Andrea let go and slumped down to the ground. She put her head in her hands.
“Why doesn’t anything work?” she moaned. “The food pellet didn’t hurt me, so I gave him the food. I gave him water. I cleaned his wound again—he should be healing! He should be awake!”
Katherine moved over and gently put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder.
Hey! I could have done that! Jonah thought. He remembered how he’d vowed, way back at the beginning, to take care of Andrea. He hadn’t realized how complicated that would be. He was glad that Katherine seemed to know what to do.
“Let’s just watch,” Katherine said softly. “See what happens.”
The tracer version of John White was awake now. Jonah found that it really bothered him to look at the old man’s face, with the eerie staring eyes superimposed over the closed eyelids.
“Open it,” John White whispered, the tracer and the real man together. And then the tracer sat up, his upper half separating from the real man. Jonah winced—that didn’t look right either. But then he got distracted, watching the tracer.
The tracer John White was still talking, though Jonah couldn’t hear him anymore. He gestured, clearly giving directions for exactly how to open the chest. The boy who’d found it was crouched by the chest, his hands on the latch.
“We might as well see what’s inside too,” Jonah said, trying to sound casual, as if he was used to half tracers giving ghostly instructions.
He put his hands in the exact same position as the tracer boy’s and mimicked every movement. When the boy finally raised the lid, Jonah had to push a little harder. He hoped neither of the girls noticed how much it strained his muscles.
“So what’s in there?” Katherine asked. “Andrea’s family fortune?”
The tracer boy was already lifting the first item out of the chest. Jonah looked at it, did a double take, and then glanced down into the open chest.
“Paintbrushes?” Jonah said in disbelief. “Who bothers carrying art supplies halfway around the world?”
“John White did,” Andrea said quietly, pride in her voice. “He was an artist. Is. That was his job on all his trips to Roanoke Island. He was supposed to record views of the local people, the local plants and animals. To get more people to come here. And just to show what everything was like.”
“Let me guess,” Katherine said. “Nobody had invented cameras yet?”
Andrea shook her head.
“John White has been widely praised in modern times for his sympathetic depiction of Native Americans,” she said, as if quoting. “It’s a tragedy that so little of his work survived.”
Jonah shook his head. Art supplies! Whatever happened to going back to England for everything the colonists needed? Like . . . food? And whoever heard of an artist also being a governor? Were the English trying to make their colony fail?
The tracer boys were pulling other things out of the chest, so Jonah did the same. Quill pens. Little jars that must have contained inks and paints. Tablets of blank paper. Tablets full of pictures.
The papers and jars were wrapped in cloth—no, it was clothing: another shirt just like the one John White was already wearing and two dresses that seemed to amaze the tracer boys.
“I bet he was bringing those for Eleanor,” Andrea murmured.
The tracer boys held the dresses up against their own chests and laughed, just like the football players at school who had dressed up like cheerleaders for Halloween.
“Oh, grow up!” Katherine muttered.
John White’s tracer must have said something similar, because the tracer boys quickly put the dresses back into the chest. At the old man’s direction, they picked up a tablet instead and began looking through the pictures. John White waved his arm, apparently telling the boys, Turn the page, turn the page, that’s not, the picture I want to show you. . . . Jonah pulled the real version of the same tablet out of the chest, so he could turn pages along with the tracer boys.
On the first page was a drawing of an Indian village with huts made of curved branches. Jonah looked at the picture, then glanced the disheveled huts around him.
“Do you think . . . It’s a drawing of this village we’re sitting in right now, isn’t it?” he asked, holding up the page so Andrea and Katherine could see.
“Yes,” Andrea whispered. “Except . . . everything’s in good shape. And there are people.”
The drawing was actually full of people. Indians—dancing, cooking, laughing, harvesting healthy-looking corn . . . They practically jumped off the page, they looked so alive. Jonah could see on their faces how happy they were, how proud they were of their thriving village.
Where had they gone? What had happened to them?
The tracer boys were holding the tracer tablet out to John White, pointing to a particular picture. Jonah could practically hear them asking, “Do you mean this one?”
John White’s tracer nodded vigorously, tears glistening in his eyes.
Jonah glanced at the picture the tracer boys held up and quickly flipped through his tablet until he located the same drawing.
It was a woman holding a tiny baby tightly wrapped in a blanket. The woman’s hair was pulled back from her face rather severely, but her eyes shone with love.
At the bottom of the page were the words Eleanor and Virginia.
Katherine gently touched the woman’s face in the picture.
“She looks a lot like you, Andrea,” Katherine murmured. “I didn’t notice when JB was showing us that DVD . . . or whatever that was.” She laughed a little, an embarrassed-sounding snort. “But she’d just given birth then. Maybe women don’t look like themselves when they’ve just given birth.”
Jonah wasn’t going to comment about that. He peered down at the picture: It was definitely the woman from the scene JB had shown them. And she did look like Andrea or like what Andrea could look like in ten or fifteen years.