“No problem. I can wait,” Katherine said, grinning.
She followed the boys to the Winstons’ brick mailbox. Chip took his time about reaching in, drawing out the stacks of letters and magazines and junk mail. Jonah felt like telling him, Look, if you think Katherine is going to get bored and leave, forget it. Once she’s into something, she never gives up.
Chip was so completely into his act, trying to get rid of Katherine, that he just stood there, staring at the stack of letters.
Maybe it wasn’t an act.
“Chip?” Jonah asked cautiously. “Is something wrong?”
Jonah remembered that lists and ghosts and the FBI weren’t all they had to worry about. He remembered that letters had been the first signs of strangeness.
“Chip?” Jonah repeated.
Chip held up a letter.
“It’s addressed to me, and there’s no return address,” he said. “But it’s not like the others.”
He was right. This letter was in a smaller envelope, the kind used for invitations. And Chip’s address wasn’t typed but written—in firm grown-up handwriting, like a teacher’s.
“Open it!” Katherine said excitedly. “Let’s see what this one says!”
Jonah turned to glare at his sister—what was wrong with her? Wasn’t she scared at all? How could she act so thrilled when he felt almost paralyzed with dread?
Katherine missed his glare because she was snatching the envelope out of Chip’s hand, ripping the letter open.
“Whoa,” she breathed.
“What is it?” Jonah asked. He discovered he wasn’t completely paralyzed. He could crane his neck and peer over Katherine’s shoulder.
The letter was on a piece of generic white paper. Unfolded, it said:
You contacted me at 8:35 p.m. on Monday, October 2. I was not at liberty to discuss anything with you over the phone. If you call back, I will deny that I sent this letter. I will refuse to tell you anything more. But if it is safe, I will meet you in conference room B at the Liston Public Library at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 7. Then we can talk.
Do not attempt to contact me otherwise. This is the only way.
There was no signature.
SEVENTEEN
“Angela DuPre,” Katherine said.
“Wh-what?” Jonah stammered.
“That’s who this is from,” Katherine said confidently, waving the letter in Jonah’s face. “Remember, Chip, she was the only one from the witnesses list who seemed kind of, I don’t know, regretful about hanging up on us. Is regretful a word?”
Jonah didn’t care about words right now.
“Well, it could have been—what was that other woman’s name?—Monique Waters?” Chip suggested.
“Oh, no,” Katherine said. “That woman loved hanging up on us. She was cold.”
“And the air traffic controller talked to you, not me,” Chip said, “so he wouldn’t send me a letter—”
“And this is definitely a woman’s handwriting. Definitely,” Katherine said.
Jonah was getting annoyed with their little junior detective routine.
“So are you going?” he asked. “On Saturday?”
Chip and Katherine both stopped talking. Both of them froze with their mouths hanging open. It wasn’t a good look for either of them.
Then Katherine laughed.
“Of course,” she said. “We have to!”
“This is a complete stranger,” Jonah said. “She won’t even sign her name. She won’t talk to you on the telephone. She sounds crazy. This is how people end up getting kidnapped.”
“But she’s got information,” Chip said. “She might know who I am.”
Chip sounded so plaintive, Jonah couldn’t argue anymore.
“If you’re going to kidnap someone, you wouldn’t ask to meet at the library,” Katherine said. “That conference room B—that’s where we used to have Brownie meetings when I was a little kid. It’s, like, glass on three sides. And you have to walk through the whole library to get to it. It’s safe.”
Jonah shrugged. He felt strangely dizzy, just like he had that time in Florida when he’d gotten caught in a riptide, and the flimsy little flutter kick he’d learned at the Liston Pool had been no match for the forces carrying him out to sea.
Jonah’s dad had jumped in and saved him that time.
He can’t save me now, Jonah thought despairingly. We can’t tell Mom and Dad anything about this. Can’t tell them we’re meeting a stranger. Can’t tell them we’ve been calling strangers. Can’t tell them we took pictures of a secret file…
“Besides,” Katherine was saying. “There’ll be three of us together, and no one adult could kidnap three kids.”
“How can you be so sure that she won’t bring anybody with her?” Jonah asked, at the same time that Chip said, “What if seeing all three of us scares her off? She sounds a little paranoid—I think it has to be just me.”
“Well, we’re all going,” Katherine said. “There’s no question about that!”
They didn’t get a chance to call any of the kids on the survivors list that afternoon—or the next—because they were so busy debating their strategy for meeting with Angela DuPre (if that was really who’d written the letter). Saturday morning, Jonah had a soccer game and Katherine had a piano lesson, but by two o’clock they were both in Chip’s driveway, on their bikes, waiting. Jonah focused on balancing carefully, lifting his toes from the concrete on first the left side, then the right. He could straddle the bike for seconds at a time without touching the ground.
As long as he concentrated on that little game, he didn’t have to think about the fact that he and Katherine and Chip were about to do something incredibly stupid and probably dangerous as well.
“You didn’t really leave a note, did you?” Katherine asked, breaking Jonah’s concentration and forcing him to slam his right foot down to the ground to keep from falling.
“I did,” Jonah said.