Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (9 page)

I tiptoed past him and made my way to the far end of the lab. I tried to read some of the notes. They were computer printouts adorned with additions handwritten in multiple colors.

Sentences were crossed out and written over. Footnotes with asterisks and hashtags littered the margins. Equations that would have made my math teacher faint were randomly scattered in between barely legible notes.

None of it meant the slightest thing to me — until I noticed a large white plastic box at the back of the desk.

It was full of crystals. Piles of them, lying in groups.

I swallowed. This was definitely him, then — the man who’d bought a heap of crystals from the same shop where Nancy had bought my necklace!

But what did all this mean? What did he want with the crystals? What were all the test tubes for? And what on earth was I to make of his notes?

I kept silent and watched the man work. After a couple of minutes, he left his test tubes and crossed the room to start punching buttons on one of the machines. A moment later, a handheld gadget on the table beeped. He picked it up and read the screen. Still holding it, he moved over to one of the computers. I silently dodged out of his way as he came right past me. Glancing at the screen of the gadget in his hand, he started typing into his computer.

I stood behind him, holding my breath, and watched as he typed. He was muttering to himself, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

It looked like he was inputting data into a spreadsheet — numbers and words. I peered at the screen, and a moment later, I had to bite my finger to stop myself from yelping out loud.

Among all the gobbledygook, three words had jumped out at me as if they were written in bright-red capitals and underlined three times:
ROSE QUARTZ: INVISIBLE
?

For a moment, I just stared. My thoughts dried up. My blood froze in my veins. What did this mean? Was he the person who had given me superhuman powers? Was that what this place was about? Injecting weird liquids into crystals to make them do what the rose quartz had done to me? Or had he just discovered the rose quartz’s properties like I had?

Either way, something super weird was going on, and if his chart was anything to go by, this man knew a whole lot more about it than I did. I tried to make some kind of sense of his spreadsheet, but other than those three words, the rest was a complicated mass of data that meant about as much to me as it would have had it been in another language.

If it hadn’t been essential that I remain silent, I would have kicked myself. Why hadn’t I concentrated better on the spreadsheet lessons in school? I might have been able to make
some
sort of sense of it then. If only Izzy were here with me. She’d understand it much better than I could.

I had a thought.

I slipped my hand into my pocket and drew out my phone. Double-checking that it was on silent, I found the camera button and took a shot of the computer screen.

Then I hit the button to open a new text. I typed my message and sent it to Izzy.

“Get me out!”

“You again!”

The man was standing in the doorway, blocking it completely.

Izzy was outside, a bottle of lemonade in her hand and her bag slung over her shoulder. “I just wanted to let you know that I found number twenty-three, in case you’d been worried.”

“Good,” the man said. “I wasn’t worrying about it, actually, but I’m very happy for you. Now, if that’s all . . .”

“Yes, that’s all,” Izzy said. “And, thank you.”

“All right. Well, you’re welcome.” The man was starting to close the door.

No! Izzy, don’t go! I’m still inside!

Izzy turned to leave, but as she moved, she tripped, dropping her bottle on the ground. “Whoops, sorry,” she said as lemonade spilled everywhere. The man jumped back. Instantly, I squeezed through the doorway and didn’t stop running till I was down the path and halfway up the road.

Izzy caught up with me as I was crouching low behind a hedge, turning myself visible again. “Thanks!” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

As we walked, I filled Izzy in on everything I’d seen. At the bus stop, I got my phone out and showed her the picture of the computer screen. “What do you think?”

“I don’t get it,” Izzy said, squinting at the photo. “What does it all mean? What are those numbers? And why all the other crystals?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I figure he must either be experimenting on them all to see which ones make you invisible or doing something to the crystals to make it happen.”

“I agree. But even if he is, we still don’t know why it only works on you.”

I shook my head. “I know. I don’t get any of it.”

“Maybe we should ask Nancy,” Izzy suggested.

“No.”

“Why not?”

I thought about her question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. I told myself it was because Nancy probably didn’t know anything. Just because she knew this man didn’t mean she knew what he was up to with the crystals.

The real truth was more complicated, though. Nancy had been like an aunt to me my whole life. I couldn’t
bear
the thought that she might have something to do with all this — that she could be using me as part of some kind of experiment. If that
was
the truth, I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. And I wasn’t sure how to explain all that to Izzy, either.

“I just don’t want to,” I said in the end.

Izzy nodded. Maybe she understood without my having to explain.

“I know who we
could
ask,” she said after a while.

“Who?”

“Tom.”

“Tom? We can’t involve him in this! We can’t tell
anyone
about it!”

“Come on, Jess, it’s Tom. He’s the one person we both know we can trust. He wouldn’t tell anyone else,” Izzy argued. “And I figure we could use a brain like his on the case. We don’t even have to tell him about you turning invisible.”

I frowned. “Really?”

“Really. Not if you don’t want to. We could just show him the spreadsheet and see what he makes of it.”

I thought for a moment. Izzy was right. Tom loved solving logic problems even more than Izzy did. If anyone could make sense of this, it was probably him. And she was right that we could trust him, too. “OK. Let’s get him on board,” I said as the bus rounded the corner.

Izzy already had her phone out.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting him to tell him to meet us at my house. We can send the pic to my computer and blow it up so we can see it better. We’ll show it to Tom and ask him what he thinks of the chart. You can be in charge of how much we tell him. OK?”

I nodded at Izzy as we got on the bus. “OK.”

Forty-five minutes later, Izzy and I were sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop open, waiting for it to boot up so we could open the picture, when the doorbell rang.

“That must be Tom,” I said.

Izzy jumped up to let him in.

“Hey, girls,” Tom said with a smile as he came into the kitchen. “What’s going on? What’s with the weird text?” He sat down at the table and waited for one of us to answer.

I looked at Izzy. She looked at me. And then I said, “Look, you’re going to find some of this hard to believe, but as long as you promise to keep it to yourself, I’m going to tell you everything — and all of it’s true.”

Tom’s smile faltered a little. “Sounds ominous,” he replied nervously. “Go on, then.”

So I did. I told him everything that had happened. Tom listened in silence to the whole thing.

When I’d finished, he stared at me with his mouth open. He glanced briefly at Izzy, then back at me. And then he burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Izzy asked.

“This! This — story, or whatever. It’s great. I love it. You two crack me up with your crazy stuff.”

“Tom, this isn’t crazy stuff,” I hissed. “Well — I mean, yeah, it is
pretty
crazy. But it’s not a story. It’s true.”

Tom leaned in closer. “You’re honestly telling me that you can turn invisible?” he whispered.

“Yes!”

“And that there’s some sci-fi lab in the middle of town full of crystals and charts and potions and mad scientists that might be responsible for it? Which, by the way, would actually be the coolest thing in the world, if it
did
exist.”

“It
does
exist!” Izzy insisted.

Tom scowled. “Really? I mean,
really
?”

I stood up. “Tom,” I said impatiently, “watch.” And then I took a deep breath, cleared my mind — and turned myself invisible.

Tom’s eyes looked as if they might actually pop out from his face. He turned to Izzy. “She . . . she . . .”

“Yeah,” Izzy replied. “She turned invisible. Just like she said.”

I made myself visible again and sat down. “Now do you believe us?” I asked.

Tom swallowed and nodded.

Izzy reached for her laptop and clicked on her e-mail. “Now that we’ve got that settled,” she said, “take a look at this. See if you can make any more sense of it than we could.”

“OK,” he said. His voice was a bit shaky. “I — sorry, Jess. I mean, I didn’t think you were actually lying, I just found it a bit hard to believe.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “So did I at first!”

“But, I mean, how is this even possible?” he went on. “Like, scientifically? Mathematically? Logically?”

“Maybe not everything is logical and mathematical,” Izzy countered.

Tom gave her the kind of look most people would give you if you’d suggested that the moon had turned orange and had cows grazing on it.

“
Everything
is mathematical,” he insisted. “Even things you can’t see, like atoms. Even nature. The tides, the moon, the petals on a flower. All of it is — ”

“Look, we can’t explain it,” I said, waving a hand to stop Tom before he got going on his favorite subject and we ended up straying too far from what we were here to do. “Not yet. That’s why you’re here. To help us figure it all out.”

Tom cleared his throat and leaned toward the laptop. “OK,” he said. “Let’s have a look at this picture.”

The three of us stared at it in silence for a couple of minutes.

Eventually, Tom sat back and shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it,” he said. “I mean, obviously, it’s a classic database-oriented spreadsheet, but too much of it is using unidentifiable markers. Without being able to quantify the algorithm, it’s almost impossible to identify the linear dependence among the variable data to provide a valuable analysis.”

I tried to look at Tom in a way that implied I had a clue what he had just said.

“Come again?” Izzy asked.

Tom thought for a moment. “Sorry. I forgot we speak different languages.” He slowed down, as if talking to someone who’d only just learned to speak English. “Basically, a lot of this is in code, and until we can crack the code so we understand what all the initials refer to, this chart doesn’t give us much to go on. Does that make more sense?”

“I think so. Do you think you could crack it?” I asked.

Tom shook his head. “To be honest, from this picture alone, I doubt it. There just isn’t enough information to go on. I can give it a try, but don’t hold out too much hope. E-mail it to me and I’ll study it at home tonight. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.”

Izzy tapped a few keys on the laptop. “OK, done. Thanks, Tom.”

I thought for a moment. “All of which leaves us no closer than we were before we found the lab.”

Tom looked at me. “You know, there’s another way you can find out what’s going on here.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You could ask the man.”

“The man from the lab?”

“Uh-huh. The scientist, or whatever he is. He’s the only person you know who could definitely give you some information.”

Izzy nodded slowly. “Tom’s got a point — except I can’t exactly see him opening up to us after we’ve already annoyed him.”

Izzy was right. She couldn’t knock on his door for a third time, and there was no way I was going on my own.

I had another thought. “Wait! Didn’t you write down his phone number as well as his address?”

Izzy rifled in her bag and fished out her notebook. She flipped it open and showed me the page with the man’s details on it — address and phone number.