very hard.
“Just for that, I’m not going to tell you what Chip and I found out,” Katherine threatened.
“Good. I don’t want to know anyhow,” Jonah said. “Remember?”
“Okay, then, just for that, I’ll tell you everything,” Katherine corrected herself. “Chip and I called every name on the witnesses list.”
Jonah thought about putting his hands over his ears and chanting, “I’m not listening! I’m not listening! La, la, la, la, la…” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that.
“Two of the people just hung up on us,” Katherine continued. “But I did get one guy to tell me that he worked as an air traffic controller. I was pretending that I was working on a career project for school, and I was supposed to call people at random and talk to them about their jobs. He was really friendly and wanted to talk and talk and talk—air traffic controllers must not get out much. But then I said, ‘Did you ever witness anything unusual, like maybe thirteen years ago or so?’ and he got really, really quiet, and then he said he had to go, he didn’t have time to talk to me. That means something, don’t you think?”
“No,” Jonah said automatically, because he didn’t want to believe that any of this meant anything.
“And then this other lady—Angela DuPre, her name was the first one on the list—she sounded perfectly normal when Chip first started talking to her. But then he laid everything on the line, about how he’d just found out that he was adopted, and he didn’t know anything about his birth parents, and he thought she might know something…and then she just totally freaked out. She started hyperventilating, almost, and she said, ‘I can’t talk to you. Don’t call me ever again.’ Weird, huh?”
It was all weird, Jonah thought, stepping in and out of the shadows. He wanted to find normal explanations.
“Well, maybe—maybe she gave up a baby for adoption,” he said. “Maybe it was, like, thirteen years ago, and so she thought Chip might be her son and it was just all too emotional for her. You know how some birth parents want to reunite with their kids, and some never want to have anything to do with them—they just want to pretend nothing ever happened….” For the first time Jonah actually kind of understood that viewpoint. Something else struck him. “Hey, maybe she really is Chip’s birth mother. Or—or mine. Maybe that’s whatwitnesses really meant. Like, it’s a code word or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Katherine said.
“Why not?” Jonah challenged.
“It just didn’t seem like that,” Katherine said.
“Oh, right, you know all about these things,” Jonah scoffed. But his heart wasn’t into it, because they’d reached the point on the street where he could see into his bedroom windows—where he’d been standing when he’d seen the intruder before. He couldn’t help staring up at the windows now, but they were blank and dark and empty.
He didn’t tell Katherine about the intruder. He wouldn’t tell her or Chip, and maybe he could forget about it himself.
“Jonah,” Katherine said earnestly. “Chip and I really are going to figure all this out. And when we do, you’ll thank us. You’ll be so happy. You’ll be—at peace.”
They were at the front door now. Jonah put his hand on the doorknob. Home, which had looked like such a safe place before, was now just a place where he might see ghosts, where he had to worry about his secrets being pulled out for anyone to see, where he had to worry about Mom and Dad worrying about him. He already felt haunted.
“Katherine?” he said.
“What?” She turned to him eagerly.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
FIFTEEN
The next few days passed uneventfully. Jonah didn’t get any more strange letters, and no one disturbed the letter he already had. He didn’t see any evidence of ghosts or intruders.
Katherine and Chip kept insisting on giving him updates on their ongoing research project, no matter how many times Jonah said, “I don’t care.” He tried to ignore them. But he knew they wanted to call every single name on the survivors list now too.
“It’d be easier if Katherine had held the camera a little steadier,” Chip told Jonah at the bus stop the third morning. “Look at this.” He took a folded-up paper out of his pocket—the printout of the photos Chip had pieced together. He pointed at one spot, where there was a gap between the words. “Right here. She got the address and phone number of this person, but I don’t know who to ask for when I call. And then, down here, right below that, she just got the name and the street address, not even a city name, so I can’t look up their phone number online. It’s frustrating.”
“Huh,” Jonah said, barely bothering to look at the paper. Then curiosity got the better of him. Since this was only Chip, not Katherine, he decided it was safe to ask at least one question.
“What are you even saying to these people when you call?”
“We ask who they are,” Chip said. “What they survived. Why their names are on a list at the FBI.”
“Do they know?” Jonah made sure he was looking away from Chip when he asked that, as if he was more concerned about watching for the bus than about hearing wha
t Chip was saying.
“None of them know about the list. They’ve survived things like broken arms and chicken pox and minor car accidents and…” Chip gave Jonah a sidelong look, “…being adopted.”
Jonah decided not to comment on that.
“They’ll talk to you? Some stranger calling them out of the blue?” He wondered if everyone was as trusting as his parents.
“Usually not right away,” Chip said. “Until I start talking about how I just found out I was adopted, and how I got these weird, kind of scary letters—and how my name’s on that list of survivors too. Usually it’s the letter part that gets them talking.”
“They got the letters too,” Jonah said. It wasn’t a question. He could tell just from Chip’s voice.
“Katherine already told you that, didn’t she?” Chip asked. “Everyone we talked to got them.”
Jonah didn’t want to admit how hard he’d been working to tune out everything Katherine had tried to tell him. He looked around for his sister. She was in the center of the kids laughing and talking under the glow of the streetlight, but she wasn’t joining in the laughter. She was peering anxiously at him and Chip.
“It’s just been five or six people you’ve talked to, right?” Jonah said. “I think that’s what Katherine said. That’s not so many. Nothing to base any conclusions on. It’s not a”—he tried to remember the proper term—“a statistically significant sample.”
Wow—his math teacher would be really proud of him for remembering that.
“Jonah, it’s seventeen people so far,” Chip said.
Jonah remembered that Katherine hadn’t been able to help Chip out the night before, because she’d had gymnastics practice. He felt a little guilty for not helping Chip himself.
“And,” Chip continued, “every single ‘survivor’ I’ve talked to is adopted, just like us. They’re all thirteen years old, or they’ll turn thirteen within the next month. They all have fall birthdays. And all of them were about three months old when they were adopted.”