In actuality, of course, the project proved precisely nothing, but the shock value was fantastic. The poor owl, having been starved for several days, quickly ravaged each presented mouse. Young girls squealed and women covered their eyes to keep from seeing the cute little mice live their last. None carried on as loudly as Amy Anne, who was delighted to show that her delicate sensibilities were quite overcome by such a gruesome demonstration. This, in turn, pleased no one quite so much as Rory Ray, who not only had successfully and very publicly demonstrated his superior scientific smarts, but now had the opportunity to step forward and settle Amy Anne’s feminine hysteria. Truly, it was his bumper day.
That is, until Piper McCloud ruined everything.
“What the heck!” Piper spoke in a cadence of such horror that all eyes were immediately riveted on her and away from Rory Ray’s opus.
Piper was standing in front of the last table in the row of science experiments, where the judge was currently examining the final entry. Except for Piper and Timmy Todd, the town runt, no one else much bothered with that experiment because it looked pathetic. Sitting on the table was one simple instruction card, next to which sat a small box.
Conrad squeezed around to see what the matter was. With eyes the size of two moons, Piper pointed at the box on the table. Just at that moment the judge was reaching inside the box and he pulled out of it a white egg-shaped cylinder. Holding it up in the light for all to see, he inspected it closely. As it shone in the sun Conrad recognized it immediately—
The judge was holding TiTI—Conrad’s time machine!
Conrad bolted forward, pulling his glasses from his face, and quickly assessed the damage. The table had two typed cards on it. The first card stated, Time Travel Dial. Created by Conrad Harrington III. A set of instructions indicated how it worked. A second sheet of paper was filled with mathematical equations and diagrams indicating how it was possible to travel in time.
Conrad’s face turned white.
“Everyone’s watching,” Piper whispered. There was no graceful way to handle this situation. They had to stand there and do what damage control they could.
“That looks real fancy, Conrad,” Amy Anne cooed. Conrad’s dramatic reaction had caught her attention and drawn her away from Rory Ray’s experiment. “You can make people travel through time?”
“It don’t work,” Rory Ray said, and snorted loudly.
“He’s right,” Conrad quickly agreed. “It’s a prototype, nothing more.”
“You know how to make a prototype?” Somehow Amy Anne was even more impressed, perhaps because she had no idea what a prototype actually was.
“It’s a piece of junk,” Rory Ray continued.
“It’s true,” Conrad concurred again, even more loudly. “I got the idea out of a comic book and I just made something that looked like the picture.”
There was no mistaking the fact that the judge was absolutely impressed. He kept nodding his head as he turned Conrad’s time machine over and jotted down notes. With each nod, Rory Ray’s face grew redder and redder. When the judge finally walked away to tabulate the scores, Rory Ray was fit to be tied.
“Betch’a you’ll win, Conrad.” Amy Anne smiled.
Unable to contain himself any longer, Rory Ray swiped the dial off the table. “It’s a hunk of junk. Any idiot can see that.”
Before Conrad could do anything, Rory Ray haphazardly shook it.
Conrad threw himself at Rory Ray, bracing for the worst.
Absolutely nothing happened.
Rory Ray looked down to find Conrad dangling off his muscular torso, and laughed. “Get the heck off me!” He kicked Conrad away and Conrad landed in the dirt.
Suddenly a loud hum began to rumble out of the egg in Rory Ray’s hands. Shocked, Rory Ray stood still.
“Drop it!” Conrad begged. “Throw it to me!”
But Rory Ray was looking at the egg as though mesmerized. Then a blinding light flashed out of its core and Rory Ray disintegrated into light particles right before their very eyes. The light particles swirled and whipped away, leaving nothing behind.
The look of horror on all the gathered faces was unmistakable. No one moved, no one could do anything.
“Holy Mother of God,” a woman breathed, and her words carried outward, echoing the sentiments of all watching.
Piper, her mouth agape in shock, looked to Conrad, who didn’t know where to look.
Suddenly Millie Mae Miller broke through the crowd and grabbed Conrad by his shirt, shaking him. “What’d ya do to my boy? Where’d you put him?”
“I-I-I don’t know,” Conrad stuttered, partly because Millie Mae was shaking him so violently and partly because he was amazed that the dial had powered up. Had someone put plutonium inside? Who had set the time dial?
“Mrs. Miller? Mrs. Miller, ma’am?”
Millie Mae was in such a state she was insensible. Piper had to grab her arms to stop her from shaking Conrad.
Millie Mae wailed, “That thing’s got the devil in it.”
“No, no, it doesn’t work that way,” Conrad assured her, but a buzz was gathering among the waiting crowd. “It’s science,” Conrad said loudly. “It works by bending the space-time continuum around a single object: in this case, Rory Ray. It’s not about the devil or anything else.”
Blank faces met Conrad’s explanation.
“What the boy say?”
“He’s making up nonsense, is what.”
Conrad shook his head and held his breath. If Rory Ray didn’t materialize in another ten seconds he was going to have a whole new set of problems on his hands.
“THERE HE IS!” someone shouted.
Everyone looked up, way up, to the plank that ran around the girth of the old water tower. Confused and frightened, Rory Ray stumbled and lurched about.
“Ahhh!” Rory Ray screamed.
“My baby!” Millie Mae sobbed.
Disoriented, Rory Ray threw himself against the water tower, bounced off, and fell against the fragile wooden railing. The force with which he hit the railing, combined with his heft, proved too much for the tired old piece of wood, and it gave way with a crack.
The water tower was fifty feet if it was an inch, and hadn’t been repaired at any time that anyone could actually remember. As he fell over the edge, Rory Ray reflexively caught hold of the gangplank and dangled off of it, with only three fingers separating him from the air.
The crowd below gasped in unison. He swayed back and forth, attempting to throw his other arm up to anchor himself onto the plank of wood. On his first try, his arm swung up uselessly and missed. The second time, his fingers grabbed for the wood and slid off, but the third time he held firm.
A sigh of relief washed over the onlookers as Rory Ray began to pull himself up and angle his body back onto the board. When he finally came to a sitting position, grateful applause swept through the crowd.
Getting to his feet, Rory Ray turned to walk to the ladder when a loud crack emanated from beneath his heel. Rory Ray froze and looked down. No sooner had his eyes traced the long fracture running through the center of the board than it gave way beneath him completely and Rory Ray fell.
“Ahhhhh!” Rory Ray screamed for a second time.
Everyone froze to the spot they were standing on, unable to look away as their worst fears were realized and Rory Ray’s big body tumbled through the air.
Of course, no one saw the actual moment when Piper took flight, but everyone saw the moment when she flew up and caught Rory Ray in her arms.
For the second or third time (or was it by this point the tenth time?) in as many minutes, the folks of Lowland County were transported by a vision of shock and horror. At first Rory Ray’s weight and the speed with which he was traveling almost knocked Piper out of the air. Buckling beneath him, she redoubled her efforts and slowed and then stopped his free fall until she was hovering fifteen feet above the ground.
Rory Ray’s shocked eyes met Piper’s struggling features
as she used all her energy to keep him aloft.
His shock quickly morphed into anger. “Git yer hands off me! Freak!”
“Ever heard the word ‘gratitude’?” Piper wheezed between gritted teeth. It was hard enough to land with Rory Ray in her arms, but having the boy fighting against her made it impossible. At two feet up, Rory Ray got his wish and tumbled free, landing on his backside.
A circle formed around Rory Ray and Piper, who landed next to him. As a show of helpfulness, she offered her hand to help him up. Rory Ray would have none of it and scrambled backward and away from her. Millie Mae ran over and hugged him tightly, which left Piper alone in the center of the circle. Conrad quickly squeezed through and came to Piper’s side. They stood close together and waited for what was coming next.
No one spoke but instead watched Piper and Conrad with hangdog expressions and something between fear and revulsion in their eyes.
Mr. Andrews shook his head and looked away.
Mrs. Corkoran pressed little Sarah Sue behind her back so that she was hidden and protected.
It was probably one of the kids at the back who threw the first rock. It was a big one, though, and it hit Piper on the shoulder.
Piper grabbed her shoulder in pain as a second rock hit Conrad on the knee, causing him to crumple. From where he crouched in the dirt, Conrad jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out three purple pebble-shaped capsules. He threw them onto the dirt with a wild swing, and the capsules broke open, releasing a thick violet gas.
“What the heck is that?” someone had just enough time to say before they lost consciousness. Like an ocean wave hitting the shore, the good folks of Lowland County sank to the ground, struck by the gentle sleep of the purple mist. Piper and Conrad, who had both been inoculated against its power during training, stumbled to their feet.
“They’ll only be out for three minutes,” Conrad explained, clutching where his knee hurt. “The last ten minutes of their memory will be erased, too.”
“Jeez Louise,” Piper groaned, moving her shoulder.
“You can say that again. We’d better get home.”
They helped each other up and started walking, carefully picking their way through the sleeping townsfolk. Piper walked painfully for a moment until finally she could not stop herself from blurting out, “I just don’t understand why you put your time gadget in the science competition. Did you really want a blue ribbon so bad?”
Conrad stopped in midstride. “What?”
“’Course you’d win. You know that. No one’d stand a chance against you. But why? It don’t make sense.” Piper searched Conrad’s face for answers and found confusion.
“Piper, I never—I never, I mean I never entered my work. Never.” Conrad was affronted by the very idea.
“I saw you,” Piper said.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know! When you were walking to the water tower with the box and those sheets.”
“What?”
“C’mon, Conrad, I was there. I yelled to you and you said, ‘Hi, Piper,’ and kept walking. Remember? So I followed behind you and that’s when you told me that Nalen and Ahmed were okay and I didn’t need to worry anymore.”
Conrad took Piper’s hands and very calmly but clearly said, “Piper, listen to me now and believe me: I never did that. It wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know who you were talking to, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t say those things and I never put my time machine in the Lowland County Fall Festival science competition.”
“But if it wasn’t you, then who was it?” Piper’s voice was edged with panic. “Conrad, what is going on?”
“Someone’s sending us a message,” Conrad breathed. It was just as J. had warned them: they were in danger and that danger was closing in fast.
CHAPTER
18
The kids huddled around the gathering table in a state of fear and anxiety, painfully aware of the empty seats that Ahmed and Nalen should have occupied. Conrad had turned the barn into a war room with maps and terrain information on the monitors.
“It’s like they vanished into thin air,” Myrtle pointed out, even though Kimber had already said just the same thing not more than one minute before. They’d been at it all night and nerves were starting to fray; Piper was in such a high state of anxiety that she couldn’t sit or keep her feet on the ground and had taken to flying about in circles while Smitty paced back and forth beneath her while Fido flew in and out of the barn and crashed into things at inappropriate moments.
“But I couldn’t see a single clue at the site,” Smitty argued, “except this muddy boot.”
Lily angrily squashed an errant tear. “It’s like when Dr. Hellion took us away to that school.”
“Well, we don’t have to worry about Dr. Hellion anymore,” Kimber pointed out confidently. “She’s dead.”
Piper’s alarmed eyes instantly connected with Conrad’s, but Conrad shook his head. “This wasn’t Dr. Hellion’s style. She lured her prey, and Nalen and Ahmed would have put up too much of a fight for her.”
Conrad manipulated a three-dimensional terrain map from side to side, studying the landscape where Nalen and Ahmed were last seen. “Obviously it was a trap.”
“But what about that guy who was posing as Conrad at the fair?” Piper pushed. “Aren’t these two things connected?”
“Yeah,” Kimber agreed. “And who else even knew about TiTI? And how did they get to it?”
“Or look so much like Conrad?”
“It’s like someone is out to get us.”
“Someone really p-p-powerful and smart,” Jasper added.
Conrad held out up his hand to stop the rapid patter and draw the focus to what was at hand. “Smitty, pass that boot to me.”
Smitty slid the boot down the table into Conrad’s expectant hand. Conrad turned it over and examined it closely. Slipping a penknife out of his pocket, he used the blade to jam free some debris in the ridge of the treads. With each thrust, dirt scattered across the table until Conrad gave one last push and a red pebble was pried loose from a tread and fell before them. Conrad did not seem surprised to see it, and he held it up to the light. It shone blood red.
“What’s that?”
“This”—Conrad carefully placed the rock on the table in front of them—“is a mystery. Without the proper tools it’s difficult to say conclusively what it is made of, but I’m willing to bet it’s beryllium and lanthanum. To meld those two metals at a molecular level you’d need temperatures greater than a thousand degrees Celsius.” He whistled softly in appreciation, allowing himself a moment to wonder at the genius of whoever created it. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”
Lily used her telekinesis to move the rock into her hand for a closer look. Even at point-blank range she couldn’t make head or tail of it. “But why bother? What is it supposed to do?”
Smitty used his X-ray vision to scan it. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have.” Conrad pulled ten more rocks just like it out of his pocket, scattering them across the table. “At every disaster site we’ve been to in the last month I’ve found one.”
Hitting a button, Conrad pulled up a map diagramming exactly where the rocks were found and when.
“The boot was left behind because someone wanted us to find it and know. Whoever has created these rocks has been everywhere we have. Why? Do they simply like to watch, or is it more than that? Are these accidents really accidents?”
The kids hung on Conrad’s words.
“The data isn’t conclusive, but there is a distinct pattern and it’s definitely not random,” Conrad said meaningfully. “What I’m saying is that someone out there is behind these disasters.”
A shiver passed through the room.
“Who could do that?” Violet shrank at the thought.
“Who would do it?” agreed Piper. “And why?”
“Exactly.” Conrad
’s brain sank its teeth into the matter. “What is the motive? Who has the means? Those are the questions that we are going to find answers to. Next steps—we need to return to the site where Ahmed and Nalen went missing to gather more evidence. I’ve created a grid and assigned search teams. Each team takes one section.”
Conrad was pointing to the grids when a distant thumping sound caused a hush at the table. Turning their ears, they tracked the direction of the noise. Conrad activated his surveillance program and quickly identified an incoming helicopter heading straight for the McCloud farm. With deft hand movements he manipulated the image. “It’s a Nighthawk.”
The next moment the pounding of the blades in the air above them caused the timbers of the barn to quiver.
Myrtle prepared to bolt. “Let’s make a run for it.”
“No, wait!” Conrad pointed to the image of the helicopter. “Look!”
Piper squinted at the insignia on the door of the helicopter where Conrad was pointing.
“It’s Marine One.” Conrad could see that Piper didn’t comprehend the full importance of what he was trying to communicate. “That’s the insignia for the President of the United States.”
Now Piper’s eyes went wide. “Your father is coming to snatch us, too.”
“In broad daylight with one helicopter? Not likely.”
“So, what then?”
Conrad headed for the door. “We’re about to find out.”
* * *
The blades of the Nighthawk helicopter swirled dust and dried leaves about the farmyard. Betty came outside, her baking apron smudged with cookie dough, and shielded her face with her hand. The other kids came to Betty’s side and Joe emerged from the tractor shed as Marine One landed expertly between the barn and the house. The engine of the helicopter went from a roar to a terrible whine, the blades slowed, and then a marine threw open the door and lowered a set of steps.