The Bridge to Never Land (11 page)

CHAPTER 15

J
UST WHEN THEY THOUGHT
they’d be spending the night under a tree, Aidan realized that they were near the home of a friend of his, Matthew Langerham, whose family happened to have a bus-size camper parked alongside their house. Matthew had once shown Aidan the tricked-out camper’s interior; Aidan had seen where the key was hidden, behind the rear license plate.

They slipped in quietly just after midnight, Aidan taking a bunk bed amidships, Sarah heading back to the master suite. Tired from miles of running and walking, they both fell asleep almost immediately.

Aidan awoke to see daylight streaming through the cracks between the camper curtains. He rose quickly and went back to the master suite. Sarah, too, had been awakened by the light; she was sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

“It’s morning,” he said. “We need to leave.”

“In a minute,” she said, pulling the iPad from her backpack and turning it on.

“Oh man,” she said. “I’m almost out of battery.” She frowned at the screen. “There’s like ten e-mails from Mom. She’s really mad.”

“I bet,” said Aidan, peering through the camper curtain.
“Oh my god!” said Sarah, leaning into the iPad.
“What?”
“Someone answered us!”
“From Facebook?”
“No. They responded to the Craigslist ad. Look.”
Aidan took the iPad and read the e-mail: “If this is a joke,
ha ha. If you’re serious, I’d like to meet you.”

Aidan looked at the sender’s e-mail address: [email protected].

“Asterjd,” he said. “Aster.”

“Yeah,” said Sarah, taking back the iPad.

“Of course, anyone can create a Gmail account.”

“I know that,” said Sarah, tapping. “But whoever this is, they responded to us. This is all we have. So we’ll work with it.”

Aidan read over her shoulder as she typed a reply: “This is no joke. We need help. Who are you? Where are you?”

Sarah tapped
SEND
and the e-mail was gone.

“Can we go now?” said Aidan.

“Not yet. I need to answer Mom.” She was tapping again.

“What are you telling her?”
“We’re still sorry, still safe, please don’t worry, blah blah…hey!”

“What?”

“Asterjd,” she said. “He just answered.”

“What’d he say?”

Sarah was reading, frowning. “Whoa,” she said.

“What?”

“He’s a professor. At Princeton!”

“Princeton. The college?”

“University. He’s in the physics department.”

“Where is Princeton, Connecticut?”

“No, idiot. New Jersey.” She started tapping again, then stopped. “My stupid battery’s dead,” she said.

Aidan, peering out the window again, said, “We have a bigger problem than that.”

“What?” said Sarah, joining him. “Oh, no.”

Their father’s car was pulling into the Langerhams’ driveway. As they watched, the car stopped and their father got out. He disappeared from view, headed toward the front door.

“How’d he know we were here?” said Sarah.

“He must be checking our friends’ houses,” said Aidan.

“We have to go now,” said Sarah, stuffing the iPad into her backpack.

They left the camper quickly, Aidan locking the door and returning the key to its hiding place. They ran across the backyard and through several neighboring yards onto a side street, then into a park where they hid for a while. Eventually they worked their way to a main road and followed it, Sarah in the lead.

“Do we have any idea where we’re going?” said Aidan.

Sarah pointed ahead. “There,” she said. “The bus stop.”

“We’re taking a bus?” said Aidan.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Downtown. To the train station. We’re going to Princeton.”

“Wait…just like that, we’re gonna get on a train for New Jersey? To see a guy we don’t know anything about?”

“We also need disguises,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s what scares me,” said Aidan.

They boarded the first bus that came along, which, as it turned out, was headed in the wrong direction. But after getting directions and changing buses twice, they finally made it to the train station, where, after consulting with the ticket agent, they bought tickets to Philadelphia, where they would change to a train to Princeton.

While they were waiting for the train they went next door to a drugstore, where they bought a large quantity of non-nutritious food. At Sarah’s insistence they also bought sunglasses, as well as a scarf for her and a ball cap for him. They tried to stay in well-lit areas of the station; whenever somebody approached, they looked at the floor, making sure the person cast a shadow.

When they boarded the train, Sarah plugged her iPad into a power outlet and turned it on. She found a new barrage of e-mails from their parents, but she was in no mood to read them, so she powered it back down and dozed off. Aidan did the same; neither had gotten much sleep in the camper.

When they reached Philadelphia they enjoyed a hearty meal of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Coke before boarding the train to Princeton. Sarah again turned on her iPad and, with a sigh, began plowing through the mass of e-mails from her parents—some pleading, some threatening, some hurt, some angry, most of them a combination of all these things. She’d been reading these for forty-five minutes when suddenly she sat up straight.

“Wake up,” she said, prodding Aidan, who’d fallen asleep.

“What?” he said, blinking.

“One of the earlier e-mails from Mom. I just read it. Get this: she mentions that we were at the Langerhams’.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Dad got into a big fight with them because he thought they were hiding us, and he finally realized they weren’t, and now the Langerhams are mad at Mom and Dad, and Mom is not happy. But why was Dad so sure we’d even been there?”

Adam frowned. “Wait a minute,” he said.

“What?”

“That app,” he said. “Whaddyacallit. That tells you where your iPad is.”

“Find My iPad?”

“Yeah. Do you have it turned on?”

Sarah went pale. “Yes,” she said.

“Turn it off.”

Sarah turned it off, then said, “You think that’s how they…”

“Yup,” he said. “Dad has your password. They used Find My iPad to track us. That’s how come Dad went to the Langerhams’. Think about it. He came pretty quick after you turned it on.”

“So whenever I turned the iPad on…”

“They knew where you were. So where else did you turn it on?”

She frowned. “I turned it on for a few minutes this morning when the train was leaving Pittsburgh. And again when we were reaching Philly.”

“Okay, so they’d know we were downtown, and then in Philly. The big problem is, now they also know we’re moving north out of Philly. If they’re using Google Maps, they might even know we’re on a rail line. They could know we’re on
this train.”

“You think they’d go to all that trouble?”

“Knowing Mom? The Marines are probably waiting at the next station. We need to stop leaving a trail. No iPad, no e-mails, no Skype. And we’ve got to turn off our cell phones. The cops can track those.”

“Seriously?” said Sarah. “Do you think they’d call the New Jersey police?”

“This is Mom we’re talking about. She’d call the White House.”

“But even if she did call the police…there must be thousands of teens who run away every year. They can’t wait at train stations for all of them.”

“Have you ever heard of private detectives?”

“You think she’d do that?”

“I repeat: this is Mom we’re talking about.”

Sarah sighed. “You’re right. What are we going to do?”

“I’m thinking,” said Aidan.

“Well,” said Sarah, “think fast.”

Lester Armstrong, private investigator, was an imposing man—the size of a vending machine, and mostly muscle. But it was his brains, not his brawn, that got him into the

P.I. business. He’d been working as an underpaid baggage handler for a discount airline at the Newark airport when he happened upon a commotion at the Lost Baggage department. A very angry passenger was pounding on the counter, demanding to know what had happened to his suitcase, which contained jewelry belonging to his wife. The man wanted his suitcase back so badly that he loudly offered $500 cash to the person who found it.

Lester’s ears perked up at that; he had bills to pay. He also had a knack for computers that he had developed playing online poker, which is why he had bills to pay. Between flights, he logged into the baggage-tracking system; a half hour later he’d managed to track the bag down eight thousand miles away in Mutare, Zimbabwe.

The owner of the bag, whose name was Nestor Paolo, was so grateful that he not only gave Lester the reward, but also offered him a job. Paolo was a private investigator with a security company based in Chicago; he needed a computer-savvy investigator and figured Lester’s size might also come in handy, as Nestor himself was diminutive in stature, though powerful of mind.

And so Lester left luggage to become Nestor’s East Coast office, making more money than he’d ever made before. It turned out that his gift for finding things also worked with people. He became a master of the computer-aided search; nobody could find a runaway teenager or spouse faster than Lester Armstrong. He had a nationwide reputation, which is why when a frantic Natalie Cooper began calling various hotlines, looking for a way to track down her runaway children, Lester’s name came up immediately.

The Coopers hired Lester over the phone; he questioned them and quickly found out about Sarah’s iPad. Within minutes, using the password supplied by Tom, he had tracked her to the Langerhams’ house and sent Tom in pursuit. That hadn’t worked, but Lester had picked up the iPad’s trail again—first at the Pittsburgh train station, and then in Philadelphia. He was soon speeding south in his Escalade, keeping one eye on the laptop computer in the passenger seat. He smiled when he picked up Sarah’s iPad again, this time north of Philadelphia and moving.

“That’s right,” he said. “Come to Lester.” He pulled off the road and, with some quick keyboard work, determined that the iPad was on a train. By noting where and when it stopped, and then making a quick call to an Amtrak dispatcher who owed him a favor, he figured out which train they were on. Its next stop was in eleven minutes; the station was thirteen miles from Lester. With a smile, he put the Escalade in gear.

“We’ve got to split up,” Aidan said.

“Because?”

“Because they’re looking for two of us. Together.”

“Good point.”

“You need to lose the hairdo.”

“No way.”

“Way. If they’re looking for us, they’ll have pictures, and in every picture ever of you your hair’s piled up like some kind of freako sculpture.”

“It’s my trademark.”

“Whatever. Lose it. You need to look a lot different, because you’re staying on the train.”

“Wait…what are you doing?”

“Getting off the train. We’re splitting up, remember?”

“But how are we gonna—”

“Shh. Just listen. I’ll stick near a family so I don’t stand out. I’ll hang around, and if the coast is clear, I’ll get the next train and meet you in Princeton. We don’t turn on our phones. We don’t go online. Okay?”