Revealed (27 page)

“Maybe they'll shut up if we go into the office,” Angela said, making a face. “But first I have to warn you—”

“What?” Jonah asked. She looked so serious Jonah's mind went back to all his worst fears. Were Gary and Hodge back in the airfield office? Had somebody died? Were he and Angela somehow trapped in 1932 forever?

“JB's in the office,” Angela said.

Jonah did a double take.

“But—that's great!” Jonah said. “So we don't have to worry about finding him. He can tell us how to do everything else—get Katherine back, get the other kids back, fix my parents . . .”

Angela was grimly shaking her head.

“It's going to be hard for you even to look at him,” she warned.

Jonah remembered that in the last glimpse he'd had of JB in this time period, JB had been standing in the kidnapped Lindbergh child's room, and the police had just decided that he was too crazy to be a suspect. Had they put him in prison anyway? Or had they put him in some sort of mental institution? Even with an Elucidator, had Angela had trouble getting him out of the institution?

Twentieth-century mental institutions—not the greatest places to hang out
, Jonah remembered. He'd seen the types of places where the original Tete Einstein had been confined before his mother had figured out a way to save him and send him to the future and let him grow up as JB.

The shouting from over at the fence intensified.

“Could Colonel Lindbergh comment about what it was like to find out that the whole time he was looking for his child, the baby was dead and lying in a shallow grave not even five miles away?” “What safety precautions will the Lindberghs take to make sure that their second child won't be kidnapped too?” “When is the second child due?” “Could Colonel Lindbergh make a comment about his family's emotions regarding the second child?”

Angela tugged on Jonah's arm.

“Come on,” she said. “We've got to get away from that.”

Still crouching down low, they crept around to the door of the airfield office and stepped inside. Now Jonah could barely hear the shouting from outside.

But JB was sprawled in a chair right in front of him, just inside the door, and Jonah could see exactly what Angela had meant about it being hard to look at him.

JB was still a thirteen-year-old boy. But his eyes were vacant and glazed over now, and even though they seemed to be staring straight back at Jonah, they showed no gleam of recognition.

JB was also drooling.

“It's like JB's vanished from inside his own body,” Angela said, choking up. “I think the un-aging and the time changes made his schizophrenia come back, kind of
like his asthma. I've been afraid to leave 1932 to get medicine for him, because I wasn't sure I could get back in to meet you. And the medicine they had in 1932 to treat schizophrenia . . . I've been afraid to give that to him too.”

“Wait—you mean, you've stayed in 1932 this whole time?” Jonah asked. “Since—since you arrived in March, the night of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping?”

Angela nodded.

“The first thing I saw was the baby already dead on the ground under the ladder—I think JB saw even more. We both went a little crazy, because we thought that was you,” she said. “We thought we'd failed at everything that mattered.”

Jonah thought about how that must have looked to Angela and JB.

“I'm not the Lindbergh baby,” Jonah said. “I already told you.”

Angela lifted her hands in a helpless gesture.

“Yeah, well, I knew that as soon as I thought to consult the Elucidator I'd secretly smuggled into 1932 with me without telling JB,” she said. “The one I'd been afraid to use
until
we got to 1932 because I thought it'd mess everything up.”

Is that true?
Jonah wondered, thinking about the narrow escapes he and JB and Angela had had, clinging to the
Spirit of St. Louis
over the Atlantic Ocean and almost being struck by the plane's propeller in Paris.
Or was it not possible for Angela to use the Elucidator on those time-travel trips because it would have been too much of a paradox—since I went on those time-travel trips before I gave Angela the note at the airport telling her to carry an Elucidator with her almost thirteen years later?

Jonah's head was starting to hurt again, and he didn't think it was just from timesickness.

“JB was so grief-stricken at the thought that he'd caused your death that I guess it broke his last connection to being JB, not Tete Einstein,” Angela continued. “Though I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't go to help him right away because I thought he could handle everything better than me anyway.”

Jonah remembered JB's crazy screams about the child already being dead and everything being his fault.

Because he thought I'd been zapped back in time with him and Angela
, Jonah realized.
He thought that Gary and Hodge had kidnapped me before that moment, and that bringing me back had led to my death. So of course he blamed himself.

It was a relief to at least figure out this much of the time-travel details that Jonah hadn't understood from the very start.

“I saw on the monitor what JB told Charles Lindbergh and the police,” Jonah said. “But the monitor didn't let me see what happened to JB after he left that room.”

Angela pulled a necklace out from inside her dress. It had an oversize locket dangling from it. Jonah guessed that it probably wasn't actually a locket.

“Having this Elucidator with me meant that I could turn myself and JB invisible and get him out of police custody,” Angela said. “And then we could find food for ourselves even without any money. . . . I'm not even sure either one of us would still be alive without this Elucidator. So thank you for telling me to bring it.”

Jonah shrugged off the thanks.

“Weren't you afraid it would mess up time too much to have JB show up as a suspect and then disappear?” he asked.

“No,” Angela said. “There were all sorts of crazy tips coming in and suspects and allegations—pretty much everything about that crime and the investigation was insane, so it didn't change anything.”

This was a relief too.

Jonah turned so he didn't have to keep looking at the vacant-eyed JB.

“But you couldn't just tell the Elucidator, ‘Make JB sane again'?” Jonah asked. “You couldn't tell it, ‘Stop Gary and Hodge from kidnapping Jonah'? Or ‘Fix everything that's messed up right now'?”

“Jonah, you of all people know that nothing with an
Elucidator is that simple,” Angela said, rolling her eyes. “I have asked it, practically every hour, ‘Let me talk to Hadley Correo or some other time agent from the future.' And it always tells me, ‘Not possible at this juncture.' It's as frustrating as the Magic Eight Ball I had when I was a kid.”

Belatedly Jonah remembered that he was still clutching an Elucidator in his own hand. He looked down at it—it wasn't a handheld Connect 4 game anymore. It was a giant marble, like the cat's-eye shooter he could remember his grandfather showing him, back when Jonah was little. Grandpa had always claimed that marbles were a thrilling game, but he'd never managed to convince Jonah.

This is almost as bad as the fifteenth century, when the Elucidator showed up as a rock
, Jonah thought.

Still, he noticed that this marble glowed with the words DO YOU HAVE ANOTHER QUESTION?

“What if my Elucidator gives a different answer?” Jonah asked Angela. He bent down close to the marble Elucidator and asked it, “Could you let me talk to Hadley Correo or some other time agent? Or maybe JB from some point in the future when he's perfectly sane?”

NOT YET, the Elucidator flashed.

Jonah lowered his hand in disgust.

“Well, at least it's a slightly different answer,” Angela said, shrugging helplessly.

Somebody knocked at the door just then.

“Make all three of us invisible!” Angela hissed into her locket Elucidator.

“And both Elucidators!” Jonah added, because he could see that the marble and the locket weren't fading away instantly.

The door opened, revealing a man in overalls.

“Colonel Lindbergh, I just wanted to warn you that—” the man began.

Before he could even finish his sentence, a horde of men shoved him out of the way and trampled into the office.

“Colonel Lindbergh, I just have a few questions!” “I've asked and asked and asked for an exclusive interview.” “I know this flight you just took was supposed to be of ‘no particular significance,' but we just got a news tip that . . .”

Jonah was relieved that it was only the newspaper reporters, not Gary and Hodge. And then his relief turned to horror, because the pack of reporters was just moments away from slamming into the invisible JB. Jonah and Angela, by themselves, could have climbed out a window or pressed tightly into a corner, out of the way. But JB was apparently incapable of moving.

Jonah leaned over his marble Elucidator and whispered the best command he could think of in a pinch: “Take all three of us back to the time cave with Mom and Dad! Now!”

“What if we can't ever get back into 1932?” Angela screamed at Jonah, even as the three of them floated through Outer Time. “What if it turns out that there's still something there that we need to fix?”

“Oh, no, you're right!” Jonah groaned. “Let's find out! Elucidator, take us back to—”

Angela clapped her hand over Jonah's mouth. Why was she constantly shutting him up? This was almost as bad as hanging out with Katherine.

“Since we're on our way to the time cave anyway, why don't we hole up there for a little while and think through things?” Angela asked. “And
then
we can go back to 1932 if we have to, once we know what we're doing?” Angela asked.

Oh yeah
, Jonah thought sheepishly.
Not such a bad idea.

He nodded, and Angela took her hand off his mouth.

Katherine probably would have left him muzzled a bit longer. Was it crazy that Jonah missed all the annoying things about Katherine as much as her good traits?

“You think we really can figure everything out, right?” Jonah asked Angela. He glanced nervously at JB, who bobbed silently along through Outer Time. “You think there is something we can do to cure JB and get Katherine and the other kids back and make you and JB and my parents the right ages again and—”

“Could you maybe not list
everything
we need to take care of?” Angela moaned. “Can't we just start with one thing at a time?”

They landed back in the time cave, and everything looked just as it had before Jonah had been sucked into 1932 in the first place. He went over to crouch beside his sleeping parents in the car. He found there was nothing he could say to them, so he just threw his arms around their shoulders.

They were still thirteen-year-olds. Hugging them was nothing like hugging his real, actual, adult parents.

Or maybe the problem was just that they didn't hug back.

“Good news,” Angela said softly from behind him. “I just asked my Elucidator if it would be possible for us to go back to 1932, and it said yes.”

“Okay!” Jonah said enthusiastically, lifting the Elucidator in his hand. “Let's—”

This time Angela only pushed his arm down, rather than muzzling him again.

“After we figure out what to do, remember?” she asked.

“Right,” Jonah said.

“We can be leisurely,” Angela reminded him. “We can think and think endlessly, and still go back to 1932 only a split second after we left. Or—to anywhere else we might need to go.”

It sounded like torture to Jonah, to think that hard and that long without doing anything. He'd used up his patience for that kind of thing watching months and months of time pass in 1932 on the monitor, before he got sucked back there. But he didn't complain to Angela. Instead he suggested, “Can we make sure JB is comfortable first? Or—see if traveling through time cured him?”

“JB?” Angela said doubtfully.

JB lay on a heap on the ground staring at the ceiling of the cave. He didn't answer.

As if they'd both been thinking the same thought, Jonah and Angela together hoisted JB into the front seat of the car, so he was right in front of Jonah's kid parents.

“It's like he's in a coma or something,” Jonah complained.

“I think the technical term would be more like
‘catatonic,' ” Angela said. “But I'm sure somewhere in the future, once we get him back to the future, he can be cured.”

She didn't sound sure.

Jonah went over and sat down on the ground with his back against the rock wall.

“Elucidator, can you show me exactly what happened when Gary and Hodge made time split?” Jonah asked, looking down at the object in his hand. It wasn't a marble anymore; now it looked more like a cell phone with a perfectly clear screen.

But the only thing the screen showed was Jonah standing with Gary in the stairwell at the airport. An airplane landed in the darkness outside the window before them.

“I just lived through all that!” Jonah complained. “I mean, give me the broader view. The big picture!”

Now the scene Jonah saw was an image of planet Earth. From space.

“Ergh!” Jonah growled in exasperation. He so wanted to throw the Elucidator down to the ground and smash it into a million pieces.

“Look,” Angela said, sitting down beside him and holding out her own Elucidator, which had turned into an ID-style rectangle of plastic on a lanyard. But it, too, had a screen on its face.

“I asked it to let me draw a graph, because my mind keeps tripping over what could and couldn't have happened in each stream of time,” Angela explained.