Found (8 page)

Jonah burst in through the front door.

“Mom? Dad?” he called accusingly. If they were snooping in his room, he was going to be really angry. He hadn’t started flunking out of school as a cry for help—there was no reason for them to search through his things.

Mom peeked out from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Dad and I are back here,” she said.

Jonah sped around the corner, saw Dad sitting at the computer. Dad hastily clicked out of whatever he was looking at, but not before Jonah caught a glimpse of the FBI crest—
Thanks, Dad, you really think you have to hide that from me?
Jonah decided he didn’t have time to think about that right now.

“Then who’s in my room?” he demanded.

“No one’s in your room,” Mom said, sounding baffled.

Jonah whirled around and rushed up the stairs. He shoved open the door to his room, flipped on the light.

Nobody was there.

Jonah jerked the closet door open; he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He looked beside his desk, behind the door, all the places he’d ever used during hide-and-seek games when he was little.

“Jonah, honey, what are you doing?” Mom asked, appearing in his doorway.

“I thought I saw someone in my room,” Jonah said. “When I was outside.”

Mom peeked into the closet and under the bed.

“There’s nobody here,” she said. She took in a shaky breath. “Really, Jonah, if there’d been an intruder, we would have heard him. You know how those stairs creak.”

Maybe whoever it was didn’t use the stairs
, Jonah thought.
Maybe he used a ladder at the back of the house….

Or maybe it was someone who could just appear and disappear at will, like Katherine’s ghost.

Jonah didn’t want to think about that. But he also didn’t go to the back of the house to look for a ladder.

Dad walked into the room and laid his hands comfortingly on Mom’s shoulders.

“Jonah, if you’d really thought there was an intruder, you shouldn’t have come rushing up here, putting yourself in danger. You should have called the police,” he said.

Jonah sat down on his bed.

“It was just my imagination, I guess,” he said sulkily. “If I’d called the police, they would have been mad.”

“But you would have been safe,” Dad said.

Mom sat down beside Jonah on the bed. She patted his shoulder.

“You’ve just had a hard day,” she said. “It’s been a little overwhelming for all of us.”

“Yeah,” Jonah said absently.

He was facing his desk, where he’d dumped the contents of his backpack after school, before they’d gone to see Mr. Reardon. Jonah hadn’t been able to concentrate on homework—not enough to do it, and certainly not enough to put it all in a tidy stack—so he had a half-finished math sheet sliding into the paper giving instructions for his next language arts paragraph sliding into a sheet announcing the school’s Halloween dance. But that wasn’t what Jonah was looking at. On top of those papers, Jonah could see another one that was half–folded up, as if it had just been removed from an envelope.

He wasn’t at the right angle to see everything written on the half-folded paper, but he could see a little bit: “
Bewa
—”

It was one of the mysterious letters he’d received, which he knew he’d left in the back of his top drawer, under his collection of state quarters.

Jonah remembered the tiny light hovering over his desk that he’d seen from outside.

“Are you
sure
you weren’t in here a few moments ago, right before I got home?” Jonah asked his parents. Suddenly he
wanted
to believe that they’d been searching through his room, snooping around. It was better than any of the other possibilities.

“Jonah, we weren’t,” Dad said. “Neither one of us has been upstairs since before dinner.”

Jonah could barely remember dinner. He and Katherine had rushed through the leftover chili so they could get to Chip’s house.

Dad was peering at him with a concerned squint, worry lines ringing his eyes.

“Is something wrong?” Mom asked. “I mean, something we don’t already know about?”

Was that the opening Jonah wanted? He did want to tell Mom and Dad about the letters—let them worry, so he wouldn’t have to. But the tale of the letters now involved disappearing ghosts, and Katherine taking cell phone pictures of secret documents with Jonah’s name on them, and
witnesses
, as if Jonah had been involved in some crime.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jonah said. He yawned unconvincingly. “I’m just tired.”

Mom and Dad were both still looking at him doubtfully, but it seemed like they were willing to play along.

“Maybe you should go to bed early,” Mom said. Mom was big on the curative powers of sleep. Jonah was surprised she didn’t add, “Everything will look better in the morning.” Instead she said, “I’m glad you came back from Chip’s. Was Katherine with you? I didn’t see her….” She looked around as if, having acted so worried about Jonah, she now had to show the same amount of concern about her daughter.

“She’s still at Chip’s,” Jonah said.

By her face, Jonah thought he could practically see the calculation going on in Mom’s head:
Goodness, there couldn’t be anything romantic going on between those two, could there? She’s only in sixth grade, but this is an older boy….

“She’s got the cell phone with her, doesn’t she?” Mom asked with studied casualness. “I think I’ll give her a call, tell her to come on home. It’s almost nine o’clock.”

“I’ll go get her,” Jonah volunteered. He was still a little mad at his sister, but somehow he didn’t want her walking home alone, along the dark street with all its eerie shadows.

Which was crazy, because
he
was the one who’d gotten the threatening letters.

Of course, she was the one who thought she’d seen a ghost….

“Would you do that?” Mom asked. “Thanks.”

Jonah waited until Mom and Dad were out of his room before he tucked the mysterious letter back in his drawer. Then he went outside. He was nearly back to Chip’s house when he saw Katherine, slipping out of the Winstons’ front door.

“Tomorrow,” she was promising Chip. “We’ll solve this. We will!”

Jonah waited until Chip had shut the door, and Katherine was stepping out onto the sidewalk. He hid behind a maple tree and then jumped out just as Katherine was passing by: “Boo!”

Katherine shrieked and then she giggled and then she pounded her fists against Jonah’s chest.

“I
hate
you!” she screamed, laughing. “You’re
terrible
!”

Jonah almost laughed too because it felt so good to treat everything like a joke, to pretend that he wasn’t worried about anything. And, fortunately, Katherine’s fists didn’t hurt at all. She wasn’t hitting very hard.

“Just for that, I’m not going to tell you what Chip and I found out,” Katherine threatened.

“Good. I don’t want to know anyhow,” Jonah said. “Remember?”

“Okay, then, just for that, I’ll tell you everything,” Katherine corrected herself. “Chip and I called every name on the witnesses list.”

Jonah thought about putting his hands over his ears and chanting, “I’m not listening! I’m not listening! La, la, la, la, la…” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that.

“Two of the people just hung up on us,” Katherine continued. “But I did get one guy to tell me that he worked as an air traffic controller. I was pretending that I was working on a career project for school, and I was supposed to call people at random and talk to them about their jobs. He was really friendly and wanted to talk and talk and talk—air traffic controllers must not get out much. But then I said, ‘Did you ever witness anything unusual, like maybe thirteen years ago or so?’ and he got really, really quiet, and then he said he had to go, he didn’t have time to talk to me. That means something, don’t you think?”

“No,” Jonah said automatically, because he didn’t want to believe that any of this meant anything.

“And then this other lady—Angela DuPre, her name was the first one on the list—she sounded perfectly normal when Chip first started talking to her. But then he laid everything on the line, about how he’d just found out that he was adopted, and he didn’t know anything about his birth parents, and he thought she might know something…and then she just totally freaked out. She started hyperventilating, almost, and she said, ‘I can’t talk to you. Don’t call me ever again.’ Weird, huh?”

It was all weird, Jonah thought, stepping in and out of the shadows. He wanted to find normal explanations.

“Well, maybe—maybe she gave up a baby for adoption,” he said. “Maybe it was, like, thirteen years ago, and so she thought Chip might be her son and it was just all too emotional for her. You know how some birth parents want to reunite with their kids, and some never want to have anything to do with them—they just want to pretend nothing ever happened….” For the first time Jonah actually kind of understood that viewpoint. Something else struck him. “Hey, maybe she really is Chip’s birth mother. Or—or mine. Maybe that’s what
witnesses
really meant. Like, it’s a code word or something.”

“I don’t think so,” Katherine said.

“Why not?” Jonah challenged.

“It just didn’t seem like that,” Katherine said.

“Oh, right, you know all about these things,” Jonah scoffed. But his heart wasn’t into it, because they’d reached the point on the street where he could see into his bedroom windows—where he’d been standing when he’d seen the intruder before. He couldn’t help staring up at the windows now, but they were blank and dark and empty.

He didn’t tell Katherine about the intruder. He wouldn’t tell her or Chip, and maybe he could forget about it himself.

“Jonah,” Katherine said earnestly. “Chip and I really are going to figure all this out. And when we do, you’ll thank us. You’ll be so happy. You’ll be—at peace.”

They were at the front door now. Jonah put his hand on the doorknob. Home, which had looked like such a safe place before, was now just a place where he might see ghosts, where he had to worry about his secrets being pulled out for anyone to see, where he had to worry about Mom and Dad worrying about him. He already felt haunted.

“Katherine?” he said.

“What?” She turned to him eagerly.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The next few days passed uneventfully. Jonah didn’t get any more strange letters, and no one disturbed the letter he already had. He didn’t see any evidence of ghosts or intruders.

Katherine and Chip kept insisting on giving him updates on their ongoing research project, no matter how many times Jonah said, “I don’t care.” He tried to ignore them. But he knew they wanted to call every single name on the survivors list now too.

“It’d be easier if Katherine had held the camera a little steadier,” Chip told Jonah at the bus stop the third morning. “Look at this.” He took a folded-up paper out of his pocket—the printout of the photos Chip had pieced together. He pointed at one spot, where there was a gap between the words. “Right here. She got the address and phone number of this person, but I don’t know who to ask for when I call. And then, down here, right below that, she just got the name and the street address, not even a city name, so I can’t look up their phone number online. It’s frustrating.”

“Huh,” Jonah said, barely bothering to look at the paper. Then curiosity got the better of him. Since this was only Chip, not Katherine, he decided it was safe to ask at least one question.

“What are you even saying to these people when you call?”

“We ask who they are,” Chip said. “What they survived. Why their names are on a list at the FBI.”

“Do they know?” Jonah made sure he was looking away from Chip when he asked that, as if he was more concerned about watching for the bus than about hearing what Chip was saying.

“None of them know about the list. They’ve survived things like broken arms and chicken pox and minor car accidents and…” Chip gave Jonah a sidelong look, “…being adopted.”

Jonah decided not to comment on that.

“They’ll talk to you? Some stranger calling them out of the blue?” He wondered if everyone was as trusting as his parents.

“Usually not right away,” Chip said. “Until I start talking about how I just found out I was adopted, and how I got these weird, kind of scary letters—and how my name’s on that list of survivors too. Usually it’s the letter part that gets them talking.”

“They got the letters too,” Jonah said. It wasn’t a question. He could tell just from Chip’s voice.

“Katherine already told you that, didn’t she?” Chip asked. “Everyone we talked to got them.”

Jonah didn’t want to admit how hard he’d been working to tune out everything Katherine had tried to tell him. He looked around for his sister. She was in the center of the kids laughing and talking under the glow of the streetlight, but she wasn’t joining in the laughter. She was peering anxiously at him and Chip.

“It’s just been five or six people you’ve talked to, right?” Jonah said. “I think that’s what Katherine said. That’s not so many. Nothing to base any conclusions on. It’s not a”—he tried to remember the proper term—“a statistically significant sample.”

Wow—his math teacher would be really proud of him for remembering that.

“Jonah, it’s seventeen people so far,” Chip said.

Jonah remembered that Katherine hadn’t been able to help Chip out the night before, because she’d had gymnastics practice. He felt a little guilty for not helping Chip himself.

“And,” Chip continued, “every single ‘survivor’ I’ve talked to is adopted, just like us. They’re all thirteen years old, or they’ll turn thirteen within the next month. They all have fall birthdays. And all of them were about three months old when they were adopted.”

Just like me
, Jonah thought.

“What are they—clones?” he asked sarcastically. “Did you ask to check their DNA?”

“Jonah, eight of them are girls. Three are Asian. Two are black. They’re not clones.”

Jonah decided to stop making jokes.

“I haven’t even told you the weirdest thing,” Chip said. “Everybody lives here in Liston or in Upper Tyson or Clarksville.” Upper Tyson and Clarksville were the two closest suburbs.

“So?” Jonah challenged. “How’s that weird? Maybe this is just the territory for the FBI office I went to.”

Chip shook his head.

“Most of the kids were adopted in other places, like me,” Chip said. “But even the ones who used to live someplace else, they’ve all moved here. All within the past six months. That’s twelve kids moving here, all since June.”

Jonah had chills suddenly. Then he thought of something.

“Wait a minute—let me see that list again.”

Chip pulled the papers back out of his pocket. Jonah yanked it out of his friend’s hands and stabbed a finger at one line of print.

“See, this person you were asking me about before, that’s an address in Ann Arbor, Michigan,” he said triumphantly. “That’s miles away, a whole different state. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Katherine only got the complete information on people who live close by. No, wait—here’s somebody in Winnetka, Illinois. So, there are at least two people who live somewhere else—”

“Jonah, that’s
me
, in Winnetka,” Chip said. “I’m on the list twice, with my new address and my old one, both, just like I got two copies of each of those weird letters….” His voice faltered. “Oh, I see….”

“What?” Jonah thought of something new, too. “You think the FBI sent us the letters?”

“No…I don’t know,” Chip said distractedly. “But this person in Ann Arbor? It’s a girl, and her name’s Daniella McCarthy.”

The only thing Jonah could see above the address,
103 Destin Court, Ann Arbor, Michigan
, was a little line, right above the
t
of
Court
. It might have been the loop of the
y
at the end of
McCarthy
. Or it might have been just a wrinkle in the paper, magnified and darkened by the camera.

“How do you figure that?” Jonah asked.

“I bet you anything it’s the same girl as down here, the one at 1873 Robin’s Egg Lane,” Chip said. “And I bet there’s a Robin’s Egg Lane in Liston or Upper Tyson or Clarksville. That’s the pattern on the entire list—old address, new address…. I bet if I call this Ann Arbor number, I’ll get one of those messages, ‘Doo-doo-doo…The number you are calling has been changed. The new number is…’” He’d made his voice robotic, just like a computerized phone message. Now he slipped back into his usual voice. “I’ll prove it.”

He pulled his cell phone out of his backpack and began dialing.

“Chip, do that later. The bus is coming,” Jonah said, because he could see the headlights swinging around the corner.

“I’m just going to get a machine,” Chip said. “Got anything to write with?”

Jonah fished a pen out of his own backpack. Chip held out his left palm.

“I’ll repeat the number back to you. You write it on my hand,” Chip said.

Chip was still talking when the phone clicked—Jonah was close enough to hear—and a decidedly noncomputerized voice said, “Hello?”

It sounded like a girl.

“Uh, hello,” Chip said awkwardly. “Uh, Daniella?”

“Yes?” She sounded impatient.

“Um…you still live in Ann Arbor?”

“Where else would I live?”

“Uh, Liston, Ohio? Or maybe Upper Tyson or Clarksville, but that’s not as likely—are you sure you aren’t moving or planning to move or in the process of—?”

“No,” the girl said, in a tone that very clearly said,
that is such a stupid question.

“Hey, you two going to school today?” the bus driver yelled.

Jonah realized that the bus had arrived and almost all the other kids had already climbed on. He jerked on Chip’s arm, pulling him toward the bus.

“Um, sorry,” Chip was saying into the phone. “I think I have some bad information. You really don’t have another address on a Robin’s Egg Lane in another city?”

Jonah couldn’t hear what the girl said in reply, because they were stumbling up the steps. But a moment later, as they shoved their way down the aisle, Chip began pleading, “No, wait, don’t hang up—are you adopted?”

“Great pickup line, dude,” an eighth-grader muttered from his seat.

Chip lowered the phone from his ear.

“Let me guess—she hung up?” Jonah asked.

Chip nodded.

Both of them plopped into their seat as the bus pulled away from the curb.

“Wow—you really have a way with girls,” Jonah wisecracked.

Chip shook his head.

“I don’t understand. This doesn’t fit the pattern at all. And now she’s all mad at me, just for asking—really, I did a much better job with all the other calls, or I had Katherine make them—”

“So just have Katherine call this Daniella back tonight and ask things the right way,” Jonah said.

“You don’t understand,” Chip said. “I want to know everything
now
.”

Chip slumped in the seat, staring at the cell phone as if it had betrayed him. He looked so miserable that Jonah felt obligated to cheer him up.

“Hey,” Jonah said, jostling Chip’s arm. “You and Katherine have been hanging out together a lot. Do you still have a crush on her?”

It was strange, how talking about Chip’s liking Katherine had become the
safe
topic.

“I can’t think about crushes and girls and all that right now,” Chip mumbled. “Not when I don’t even know who I am.”

“You’re Chip Winston,” Jonah said firmly. He felt like he was replaying the conversation he’d had with Katherine the night he’d gotten the second letter. Except he was taking the Katherine role.

Chip didn’t answer right away. Jonah wondered if he’d even heard him. Then, so softly that Jonah had to lean in to hear him, Chip whispered, “Can I tell you something? Even before I found out I was adopted, even before I knew Mom and Dad weren’t really my parents—biological parents, I mean—I always felt like there was something wrong with me. Something different. Like I wasn’t who I was supposed to be. Like I never belonged. Not here. Not back in Winnetka. Not anywhere.”

Jonah leaned away and squinted at Chip in distress. Kids weren’t supposed to say stuff like that to other kids. What if somebody else heard him? Jonah looked around. Marcus Gladstone was drumming his fingers on the seat in front of him. Owen Rogers was doing his math homework, muttering, “Come on, come on, multiply both sides by twelve…carry the four….” Queen Jackson was telling Nila Holcomb, “That boy is just bad news.” Jonah was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about him or Chip.

Chip hadn’t even looked up. He was still talking, his eyes trained on the seat back in front of him.

“—And it seems like, this whole adoption thing, maybe that’s my answer. Maybe once I find out everything and get an explanation, then I’ll
know
—”

Jonah shoved his shoulder against Chip’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he interrupted harshly. “Stop that.” He tried to remember the argument Katherine had used on him. “Weren’t you paying attention in that guidance assembly the other day? All teenagers wonder who they are. It’s part of growing up.”

Jonah couldn’t believe he’d been forced to use such a goopy line. Now he was as embarrassed for himself as he was for Chip. He hoped no one else had heard
him
.

“I think this is different,” Chip said quietly. He paused, as if to give Jonah a chance to say, “I know what you mean.” Or to admit, “You’re totally right. I’ve felt the same way. And not just since I turned thirteen.” When Jonah didn’t say anything, Chip went on. “And don’t you see? This is
big
. All these kids, and the FBI, and—and
ghosts
…”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Jonah said.

“I was working on a theory,” Chip said. He held up his cell phone. “Until our friend Daniella messed everything up.”

“So what was the theory?”

Before Chip could answer, the phone in his hand began to ring, blaring a Fall Out Boy tune. Quickly, Chip flipped it open and looked at the number.

“Seven-three-four area code…is that—” He raised the phone to his ear. “Daniella?”

“Who are you?” Daniella was evidently shouting, because this time Jonah didn’t even have to lean close to hear every word. “How did you know?”

Chip moved the phone away from his head, gave it a baffled look, then placed it back against his ear.

“I—what are you talking about?” he asked.

“We
are
moving!” Daniella screamed. Her voice blared from the phone. “This is so awful! My life is over!”

“I thought you said you weren’t,” Chip said cautiously.

“I didn’t know!” From the way her voice sounded, Jonah suspected that Daniella was about to cry. “My dad made this big ‘family announcement’ at breakfast—he’s taking a job transfer, and that little ‘getaway’ my parents were on was actually a house-hunting trip! They’re going to make an offer on a house today. What are you—the realtor’s kid?”

“Er, no. Actually—”

Daniella didn’t seem to hear him.

“That wasn’t funny at all, if that’s your idea of a prank,” she fumed. “Or, were you trying to talk me into thinking I was going to like the house? I won’t. My parents say it’s ‘wonderful.’” She made
wonderful
sound like something evil. “I bet it’s a pit!”

“Hold on,” Jonah said, struggling to catch up with all of Daniella’s fury-by-phone. “Did she say her parents are making an offer on the house
today
? They don’t own it already?”

Chip squinted in puzzlement.

“You’re talking about the house on Robin’s Egg Lane, right?” Chip said into the phone. He struggled to pull out the survivors list from his pocket, unfold it, and find the right number. “Um—1873 Robin’s Egg Lane? In”—he bit his lip, obviously making a guess—“Liston, Ohio?”

“Yes, yes, that’s what you asked me about. Mom and Dad saw it yesterday and just ‘fell in love with it.’” She twisted the words bitterly, so it sounded like they’d fallen into the deep fiery pits of Hades.

Jonah leaned in close and spoke into the phone: “You say they just saw the house yesterday? For the very first time?”

“Yes…,” Daniella moaned. “Yesterday, for the first time. And, just like that, they’re going to try to buy it today. I think they’re having a midlife crisis. They’re insane. Why do they have to ruin my life?” Now Jonah was certain: she was crying. Her words kept dissolving into wails. “I hate Ohio! I’m going to be miserable there! I—I—” She sniffled. “I can’t talk anymore. I’m too upset.”