“No,” Jonah said automatically, because he didn’t want to believe that any of this meant anything.
“And then this other lady—Angela DuPre, her name was the first one on the list—she sounded perfectly normal when Chip first started talking to her. But then he laid everything on the line, about how he’d just found out that he was adopted, and he didn’t know anything about his birth parents, and he thought she might know something…and then she just totally freaked out. She started hyperventilating, almost, and she said, ‘I can’t talk to you. Don’t call me ever again.’ Weird, huh?”
It was all weird, Jonah thought, stepping in and out of the shadows. He wanted to find normal explanations.
“Well, maybe—maybe she gave up a baby for adoption,” he said. “Maybe it was, like, thirteen years ago, and so she thought Chip might be her son and it was just all too emotional for her. You know how some birth parents want to reunite with their kids, and some never want to have anything to do with them—they just want to pretend nothing ever happened….” For the first time Jonah actually kind of understood that viewpoint. Something else struck him. “Hey, maybe she really is Chip’s birth mother. Or—or mine. Maybe that’s what witnesses really meant. Like, it’s a code word or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Katherine said.
“Why not?” Jonah challenged.
“It just didn’t seem like that,” Katherine said.
“Oh, right, you know all about these things,” Jonah scoffed. But his heart wasn’t into it, because they’d reached the point on the street where he could see into his bedroom windows—where he’d been standing when he’d seen the intruder before. He couldn’t help staring up at the windows now, but they were blank and dark and empty.
He didn’t tell Katherine about the intruder. He wouldn’t tell her or Chip, and maybe he could forget about it himself.
“Jonah,” Katherine said earnestly. “Chip and I really are going to figure all this out. And when we do, you’ll thank us. You’ll be so happy. You’ll be—at peace.”
They were at the front door now. Jonah put his hand on the doorknob. Home, which had looked like such a safe place before, was now just a place where he might see ghosts, where he had to worry about his secrets being pulled out for anyone to see, where he had to worry about Mom and Dad worrying about him. He already felt haunted.
“Katherine?” he said.
“What?” She turned to him eagerly.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
FIFTEEN
The next few days passed uneventfully. Jonah didn’t get any more strange letters, and no one disturbed the letter he already had. He didn’t see any evidence of ghosts or intruders.
Katherine and Chip kept insisting on giving him updates on their ongoing research project, no matter how many times Jonah said, “I don’t care.” He tried to ignore them. But he knew they wanted to call every single name on the survivors list now too.
“It’d be easier if Katherine had held the camera a little steadier,” Chip told Jonah at the bus stop the third morning. “Look at this.” He took a folded-up paper out of his pocket—the printout of the photos Chip had pieced together. He pointed at one spot, where there was a gap between the words. “Right here. She got the address and phone number of this person, but I don’t know who to ask for when I call. And then, down here, right below that, she just got the name and the street address, not even a city name, so I can’t look up their phone number online. It’s frustrating.”
“Huh,” Jonah said, barely bothering to look at the paper. Then curiosity got the better of him. Since this was only Chip, not Katherine, he decided it was safe to ask at least one question.
“What are you even saying to these people when you call?”
“We ask who they are,” Chip said. “What they survived. Why their names are on a list at the FBI.”
“Do they know?” Jonah made sure he was looking away from Chip when he asked that, as if he was more concerned about watching for the bus than about hearing what Chip was saying.
“None of them know about the list. They’ve survived things like broken arms and chicken pox and minor car accidents and…” Chip gave Jonah a sidelong look, “…being adopted.”
Jonah decided not to comment on that.
“They’ll talk to you? Some stranger calling them out of the blue?” He wondered if everyone was as trusting as his parents.
“Usually not right away,” Chip said. “Until I start talking about how I just found out I was adopted, and how I got these weird, kind of scary letters—and how my name’s on that list of survivors too. Usually it’s the letter part that gets them talking.”
“They got the letters too,” Jonah said. It wasn’t a question. He could tell just from Chip’s voice.
“Katherine already told you that, didn’t she?” Chip asked. “Everyone we talked to got them.”
Jonah didn’t want to admit how hard he’d been working to tune out everything Katherine had tried to tell him. He looked around for his sister. She was in the center of the kids laughing and talking under the glow of the streetlight, but she wasn’t joining in the laughter. She was peering anxiously at him and Chip.
“It’s just been five or six people you’ve talked to, right?” Jonah said. “I think that’s what Katherine said. That’s not so many. Nothing to base any conclusions on. It’s not a”—he tried to remember the proper term—“a statistically significant sample.”
Wow—his math teacher would be really proud of him for remembering that.
“Jonah, it’s seventeen people so far,” Chip said.