Revealed (13 page)

He just didn't understand why kid JB was screaming it.

Because what kid JB was saying was, “The child is dead! He's dead, I tell you! I saw him fall myself!”

Jonah had to clutch the rock wall beside him, just to hold himself up.

JB, I'm right here
, he thought.
I didn't die!

Did kid JB think he was telling the truth? Or was this some kind of elaborate lie—a way to force the time agency to come back and rescue him and Angela before they did any more damage to time? Was this JB's way of trying to get help for Jonah and Katherine and their parents in the twenty-first century?

Why
wasn't
the time agency intervening to stop him?

Jonah just couldn't see cautious JB trying something so radical and extreme. And mean. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wouldn't be that reckless. Would he?

And where was kid Angela? What had happened to her?

On the screen Lindbergh seemed to be responding to the strain in JB's voice, even if the man didn't understand the words.

“Get a translator,” Lindbergh snapped, with the tone of someone who was used to being obeyed.

A man in civilian clothing was hustled into the room, and his face went pale when he heard what JB was saying. The man appealed to the policeman who seemed to be most in charge.

“Perhaps I could translate just for you, and then you can decide what to share with Colonel Lindbergh?” the translator asked.

“I want to know everything going on in this investigation!” Lindbergh commanded. “This is my
son
we're talking about!”

And that's why he's trying to protect you
, Jonah thought.

The translator was a skinny guy, and probably seven or eight inches shorter than Charles Lindbergh. But Jonah thought the man was incredibly brave. He looked at Lindbergh, looked at the head policeman, and then said flat out, “He says he saw your son fall. He says your son is dead.”

Lindbergh froze. So did every cop in the room.

“Did he do it?” Lindbergh asked in the iciest voice Jonah had ever heard. “Am I facing my son's killer?”

Jonah stared at JB.

You understand English!
Jonah wanted to scream at him.
You know how to speak it! Don't you know speaking German just makes you look guilty? Don't you know you've got to get out of this?

JB didn't even seem to have heard what Lindbergh said. The boy was rolling his head around as if he was the one in anguish.

The translator repeated Lindbergh's question for kid JB in German.

“Didn't you see the broken rung on the ladder? Didn't you all figure out what happened? How the kidnapper slipped and dropped the baby?” JB asked. Jonah had to remind himself that the answer was still in German; that was why neither Lindbergh nor any of the policemen reacted.

Before the translator had a chance to explain to the others, JB began clutching his own head, tearing at his own hair.

“It's my fault he's dead,” JB said. “I never thought it would work this way.”

The translator told Lindbergh this part of what JB had said.

Instantly Lindbergh lunged across the room, aiming for JB. He had his fists up, ready to pummel JB.

Jonah couldn't watch. He slid off to the side and slipped down into a crouch.

Why would JB say that?
He wondered.
How could he not know I'm still alive, still back here in the time cave? Isn't that what he warned me about?

Jonah leaned back against the hard rock wall and tried to figure everything out.

JB can't just be acting
, Jonah thought.
He really seems to believe he saw Charles Lindbergh's son die. Saw
me
die.

What would make him think that?

Maybe JB thought he really did see me go back in time with him and Angela?
Jonah thought.
Maybe he thought I rejoined my own tracer when the original kidnapper was carrying me down the ladder?

Jonah could kind of see how this might have happened. It'd been dark. Maybe Gary and Hodge had snatched Jonah out of time so quickly that JB really did believe he'd fallen from the ladder and been killed. Maybe the original kidnapper had reacted as though that was really what happened.

But if I vanished from my original time period because of Gary and Hodge kidnapping me from the other kidnapper, what's keeping me from ending up back there right now? Why isn't the monitor sending me back like it did JB and Angela?

There had been a moment during his time travel through the 1600s that Jonah still hated thinking about. One of JB's former employees had forced time itself to unravel by making it possible for two copies of the same person to appear at the exact same moment. It broke all
the rules; it practically destroyed all of time. Was something like that happening now?

Only maybe I vanished twice, rather than appearing twice?
Jonah wondered.

He didn't understand. He had to go back to watching the scene on the monitor.

Lindbergh was practically beating up kid JB, and the police were standing back and watching. It went on and on—until finally one of the policemen pulled Lindbergh away from him.

“We'll need to have a trial,” he said apologetically. He was apologizing to Lindbergh, not JB. “The world will have to see that we do things fairly here in America.”

“This man killed my son!” Lindbergh raged.

“This is what I deserve!” JB said, still in German. His battered face was starting to swell; one of his sleeves hung in tatters from his arm.

JB, what are you talking about?
Jonah wondered.
What's wrong with you?

“What's the murderer's name, anyway?” one of the policemen asked the translator. “We'll want to get the news out instantly that we've found our man. We'll need his address, too.”

The translator asked JB the same thing all over again in German.

JB kept his head down, as if in shame.

“I am Tete Einstein,” he said. “I live in Zurich, Switzerland. I'm the son of Albert Einstein.”

The translator told the others what JB had said.

“Albert Einstein's that scientist in Germany with the crazy ideas,” the translator said, suddenly looking queasy. “How could this be his son?”

“Is it possible we're dealing with an escapee from an insane asylum?” one of the policemen asked. “Is it possible he had nothing to do with the kidnapping—he just wandered onto the grounds with the rest of the curious public and made up a story to get into the house?”

“But why would he
confess
to killing the son of America's greatest hero?” one of the other officers asked. “Right to Colonel Lindbergh's face?”

“Is that confession proof that he's guilty—or just proof that he's totally nuts?” another officer asked quietly.

Jonah had other questions.

“What are you thinking?” he yelled at kid JB's image on the screen. “Why would you tell them
that
identity?”

It was almost worse than JB admitting that he was a time traveler from the future. Why hadn't JB just come up with a convincing lie?

Is it because he's back in the twentieth century for the third—no, fourth—time around?
Jonah thought, horrified.
Did going back
again and again trigger something? What if he really has forgotten that he ever became anyone besides Tete Einstein?

Why else would he tell the police he was Einstein's son?

Jonah forced himself to calm down and think about dates. In another time hollow, in what seemed like an entirely different lifetime, he'd been able to watch virtually every moment of the lives of Albert and Mileva Einstein and their family. It wasn't actually a different lifetime: Tete Einstein had been born in 1910. Mileva Einstein had secretly sent him into the future when he was a teenager, so that would have been sometime in the 1920s.

It would have had to have been the early 1920s
, Jonah thought.
Before Lindbergh's flight, or else JB wouldn't have been able to go back to that time period with Angela and me. He would have been the one left behind in the time cave here, and Angela and I would have been doomed because we wouldn't have had an Elucidator with us to save us.

Jonah shivered, even though it wasn't possible to feel cold in a time hollow. He went back to concentrating on dates. He caught a glimpse on the screen of a notebook one of the policemen was using, with a date written clearly at the top: March 1, 1932.

So JB—as Tete Einstein—was supposed to be twenty-two in 1932
, Jonah thought.
Not thirteen.

How messed up could time get from JB returning to part of his original time period as a teenager instead of the young adult he was supposed to be? And then—how could he have told policemen who he was? What if they took him seriously and tried to double-check? Jonah wondered if it wouldn't be the best thing in the world if everyone just thought kid JB was crazy. Especially if JB started trying to explain his strange age with time travel.

Then Jonah remembered the mental institutions he'd seen Tete Einstein in during the original time he'd watched of the Einsteins' lives.

He really hoped the mental institutions in America were better than the mental institutions in Switzerland in the first half of the twentieth century. But he kind of doubted it.

Angela, where are you?
Jonah wondered.
Please tell me you're off somewhere finding an Elucidator so you can rescue JB and come back for me. Or come back for me so we can rescue JB together.

Jonah looked around the cave. No Angela. She wasn't showing up anywhere on the monitor screen, either.

He remembered how the two women had been hustled out of the room.

Katherine would be standing here telling me, “Duh, Jonah, women weren't allowed to do much of anything back in the early twentieth century,”
Jonah thought.
That was why Angela was making such
a big deal about that one woman finding a way to become a pilot when she was both female and black. Cut Angela some slack—she's probably having a terrible time finding any way to get help!

Thinking about the black female pilot Angela had told him about also made Jonah notice: Every single face he'd seen in the Lindbergh house was white. Every single police officer was male.

Well, if anyone can succeed as a black female in the 1930s, it's Angela
, Jonah thought loyally.

She still didn't show up back in the cave.

Jonah went back over to the car where his parents still slept.

“What am I going to do?” he asked them.

Nobody could actually hear him, so he let himself say what he really wanted to say.

“Mommy? Daddy?” he whimpered. “What am I going to do?”

Jonah thought about trying to figure out how to open the door of the time cave and go back to the twenty-first century. But that would just set time in motion again. His parents would wake up, and he didn't know what he could tell them or how he would keep them out of trouble.

Weeks ago Jonah would have rushed to do this anyway. It would have been
action
. It would have been
something
to do.

But how could Jonah open the door and let in all sorts of unknown dangers, when he might still learn more in the safety of the time cave? Even if he did end up having to open the time cave, shouldn't he know everything he could before he did it?

Jonah winced and grimaced and ground his teeth and tried to think of some other plan.

And then he walked back to the monitor and went back to watching the Lindberghs agonizing over their missing son.

He saw kid JB led offscreen, and everyone else rejoining their tracers, time closing over the hole JB had made in it—had JB done that on purpose? Or just because he really was as confused and mentally ill as the original Tete Einstein?

Jonah couldn't tell. He didn't see anything else of JB, and he never heard anyone else mention him again. Evidently once the police decided he was crazy, they lost interest in him.

Jonah didn't see any sign of Angela, either, even though he watched for her devotedly. He was constantly scanning shadows and hiding places.

I'll just wait until I see Gary and Hodge show up
, he thought.
No matter when they kidnapped me, I
know
they eventually met with Charles Lindbergh. Because they were the reason he came to kidnap Katherine. I
have
to hear what they told him.

But in the meantime all Jonah could see was Charles and Anne Lindbergh despairing and hoping and despairing again, and desperately trying anything they could think of to get their son back.

It was so hard for Jonah to watch, because that was exactly how he felt about getting Katherine back.

Days passed on the monitor screen. A week. Two weeks. A month.

Lindbergh was dealing with 1930s gangsters now, tough-talking criminals who promised him they could find out who the kidnapper was; they could find the boy for him. Lindbergh made it known that he was perfectly willing to pay the ransom—he'd do anything to get his son back safely. Lindbergh worked with a go-between who followed a trail of clues to a meeting in a cemetery. Lindbergh was everywhere in the investigation, actually telling the police what to do.

That's how I would want to be
, Jonah thought.
That's what I really want to be doing, searching for Katherine.

Anne Lindbergh could do nothing. Jonah heard her and Charles talking about how she was pregnant with their second child, and so she needed to rest and take it easy. But not having anything to do just made the ordeal worse for her. She cried and wrote letters and journal entries about how helpless she felt. The letters and journal entries were heartbreaking in how hard she was trying to hold on to hope.