Also, if this was an environmental thing, what were the two sides fighting over? Did the janitor just want him to stay here to deliver his message? Did the other guy want the world to end?
Jonah wasn’t enjoying his shower anymore. He shut off the water, stepped out, and pulled a towel from the rack. Distantly, he heard the phone ringing. Then it stopped ringing—Dad must have gotten up from watching the Ohio State game to answer it. Jonah knew Katherine would still be in the shower because she always took forever. Then she always had to spend another eternity drying her hair—she’d be doing well to make it back to Chip’s house before midnight.
“Jonah?” It was Dad, shouting up the stairs. “Chip’s on the phone. He says it’s urgent. Can you get the phone up there?”
“Sure,” Jonah said.
He wrapped the towel around his waist and went for the phone in his parents’ bedroom.
“Got it, Dad,” Jonah yelled. He heard the click that meant Dad had hung up downstairs. “Hello?”
“They’re gone,” Chip said, his voice cracking.
“What’s gone?”
“The lists on my computer—the survivors list, the witnesses list, the files where Katherine and I were keeping checklists about who said what—it all disappeared. But the rest of the computer is fine. How could that be?” Chip’s voice arced toward hysteria.
“Calm down,” Jonah said. “Maybe you just deleted something by mistake. Did you check in the Delete file?”
“Not there.”
“Didn’t you have everything backed up?”
Silence. Evidently Chip didn’t.
“But you made printouts,” Jonah reminded him.
“I left them at the library,” Chip groaned. “I didn’t get them back from Angela before we climbed out the window—did you pick them up? Did Katherine?”
Jonah thought about this. He could remember the papers lying on the table in front of Angela, right before the first man slammed against the door. What had happened to the lists after that? When he’d run around the table to get to the window, had the breeze lifted the pages slightly into the air? After he’d climbed out the window and glanced back, had the papers been sliding across the table, as the fighting men jolted it from below? Why hadn’t he paid more attention? And why hadn’t he simply grabbed the papers as he ran?
“There wasn’t time!” Jonah said, his voice unnecessarily surly.
“Maybe if I call the library,” Chip said desperately, “maybe somebody found them—”
“Don’t bother,” Jonah said. “They weren’t there when I went back.” He was sure of that detail.
“Do you think Angela took them?” Chip asked.
Jonah shrugged, forgetting that Chip couldn’t see him.
“What good does that do us?” Jonah said. He didn’t want to speculate about where Angela might have gone with the papers. A new thought occurred to him. “Doesn’t Katherine still have all the pictures stored on her cell phone?”
“She deleted them after we downloaded everything,” Chip moaned. “She said they took up too much space, and she was worried that your parents might see them, because sometimes your mom borrows that phone….”
This was true. Mom had been having trouble with her own phone battery.
Some of Chip’s despair was beginning to infect Jonah.
“Then we don’t have anything left from those lists at all?” Jonah asked, his own voice edging toward panic. “Nothing?”
“I still have Daniella McCarthy’s phone number on my cell,” Chip offered.
“But no one else’s?”
“I used our home phone for everyone else,” Chip said. “Katherine told me I was being mean, trying to rack up all those minutes on my cell.”
And you actually listened to her? Jonah wanted to scream. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut. Stay calm, he ordered himself.
“Your parents,” he began slowly. “If they don’t want to talk about you being adopted—do you think they might have deleted those files? Do you think if maybe you go ask them—?”
“My parents never look at my computer,” Chip said bitterly. “They don’t care. The only people who knew about those files were you and Katherine and me. And I didn’t tell anyone. Did you? Did Katherine?”
“No,” Jonah said automatically. But he still had his eyes squeezed shut, and it was as if he had his memory displayed on the backs of his eyelids: he could see his own hand sweeping across a page, writing out, “All the information is on Chip’s computer, in the basement at his house.”
“Oh, no,” Jonah said. His eyes sprang open again, and he caught a glimpse of his own stricken expression in his parents’ dresser mirror. “The note. The note I left for my parents when we went to the library, just in case something happened…”
“Did they read it?” Chip asked, horrified. “You think they came over and erased my computer files? Would they do that?”
“No….” But Jonah took the phone and rushed down the hall to his own room. The note was still hidden in the top drawer of his desk, right beside the mysterious letter, Beware! They’re coming back to get you. He thought about the casual way Dad had shouted up the stairs about the phone call—Dad hadn’t seen this note. And Mom was still out running errands. She hadn’t seen it either.
Then he remembered the man at the library, struggling under the table as Jonah scrambled out the window.
Go, Jonah! Hurry! And Jonah—I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—
“Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. “It was one of them.”
“Them who?”