“I think you did see something,” she muttered. “You really were looking carefully for those men.”
And Jonah had been. Even when the kids from school had been laughing at him, he’d made sure that he peered down every aisle between the bookshelves, every nook of the little-kid reading area.
The men were nowhere in sight.
“Oh, well,” Jonah said, trying very hard to keep his voice from shaking. “Nothing’s wrong now. Can I just go?”
The librarian regarded him thoughtfully.
“Go on, then,” she said.
Jonah could feel her eyes on him as he went to join Chip and Katherine. Walking out the door, he felt robotic, because his body was doing something so normal—one foot stepping in front of the other, hands held out to shove against the door—while his mind was zipping and zooming and alighting on one strange thought after the other.
“What happened?” Katherine asked. “Is Angela okay?”
“Angela…” Jonah had to struggle so hard to focus his mind, to concentrate on the one precise moment of memory that his brain kept trying to transform into something normal and acceptable, something that would fit with everything else he already knew about the world. He wouldn’t let his brain do that; he wouldn’t stop trusting his own eyes.
“I saw Angela,” Jonah said. “I don’t know if she’s okay or not. I think she went into a time warp.”
TWENTY-ONE
“Not you, too!” Chip complained.
“I’m sorry!” Jonah said. He bent over, bracing his hands against his knees, trying to pull more air into his lungs, a delayed reaction to all his frantic pedaling and running. As soon as he could, he looked back up at Chip. “I’m not sure that’s what happened. I’m not sure of anything anymore. But I think that’s what happened, because it makes the most sense.”
“The most sense?” Chip repeated in amazement. “That’s the best explanation you can come up with? A time warp?”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” Jonah said. The edges of his vision were a little blurry even now, but this was a normal feeling. Oxygen deprivation, his mind automatically labeled it. He felt the way he did after he’d played an entire soccer game as midfielder, running up and down the field for a solid hour. He’d felt this way after the soccer game this morning.
Oh, jeez, he thought. I played that soccer game and then I rode my bike like a maniac—no wonder I feel so dead. No wonder I’m seeing things. I mean, not seeing things. Seeing someone vanish. Or, wait…maybe she wasn’t really there in the first place?
His thoughts got so tangled that his mind gave up trying to revise his memory of seeing Angela vanish. It had happened. Period.
“Katherine,” he gasped. “When you said you saw the janitor disappear—I shouldn’t have made fun of you. I didn’t know….”
“You believe me now?” Katherine asked. “Why?” Comprehension dawned on her face. “Angela disappeared, didn’t she? And you saw it….”
Jonah nodded.
“I’ll show you.”
He started to stumble over something—it was his own bike, where he’d dropped it in the middle of the sidewalk. He picked it up, and then it was nice to have the handlebars to lean on as he led Chip and Katherine through the parking lot, over to the cluster of pine trees. He dropped his bike again by the curb.
“She was right here,” he said, stepping into the pine needles. “I saw her. And then she took one step forward”—he took a step—“and she was gone.”
Jonah rocked back on his heels, stepped forward again. He felt nothing different in either place. There was no temperature change, no wind howling furiously around some time portal. In both spots—before his step and after—he felt just a gentle breeze, the sunshine warm on the back of his neck, the pine needles soft beneath his feet.
“Guess the time warp only wanted Angela, not you,” Chip said mockingly, but there was an edge of fear in his voice.
“Or—someone’s protecting you,” Katherine said.
Jonah looked at his sister. She was in the middle of pulling her hair back, capturing it in a ponytail. Jonah was surprised to see how red her face was. She had a ring of sweat where her bike helmet had pressed against her head, and the sweat was trickling down her cheeks. He was amazed that she was willing to be seen in public like this.
“Didn’t you notice,” she began in an oddly strangled voice, “how, when those men were fighting, the cute janitor guy yelled out, ‘Jonah! Chip! Run!’? He didn’t say my name. He didn’t say Angela’s.”
“You think those guys were fighting over us?” Chip asked. “Why not you, too?”
“You’re the babies from the plane,” Katherine said. “I’m not.”
Jonah thought about this. The fight and the fleeing had happened so fast, all he had were jumbled images in his head. But the janitor/tackler had seemed to be trying to protect them.
“How did he know our names?” he asked. “Mine, I guess from Mr. Reardon’s office, but—Chip’s?” He remembered something else. “And he did recognize Angela. I don’t know if you two heard, because you were out the window already, but he called her Angela DuPre. And he said—he said—” It was such a struggle to remember, “—something like, ‘We have wronged you.’ No, ‘We have wronged you in time. We owe you.’”
“’In time’?” Chip whispered.
Katherine sat down on the curb, her elbows propped on her knees, her face caught in her hands.
“That whole plane thing did kind of ruin Angela’s life,” she said. “I mean, refusing to talk on the telephone? Having everyone think she’s crazy?”
Chip sat down beside Katherine.
“What does the janitor guy have to do with the plane?” he asked. “And who was the guy he was fighting with? What did he want to do to us?”
Jonah stiffened.
“Beware,” he quoted. “They’re coming back to get you. That’s what the letter said. That’s who they were warning us about!”