Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (8 page)

“I’ll take these, please,” I said, pulling my purse out of my pocket. I handed him a five-dollar bill. Bye-bye, allowance.

He wrapped them both in tissue paper and stuck a label on them before handing them back to me.

I thanked the man and turned toward the door. It was time to get out of there.

We huddled in a café in Memorial Square with a couple of hot chocolates and studied the details that Izzy had scribbled down. There was an address and a phone number. The number was local; I didn’t recognize the address: 33 Albany Road.

Izzy was busy tapping on her phone. After a minute, she held it up to show me the screen. There was a picture of a map with an
X
in the middle of it and Albany Road above it. At the bottom of the screen, it gave us various options for getting there. Six minutes by public transportation. Twenty-two minutes’ walk.

We looked at each other. “What do you want to do?” Izzy asked.

My stomach suddenly seemed to be playing jump rope. We couldn’t back out now, though. I took a last swig of my hot chocolate, wiped my mouth, and stood up. “Let’s walk,” I said. “I’m running out of money.”

We discussed our next move as we made our way to Albany Road.

“So, what do we do when we get to this address?” Izzy asked.

I looked at her blankly. “Um,” I said. “I don’t really know.” I thought about it. “Do we have his name?”

Izzy shook her head. “I think it was on the other side of the card, but I didn’t dare turn it over in case the shopkeeper saw me and got angry with us.”

I walked in silence for a minute as I thought a bit more.

“You’re sure you don’t want to just ask Nancy about this?” Izzy asked.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said quickly. Nancy had bought the necklace, but the shopkeeper had told us it was the man she’d brought in who had been most interested — particularly in the rose quartz. Plus, checking out some stranger whom I’d never met felt preferable to asking someone who was practically an aunt if she’d secretly set me up with something completely freaky and weird. “Let’s stick to the mystery man,” I said.

“Do you think he’s going to be our guy?” Izzy asked. “Do you think he’ll know what the crystal does?”

“No idea. But after what the man in the shop said, he seems like the best option.”

Izzy smiled. “I hope so,” she said.

The jump rope flipped around in my stomach. “Yeah,” I said, trying to ignore the worried question marks spinning with it. “Me too.”

Albany Road was a short cul-de-sac lined with small businesses. A few of them had names on them, like Evans Embroidery and Peters & Sons Fishing Equipment. Most were unnamed and looked anonymous and dark. All of them were closed and locked, some with shutters over the windows. The street felt silent and empty. And a little creepy.

We made our way down the road, glancing up at the doors to check the numbers. Number thirty-three was right at the end. This one had shutters, too — only these were open. It looked like someone was there.

Which was when I had a thought. I grabbed Izzy’s arm. “Wait,” I said. I nodded toward an alleyway between a couple of the buildings.

Izzy followed me into the alley. “What’s up? You’re not backing out?”

I shook my head. “Not at all. But we can’t go over there without a plan. Come on, Izzy. When do you ever do
anything
without a plan?”

Izzy scrunched up her nose and fiddled with her glasses — orange with purple flecks in them today, to match her orange bag with purple writing. “You’re right,” she said. “So what do you suggest?”

I breathed out hard. “I think you need to go in there on your own,” I said.

“You
are
backing out!”

“I’m not!”

“But you said — ”

“I’ll be with you,” I interrupted. “But he won’t know about it.”

Izzy stared at me for a moment, then she smiled as she realized what I was getting at. “Because you’ll be invisible!”

“It’s the only way we’ll actually find out anything,” I told her. “What were we thinking we’d say? ‘Oh, hi there. I don’t suppose you’ve come across some crystals that make certain people turn invisible, have you? No? OK, sorry to have bothered you’? I mean, we’ll never find out much by talking to him.”

“You’re going to go inside?”

I nodded. “You go to the door and distract him. I’ll sneak in, have a look around, see if there’s anything suspicious.”

“Got it.”

“Just don’t go off and leave me, OK?”

“ ’Course I won’t go off and leave you. We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

“Hundred percent,” I said. I decided not to point out that Izzy wasn’t the one who had to sneak invisibly into a mysterious building and creep around trying to find out what a scary stranger was up to. It wasn’t her fault I was the only superfreak around here.

“Ready?” Izzy asked.

I looked around. The alleyway was deserted.

“As I’ll ever be,” I replied. I closed my eyes, cleared a section of my mind, and turned myself invisible.

“OK, let’s go,” I said, and we walked up to number thirty-three.

I stood back as Izzy pressed the doorbell. And then I held my breath while we waited to see who would come to the door.

“Yes?” A man stood in the doorway and looked at Izzy. He was small and scruffy, his shirt half hanging out of baggy corduroys, a tie loosely done up, a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses halfway down his nose.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly — more impatient, as though we’d disturbed him from something important and he wanted to dispense with us and get back to it as quickly as he could.

He was standing right in the middle of the doorway. There was barely any space to see behind him, let alone squeeze past without him knowing. I could just about see a small and very sterile-looking hallway with a door leading into another room beyond.

What was in that room?

Izzy smiled innocently at the man. “I . . . er, I’m really sorry to bother you,” she said. “I’m looking for number twenty-three.”

“This is
thirty
-three,” the man replied sharply.

“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” Izzy replied as the man went to close the door.

I nudged her in the ribs to let her know I was still outside with her.

Izzy leaned forward. “Wait!” she said.

The man paused and looked at her quizzically.

“I — I mean, please,” Izzy faltered, “I know that this is thirty-three. Just, well, I’m a bit lost, and I don’t know where to find the one I’m looking for.”

Finally, the man took a step out of his doorway. “It’s that way,” he said, pointing down the road.

I tried to squeeze past him, but there wasn’t enough space without bumping into him — and completely giving away the fact that there was an invisible person standing outside his office was the last thing I wanted to do.

“Sorry, which one is it exactly?” Izzy asked. “Can you show me the exact one?”

The man sighed, but he took another step away from his door. “It’s five doors down. The one that’s set back,” he said.

I didn’t hear Izzy’s reply. I was too busy sneaking inside and getting away from the man before he walked into me and the game was up.

A moment later, the door had closed, the man was heading back inside, and our investigation had well and truly begun.

The first thing I thought as I looked in through a glass door from the hallway was that it reminded me a bit of the chemistry lab at school. The second thing I thought was that, actually, it was
nothing
like the chemistry lab at school.

How it was similar to a chemistry lab: It was filled with scientific equipment and desks. A couple of long Formica tables ran along one side of the room, each with a tall black swivel chair tucked in beside it. Above the desks ran a long shelf, packed with jars, bottles, tubes, and boxes, each with a neatly written label. Each desk had a computer and a load of paperwork. The first desk was arranged neatly with a pile of books, a tray of folders, and a desk planner. The other was covered in a heap of notebooks and papers that were arranged in the kind of mess that possibly made sense to the person who owned them but looked like an amateur burglary had taken place to anyone else.

Across the other side of the room there was one long work surface. On it stood a huge microscope, surrounded by various racks with different size test tubes propped up in them. Some of the tubes were empty; others had different sorts of liquid in them. It was hard to tell what the liquids could have been: some were clear, others colored. There was a purple one, a pink one, a deep blue, a yellow, and a green.

So far, a chemistry lab.

How it was different from a chemistry lab: To start with, as the man stepped toward the glass door into the main area, the door slid open with a soft
whshhhhh
noise that sounded a bit like the spaceship doors on
Star Trek
and not at all like the door to our chemistry lab. I quickly stepped through behind him and looked back as the door closed with another
whshhhhh
followed by a soft
clthnnnk
.

My heart did a tiny
clthnnnk
itself as I discovered that I was now hermetically sealed into a lab that I was gradually realizing looked like a cross between a high-tech experimentation center and a chemistry classroom from a hundred years in the future.

Bright lights shone down from the ceiling so fiercely that I felt almost pinned to the floor by them. White walls, white ceiling — everything was spotless and clinical.

Machines beeped and whirred and clicked and buzzed all around me. Just down from the microscope and test tubes was a metal box with orange buttons and red lights blinking above. Next to that sat a bright-blue box with a silver tube running from it up to a white tray on a high shelf. Beyond that, another machine bleeped every thirty seconds. Then there was something that looked like a metal bowl, but it had a digital display on it with numbers that flashed up in pink every few seconds.

There was only one tiny window at the far end of the room: small, high up, and frosted so no one could see in.

What on earth
was
this place?

The man put on a pair of plastic goggles and took up from where we had presumably disturbed him, studying liquids in tubes and scribbling notes.