The Littlest Bigfoot (22 page)

Jo smiled and slid across the floor, over to a bank of scanners and color printers set on shelves along one wall. In less than sixty seconds, she'd scanned the image, enlarged it, digitized it, overlaid it on top of the template of an average female human face, and set up a series of comparison points. Swiftly, red lines and dots formed a graph across the furry little face. Numbers raced across the bottom of the screen. Jo reached toward the image, pinched her fingertips together, then unbunched them, waving her hands like she was miming fireworks or a flower's bloom. The picture of the face expanded above Jeremy's head, outlined in gold, then shrank to a series of ratios and equations. Another
zzzzip
as Jo moved across the floor to play another computer's keyboard like a piano.

Jeremy, meanwhile, tweezed a single hair from the clump of gray. A drop of saline, a plastic slip, and the slides were ready to be clipped under the microscope's lens. Jo looked first, then waved Jeremy over. When he brought his eye to the lens, he could see that each slide showed a single hair attached to a bulb-shaped bit of flesh.

“I can do mtDNA here, but the stuff from the follicle—the stuff that'll really tell us what we've got—that's going
to take longer.” Jo said all this while typing at yet another computer, fingers rattling over the keys so fast that Jeremy was surprised the cursor could keep up.

“Okay, but what do you think?” he asked.

She peered into the screen for a long moment, then pushed him aside, gently, and looked down the microscope's lens once more. “It looks like fur from some kind of primate,” she said.

“But . . . not human?” His heart was in his throat, his whole body thumping with its beats.

“Too soon to tell.” Her voice was brusque, not unapologetic. She knew how badly Jeremy wanted this. “Could be a hoax. Let me send it to Lila.”

Lila, Jeremy knew, was another one of Jo's friends, another member of the network of hunters. She was a nurse-practitioner turned stay-at-home mom who lived in Alabama and devoted her free time to Bigfoot hunting—specifically, sneaking samples into her hospital's lab and analyzing any blood, fur, footprints, or fingernail clippings to confirm that they came from human beings. “We'll wait and see.”

Wait and see,
thought Jeremy. He hated to wait. He wanted to see . . . and, as it happened, he didn't have to wait long at all.

He was sitting in Miss March's class the very next day, half paying attention to the lesson about the Louisiana Purchase, half beating himself up for not getting even a single piece of candy the night before, when the public-address system crackled with static, and the principal's voice said, “Jeremy Bigelow, please report to the principal's office.”

Jeremy gathered his books, zipped up his backpack, and walked down the hall. The principal, Mr. Girardi, was waiting for him outside his office. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his face was grave.

“I'm afraid I have some sad news,” he said. Jeremy made himself looked worried.

“Is it Grandma?” he asked.

Mr. Girardi put his hand on Jeremy's shoulder. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “She passed this morning. Your parents said that you'll be leaving for the funeral immediately. You've got your bike, right? They need you home as soon as you can get there.”

Jeremy hung his head so that Mr. Girardi wouldn't see his smile. He nodded. Mr. Girardi squeezed his shoulder.

“Please give my condolences to your family,” the
principal said, and Jeremy nodded again and hurried out the door. He hopped on his bike and pedaled away, not toward his house, but to Jo's. This was their Bat-Signal, the one they'd agreed on months ago. Jo was homeschooled, and her time was her own, so if she needed him, and it was an emergency, she'd call the school pretending to be his mother and tell the principal that his grandmother (both of whom had actually died years before Jeremy was born) had died.

Stopping at a traffic light, Jeremy pulled out his phone. “Get here as fast as you can, I have news,” Jo had texted. As soon as he finished reading that text, a second one arrived. “Hurry.”

Jeremy felt his fingertips turn cold as the Town Hall bell tower tolled noon over his head. Jo never told him to hurry. In fact, Jo was usually telling him to slow down, to be thorough, to make sure he wasn't making sloppy mistakes. Jeremy pedaled faster than he ever had, and then dumped his bike on her lawn and raced to her lair.

Jo wore a baseball cap. Beneath its brim, her face looked pale and pinched. Her mouth was set in a straight line, and there were dark smudges underneath her eyes that suggested a sleepless night.

“Good news and bad news,” she said, and Jeremy
heard the faintest quiver in her voice. He'd never heard Jo sound uncertain before, and he'd definitely never heard her sound afraid.

“Good news first?” he asked.

She managed a ghostly smile. “We got our first hit. The grayish fur you found . . . it's not from a human.”

Jeremy heard his breath whoosh out of him. His knees started to tremble. His skin prickled with goose bumps. This was it. This was, as the old man had said, everything.

“And the bad news?” he managed.

Instead of speaking, Jo wheeled herself over to her desk, where a single piece of paper was waiting. “It came this morning,” she said. “But not in the mailbox. I woke up, and it was on the floor outside my bedroom door.”

Jeremy looked down, and felt his goose-bumped skin go icy. The missive, according to its letterhead, was from the Department of Official Inquiry, Paranormal Division. It was addressed to Miss Josette Taylor Tarquin and Master Jeremy Josiah Bigelow.

We have intercepted the samples you collected. We have copies of the photographs you
have taken. Prepare to surrender everything related to your investigation, including but not limited to physical evidence, computer files, hard drives, disks, faxes, photographs, handwritten documents, and any and all correspondence. The courier will be at this residence at 0000 hours tomorrow, November 2. This is a matter of global security. We require your complete and total cooperation. If we do not receive it, penalties including but not limited to arrest and imprisonment will be assessed against you and your parents and/or guardians.

The letter was signed with an illegible flourish of black ink. The words “Matthew Carruthers, Director” were printed beneath it.

Jeremy picked up the sheet of paper. It was heavy, creamy, embossed with an image he couldn't see but could feel. Lifting the paper to the light revealed the imprint of a five-pointed star with the words “Department of Official Inquiry” written underneath it. Beneath the words was a drawing of a circle enclosed by an oval, and the motto
oculus videt in abscondito.

“It's an eye,” said Jo. Her voice was tiny. “And the Latin means ‘The hidden eye sees all.' ”

Jeremy felt a shudder work its way up his spine. “Is this real?” His lips felt numb, his tongue felt frozen. “This agency? Are we going to get in trouble?”'

“I can't find anything about the agency online, but the letter's real,” Jo said. Her face was white, her forehead furrowed. She looked furious . . . and, he thought, beautiful in her anger. “Whoever broke into my house and left it for me was real.”

“What do we do now?”

Jo gave him a smile like the edge of a knife. “Are you familiar with the expression ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant'?”

Jeremy shook his head.

“It means we tell the whole world what we've found.” Jo's mouth was set in a grim line. “November second isn't until midnight, so today—tonight—we let the whole world see. We put our pictures online. We tell everyone that the hair you found isn't from a human. We post to every group that has anything to do with Bigfoots or the paranormal. We call a press conference. We'll get the media there. If the whole world is watching, then this . . . this agency . . . it won't be able to hurt
us. Especially because we're kids,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

Jeremy shook his head. This was all too much, happening too fast. “Carruthers,” he said. “Do you think it's any relation to Milford Carruthers?”

“I think that's the least of our concerns right now,” Jo said, just as Jeremy's phone started buzzing against his hip. He pulled it out and saw a name he hardly ever saw flashing on the screen: Mom.

“Hello?”

“Jeremy?” His mother's voice was tight, higher than usual, and instead of her normal thoughtful tone, she sounded tense. Annoyed, he thought. Maybe even afraid. “Where are you?”

“At Jo's house,” he said. “It's a half day. Teachers' in-service.” His mother never paid much attention to the specifics of Jeremy's schedule, so she wouldn't expect him to be at school, but he gave her the excuse, just in case she was paying attention. “Why? What's up?”

“Can you meet me at Fitzsimmon's Market? My credit cards aren't working.”

“What?” he said. Jo was staring at him. “Don't you have more than one?”

“Cards,” his mother said. “Cards, plural. None of them
are working. Not my bank card, not my credit card . . .” She put her hand over the phone and said something sharp to the cashier. “Ugh. First my computer crashed—it wouldn't even restart, no matter what I did—and then I went shopping and
this
happened. I'm worried someone got my social security number and they've stolen my identity.” She paused. “That's a thing, right? Identity theft?”

“I'll come with my allowance,” Jeremy said.
Coincidence,
he thought, even as his mind was whispering more malevolent possibilities.

Jo tapped his shoulder.
What?
she mouthed.
My mom,
Jeremy mouthed back. “I've got my bike. I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“Fine,” said his mother . . . and then, to the cashier or the manager, “I promise you, I'm not trying to steal anything!”

“I'll be right back,” Jeremy said as his mother hung up. Jo gave him a single, businesslike nod. On the screen, he saw the press release she'd already written. He scanned it quickly, seeing phrases like “compelling evidence” and “Standish has been a long-rumored site of Bigfoot activity” and “photographs and DNA evidence enclosed.” On another screen, Jo had scanned in the pictures he'd snapped of
the furry creature and was superimposing the Patterson-Gimlin stills over her body and face.

“If we hold this press conference . . . ,” Jeremy began, thinking out loud. “People will start looking right away.” Jo nodded. “So this Department of Official Inquiry will have people there, right?”

“Unless they're stupid,” said Jo. “And I don't think they're stupid.”

“Won't we lead them right to the Bigfoot?”

“Maybe we'll lead them,” Jo said. “But we'll be there too.” She gave herself a hard shove, pushing off from the desk and sliding her desk chair all the way across the lab and into the hall. Then she opened a coat closet, pulled out a folded-up arrangement of metal and wheels and gave it a single sharp shake. Jeremy watched, astonished, as the bars and leather resolved into a wheelchair, and Jo used her arms to hoist herself into it.

“Slipped capital femoral epiphysis,” she said, pronouncing each word separately. “Unusual but not rare for adolescent females. It's where the head of the thigh bone isn't connecting correctly with the rest of the thigh bone, due to weakness at the growth plate.”

“I'm sorry,” Jeremy managed.

“Yeah, me too,” said Jo. “It was misdiagnosed. My doc
tor kept saying it was just growing pains, and that I should stop complaining, and by the time my parents went for a second opinion . . .” She shrugged and started wheeling herself down the hall. “I've had two surgeries already, and I'll probably need more, and even then, they're not sure if I'll be able to walk or not.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again. This time she flashed him a thin smile.

“They're not sure,” she said. “But I know I will. And it wasn't an awful thing. It was how I got into Bigfoot hunting in the first place. I had lots of time to kill in the hospital.” Jo put her hand on his forearm and let it stay there for just a second. Jeremy felt the skin where she'd touched him thrumming like a hummingbird's wings. Then she reached down and gave the wheels a tiny flick, which sent the chair gliding toward the door.

Outside, the street was empty, except for a white van. The sign on its side read, “Standish Security Systems: Your Safety, Guaranteed.”

“I bet,” Jo murmured, as she took in the van. “Go give your mom her money first. Then we'll go for a ride. I emailed the press releases, but, just to be on the safe side, maybe we should take them to Channel Six and the
Standish Times
by hand, too.”

“Of course,” Jeremy said.
I'm scared,
he thought. But he was excited, too. This was real. It was going to happen. He, Jeremy Bigelow, had a friend, and the two of them were going to show the whole world that Bigfoots were real.