But wait. There is one other interesting piece of information on the high school’s site. Dr. Jain is quoted as saying, “Wisconsin has held many fond memories for me. It broke my heart eleven years ago when I moved away. I hope I can help ease the hearts of many Nottawa High School students and make my mark on the community now that I am back.”
Eleven years. Dr. Jain moved out of the area more than a decade ago. That had to have been when her husband left her. Unless she wasn’t telling the truth about that. Maybe it’s a stretch to think why she’s here now is related to why she left then, but what other reason could she have to return and bring something so terrible with her?
I look at my phone. Twelve fifty a.m. Nate has been missing for only a couple hours, but there’s no telling what has happened. My brother and mother might be on their way to Dr. Jain’s place. Part of me thinks we should skip trying to hook up to the Web and just go to the address Dr. Jain gave me. I wish I knew what the right thing to do was. Will talking to Dr. Jain help? Or am I rushing headlong into danger and dragging Bryan along with me?
There’s only one way to find out.
Ethan
ETHAN SMILES at the message on his phone. Asking for more information is always a good idea.
An ambulance cruises out of the school parking lot. Lights flashing. Siren blaring. Both give Ethan a rush. But beneath the rush nags worry. From his spot down the street he can’t see what’s happening, but the speeding ambulance makes him think that perhaps Hannah survived the explosion and fire. He should have moved her closer to the explosion, but he figured she’d be dead no matter what.
Maybe she is dead and someone else is injured. He has to hope for that outcome, because if Hannah is alive and she recovers she’ll be able to point her finger at him. He can’t allow that to happen.
He looks back at the message on the phone. Does he follow instructions and remove the assigned target or head after the ambulance? Or maybe he should just blow town.
No. He can’t leave. He has no money and nowhere to go. So really, he has two choices in front of him. Which to choose? He pulls a quarter out of the cup holder. Heads he goes for the target. Tails he covers his own tail and makes sure that Hannah is eliminated for good.
Ethan gives the coin a flip, catches it, and slaps it onto the back of his hand. He glances at the quarter and dumps it back into the center console. Fate has decided, he thinks as he puts the car in gear. He takes one last look at the smoking building and the lights flashing in the school parking lot. Fate decides everything. Too bad Fate is a total bitch.
Kaylee
OUR SLOW PACE on the slick roads and the lack of reception on my phone make me want to scream. But I have to hold it together. Dr. Jain expects me to lead with my emotions. To charge into the situation without thinking it through. She thinks she knows who I am. But she doesn’t. How could she when I’m not sure I really know who I am yet myself?
“I think Jammin’ Joe might have free Wi-Fi and I doubt the staff is tech savvy enough to turn it off when they leave,” Bryan says. “You want to stop or keep going?”
All sorts of terrible scenarios have been playing in my head while Bryan has been driving. Most I know are unrealistic and worthy of the horror films Nate is so fond of. But one of them won’t let go. If Dr. Jain has figured out a way to orchestrate an accident for Nate that will put him on life support, then she doesn’t need my brother here yet. The hospital can keep Nate alive with machines until his family decides what to do. Dr. Jain could believe she can convince them to turn an apparently innocent tragedy into something positive.
As much as I want to tell Bryan to keep driving, I open my laptop and say, “Let’s see if we can get a signal.”
Bryan misjudges the size of the parking space and the car jumps the curb. I clutch my laptop and scream. So much for staying calm. But he misses slamming into the handicapped parking sign by a couple inches, so that’s good.
When the car is stopped, we look at each other for a second. I take several deep breaths before typing my password into the laptop and let it search for a network to connect to.
Come on.
The cursor spins and spins.
“How long does the GPS say it will take to get to the address Dr. Jain gave us?” I ask.
“Seven minutes. But fifteen minutes ago it said it would only take that much time to get this far. And it took double that. The streets are plowed better here, but it will probably be worse outside of town.”
I try to figure out how long Dr. Jain thinks it will take me to get to her location. A while, especially since she believes I’ll have to find a car. Arriving faster than she plans would be a huge advantage. One I don’t want to lose.
“Ten minutes,” I say as the cursor stops spinning and Accept the Terms and Conditions of the free Wi-Fi page appears. Score. “I’ll look for information for only ten minutes. Then, no matter what I say, I want you to put the car in gear and go.”
Bryan nods and I open up my browser and get to work. The first thing I search for is the address we are going to. What is it? What’s around it?
Not much. At least not from what I can tell. It looks as though it is out in the middle of nowhere. No surprise. But there is one entry for that address—a link to something called Everything Nature—Stone Pottery. Martin A. Boone is the owner, but when I click on the link a message tells me the site no longer exists. So I do a search on “Martin A. Boone” and find a new address for Everything Nature—Stone Pottery. I click on the link and watch the site load.
There’s a picture of a blond man standing in front of shelves filled with bowls, plates, and vases. Something about him looks familiar. I click on the bio page and learn that he’s a lifelong resident of Wisconsin who has embraced techniques used by Native American tribes from this area to create his art. He’s newly remarried, has a studio-gallery in Burlington, Wisconsin, and travels to art festivals around the country, displaying and selling his work.
Remarried. And Dr. Jain is divorced. Is he her ex-husband? Burlington isn’t far. Fifteen miles. Twenty, tops. And his business was once located at Dr. Jain’s mystery address. He’s connected to her in one way or another. As interesting as that is, I don’t find anything that tells me why he looks familiar or if he is tied in to what’s happening now.
I copy the link into a document and then glance at the time. Four minutes used up. I have to move on to the next search. This time I dig for information on Amelia Jain herself.
“I see headlights,” Bryan says. I crane my neck and look toward the road, hoping they belong to a plow. A cop might stop to see what we’re doing here.
The school website information that I had previously found appears, as do a couple of articles from local papers about her accepting the job at Nottawa High. The first article shows a photograph of Dr. Jain looking stern yet calm and includes a press release the school must have written for the occasion. An article on the Racine County News website starts off the same, and I’m about to click away when I notice it continues where the other stopped. This reporter must have actually talked to Dr. Jain because he writes that while she enjoyed the government research job she took after earning her Ph.D., she wanted a chance to get out of the lab and apply all she had learned to real communities.
Research.
Apply what she had learned.
“The headlights turned into a parking lot up ahead. I think it might be a police cruiser.”
“Give me one more minute.”
Typing as fast as I can, I search for the program Nate thought he was taking a survey for. Not there. I think about the email address I saw on his phone and do a search for information about .gov websites. Access to registering those sites is restricted to government entities and the domains are administered by the General Services Administration. An agency that is part of the federal government. Nate wasn’t fooled into thinking the Nottawa Project was a government program. It was a government program.
“I think the other car is turnin
g around.”
“One more minute,” I say as I open up my email. As fast as my fingers will go, I type out the things I think NEED is responsible for—Amanda’s death, Nate’s kidnapping, the dead dogs, fights, broken mailboxes. I then mention the Nottawa Project survey that was sent to Nate. I stress it was a government website that came up when Nate looked for information. This isn’t just about Dr. Jain. There is more at work here.
“The car is coming back this way.”
I add the email address for the police department from Officer Shepens’s card and then go back to the body of the email to add the URL for the NEED site and my belief that Dr. Jain, with her prior government connection, is involved in the administration of NEED. I even tell Officer Shepens that the motive for her launching this in Nottawa might somehow involve her ex-husband, who lives nearby. It’s not a lot. But Bryan is starting the car and I don’t have time to write more. Hoping it’s enough to help Officer Shepens start looking for answers, I hit Send.
We are turning onto the road as the approaching car slows. Neither of us says a word as the distance increases between our car and the one behind us. If it is a cop, he must have decided we aren’t in trouble.
Bryan glances at me. “So did you learn anything useful?”
“Maybe.” I give him the rundown on everything I found on Martin Boone and his business, how I think he might be connected to Dr. Jain, and the government website that Nate saw when he got his survey.
“Why would the government be involved in creating a scary social media site for a bunch of high school kids? Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine iPads and iPods would be approved as a line item in a departmental budget. Our government does some stupid things, but I have a hard time believing they’d be part of something like this.”
“People are apparently capable of lots of things we’d have a hard time believing as long as the reward is high enough.” NEED has hammered that lesson home.
“But we’re kids.” Bryan shakes his head. “If we were adults, I guess I might buy it. But the government isn’t supposed to screw with kids.”
“I don’t think that’s a law.” It should be, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. Yes, it seems crazy, but it’s the only thing that makes even a little bit of sense. “Dr. Jain did research for the government and helped develop government programs. It would make sense that they’d want to test programs on a control group to make sure things work before launching the program for a wider audience.” Science isn’t my best subject, but I’m pretty sure I understand the way test subjects work.
Bryan opens his mouth, then closes it and frowns. He drives in silence as I look out the window. The town is behind us. According to the GPS, we’re a mile from our destination.
Minutes. I’m just minutes away from confronting Dr. Jain. From seeing if Nate is okay and maybe learning if my brother and mother are all right. I wish I could call Mom and hear her voice. But I can’t. I just hope if things go bad for me she’ll eventually understand what I did. That she’ll know I was telling the truth. I can’t bear the thought that she’d never understand what I’m doing now or why. I’d like to believe that she’d be proud.
“Stop!” I say louder than I mean to. Bryan jams on the brakes and the car skids.
“What’s wrong?”
“You can’t keep driving.”
“Why not?”
“Dr. Jain doesn’t know you’re with me. If I drive in on my own, you can follow on foot and help me if I get into trouble. Here.” I take the flashlight from my bag and hand it to him.
“I can’t let you go in alone,” Bryan says. “The whole reason I’m here is to help fix things.”
“That’s why you have to let me go by myself,” I insist. “Dr. Jain knows all of us. She knows how we think, which is why she has been able to manage everything that has happened up until now. We have to surprise her. Doing something she doesn’t expect might be the only way we survive this. We have to go in separately.”
Bryan sighs and puts the flashlight in his lap. “Okay. Once we get to the right street, I’ll get out and you can drive the rest of the way in. You have a license, right?”
“I haven’t taken the test yet.” And I suck at driving because my mother never bothers to take me out to practice. But Bryan doesn’t need to know that. I’ll just go slow. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the car there in one piece.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” He drives to the nearest intersection, slows down, then stops. No one’s on the road, which will make it easier for me to drive. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. The cold wind slaps me as I get out of the car and walk to the driver’s side. Bryan is already standing next to the car.
“Keep it in second gear,” he says as I slide behind the wheel. “I’ll give you a few minutes’ head start and then I’ll follow. Be careful.”
“You too.”
Bryan closes the door, touches the window, then turns and jogs off into the snow. For a moment I just sit there and watch him go, hoping that we’re doing the right thing even as I know this is the only thing we can do. But before I put the car in gear I have one call to make. I can’t talk to my mother, but maybe . . . just maybe I can speak to my father.
The phone on the other end rings. A late-night call might concern him enough to make him pick up. But he doesn’t, and that’s okay. Because there is nothing he can do to help me now. However, instead of a hang-up, this time when voicemail comes on, I close my eyes, picture his face, and say, “Dad, this is Kaylee. I wish you were here because there’s a lot going on. You’ll probably hear about it. I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, but if . . .” I shake my head and swallow the knot that’s lodged in my throat. “In case I don’t get another chance, I just wanted to say that I love you. Tell Mom I love her, too.” Then I slide the phone back in my pocket and start the car.
My fingers grip the steering wheel so tight they hurt. Bryan’s car is bigger than ours. I feel as if I’m going to mow down the mailboxes on the side of the road. Thank God no one else is out driving and I can stick to the middle of the street. Bryan is probably watching me, wondering why I’m going this slow, but I don’t look for him. I don’t take my eyes off the road as I search for the street number Dr. Jain gave me. I can do this. I can face driving alone in the middle of the night on snowy roads and whatever comes next.
The heat blasts and makes me sweat, but I don’t try to find the controls to turn it down. I think about my driving and Dr. Jain and NEED. Bryan is right. There has to be a reason for creating a network that targets teens. People get freaked when kids are involved. So why create something that could cause trouble if it ever got leaked to the press? What’s so special about high school students?
There. I see a light on the side of the road illuminating a sign that reads ART STUDIO NOW CLOSED. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER. The address is also visible. Someone came out and cleared off the snow.
My stomach clenches as I turn the wheel and follow a path that has been plowed up the long stone drive. I stop the car fifteen feet in and study what lies before me. There’s a big white house with a snow-covered wraparound porch on the right side of the drive. A brownish gray barn sits to the left of it, along with a bunch of smaller outbuildings. A walkway has been cleared to the barn door, and light shines from one of the windows there. The house is totally dark. I guess Dr. Jain is indicating where she wants me to go.
There’s no car, though. My mother’s car isn’t here.
I turn off the engine and put the keys in the center console for Bryan. I wouldn’t blame him if he decided to get the hell out of here.
Taking a deep breath, I unfasten my seat belt and open the car door. I step outside and shiver as the cold air hits my sweaty skin. I wish I had thought to bring something I could use to defend myself, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
I slam the car door shut. There’s no point in trying to be quiet. I’m pretty sure Dr. Jain knows I’ve arrived.
I force myself
to move. One foot in front of the other. Every crack of a stick or rustle of a branch makes me jump and walk faster. I’m about ten feet from the door when I see it open.
“Hello, Kaylee.” Dr. Jain stands there with a gun in her hand. “Won’t you come in?”
She steps back and smiles at me. The smile makes me want to slap her. Instead, I meet her eyes and hold them as I move forward. A crack splits the air. I hear it a second before I cry out from the pain.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. I’ve been shot.
Bryan
WOW. KAYLEE DRIVES SLOWER than anyone he’s ever seen.
Her pace means he can almost keep up on foot, though. He should be afraid, but he’s not. If Dr. Jain really is behind this, she’s going to do whatever she has to protect herself and the project. She isn’t going to let either of them out of here alive. Still, he isn’t scared as he trudges toward the house. He knows what he’s doing is finally right. Maybe after this he’ll be able to live with the rest.
He reaches the side of the big white house and considers his options for getting to the driveway. He could go around the back of the house to avoid being seen from the street. Or he could climb up on the front porch and sneak around that way. The porch might be quicker, but the back is less noticeable.
A car door slams. That decides it for him. Kaylee is out of the car. Quicker is best.
He tucks the flashlight Kaylee gave him into his jacket, grabs the rail of the porch, and pulls himself up and over. Ha. Take that, Mr. DeAngelos. Bryan might suck at pull-ups during gym class, but he can do it when it counts.