Thanks, Mom. Nice touch.
“I don’t see anything,” Mr. Reardon said. Was there a flicker of suspicion in his voice?
“Maybe we’re at the wrong angle,” Jonah said. He crouched down a little, pointed. “Over to the right, I think—”
“There’s nothing out there,” Mr. Reardon said, and he sounded certain now.
“Wow, that’s weird,” Jonah said. “Are you sure? From where I was sitting, it looked like…”
He shouldn’t have said, “where I was sitting.” Mom, Dad, and Mr. Reardon all turned around, looking toward Jonah’s chair. Fortunately, Katherine wasn’t poring over the folder at that moment; she was leaning against the edge of Mr. Reardon’s desk closest to the window, her arms behind her, her gaze fixed straight ahead—as if she, too, were engrossed in searching for Jonah’s mysterious light.
But how could she possibly have had enough time to look in the folder, memorize whatever was in there, and then position herself in front of the desk?
Jonah’s heart sank. His big act had been for nothing.
“I guess—I guess it must have just been a reflection,” he said.
Some of the disappointment must have crept into his voice, making it sound like he’d really been hoping to see a dramatic plane crash, because Mom said, a little disapprovingly, “Thank goodness that’s all it was.”
Then Mr. Reardon was showing them out, down the hallway, through the waiting area, out into the parking lot. Jonah didn’t see a single other janitor, with or without Mountain Dew. Jonah held Katherine back as they approached the car, as soon as they were out of Mr. Reardon’s view.
“Did you get to see any of those papers?” he whispered.
“Not really,” she admitted.
“Thanks a lot,” Jonah said bitterly. He knew it wasn’t really fair to be mad at her. She hadn’t had any time. Still…
“I did better than that.” Katherine held up the cell phone. “I got pictures!”
ELEVEN
“You have to admit I’m a genius,” Katherine said.
“Shh,” Jonah hissed.
Mom and Dad were right in front of them, talking in low grim voices, their shoulders hunched over in defeat and dismay.
“No, really,” Katherine persisted. “After what I saw, the fact that my brain worked at all is amazing. And then, to think of something like this—”
“Can it, will you?” Jonah interrupted the self-congratulations. “We’ll have to talk later. Right now…”
Already, Dad was turning around, putting his arm around Jonah’s shoulders.
“Jonah, I am so sorry about all of this,” he said. “This is not how the government is supposed to work. That man has evidently forgotten that he’s supposed to be a servant of the people, that the government is supposed to benefit us—”
“Dad, I don’t need a civics lesson, okay?” Jonah shrugged away his father’s arm.
“That Mr. Reardon needs one,” Mom said. “Ooh—I can’t remember the last time somebody made me so mad. The nerve! Threatening us…” Her voice shook, and she turned quickly away to dab at her eyes.
Jonah slipped into the car. He felt so strange already—the last thing he needed was to watch his parents having emotional breakdowns.
Mom and Dad were getting into the front seat.
Good, Jonah thought. Just drive away—you’ll have to face forward for that….
But Dad wasn’t pushing the key into the ignition. He turned around in his seat and peered earnestly back at Jonah.
“I promise you, Jonah,” he said in a husky voice. “If you want us to pursue this, we will. That man had no right to imply that we would be punished for asking questions. You are an American citizen. He can’t take that away from you.”
“Just forget it!” Jonah said harshly. He glanced over at Katherine, on the seat beside him. She was holding out the cell phone.
Names, Jonah thought. Maybe there’s the name of a country. Maybe there’re the names of a man and a woman. My birth parents.
“You’re scared,” Dad said. “I understand. You shouldn’t make any final decisions right now. Think about it.”
“And, Jonah,” Mom began, sniffling a little, “if you ever want to just talk things out, we—”
“Can we just do that some other time?” Jonah snapped.
“Sure,” Mom said quietly.
A silence enveloped the car. Jonah saw Dad take one hand off the steering wheel and slip it into Mom’s hand. But they didn’t try to say anything else to Jonah. Dad pulled out of the parking lot and was quickly out on the highway. The streetlights and the lights of passing trucks and cars flashed intermittently into the car.
Jonah reached for the phone in Katherine’s hand.
When they’d first gotten the phone, he’d spent about an hour taking pictures of wacky things—his big toe peeking out of his holey sneakers, the dust bunnies under his bed, a close-up of his guinea pig’s eye. But he hadn’t played with the camera much since then. It seemed to take him forever to navigate from Menu to Camera to Saved Pix.
The first picture he clicked on was just a blur.
“Couldn’t you have held it steady?” he whispered to Katherine.
She took the phone away from him. “There!” she said, and handed it back.
The phone’s screen was so tiny, it was hard to read anything. But Jonah could make out one line, a title at the top of an infinitesimally small list.
The title wasn’t Birth Parents or Country of Origin.
It was Witnesses.
TWELVE
“Download it all,” Jonah said. “Hurry.”
He and Katherine were at Chip’s house, because Chip’s computer was in the basement, not right smack in the middle of the kitchen, where anyone could see. (Mom and Dad believed all those warnings about how kids shouldn’t have privacy online.) Jonah and Katherine had brought the cell phone and a cable with them, and Katherine was convinced that as soon as they got the pictures on the computer screen, everything would be big and clear and easy to read.