Revealed (14 page)

And . . . that's more what I'm like
, Jonah thought.
She can't do anything but hope and write. I can't do anything but hope and watch.

Sometimes Jonah had to take a break from what was happening on the screen. He figured out how to pause it.
At first all he could think of to do instead was go visit his sleeping parents. But then he started playing around with the other monitor screens as well, the ones showing the other missing children from history and their stories.

Oh—stupid me!
he thought one morning—or afternoon—or, really, who knew what time of day it was?
If the monitors zap people back to any time period they haven't visited already, why don't I find someone's time to go back to that's at least quasi-safe, and I'll glom onto the Elucidator of whoever returned them to history? If it's JB as an adult, he'll understand! He'll help me!

Jonah thought hard about this theory and eventually picked Ming Reynolds. Except for the people Jonah himself had been involved in returning to and then rescuing from their original time, Ming was the only one whose original identity Jonah knew anything about: She was a minor Chinese princess from some time period thousands of years ago.

I definitely
wasn't
in that time period originally
, Jonah told himself excitedly.

He set up the monitor to watch her original life. Tingles of excitement spread through him as he watched the first scene start.

Are those . . . water buffaloes she's standing beside?
he wondered.

He saw Gary and Hodge steal her away; he saw
JB—the real JB! The adult!—carry her back, letting her second cousin get one glimpse of her beside the water buffaloes. And then he saw JB yank her back out of time as the water buffaloes began stampeding.

Jonah's heart pounded and he started breathing hard, like he thought he'd need to run away from the water buffaloes any instant.

But the rock of the time cave stayed firmly beneath him. The water buffaloes stayed only on the screen.

So . . . is it only the monitor screen connected to the Lindberghs that can pull people back in time?
Jonah wondered.

He became a little reckless, calling up the original time periods for every single one of the other thirty-five missing children from history. He saw fires, floods, plagues, more stampedes. Also: secret stabbings and secret shootings and, once, a secret beheading by guillotine in the middle of the night. He rewatched the stories where he knew the ending because he'd been present: the 1485 battle where Chip and Alex were supposed to have perished; the 1903 plague that was supposed to have killed Emily; the 1918 squad of assassins that had meant to kill Daniella and Gavin. He saved the 1600s for last, because that was when JB's former employee, Second, had nearly ruined all of time. Even in those cases Jonah watched Andrea, Brendan, Antonio, and Dalton escape all over again, free and clear.

None of those viewings sucked Jonah back into another time. He didn't expect it from the scenes he'd already witnessed in person, but he was surprised that the moments he was seeing for the very first time didn't pull him back. And he was surprised that starting a familiar scene a second too early or lingering in it a second too long didn't change anything either.

At least I'm seeing everything about how Gary and Hodge operated, kidnapping children
, Jonah thought.
At least I'm seeing all the creative ways JB managed to safely return and rescue those kids, even when Katherine and I weren't involved.

It wasn't until he had watched the very last kid's story that Jonah realized something big:

Of the thirty-six missing kids who had been on the time-crashed plane at the beginning of Jonah's modern life, all but one of them had already been safely returned to and then rescued from their original time period.

Jonah was the only one left.

What does that mean?
Jonah wondered.
Why didn't JB ever tell me I'm the only one who hasn't resolved his earlier life? When did all the rest of the kids have a chance to go back in time—was it before or after I was in 1918? Was it when Gavin and I were recovering from our bullet wounds?

Jonah didn't have answers to any of his questions.

He went back to watching the Lindberghs' desperate lives.

He wasn't the only one: There were crowds outside their home, journalists from all over the world breathlessly covering every new lead.

On April 1, 1932, a month after the kidnapping, the Lindberghs received their tenth ransom note. This one told them to have their money ready the very next night.

Jonah watched Charles Lindbergh climb into a car
with fifty thousand dollars in a wooden box. Another car followed with an additional twenty thousand—the ransom demands had gone up.

The man who was acting as go-between for the Lindberghs, Dr. John Condon, began following a clue hunt through the Bronx: Go to a flower shop on Tremont Avenue and look for the next instructions under a rock. Walk to the intersection at the edge of St. Raymond's Cemetery.

Lindbergh stayed a few hundred feet away from Condon, watching.

“Ay, Doctor,” a voice called to Condon from the cemetery.

Condon froze, halfway across the street. Then Jonah saw him start running toward the cemetery. He was a heavy man—he didn't seem capable of running fast. Jonah saw a second man waiting for him in the shadows.

My kidnapper?
Jonah wondered.
Is it really him or just someone trying to steal the Lindberghs' money?

It had to be that Jonah-as-the-Lindbergh-baby was still
somewhere
in the world in April 1932. If Gary and Hodge—or anyone else—had pulled him out of time by this date, then the monitor would suck him into the past, just as it had kid JB and kid Angela.

Wouldn't it?

Jonah missed some of what the shadowy man in the cemetery was saying to John Condon. Condon gave him the box containing the fifty thousand dollars, and the shadowy man gave him an envelope that he said contained an exact description of where the Lindbergh child could be found.

“Give me your word that you'll wait six hours before opening the directions,” the shadowy man said.

“I will,” Condon said, nodding with great sincerity.

Condon took the directions back to Charles Lindbergh, who was waiting in the car. Jonah couldn't believe they made no effort to follow the man in the cemetery.

The camera—or whatever was giving Jonah the ability to watch the entire scene—let the man from the cemetery disappear back into the shadows as well.

Why doesn't the monitor give some view of where the baby is—where I really am?
Jonah wondered.

All the other monitors had shown what actually happened to the missing kids themselves. Was this monitor different because Jonah hadn't been returned to his native time yet? Or was it just because Jonah had asked JB to show Charles Lindbergh so they could see him meet with Gary and Hodge?

Keeping one eye on the screen, Jonah went back to the keyboard. But he couldn't figure out how to change the scene.

On the screen Lindbergh and Condon were driving away. They were discussing whether or not they really should wait six hours before looking at the directions for where to find the baby.

“I gave my word, but you didn't give yours,” Condon argued. This sounded like the way kids at school would reason. Jonah had to do a double take to make sure that Condon hadn't been suddenly turned into a thirteen-year-old too.

But Condon and Lindbergh are dealing with a stolen baby
, Jonah thought.
How can they wait? How can they not rush to look for the child—for me!—as quickly as they can?

Jonah saw Lindbergh pull his car back over to the curb and rip open the envelope. The short letter inside said:

The boy is on Boad Nelly. It is a small Boad 28 feet long. Two person are on the Boad. The are innosent. you will find the Boad between Horseneck Beach and gay Head near Elizabeth Island.

“He's on a boat near Martha's Vineyard!” Lindbergh explained. “It's by where Anne and I had our honeymoon!”

Then Jonah watched as Lindbergh flew three other men over the water near the Elizabeth Islands. Every time
they spotted a boat that might fit the description of
Nelly
, Lindbergh swooped down low and close. Coast Guard cutters spread across the water as well, searching, searching, searching . . .

Jonah held his breath.

Will they find me? Or will they find where I'm supposed to be? What will happen then?
he wondered.

Jonah lost track of how much time Lindbergh and the others spent searching. But he saw Lindbergh in a dark car at night after a long day of searching—had it been the second full day of searching? The third?

Lindbergh was dropping off his fellow searchers in New York before he himself drove on to his home in New Jersey. It seemed at first that Lindbergh was not going to say a word. But then Lindbergh looked the others directly in the face.

“We were double-crossed,” he said. “The kidnappers never meant to tell us where to find the boy.”

Everyone stopped looking at the Elizabeth Islands.

Jonah slumped against the rock wall of the cave.

How do Charles and Anne Lindbergh survive this?
he wondered.
Do they survive? Do they dare to keep holding on to hope?

He didn't want to think about how the Lindberghs had hundreds and thousands of people helping them look for
their son: the entire New Jersey state police, the Coast Guard, every single person who read a newspaper or listened to a radio report. And they
still
couldn't find the boy.

As far as Jonah knew, he and kid JB and kid Angela were the only ones looking for Katherine. And what had any of them accomplished?

This is the best thing I can do for Katherine
, Jonah told himself.
When I see Lindbergh meeting with Gary and Hodge, then I'll know how to help.

Painful as it was, Jonah went back to watching the Lindberghs.

Another man had shown up, claiming to have a connection to a gang of kidnappers. Charles Lindbergh went sailing with that man to meet the gang near Cape May, New Jersey.

“And you trust this man?” Jonah yelled, as if Lindbergh could actually hear him. “You really think he's going to lead you to your son?”

But what else could Lindbergh do?

Lindbergh and the other man sailed and sailed and sailed, going around in circles for hours on end. Even Jonah was starting to feel dizzy.

Then suddenly the scene shifted. Two men Jonah had never seen before were sitting in the cab of a truck, moving along a small, muddy road.

“Who
are
these people?” Jonah muttered. “What happened to the Lindberghs?”

While Jonah watched, the man on the passenger side squirmed in his seat.

“Would you mind pulling over?” the man asked. “I'm not going to make it to the next town.”

Does he mean he has to pee?
Jonah wondered.
Didn't his parents ever tell him he should always go before he goes?

Jonah snorted, mostly with disgust at himself for making such a lame joke. But after days of watching the tense, worried Lindberghs and the tense, worried cops, it was almost peaceful to watch people whose biggest concern seemed to be finding a place to pee.

The truck stopped; the man tramped far out into the woods. Jonah guessed he was trying to find a place he wouldn't be seen from the road—not that there appeared to be any other traffic nearby.

Jonah could see only the man's back. The man seemed to freeze in place. Had time stopped? Had the monitor malfunctioned? No, now the man was turning back around, shouting back to his friend still in the truck.

“Uh, Orville?” the man said, and now his voice was tense and worried too. “I think this is a dead body. It's a . . . it's a baby.”

The camera zoomed close, seeming to accompany the
second man—Orville?—as he rushed to his friend's side. Now both men stood over a small body lying facedown in the dirt. The first man picked up a stick to shove away a layer of dead leaves, revealing a cluster of golden curls.

“It's got to be the Lindbergh baby, don't you think?” the first man said.

Watching, Jonah felt his knees give way. He sank down to the rock floor.

“I'm dead?” he mumbled. “I'm dead?”

How could that be?

A fake corpse
, Jonah told himself.
Duh. Use your brain.

He knew that his friends Gavin and Daniella—and their sister Maria and a family friend, Leonid—had been able to escape from 1918 only because fake remains were left behind in their place. Their fake skeletons were realistic enough to fool twentieth-century science and twenty-first-century science. By the time science would become advanced enough to detect the forgery, it wouldn't matter if everyone knew that those four kids had survived.

So how is this any different?
Jonah wondered.

It felt different.

Just because that's the fake version of your dead body they're poking at?
Jonah told himself.
Just because you know now that that was supposed to happen to you in original time?

It was impossible to get an upset stomach in a time hollow, but Jonah started retching anyway.

Stop it
, Jonah told himself.
None of this really did happen to you. You were rescued. You were saved. You're still alive. Even in 1932 you're still alive.

Didn't he have proof of this? If Jonah-as-the-Lindbergh-baby really had vanished from 1932, wouldn't Jonah himself instantly be zapped back to that moment?

Jonah knew that was how things worked. And he was still in the time cave. He was still able to watch 1932 on the monitor without being sucked into it.