Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (19 page)

I still had three crystals in my hand. I peered around the lab for another hiding place. Then I spotted a cardboard box, half open, on the floor under the far desk. Only problem was, the man was standing right next to it. I held my breath and waited for him to move. As soon as he’d crossed over to the other side of the lab, I crouched down, sneaked under the table, and dropped the remaining crystals into the box. They could easily have slipped off the table into that.

Now there was just the serum to return.

I was tiptoeing across the lab to the cupboard it had come from when the stranger suddenly stepped backward, right into my path. I jumped sideways, knocking a pile of papers off the desk as I did.

The man spun around. “Who’s that?” he snapped. His voice sounded like a hiss.

I stayed as still as I had stood the time I’d been desperate to win freeze dance at Izzy’s seventh birthday party. For good measure, I stopped breathing, too.

The man bent down to pick up the papers. “Concentrate, man,” he said to himself. His voice was deep and menacing. “Make a mess and they’ll know you were here.”

Phew. He’d assumed he’d disturbed the papers himself. I managed to breathe out.

The man continued snooping around the lab. With every step he took, I was more and more convinced he was going to discover me. Plus, he was right in front of the cupboard I needed to get into. Any second now, he’d open it and see the vials that contained all the ready-made serum. No!

He was reaching up toward the cupboard and I was wondering how I could distract him without giving myself away when the sound of an old-fashioned telephone broke the silence.

The man patted his jacket pocket and pulled out a cell phone. “What?” he said, his voice low and deep and menacing. He paused for a moment, then spoke: “Yes, yes, of course I did. . . . No, not yet . . . I just need a bit more time.”

I put my hands in my pockets to stop them from shaking. My fingers tightened around the bottle of serum. I had to put it back.

“Yes, I know that it’s a lot of money, and, as I said, you will get it all back. With interest. I take my business dealings seriously, and I have never defaulted on a loan. . . .” There was another pause before he added, “I’m pursuing a new lead.”

The man turned vaguely in my direction and smiled. It was a predator’s grin. Then he nodded impatiently. “Believe me, you’ll be more than satisfied. I’m going to invent the most incredible thing. . . . Let’s just say I’ve got a winning formula.”

At that point, he broke off to chortle at his own joke. His laugh cut through me as if it were a steak knife and I was dinner. “Trust me,” he continued. “Just give me more time, and I will make you almost as rich as I’m going to make myself.”

Then, in a voice that was so slimy it was as if a snake were slithering out of his mouth with his words, he added, “Of course I’ll test it rigorously. . . . On whom? I don’t know — a bunch of kids who don’t demand to read contracts or be paid. I’ll find them from somewhere.”

OK, that was it! I had to get out of here. My fingers loosened around the bottle in my pocket. I’d managed to put everything else back. It was only one little bottle. Surely no one would miss that. I couldn’t risk staying here another minute.

Luckily, a few minutes later, the man walked close enough to the automatic door that it whooshed open. I took the opportunity and whizzed through. As it slid shut, I opened the front door as quietly as I could, edged outside, and softly closed it behind me.

And then I ran like the wind, back along the path, back to Max, back to safety.

It was only once I’d made myself visible again and we’d sneaked back down the road and into the relative security of the town center that I finally stopped shaking and allowed myself to ask the questions I was pretty sure we were both thinking.

Who
was
that man? What was he doing breaking into the lab? Did he know about the crystals and our superpowers? And, if so, what exactly was he planning to do with them — and with us?

Max’s face was white as we sat on the bench at the bus stop. Anyone would have thought
he
was the one who’d nearly gotten caught breaking into a lab while invisible.

I told him everything I’d seen and overheard.

“He wants children to experiment on?” Max said numbly.

“Well, he didn’t exactly use those words. But, yeah, that was the impression I got.”

“Do you think he knows about us?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He was too vague about getting kids to help him. I think he’d have been more specific if he’d meant us.”

Max sighed. “Well, that’s something, I guess. But what
does
he know? What’s he even doing here?”

“And, more important, who the heck is he?”

Max looked up, as if he’d only just remembered I was there. “You know, I — I think I might have an idea,” he said.

“You know him?”

Max shook his head. “I don’t know him. But . . .”

“But what?”

Max swallowed. “But I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure. He told me he was a friend of my dad’s.”

For a second, I let myself feel relieved. So he
wasn’t
some weird psycho stranger after all. He was a friend of the doctor and probably had every right to let himself into the lab, even if he did do it in the middle of the night and sneaked around like a thief.

Like I said, I only felt relieved for a second. Because then Max added, “But I think he was lying.”

“Tell me everything,” I said.

“It was the first time I went to the lab,” Max began. “I’d just left and was walking down the road when I saw him. He seemed to come out of nowhere, and it made me jump.”

“Go on.”

“He came over to me and apologized for startling me. I wanted to get away, but he drew me into conversation. I felt a bit awkward, ’cause I wasn’t sure if he’d seen me come out of the lab and if he knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. I kept talking to him just to make sure I didn’t come across as suspicious. We walked along the road together. He was really friendly. Said he’d known my dad years ago and was hoping to get back in touch.”

“That all sounds innocent enough.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. He didn’t want me to mention anything to Dad, because he was going to surprise him. They were old friends and went back a long way, he said.” Max’s voice trailed off and he looked down at his feet.

“What is it?” I asked. “Did he say anything else?”

Max nodded. “He said he knew my mom. It was the only part of the conversation that seemed a bit strange.”

“Strange how?”

“He was talking about a time before I was born, maybe kind of overdoing it with how well he’d known my parents and how friendly they’d been. He told me how he’d been to a surprise birthday party for my mom once. Then he broke off and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Of course! That’s it!’ I asked him what he was talking about and he got flustered and said he’d just remembered he had to be somewhere.”

“Couldn’t you tell what he was thinking?” I asked. “Read his mind?”

Max shook his head. “I’d only just gotten the hematite. I hadn’t worn it yet.”

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing! He rushed off to his appointment, and I didn’t really give him another thought until now.” Max turned to look at me. His face had drained of color. “Jess, it was when he mentioned my mom’s birthday that he suddenly got strange and then disappeared on me.”

“Um. Yeah. And?”

“The combination on the keypad,” Max said quietly.

“Zero-six-two-six?”

Max nodded. “It’s a date. The twenty-sixth of June.” He looked down at his feet and added in such a quiet voice I could barely hear him over the sound of the approaching bus. “Jess, I think it was talking to me that made him realize how he could break in! The twenty-sixth of June . . . it’s my mom’s birthday.”

The next morning, I was waiting for the bus and mulling over everything that had happened when a car startled me out of my thoughts. I looked up. Nancy. She pulled over and lowered her window.

“Jess, get in,” she called, leaning over and waving me over. “I’ll take you to school.”

I looked over my shoulder, feeling like a spy in an action film. Then I realized two things. Thing one: Nancy was a close family friend, and there was nothing remotely suspicious or spy-like about her giving me a lift to school. Thing two: there were four other people at the bus stop, two of whom were talking about hairstyles so animatedly that there wasn’t the slightest chance they would be aware of anything else going on around them, and the other two were totally engrossed in their phones.

So I got in the car.

“What’s up?” I asked, concentrating very hard on making my voice sound casual and relaxed, neither of which I was feeling, as I pulled the door closed and fastened my seat belt. My brain was working overtime, trying to figure out how she’d found out about Max, if she knew we’d been to the lab last night, and exactly how much trouble we were in as a result. Turned out I didn’t need to worry.

Nancy pulled out onto the road and glanced at me. “I wanted to tell you,” she said brightly. “I went to the lab first thing this morning.”

First thing? I checked the clock on her dashboard: quarter past eight. Surely
this
was first thing.

“I’m an early riser,” Nancy said, noticing my look of confusion. “That’s what happens when you do too many night shifts. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep; I was worrying so much about the lab. So I decided to go down there and have a really good look around, and guess what!”

“What?” I asked, trying to inject the perfect
I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-going-to-tell-me-because-obviously-I-was-nowhere-near-the-lab-last-night
tone into my voice.

“It’s all there!”

“The crystals?”

“Yes! Well, actually, I haven’t found them
all
yet. There are one or two still unaccounted for — but I looked everywhere and found most of them. James must have knocked them off the table or covered them with his notes without realizing. But the great thing is, it was just an oversight. No one’s been breaking in.” She smiled broadly. “Isn’t that great?”

“Yay! That’s awesome,” I forced out of my mouth with as much surprise as I could muster. We’d done it! We’d gotten away with it. Max wouldn’t get into trouble. I was surprised at how glad I felt for him.

“I’ve also changed the keycode, just to be on the safe side. I should have done that earlier, but I didn’t want to do anything to unsettle James while I was unsure,” she went on as she drove. “Now that I know no one’s coming in, I feel happy to tell him it’s just a routine thing to keep on top of security. Anyway, we’re safe. I’m so relieved!”

“That’s wonderful news,” I said. And it was, actually. We weren’t in any trouble — which meant I was almost as happy and relieved as Nancy.

“I don’t know what we would have done if the project had come under threat now,” Nancy went on. “I dread to think what would have happened if all of this had gotten into the wrong hands. Can you imagine?”

Er . . . yes, actually. I’d done little
but
imagine what could happen. I’d practically felt the bars of the experimental cage that I was trapped in while scientists prodded and poked me. I’d seen the newspaper front pages with “Jessica Jenkins — Freak of the Century!” splashed across them. I’d imagined that horrible creepy man from the lab giving horrible creepy orders about what to do with us.

“The tiger’s eye, for example,” Nancy continued. “Imagine if some really bad people got hold of an innocent-looking crystal that could become a bomb!” Nancy shivered. “It’s unthinkable.” She turned to smile at me. “But, thankfully, we don’t
have
to think about it. No one’s breaking into the lab. We’re safe.”

“Yay,” I said weakly. Part of me really, really wanted to tell her about the man. I knew I probably should. But I’d promised Max I wouldn’t betray him, and how could I tell Nancy about the man without giving Max away? My greater loyalty was to him right now. I couldn’t break my promise. Not yet.

“This is the first time James has been happy for years,” Nancy said, making me even more determined not to tell her. “It’s as if he has something to live for again. I couldn’t bear the thought of him going back to the state he had been in for so long.”