Watcher in the Woods (14 page)

Toria beamed. “Oh, yeah! Mom always put notes in our lunches on the first day of school.”

Xander crinkled his nose. “Mushy, corny ones. Half the note was
I love you this
and
I'm proud of you that
. The other half never made sense.”

David grinned. “Like last year. She told me not to rip my pants or try to open doors with my face.” He shook his head. “What was that about?”

“She told me not to put Skittles in my nose,” Toria said.

Xander said, “And she never even
tried
to explain them. She'd just look at you like
Whatta ya mean, you don't get it?”

They all laughed. That was Mom. She wasn't very good at
telling
jokes. She either forgot the punchline or said it too soon or set it up all wrong. But her lunch-box notes had always made David smile, and they'd all laugh about them later.

“You know,” Dad said, “she gave me notes too.”

Xander looked surprised. “She did?”

Dad tilted his head. “Once, a long time ago—Xander, you were just a baby, David and Toria, you weren't born yet—she sent me off to my first day on a teaching job with a brown-bag lunch. I put it in the refrigerator in the faculty break room. There were half a dozen brown bags just like it, and one of the other teachers got mine by mistake. He found the note, and it said, ‘Honey, don't forget to glue on your hair.' I had a big ol' mop of hair back then, but from that day on, I could never convince anyone that it was really mine. I would pull on it and invite them to yank on it, too, but they would just laugh and say I must use good glue.”

They all laughed. Xander lifted his own hair on both sides to show both its volume and authenticity.

“Let me tell you,” Dad said, “for a guy with lots of hair, that was devastating.”

Toria pulled at her hair with both hands; David did the same with his one good hand. Together they said, “I must have used the good glue!”

Dad remembered more. “At the faculty Christmas party, I tried to get her to admit she was joking, but she played it straight. She never actually said I was bald, but she said things like, ‘There's nothing wrong with male-pattern baldness. Look at Sean Connery.' As sweet and innocent as can be.”

“Is that when you started calling her Gee instead of Gertrude?” Xander asked.

David added the line he'd heard his dad say so many times: “Because she definitely isn't a
Gertrude
!”

“Nah,” Dad said. “She'd been going by Gee since she was a little girl. She was named after her grandmother, but her parents knew right away that she wasn't going to live up to the old-fashioned prim and properness that name brings to mind.”

“What do you think she should have been named?” Toria said. Dad smiled. “Honey.”

As the SUV progressed up Main Street toward home, their laughter faded. David knew that the others were thinking of Mom, just as he was.

After a minute Xander said, “What are we going to do? About getting her back?”

“I was thinking,” Dad said. “We're going to need a central place to figure out that house, to gather everything we know and everything we learn about those rooms upstairs.”

“A war room,” Xander said.

“A mission control center, like NASA 's,” David suggested.

Dad nodded. “You've got the right idea.” He pulled off the main drag into a drive-in diner. It was the kind of place where you ordered from your car and they hooked your tray of food onto the car window. He smiled at them and raised his eyebrows. “Who's up for an ice cream?”

CHAPTER twenty - eight

MONDAY, 5 : 18 P . M .

“Okay, where?” David asked.

The whole family was in the library. Boxes from their old house were stacked there, waiting to be unpacked—the movers had come on Friday, and Mom had been kidnapped Sunday night: almost everything they owned was still boxed up and would probably stay that way for a while. Dad had identified the cartons that would be most useful to their task, the ones from his home office.

David had spotted a dry-marker board and pulled it out from between a wall of boxes and the built-in library shelves. Now he needed to know where to take it: what part of the house would become their mission control center?

“How about this room?” Xander said. “It's got shelves. It's close to the kitchen.”

“Nah,” David said. “If we have to go back and forth between the control room and the portals, this is too far away. Two flights of stairs and the other end of the house.”

Dad said, “Besides, it's open to the foyer. Anybody coming over would see it. We don't want that.”

“What about in the hallway on the third floor?” Toria chimed, apparently stunned by her own brilliance. “Right there next to the doors and everything!”

“That's a little
too
close for me,” David said. “The way those locks came off, and everything that's happened up there . . .”

“It'd be like having a war room right on the front lines,” Xander agreed. “Bullets zinging around—you'd never get any planning done.”

“How about the servants quarters'?” Dad said. “Big room. Has its own bathroom. Right at the base of the stairs leading up to the portals.”

“Perfect,” Xander said.

“I like it,” David agreed. He walked out of the room with the dry-marker board, heading for the stairs.

Xander lifted a box that had the word
Mac
scribbled on one side. “I've got the computer,” he said, hurrying after David.

“Yea,” David said. “I've got a computer class and have to get online.”

Xander said, “Not in our control center, dude. It's only for things that will help find Mom.”

“We only have one computer,” David complained.

“Tough.”

They had reached the top of the stairs. David called over the banister, “Dad! Can I use the computer for school?”

“We'll see,” Dad called back.

David yelled, “We only have one!” He showed Xander a sour face.

Xander scowled back at him and leaned close. He whispered, “We only have one mom.”

It felt like a punch to David's stomach. He frowned and carried the dry-marker board toward the room that would become their control center. As he was leaving, Xander caught him by the arm.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

David looked at the floor. “You can
try
not to be mean, you know.”

“I'll try.” Xander punched him gently in the shoulder, on the uninjured side.

David stomped him on the foot and ran down the hall, laughing.

Over the next half hour, David, Xander, and Dad carried boxes up to the room. Toria followed them with a notepad. As they thought of things they needed, they called them out to her: bulletin boards, index cards, dry-erase board markers, pushpins, Sharpie markers in different colors, binders, a first aid kit.

Xander thought the computer needed upgrading. “For sure a bigger hard drive and flat-screen monitor,” he said. “Maybe
two
screens.”

David thought it would be cool to link the notes they would make about each world with possible connections to other worlds or things. He imagined an index card about his time in the French village during WWII linking somehow—he didn't know how yet—to Xander's adventure in the Colosseum.

He asked Toria to add colored string to the list.

Dad dug into the boxes from his days as a teacher and found a time line of all the major events in history. Only a foot tall, it ran some thirty feet long. He mounted it high up along two walls in the mission control center—or MCC, as they were already calling it.

To David, it was the coolest thing so far. After all, the portals apparently were doorways into the past. That got him thinking. He said, “Dad, do the portals ever take you to the future?”

“Not that I've seen, Dae,” Dad said, rummaging through a box. They were all in the old servants' quarters now, cleaning, unpacking, setting things up.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Maybe it has to do with the laws of time travel, or . . .” He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“There was that antechamber with things that looked like they were for space travel,” Xander said. “Remember, Dae?”

David nodded. “But people do that now,” he said.

“Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969,” Dad reminded them.

“The
moon
?”

The way Xander said it made David's stomach squirm. Dad scowled at Xander and pointed a finger at him. “Stay away from the rooms with space stuff. At least for now.”

“Well, the portals do take you to different times and
places
,” Xander said. “We'll need a big wall map of the world.”

“I think I have one,” Dad said.

“My string-connection idea is gonna work perfect,” David said.

As they became more involved in the task, ideas for making it more useful struck each of them like beads of water in a storm.

Xander said he would draw up a large chart of the hallway and antechambers. They would write down the items they found in each and keep doing it as the rooms shifted and the items changed. “Maybe there's a pattern to the way they move around that we haven't noticed yet,” he said.

“We can link your lists of items to the worlds they lead to, to the map and time line,” David said.

Dad added, “So we'll have links from rooms to items, to historical times, to geographic locations.” His grin stretched wide, and he nodded. “This is gonna work. I know it.”

David caught his excitement. He said, “Whatever's happening, whoever's behind it—they haven't seen anything like
us
before.”

“We'll take 'em by storm,” Xander said. “We'll be Bruce Willis in
Die Hard
.”

David added, “Aragorn in
Lord of the Rings
.”

“Aragorn?” Xander said. “No, no . . . Legolas.”

“You're both wrong,” Dad said. “Gandalf!”

“I know,” David said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator
!”

Xander's eyes got big. In his best deep voice, he said, “I'll be back,” and ran out the door.

CHAPTER twenty - nine

MONDAY, 5 : 59 P . M .

They listened to Xander's footsteps pounding down the hall—toward their bedroom, David thought. But in that house you could never be sure where any sound came from. It was unsettling, like detecting the faint smell of smoke without ever finding out what was causing it.

Toria said, “Dad, did you say flip chart?” She was consulting her list, tapping it with the tip of a mechanical pencil.

“And a stand for it,” Dad agreed. “It's like a big tripod.”

“For what?” David asked.

“Rules. We'll start a list and refine them as we learn more.”

David wrinkled his nose. “Rules? Like what?”

Dad came off the step stool he had been using to reach the time line and smooth out a section. He sat down on the stool. “I've been thinking about this.” He held up two fingers. “Two kinds of rules: one are things that we impose on ourselves for safety and to learn the most about the worlds.”

“Like the buddy system?” David asked.

“And that we always debrief within an hour of coming back from a world.”

“Debrief ? What's that?”

“It's sharing everything you learned from a mission—writing about it, talking about it—so you and others can learn from it. If we do it right away, we won't forget anything.”

“Like what?”

“Take your trip yesterday to World War II. I'm sure there are things you've already forgotten: what people looked like, any signs that you saw, exactly what you did and the order in which you did it.”

David shook his head. “How would any of that help?”

“Until we know what we're dealing with,
anything
could help. What if we realize that we're seeing the same people in different worlds?” He gave David a look that said,
Yeah, huh? What
about that?

David felt something in his head pull painfully tight, like getting a charley horse, but in his mind. He said, “The same people in different worlds? You mean like
us
?”

“Travelers like we are, maybe . . . or not.” He looked at David's bewildered face. “Never mind. What I'm saying is, we just don't know what we'll learn once we start recording our experiences, comparing them to each other. That's what debriefing will let us do.”

David sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall. “And debriefing is a
rule
?”

“Well, yes. It's SO P—standard operating procedure. Rules that we implement to help us reach our goal and keep us all on the same page. Like the rule that we never talk about what we're doing here to anyone else. And not to each other in public. And never over the phone. Things like that.” He stood and started to pace. “I can think of dozens. We need to write them down and all agree to them.”

“Okay,” David said, letting out a weak laugh. “I get it. Lots of rules.”

“Those are just
our
rules,” Dad said. “Then there are the rules of the worlds, the time ripple or whatever it is.” He looked at the room around him. “The house.”

“The house has rules?” David said.

“The same way everything does,” Dad said. “Like the rules of gravity and physics.” He leaned over and touched David's bruised cheek. “You cut yourself, you bleed, right?”

“The house doesn't
bleed
.”

Dad raised his eyebrows. “As far as we know. But it does do weird things with sound, right? And it doesn't like to have the doors upstairs locked. The antechamber won't change as long as someone's in it or in the world beyond. These are all ‘rules,' and I'll bet there are many more we don't even know about yet. We need to make a list of them so we know what we're dealing with, what we can do and what we can't do. Maybe we'll see a pattern that will help us figure this whole thing out.”