And anyhow, if Angela never got more than a quick, easily forgotten glance at the time-crashed plane, she also never would have met any time agents thirteen years later; she never would have helped Jonah and Katherine and their friends in the time cave; she never would have known anything about Elucidators or time travel. She certainly never would have traveled through time herself.
Based on what Jonah knew, was there any way that Angela would be waiting on the airfield in 1932?
No, he thought miserably. None.
He spun through the emptiness of Outer Time, too stunned to keep himself from flipping over and over. He let the outside forces take control of his body.
But I have an Elucidator! he reminded himself. I can find Angela myself. And JB, too. I can go anywhere in time! I can ask the Elucidator anything I want to know! I have control now!
But could he trust the Elucidator in his hand?
He’d been vaguely thinking that Angela and JB—and probably other time agents as well—had arranged for Eva the social worker to meet him in front of his parents’ house, take the baby version of himself on in to his parents, and give him an Elucidator. He’d kind of thought he deserved some credit himself for Eva appearing—because the note he gave Angela had to be the tipoff that his teenage version would be in that time period and needed an Elucidator.
It wasn’t exactly a leap for anyone who knew him very well to think that, after giving the note to Angela at the airport, he’d also make a stop at his parents’ house.
But how would JB and Angela know that I’d be carrying the baby version of myself? Jonah wondered. How would anybody know that but Gary and Hodge? And if my note to Angela went straight into the garbage . . . who did provide this Elucidator for me? If, in the new versions of time, Angela never gets to travel to any other time periods, how much else has changed about my past and what I thought I knew?
Jonah was tying his own brain into knots. Then he hit the point in his time-travel trip where everything sped up, and it felt like his entire body was being torn apart. He couldn’t think at all.
He landed. The mind-blurring, sense-dulling numbness of timesickness hit him harder than usual.
Because I just traveled not just from the future, but from a branch of time that’s about to collapse? Jonah wondered. Or just because I’m terrified of what I’m going to find out when I open my eyes?
He opened his eyes anyway. With great effort he got them to focus on a face bent down close to his. With even more effort he tried to make sense of the sound roaring around him.
It was screaming.
A moment passed before he could recognize the face, before he could pick out distinct words in the screaming.
The words were “Jonah! You made it back!”
And the face was Angela’s.
Jonah sat up quickly and cried, “Angela! What are you doing here?”
FORTY-ONE
Angela gave him a shove, knocking him back against the side of the airfield office building. She was still kid Angela, Jonah noticed, which meant that she shoved hard.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me!” she complained. “I did what your note told me to do! Where’s the gratitude? Don’t you know how awful it is to be a black female in the 1930s? Don’t you know what all I’ve done for you? I was expecting excitement and hugs—not that it’s really safe for a black girl to be seen in public being hugged by a white boy in 1932, but—”
She stopped.
“Jonah, you’re as white as a ghost. What’s wrong?” she asked.
Jonah moaned, and slumped back against the wall of the airfield office.
“I don’t understand anything,” he said.
Quickly he told her what had happened to him since the time cave, and what he’d figured out on his trip back to 1932. By the time he was finished, Angela was squinting in confusion too.
“But . . . of course I’ve traveled through time,” she said. “Of course I saw all the babies on the plane and talked to the FBI agents. Of course time agents were the ones who arranged for you to get that Elucidator—”
“Then why aren’t time agents here now, helping us out?” Jonah asked.
Angela didn’t seem to have an answer to that.
Jonah saw Angela glance around the deserted airfield. She seemed to be looking for enemies who might materialize from anywhere, rather than friendly, helpful time agents.
“Are you afraid Gary and Hodge might come back?” Jonah asked.
Angela bit her lip.
“Right now I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “You’re right. None of this makes sense, so I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. What if we make a bigger mess of things?”
“Let’s find JB first,” Jonah suggested. “He can help us. And then—”
Angela started to say something, but a shout off in the distance made her stop. She put a warning hand on Jonah’s arm, and her other hand over his mouth. A moment later she pushed him down toward the ground and crouched beside him.
The shouting in the distance grew louder.
“I think they’ve seen us,” she whispered.
“Um, Gary and Hodge?” Jonah asked, his voice squeaking. He was still too weak with timesickness to be any good at running away. And where would they run to? Where could they be safe?
“No, it’s the newspaper reporters who follow Charles Lindbergh around,” Angela whispered back. “There’s some sort of security guard over at the gate keeping them out of the airfield, but they still shout questions at anyone they see.”
Now Jonah’s timesick ears could make out words in the shouting: “Is it true Colonel Lindbergh just took his first flight since his child’s body was discovered three months ago?” “Where did he go?” “Did he have a good flight?” “Could you get him to come over to the fence to make some comments for my newspaper? We’ve always been on his side—my paper hasn’t printed any of those disgusting rumors . . .”
“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 airfi
eld 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!”
FORTY-TWO
“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.