Risked (The Missing ) (2 page)

“I don’t know,” Jonah said irritably.

Anastasia and Alexis Romanov seemed to stare back at him from the computer screen, their expressions plaintive and pleading. Jonah wished he’d never thought to look for pictures. Now that he knew he himself wasn’t a Romanov, he didn’t want to learn anything else about these kids. It was too much of a burden. He already had to worry about his friends Chip and Alex, trying to recover from the trauma of the 1400s, and his friend Andrea, who’d wanted to stay in 1600 even though it was a complete mess, and Emily, who—

Katherine gasped beside him. Jonah turned and saw that she’d gone totally pale.

“What’s wrong with you?” he muttered.

“Everyone’s just supposed to be missing, right?”
Katherine asked, her voice shaking. “You and the other kids—you just vanished from history and nobody was ever supposed to know what happened to you. Isn’t that how it was always supposed to be? For all thirty-six of you?”

“Uh, sure,” Jonah said uneasily. “Why?”

Katherine raised a trembling hand and pointed to a sentence Jonah hadn’t noticed before, directly below the picture on the screen.

“Because,” Katherine said. “Because this says Anastasia and Alexis Romanov are dead.”

Jonah read the sentence beside Katherine’s fingertip:

Thanks to this most recent DNA testing, we now know that the entire Romanov family was executed in the early morning hours of July 17, 1918.

“Did
we
do that?” Katherine asked in a strangled voice.

“I think we would have known if we’d killed anyone,” Jonah said, trying to make a joke of things. He couldn’t take Katherine sounding so grim. “Let alone
executed
a whole family. Besides, we’ve never even been to 1918.”

“No, I mean, is it our fault?” Katherine asked. “Did something we changed in time on one of our trips make it so Alexis and Anastasia died in 1918 instead of being
kidnapped and turned back into babies and brought to our time?”

Jonah had known that that was what she meant. He leaned his head back.

“JB?” he called softly. “Don’t you think now would be a good time to show up and explain everything?”

This was a little twisted. Five minutes ago Jonah had been hoping that JB wouldn’t know what he and Katherine were up to. Now Jonah
wanted
the time agent to be watching and listening and ready to swoop in.

Jonah looked around. He heard footsteps coming toward the kitchen.

And then Mom came around the corner, a hammer in one hand and a yardstick in the other.

“Every year,” she said, shaking her head grimly. “Every year we
think
we’re going to be able to hang those pictures without having them look crooked. And every year we find out we have to measure down from the ceiling, not up from the baseboard along the stairs . . . and it still drives us crazy trying to do it right. What are you two up to?”

Jonah could feel the guilty expression spreading over his face.

“Nothing,” he said.

“School project,” Katherine said.

Mom glanced at the computer screen.

“The Romanovs and the Russian Revolution?” she said, sounding surprised. “Which of you is studying that? Jonah, I thought your social studies class was working on the Minoans and the Mycenaeans. And Katherine, I thought you were still on that geography unit.”

Sometimes it really stank to have parents who paid attention to what you were doing in school.

“It’s kind of an extra-credit thing,” Katherine lied smoothly. “You know Mrs. Hatchett thinks the curriculum leaves out a lot. She likes to add enrichment activities.”

Jonah had to hand it to Katherine: She rolled her eyes so convincingly that even Jonah almost believed her.

“I was helping Katherine look up a few things,” Jonah added, to explain why he was sitting in the computer chair and Katherine was standing beside him.

Katherine shot him a disgusted look, as if to say,
Now you’re pushing it too far. That’s just going to make Mom more suspicious! Why would I need your help?

Mom leaned in toward the computer, staring at the picture of Alexis and Anastasia.

“Good for Mrs. Hatchett,” she said absently. “It’s great she’s trying to make history come alive. . . . I remember being fascinated by the Anastasia story when I was about your age, Katherine. Of course, that was before they’d found any of the bones.”

“Bones?” Jonah repeated faintly.

“Well, yeah—how much research have you done so far?” Mom asked.

“We just started,” Katherine said.

Mom put down the hammer and yardstick and took over the keyboard and mouse.

“I’m trying to remember when everything was revealed,” she said, starting new searches of her own. She clicked through one screen after another until she came to a list of dates. “Okay, here we go. This says the family was killed in 1918. At first the Soviet leaders said only the tsar had been executed, so there were all sorts of stories floating around about what had happened to the rest of the family. Somehow it was almost always the youngest daughter, Anastasia, that people thought had escaped—a woman showed up in Germany years later claiming to be her, and even some of the Romanov relatives believed her.”

“Why Anastasia?” Jonah asked. “Why not one of the other girls? Or the boy?”

“I don’t know,” Mom said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Maybe it was because Anastasia had a reputation for being feisty, and the other girls didn’t. The son, though—he was so sick to begin with. . . . It was kind of amazing he lived as long as he did, anyway.”

“He had hemophilia,” Katherine said, sounding like
such an expert. Which was ridiculous, because Jonah knew she hadn’t known that a moment ago. She was just reading from the computer screen.

“Right,” Mom said.

“And there wasn’t a cure for that back then, but there is now, right?” Katherine said. Jonah could tell she was trying to catch Jonah’s eye without Mom noticing. At least one of the other missing children from history—Emily, the girl they’d helped most recently—had been endangered in her original life by an illness.

But Mom was frowning.

“I’m not sure there’s a cure for hemophilia even now,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s treatable. We can look that up too—”

Jonah didn’t have the patience for a long detour. He put his hand protectively over the mouse.

“Katherine can do that later,” he said. “Keep explaining—what were you saying about bones?”

“Well, the rumors kept flying for decades, because the people who murdered the Romanovs hid the bodies,” Mom said. She pointed to a chunk of text on the screen. “It was about sixty years before anyone found any of them, and—look here—even that was kept secret until 1989, about the time the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart. There were tests done on the bones after that, and scientists said
it was the tsar, his wife, three of the daughters, the family’s doctor, and three loyal servants. The bodies of the son and one of the daughters were missing.”

“So Anastasia and Alexis could have escaped!” Jonah exclaimed. “The fact that their bones weren’t with the rest of the family’s—isn’t that kind of proof that they did?”

Mom was scanning the computer screen.

“Well, there was some disagreement about whether it was Anastasia or Maria whose bones were missing,” she said. “And anyhow—here it is—in 2007 someone found other bones nearby, and they did DNA tests and then the scientists pretty much said, ‘It’s a hundred percent certain. These are the missing Romanov bones. The whole family died in 1918. No one escaped.’ Tragic, isn’t it?”

Now Jonah was the one trying to catch Katherine’s eye. The year 2007 wasn’t that long ago. If he and Katherine had changed something in history that led to the death of Anastasia and Alexis Romanov in 1918, wouldn’t time agents like JB have tried to keep it secret as long as they could?

Would JB have even bothered to tell Jonah and Katherine what had happened?

Was there any way to undo whatever had changed Anastasia’s and Alexis’s fates?

“JB, we
really
need an explanation,” Jonah muttered,
softly enough that there was no way Mom could hear.

The doorbell rang just then, and the sound made Jonah jump.

“I’ll get it,” he said, sliding out of the chair.

If that’s JB—wow, that was quick,
he thought.

He just needed to be prepared to play along with whatever story JB would come up with to explain his presence to Jonah’s parents.

Jonah rushed down the hall and yanked the door open.

It wasn’t JB. But it was someone Jonah recognized.

There, on the Skidmores’ porch, stood Anastasia Romanov.

To his credit, Jonah did not blurt out,
Aren’t you supposed to be dead?

He did consider it. His mind tried out and discarded several other possible things to say, but most of them sputtered away after an initial
What . . . ? How . . . ? Why . . . ?

Maybe you could figure out a few things before you say anything,
he told himself.

He blinked a few times, and his eyes kept assuring him that this was the exact same Anastasia Romanov he’d seen on the computer screen only a moment earlier. She had the same rounded face, the same impish gleam in her eyes, the same long, flowing hair. But this wasn’t like seeing a black-and-white picture colorized and come to life. The Anastasia standing before him wasn’t wearing a strand of pearls around her neck. She didn’t have her dark blond
hair pulled back in some puffy old-fashioned style; it was parted on the side and tucked behind her ears. The long, lacy white dress from the picture had been replaced with blue jeans and a University of Michigan sweatshirt.

So it’s not Anastasia zapped straight from the early 1900s to our front porch,
Jonah thought.
It’s modern Anastasia, Anastasia who’s grown up in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, just like me.

So if Anastasia was standing on Jonah’s front porch, why did the Internet say DNA tests proved she had died in 1918?

And if she was one of the kidnapped/time-crashed missing children from history, like Jonah, why didn’t Jonah remember seeing her at the time cave when almost all of them had been gathered together? Especially since, now that he was looking right at her, he could tell that even in blue jeans and a sweatshirt Anastasia Romanov looked 100 percent like Anastasia Romanov?

Jonah realized that he’d been standing there for a ridiculously long time staring at Anastasia without saying anything. The only thing he’d done was blink and maybe open and close his mouth a few times like a fish.

“Okay, okay,” Anastasia burst out. She crossed her arms defensively across her chest. “I get it that people in Ohio hate the University of Michigan, and I’m making everyone
I meet hate me by wearing this shirt. But
get over it.
All my other clothes are in boxes being carried off the moving van right now. I’ll wear something different tomorrow. Sheesh.”

University of Michigan,
Jonah thought. The University of Michigan was in Michigan, of course. Jonah even knew what city it was in: Ann Arbor. And there was something important about Ann Arbor, Michigan, something that had to do with someone moving . . .

Jonah’s brain couldn’t quite make the shift from thinking about people moving from one time period to another, to thinking about people moving from one state to another.

He was still squinting stupidly at Anastasia when he noticed his friend Chip jogging up the sidewalk.

“Daniella insisted on meeting you,” Chip said. “Posthaste.”

Jonah frowned at Chip and shook his head warningly. Chip had been back from his trip to the 1400s for a couple of weeks now, but he still sometimes acted and sounded like he was stuck in the Middle Ages. He’d lived the years 1483 to 1485 as Edward V, an English king who’d mysteriously vanished from history. Jonah could see how it would be a little hard to just snap back into normal life. But Chip really needed to be more careful.

“Er . . . remember Daniella McCarthy?” Chip asked, trying to cover his mistake. He gestured toward Anastasia.
Evidently, Daniella was her twenty-first-century name. “Remember how I talked to her on the phone before she moved down here?”

That was the hint Jonah needed. It was a first step, anyhow. Way back when Chip and Jonah and Katherine were just starting to figure out that something very, very weird was going on, they’d come across two lists of names, one labeled “survivors” and one labeled “witnesses.”

Daniella McCarthy’s name, like Chip’s and Jonah’s, had been on the survivors list.

But
is
she actually a survivor if she’s really Anastasia and the Internet says Anastasia Romanov died in 1918?
Jonah wondered.
What sites were we looking at, anyway—would the school librarian say they weren’t reliable?

But if this was just a case of getting bad info from the Internet, why had Jonah’s own mother been convinced that Anastasia was dead?

Jonah realized he was still staring stupidly at Daniella.

“Oh, uh, welcome to Ohio,” he managed to say. “Your family’s moving into your new house right now? To—” He barely stopped himself from saying,
To 1873 Robin’s Egg Lane?
It would seem way too creepy and stalkerish that he remembered her street address. Especially if she didn’t know . . .

Wait a minute,
Jonah thought.
She doesn’t know anything.
Daniella McCarthy was the one and only missing kid from history who wasn’t in the time cave that day we found out everything. Because there was some kind of mix-up that delayed her move. So she doesn’t know she’s in the wrong time period. She doesn’t know people have been fighting over whether to take her back to the past or on to the future. She only knows what Chip told her when he called her on the phone, and that was before we knew much of anything ourselves.

Really, the only thing Chip had talked about with Daniella was her move. Not time travel. Not history. Not her identity.