“Andrea, this isn’t a game,” Jonah said, bewildered. “Just—”
“You’re right,” Andrea interrupted. “It isn’t a game. But you’re the one treating it like one. Chess! Stratego!” Her voice arced wildly again. “This is this man’s life. This is his dearest dream, what he’s been working toward for years. . . .”
“What are you talking about?” Katherine asked.
“We have to keep this man with his tracer,” Andrea said. “He has to see me. I have to talk to him.”
“What?” Jonah said. “But that could really ruin time!”
“Oh, time,” Andrea said scornfully. “What has it ever done for me? Besides taking away my parents . . .”
“Andrea,” Katherine began. “You can’t blame—”
“I can,” Andrea said. “And I do. And I don’t care.” She bent over the unconscious man as if she was going to try to shake him awake.
Now it was Jonah’s turn to reach out and try to pull her back.
“Did your mystery man come back and tell you more lies?” he asked. “Is that why you’re acting like this?”
“No!” Andrea said, struggling against Jonah’s grasp.
“Then what changed?” Jonah asked, holding on. “You agreed with Katherine and me before. Why do you care so much about keeping this man with his tracer?”
Andrea lifted her head, so her chin jutted out. Even in the near-total darkness, Jonah could see how determined she was. Her eyes glistened.
“Because,” she whispered. “Now I know who he is.”
Jonah let go of Andrea’s arms. He was too stunned to say or do anything else. For once, he was glad that Katherine was so rarely at a loss for words.
“Andrea, I really don’t think you do understand,” Katherine said, almost snippily. “How could you know? Who could this man possibly be, that would—”
“He’s my grandfather,” Andrea said. “John White.”
Katherine gasped.
Jonah was struggling to catch up. Andrea’s grandfather . . . had they somehow missed the chance to save her parents’ lives, but zoomed back instead to rescue her grandfather? No, her real grandfather—her twenty-first-century, adoptive grandfather—wouldn’t be from Virginia Dare’s lifetime. This would have to be Virginia Dare’s grandfather, the one Andrea had read so much about. The one who had captured her interest in the Virginia Dare story in the first place.
I think it was because of the grandfather coming back, Andrea had said. How hard he tried to get back to his family, and how many times he failed, and then when he finally made it to Roanoke . . .
Jonah gasped now too, only a little after Katherine.
“How can you tell it’s him?” he asked.
“He keeps talking about Eleanor, which was his daughter’s name—my . . . mother’s name. My birth mother’s, I mean.” Andrea sounded defensive.
“I bet a lot of women were named Eleanor back then,” Katherine said.
“The other names he said were people at Roanoke too—Fernandez, Lane, George Howe . . . And what he was saying about a battle with Manteo’s people? That was this really stupid sneak attack the Roanoke colonists made on an Indian village. They figured out in the middle of it that they’d attacked their own friends,” Andrea said.
“John White wouldn’t have been the only colonist in that battle,” Jonah pointed out, proud that he could come up with something logical.
“But John White was the only colonist who left Roanoke to sail back to England to talk to Sir Walter Raleigh to get supplies,” Andrea said. “He didn’t want to. The other colonists had to beg him. They told him he was their only chance.”
“And he was talking about a baby,” Katherine said thoughtfully. “That would be . . .”
“Virginia Dare,” Andrea said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “Me.”
She gently patted the man’s shoulder again, and it was almost as if she was claiming him, agreeing to be his granddaughter. Jonah blinked, trying to see better in the nearly nonexistent light. He knew something important had just happened. Did Andrea want to be Virginia Dare now? Was this something else that Andrea’s mystery man had manipulated her toward?
When we got back to 1483, Chip and Alex wanted to be Edward V and Prince Richard, too, Jonah remembered. But that was after we found their tracers.
Andrea might have found her grandfather, but they still didn’t have a clue where her tracer was. Jonah glanced across the hut to the glowing tracer boys, sprawled out flat again, looking soundly asleep. Those tracers were even more proof that time and history were out of whack.
“I thought you said the grandfather didn’t find anybody when he came back to Roanoke,” Jonah said accusingly. “Just the word Croatoan carved into wood. Not two Indian boys.” He gestured toward the tracers. “Er—two boys dressed like Indians.”
“Something must have changed,” Andrea said. “Even without us interfering. Or maybe the historical accounts are wrong?”
She looked down at the man—John White?—who had settled back into a peaceful sleep again. He was even smiling slightly, and it seemed as though he was responding to Andrea’s voice. As if he knew her. But how could that be? Sure, he’d seen her as a baby, but not after that—not in any version of history—until she and Jonah had fished the man out of the waves.
Jonah shook his head. Really, history was complicated enough without there being multiple versions.
“What was supposed to happen when John White came back to Roanoke?” Jonah asked. “In the accounts you read?”
“It was three years before he made it back,” Andrea said. “That wasn’t just because of the Spanish Armada—he had all sorts of bad luck. It was like nobody cared about Roanoke but him. He was on one ship that was attacked by pirates, and he got cut up in a sword fight. And then, when he finally found a ship that would take him to Roanoke, he wanted to bring a bunch of new colonists with him, but the captain wouldn’t let him.”