Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (10 page)

“You’re right. We can’t go back there,” I said. “But we could call him and get him to meet us. He won’t know it’s us from a phone call.”

“Make sure you meet him somewhere neutral. And public,” Tom said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“And somewhere he can’t slam a door in our faces,” Izzy added.

“At the park?” I suggested.

“Perfect,” Izzy agreed. “How about the green bench with all the graffiti by the lake?”

“Great,” I agreed. “Plus, it’s nice and public, just in case he gets seriously annoyed with us. Tomorrow morning?”

Tom frowned. “I’ve got Math Olympics practice tomorrow at eleven. I won’t be free till early afternoon.”

Math Olympics is an interschool math competition, and Tom is one of the star members of our team. Most boys Tom’s age would probably do something like play soccer in the park on a Sunday, but then, Tom isn’t most boys — which is partly why Izzy and I like hanging around with him. He’s good company, even if he can be a tad geeky. And at times like this, geeky was no bad thing.

“How about we start without you?” Izzy suggested. “Text us when you’re free and we’ll let you know where we are.”

“Cool. I’ll meet you afterward.” Tom grinned. “Can’t wait. I don’t think I’ll be able to concentrate on math.”

“Wow,” Izzy countered. “That would be a first!” Then she passed me the card with the scientist’s number on it. “Go ahead.”

“Wait. Why me?” I asked.

“I’ve spoken to him too many times already. He might recognize my voice. There’s no way he’ll talk to me after I stopped by twice
and
spilled lemonade all over him.”

I looked at Tom. He held his hands up in front of him. “Hey, I’m just here as an adviser,” he said. “Plus, well, come on. You know me. I clam up and stammer like an idiot with people I don’t know. I think this should come from you.”

“I suppose you’re right.” My mouth went dry as I keyed the scientist’s number into my phone.

“You can do it,” Izzy said.

The line rang four times before an automated voice kicked in. “I am sorry, but the person you are calling . . .”

I put my hand over the receiver. “Voice mail.”

Izzy grimaced. “Leave a message!”

I calmed my breathing while the voice continued, “Please leave your message after the tone.”

The line buzzed and went silent. I cleared my throat.

“This is a message for the scientist at the laboratory on Albany Road,” I said, throwing a “Help me out!” look at Izzy and Tom.

Izzy smiled encouragingly. Tom gave me a double thumbs-up. “Go on,” he whispered. “You’re doing great!”

“It’s about the crystals,” I went on, trying to make my voice sound as confident and authoritative as possible. “And it’s about . . .” I cleared my throat again. “It’s about invisibility.”

I glanced at Izzy and Tom again. They were both nodding vigorously.

“I believe that we may be able to help each other. If you want to know more, come to Smeaton’s Park, tomorrow, at one o’clock. We will meet you on the graffiti-covered bench next to the lake. Please do not tell anyone about this call. Thank you.”

I ended the call and put my phone down. My heart was hammering so hard it was giving me chest pains.

“Fantastic,” Tom said, smiling broadly.

“We’re on for one o’clock tomorrow,” added Izzy.

“Yeah,” I said as I tried to gather my thoughts. The only problem was, they refused to be gathered. They were too busy turning into butterflies and chasing one another around my stomach.

The next day at 12:55, I was standing at the park gates. Izzy arrived a couple of minutes later.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” she said breathlessly. “Mom made me clean my room before coming out.”

“I haven’t been here long,” I said. “Come on, let’s get to the meeting point.”

We reached the bench by the lake. It was empty.

“I’m going to stay just out of sight,” Izzy said. “I don’t want the man to recognize me and leave before you’ve had a chance to talk. But I’ll be close by. OK?”

I nodded.

“You ready?” Izzy asked.

“Kind of,” I said with a grimace. I sat down on the bench while she wandered off to wait on the other side of a tree next to the lake.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was so nervous that I thought I might be sick, it could actually have been kind of fun. In a
hey-look-the-world’s-gone-crazy-and-you’ve-suddenly-got-a-superpower-and-are-about-to-meet-up-with-a-mad-scientist-in-the-park
kind of way.

I tried to relax, but then I realized I couldn’t let myself. If I calmed my breathing and relaxed my mind too much, I might start accidentally turning invisible! And since I was sitting in the park in broad daylight, about to meet a strange man, that might not be the best thing I could do at that point. So I just sat there with my head down, fighting the urge to be sick and hoping he’d turn up soon.

“Jessica?”

A familiar voice startled me out of my thoughts. I looked up. Nancy! What was she doing here? She couldn’t be here! The scientist was due to show up any minute. I had to get rid of her!

“I . . . er, I . . . hi!” I said. Cool as anything. “I can’t really talk at the moment. Sorry. Nice to see you, but I’m too busy to chat right now.”

Nancy must not have heard me properly — either that or she was terrible at taking a hint. She sat down next to me.

I stared at her, mouth open. “This seat is saved!” I blurted out. What a stupid thing to say. You can’t save seats in the park. But what else could I say? Why wasn’t she taking the hint?

She reached over and took hold of my hand. “It’s good to see you, Jess,” she said softly.

“Um. Yeah. You too,” I said, trying for a smile, but probably doing that thing with my face that you do when your mom puts on a dress that does
nothing
for her and you tell her how great she looks.

I pried my hand away from her and stood up. I’d have to hide out somewhere and wait for the man to turn up. I’d spot him when he got here and I’d give him some sort of signal. I’d figure something out. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I can’t stop. I’ve got things to do.”

Nancy stood up, too. She looked at me, an unreadable expression on her face. “Sit down, Jess,” she said.

“I can’t!” I said, starting to panic. “See, I’m going to be late . . .”

“Jessica,” Nancy said in a tone of voice I’d never heard her use before. “Sit.”

I stared at her. Like a good dog, I sat.

I glanced at my watch. Nearly ten past one. He’d probably seen the two of us here and wouldn’t come over till I was on my own. I
had
to get rid of Nancy. “I’m waiting for someone,” I said feebly.

Nancy took a long, slow breath. Then she turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Jess,” she said, “you’re waiting for me.”

I spent the next minute or two staring blankly at Nancy with my mouth open. I was glad it wasn’t summertime or I’d have swallowed at least half a dozen flies.

“I’m waiting for you?” I managed eventually. “I don’t understand.” At least, I really, really didn’t
want
to understand.

“Of course you don’t,” Nancy said softly. “That’s why I’m here. I’ve come to explain.”

“OK,” I said. “Look, can Izzy join us? She’s here, too. She came for moral support.”

“Of course she can.” Nancy looked around us.

“She’s, um, she’s behind that tree over there,” I said, waving Izzy over.

“OK, ready,” I said as Izzy joined us and I shifted along the bench to make room for her.

“Sure?” Nancy asked, giving Izzy a quick smile.

We both nodded.

Nancy took a breath. “OK. So, some years ago, when I’d just started working as a midwife, one of the doctors at the hospital told me he was starting a research project.”

Research
. The word made my insides flutter. Research, as in a lab full of books and test tubes and computers and supersonic doors and bright lights and high-tech equipment for experimenting on people like me? I kept quiet and waited for Nancy to continue.

“He’d won a grant from a new government department and asked me to join him. He was trying to find a cure for . . .” Nancy cleared her throat. “Well, for all sorts of illnesses that there was no cure for. Only, it didn’t work. Then, when the funding got cut, James gave up. On everything.”

“James?”

“Dr. Malone. My colleague. For a long time, we didn’t even talk about it.” Nancy twirled a thick dreadlock around her fingers. “Just a couple of months ago, he approached me about starting up our research again.” She turned to look at us both. Her eyes seemed to have an extra sparkle in them. “James is one of the best doctors I knew. He’s done things others wouldn’t even attempt; he sees links that everyone else misses. The man is a genius. If he wanted to give it another try, I was in.”

“What made him think it would work now if it hadn’t worked then?” I asked.

“He didn’t know if it would or not, but he wanted to try. It was exactly ten years since . . . well, since everything had fallen apart. Plus, he’d come into some money, which meant he could restart the project without government support. He rented an office space, turned it into a lab, and we started working to catch up with where we’d left off.” Nancy paused.

“And?” Izzy prompted.

“And it was hard. When we’d abandoned the project a decade ago, James destroyed virtually everything to do with it. That meant we were starting from scratch. But then we had a breakthrough.”

Nancy hesitated and glanced at me. “It was around your birthday,” she went on. “I’d been shopping for a present for you. I saw something nice in a shop in town.”

“Tiger’s Eye?”

Nancy nodded. “There were a few things that I liked. The necklace I gave you and a couple of bracelets. One with an amethyst in it, the other with a moonstone. I couldn’t decide which to get, so I bought all three and decided I’d give you one and keep the other two myself.”

“Did you know there was anything . . .
special
about the crystals?” I asked, suddenly realizing it was possible that Nancy
still
didn’t know what the crystals did. Possible, but unlikely.

“No,” she replied. “It was a couple of days after your birthday that everything changed. I’d left the two bracelets in the lab. James was on one side of the room, using the centrifuge in an experiment to separate isotopes so we could analyze the components of our serum.”

I stared blankly at Nancy, wondering why she’d suddenly started talking in a foreign language.

Nancy noticed my face. “Basically, he was working on a controlled experiment with lots of delicate items. Meanwhile, I was rushing around doing too many things at once and not concentrating properly on any of them.”

“Sounds like an accident waiting to happen,” Izzy mused.

“Exactly. James was at a crucial moment. He’d assessed the sedimentation principle with all the different variables, and — ”

Nancy stopped as she looked from me to Izzy. “OK, basically, James had poured the serum into a special kind of bowl, and at that exact moment, I swung around, grabbed my hospital bag from a shelf, and knocked the amethyst bracelet into that bowl.”

“Yikes!” I exclaimed.

“Yes. James had spent hours getting to this point in his experiment and he wasn’t happy, but then something incredible happened. The bowl began to vibrate — ever so gently — and the serum inside it frothed and fizzed.”

I felt the hairs on my arm tingle as Nancy talked.

“And then, the strangest thing of all,” she continued, “the bracelet itself came right out of the bowl and hovered above it for a few seconds. A moment later, it fell back down, the serum stopped fizzing, and it was as though nothing had happened.”

“Wow!” Izzy blinked at Nancy. “What did you do?”

“To begin with, we stared at the space above the bowl, not speaking. I think we were both afraid to be the first one to say what we’d just seen in case the other one told us we were crazy.”

Yup, I knew all about
that
one.

“Once we’d recovered from the shock, we fished out the bracelet and put the other one in the serum. The bowl shook and the serum fizzed again. But this time, when we took the crystal out, it was ice-cold. We didn’t know what any of this meant, but we knew that something big was going on.”