Revealed (2 page)

Jonah was mostly just trying not to let himself think about the fact that he recognized the name Mom had said. Not because he was a history buff like her. Not because of any visits he'd made to the past. But because weeks ago, before his first trip through time, Jonah had seen that name, Charles Lindbergh, on a seating roster for a planeload of children stolen from time.

Jonah had been on that plane. His original name—the
identity he would have carried through life if time travelers hadn't intervened—had been on that list too. He just hadn't known what it was.

He still didn't know.

What if
I
was supposed to be Charles Lindbergh?
he wondered.
Is that why Katherine thought that man looked like me?

Only how was Jonah supposed to be Charles Lindbergh if this man who'd suddenly appeared and then disappeared from the living room was already Charles Lindbergh?

Belatedly, Jonah remembered that the name on the plane's seating roster hadn't just been Charles Lindbergh. It had been Charles Lindbergh Jr. or Charles Lindbergh III or something like that.

Jonah's knees felt so weak all of a sudden that he sank down onto the nearby chair.

Katherine glanced at him, horror spreading across her expression. Then she smoothed out her face and turned back to face Mom.

“Instagram,” Katherine said calmly.

What?
Jonah wondered. Then he realized his sister was trying to explain how she could have a picture on her phone of someone who'd died forty years ago, but who somehow magically looked like he was standing in their living room five minutes ago.

Will Mom believe her?
Jonah thought.
Does Mom even know what Instagram is?

Maybe Jonah needed to help out.

“Didn't you use kind of a mix of Photoshop and Instagram together?” Jonah asked faintly. He looked up at Mom. “Didn't Katherine do a good job faking everything?”

Mom tilted her head and took the phone from Katherine's hand.

“It looks so real,” Mom said. “You've even got the candlesticks on the mantelpiece looking crooked, like they always do because
someone's
always jumping around in here, knocking things sideways. . . .”

She glanced accusingly at Jonah.

Accusingly was good. Accusingly meant that she didn't know there was anything truly weird and dangerous going on.

“Mom, all I did was take a picture of this room,” Katherine protested. “And then I put it together with a modernized picture of, you know, Charles, um, Charles . . .”

Jonah couldn't tell if Katherine really couldn't remember the last name, or if she was trying to distract Mom from looking more closely at Jonah. Jonah could feel prickles of panicky sweat on his face; he could feel exactly how close he'd come to fainting. And how close he still was. He
didn't want to be thinking,
Am I really Charles Lindbergh's son or grandson or . . . related somehow? Am I?
But he couldn't get the words out of his head.

He was just lucky Mom was focused on glaring at Katherine now.

“Katherine,
please
don't tell me this was another one of those school assignments where you spent hours making sure everything looked good, but you didn't spend five minutes actually reading about the topic you were supposed to be learning,” Mom said, waving the phone at her. “It's Lindbergh. Charles Lindbergh. Do you even know what he was famous for?”

“Um . . . ,” Katherine stalled.

Mom threw her hands up in exasperation.

“Jonah?” she challenged, turning back to him. “Do you know who Charles Lindbergh was?”

My birth father?
Jonah thought.
Someone I probably would have known really, really well, if time-traveling kidnappers hadn't stolen me away?

Now he didn't just feel sweaty and faint. He also felt like vomiting. It was a good thing he hadn't had breakfast yet.

“Mom, this wasn't
my
homework assignment,” Jonah protested weakly. “I've never had to know about Charles Lindbergh.”

If his original identity actually was Charles Lindbergh's
son, had he known his father really, really well back in some other time period, some other century? How old had Jonah been when the time-traveling kidnappers took him and un-aged him back to being a baby all over again—and then crash-landed while escaping from time agents, like JB, who wanted to stop them? Had Jonah had time to form a lot of memories with his original father before the kidnappers erased them all? If that man who'd stood in the Skidmore living room just ten minutes ago was actually Charles Lindbergh, had he once upon a time thrown a baseball back and forth with Jonah and told him stories about his own childhood and playfully punched him in the arm and called him “a chip off the old block”?

Those were all things that Jonah's adoptive dad—his
real
dad—had done with Jonah in this century.

“Jonah, if Katherine is learning about Charles Lindbergh this year, then you were probably supposed to learn about him last year,” Mom said, frowning. “This is what I keep telling the two of you, that you're not just learning stuff so you can get graded on it and then forget everything after the test. You're eleven and thirteen years old!”

“Almost twelve,” Katherine interrupted. “Remember, my birthday's just a few weeks away.”

Mom barely paused to look sternly at Katherine.

“Right. So you really should know who Charles Lindbergh
is,” Mom lectured. “It's like—cultural literacy! And it's interesting! Charles Lindbergh lived a fascinating life!”

This was one of Mom's favorite topics: It wasn't enough for him and Katherine to do well in school. They were also supposed to learn things “for life,” so they could “appreciate the treasure of knowledge . . .”

Yeah, right, Mom
, Jonah thought.
I really treasured finding out firsthand that they didn't have toilet paper in the year 1483. And finding out how sailors got punished in 1611—because I got put in the stocks. And watching our friend Emily almost die because medicine was so bad in 1903. And, in both 1485 and 1918, seeing how many people got killed because certain countries wanted different leaders . . .

Now Jonah had chills, along with his sweating and light-headedness and nausea. What horrors awaited him in whatever time period Charles Lindbergh had lived in? What if there was nothing Jonah could do to avoid them?

“Jonah?” Mom said. Her voice was softer now, sounding farther away. Jonah blinked hard, trying to make her face come back into focus. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared. Oh. It wasn't because she'd fallen into some time-travel mess herself. It was because she'd gone to the kitchen and brought back a big glass of orange juice for him, along with a slice of toast. He gulped them both down and instantly felt better.

Note to self
, he thought.
Mom might actually be right about
the whole “everybody needs a good breakfast” thing.

“Jonah, are you getting sick?” Mom asked. She brushed her fingers against his forehead. “You don't seem to have a fever, but you were so pale a minute ago . . . and you're still clammy. Do you need to stay home from school?”

Jonah glanced up at Katherine, as if trying to ask her telepathically,
Is this our solution? Mom already thinks I'm sick—do you want to pretend you're coming down with something too? And then we can work on figuring out why Charles Lindbergh, who died forty years ago, was in our living room this morning?

But if Jonah and Katherine did stay home “sick,” then Mom would absolutely decide she needed to work from home. And what could they do with Mom hovering over them, constantly feeling their foreheads and listening for sneezes and coughs?

And how quickly would she figure out that both of them were lying?

Jonah had survived deadly dangers in four different centuries—five, actually, if he counted his own. He'd made split-second decisions that had saved other people from assassins and a speeding wildfire and a firing squad and the potential destruction of time itself. But he really didn't think he could carry off lying to his mom to get to skip school. Even for a good reason.

“I'm okay, Mom,” Jonah said. “I guess I was just hungry.”

Katherine glared at him. Mom glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece and sighed.

“One piece of toast is not going to hold you until lunch, Jonah. And Katherine, you haven't even had anything yet,” she said. “Forget the bus—I'll see if Dad can drop you off at school on his way to work.” She started toward the stairs, then stopped. “No, wait, he's got that early conference call. . . .” She sighed again. “I'll call the office and tell them I'm going to be late.”

She started toward the kitchen and, Jonah guessed, the kitchen phone. But even as she walked, she was beckoning them and calling out, “Come on—start eating!”

Neither Jonah nor Katherine budged.

“
I
could have handled lying for both of us,” Katherine hissed at him. It was uncanny how totally she knew what he'd been thinking.

What she'd said was also true: Katherine was a much better liar than he was.

“Sorry,” Jonah mumbled.

“Now we're going to have to waste a whole day at school before we can do anything,” Katherine complained. “
I
think you're just scared to find out anything else about Charles Lindbergh. In case you're, you know, his son.”

At least she said this part with a little more sympathy. Jonah flushed, annoyed that Katherine knew him so
well—and thought he was such a coward. Why hadn't Jonah seen Charles Lindbergh in the presence of one of his time-traveling friends who thought Jonah was some big hero? Gavin Danes, for example, the kid who had come out of that basement in 1918 with even more bullet wounds than Jonah—Gavin and Jonah had recuperated together in the same hospital room, and Gavin thought Jonah could do anything.

Only it had actually been Katherine who'd saved Gavin from dying.

Distantly Jonah could hear Mom on the phone in the kitchen, telling someone, “It's been one of those mornings.” Even more distantly, Jonah could hear Dad's shower running upstairs. These were ordinary sounds from what should have been an ordinary day, but nothing felt ordinary anymore. He could feel all sorts of possible futures spreading out in front of him—all of them strange and terrifying.

And what was he supposed to do about any of it?

“If—” Katherine began, and instantly stopped. She stared past Jonah, toward the lamp.

Jonah turned in the chair and stared up . . . and up . . . and up.

Charles Lindbergh was back, standing in the exact same spot he'd been in before.

Katherine's right. He is tall
, Jonah thought.

He scrambled out of the chair so Charles Lindbergh wouldn't tower over him quite so much. Now, looking at the man up close and straight on, Jonah realized that Lindbergh was wearing different clothes—some kind of old-fashioned flight suit, maybe, with a brown leather jacket stretched across his broad shoulders and a pair of goggles dangling around his neck.

Did he look older or younger than he had the last time? Was that something Jonah should pay attention to? Jonah couldn't tell, because Lindbergh seemed so totally in the grip of timesickness. He was blinking furiously, the same way Jonah always did when he arrived in a new time period, when he was desperate to have his vision and other senses back as quickly as possible.

“I did it!” Lindbergh murmured.

Does he mean, “I made it back here again”?
Jonah wondered.
Why is that a bigger deal than getting here in the first place? Why does he even want to be here? Why did he disappear a moment ago?

Jonah thought maybe these weren't the best questions to start with. But before he could say anything, he heard Mom yelling from the kitchen, her phone call evidently finished, “Jonah? Katherine? Get in here! Now!”

This was torture. If Jonah and Katherine left now, they wouldn't see what happened next with Charles Lindbergh
or get a chance to ask him anything. But if they didn't leave, Mom was bound to come after them—and she'd see Lindbergh too.

Jonah inched one step closer to the kitchen, then indecisively inched back. Katherine didn't move at all.

Lindbergh cocked his head toward Mom's voice and blinked again.

“Are you Jonah and Katherine Skidmore?” he asked, pulling a small notepad and pencil from inside his jacket.

“What's it to you?” Katherine asked, as bold as ever.

Lindbergh made a small mark on the notepad.

“Confirmation of that item on my checklist,” Lindbergh muttered. He turned toward Jonah. “I apologize in advance for any distress this is going to cause you.”

Jonah took another step back.

And then Lindbergh reached out and grabbed Katherine by the shoulders.

“What are you doing?” Jonah asked. “Let go of my sister!”

He stepped forward again, waving his arms wildly, trying to pull Katherine back and shove Lindbergh away. But Lindbergh had too tight a grip.

“Jonah! Be careful!” Katherine cried, even as she tried to get away. “He's probably just using me to get to you!”

Lindbergh looked scornfully down at her and held on tighter.

“Such simplistic thinking,” he said. “And wrong.”

Lindbergh lifted Katherine, jerking her completely away from Jonah. She kept struggling, pushing away from him. But it was useless.

A split second later both Lindbergh and Katherine vanished.

Jonah stepped into the space that Lindbergh and Katherine had occupied only a moment before. He started swinging his arms again, as if convinced that even if he couldn't see Lindbergh and Katherine, he still might be able to grab them.