The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (12 page)

“Really?” said Callie.

“How often does that happen?” said Hal. “I’ve found quarters and stuff, but I don’t think I’ve ever found a five-dollar bill lying on the ground.”

“It’s found money,” said Callie. “That’s
good luck.”

“I guess,” said Hal.

“Or maybe it’s more than good luck. Maybe Amanda left it here,” Nia said. “Maybe it’s part of the clue.”

“But what does it mean?” said Callie.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Can I see it?”

Hall passed me the bill. I smoothed it out across my knee. A five-dollar bill. I looked into Abraham Lincoln’s chiseled face, his impassive gaze, his firmly set mouth. And then
I turned the bill over, and there it was, as plain as day.

“I’ve got it,” I said, and showed them what suddenly seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

“Got what?” said Nia.

“Yeah,” said Hal. “What are you talking about?”

Pinching the bill on both sides, I put my hands together and drew them apart again quickly so that I could hear the paper snap.

“Check this out,” I said. “Look
right here!”

It was so obvious to me, I couldn’t understand at first why Hal, Nia, and Callie were looking at me with blank faces. “Don’t you see?” I went on. “It’s a picture of the Lincoln Memorial. Amanda must be waiting for us there.”

“That’s the Lincoln Memorial?” Callie asked.

“It looks so familiar,” Nia said. “I thought it was the Parthenon.”

“That’s because your mom isn’t Greek,” I
said. “It may have been inspired by the Greeks, but if you had pictures and little replicas of the Parthenon surrounding you since birth, you’d never be confused. And the Lincoln Memorial, my friends, is something like three hundred yards over there.”

I pointed, and without even having to speak a word, Nia and I erased the chalk with the sleeves of our jackets, and the four of us started off.

As we speed-walked alongside the reflecting pool that separates the World War II Memorial from the Lincoln Memorial, I couldn’t help thinking of a scene in that ’90s movie my mom likes to watch when it comes on TV—
Forrest Gump
. When Forrest is speaking at a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, love-of-his-life Jenny runs through the reflecting pool in her eagerness to reunite with him. Part
of me wanted to jump into the pool too, I was in such a hurry.

But if you had a list of ways of remaining unnoticed in our nation’s capital, jumping into a fountain would not be on it anywhere. “Slow down,” I warned the others. “We’re supposed to look like tourists, remember?”

We slowed our pace and walked in silence.

I snapped a few shots with my camera as we were walking, partly to make it
look like we really were tourists and partly out of habit.

I scanned through the pictures I was taking, and in one of the images I’d just shot, I saw something in the top right corner. Something that gave me pause.

Highlighting that quadrant of the picture and then zooming in, I was able to make out the shape that had looked like nothing more than a slash of black before.

It was a jogger. The
one from the Memorial. She was running, but the light was shining on her face and I could see she’d been looking. At us. She’d been watching. She knew where we were.

I looked up, scanning the path where she’d been running but it was empty now except for a little girl riding a bike, and her dad jogging along at her side.

Chapter 14

Here’s the
thing about the Lincoln Memorial. It is simply very large.

The columns alone are forty-four feet tall, and as you climb the five flights of steps on the front of the building, you feel smaller and smaller. Once you get inside, forget it.

Abraham Lincoln was the tallest president in history to begin with, but this statue is nineteen feet taller than he was in real life. I was so jittery I would
have felt intimidated by a life-size sculpture of a squirrel.

Fortunately, the only park ranger we saw was talking to a bunch of old people, and there was no clipboard in sight.

I scanned the crowd for Amanda. If you’re looking for someone in a wig, suddenly everyone’s hair looks fake. It testifies to her penchant for elaborate costuming that I spent a good minute looking at an old man wheeling
around an iron lung before ruling out the possibility that it could be her.

“If she’s here, she’s hiding,” Nia said, keeping her voice low. Callie nodded tensely, and we all started to walk around and among the gigantic pillars.

“Look at the words through your camera,” Hal said, and I lifted it to my eye, snapping pictures.

“Do you see anything?” Callie asked.

I did. In two different places,
some of the words I was reading glowed in a way that matched what I’d seen before. In the line,
It is fitting and proper that we shall have here a new birth of freedom
, the words,
we shall have here a new birth of freedom
were highlighted.

And then I put the camera down. Fast.

I grabbed Callie’s arm. But when Nia said, “What is it?” all I could do was look at her and try to communicate with
seriously raised eyebrows that something was very wrong. Which helped not at all.

Because I had seen something. Or rather, someone. It was the jogger. She was close. She had seen us. And now she was headed straight in our direction.

There are some situations were even all my invisibility tricks just don’t work. With my unobstructed view of the floor, I could see the jogger’s sneakers moving
swiftly toward me. Purposefully striding. This was not someone pausing in the midst of a run to admire the monument’s grandeur. This was not someone stopped to stretch. This was no jogger.

When I heard my name, I think I jumped out of my skin. “Zoe?” the jogger said, and as I looked up three things happened simultaneously.

The jogger took off her baseball cap.

I felt the words
It’s okay, it’s
okay, it’s okay
pulsing into my brain like they would after you have a bad fall but realize you’re not bleeding and you haven’t broken anything.

And I said, “Ravenna,” because I knew then who the jogger was. It was not someone to fear. It was one of the people we’d come here to find. And once I saw her without her cap, I realized it was someone I would know anywhere.

I wondered how I could ever
have been afraid of her. She looked so, well, so normal in her yoga pants and sweatshirt, her iPod buds hanging down from her shoulders, her dark ponytail springing to life now that her baseball cap was removed. Ravenna Bruyere. Robin Beckendorf. Amanda’s sister.

Ravenna was the kind of older sister who had always made me feel like I was special. Back when I was ten, I thought she knew how to
do everything my ten-year-old self thought a girl in high school should be able to do: track team, yearbook staff, algebra, field hockey. She’d been a cheerleader, an honor student.

Compared to Amanda, she was resolutely normal. But there were also things about her that weren’t. When Amanda fell off her bike and gashed her knee, Ravenna spoke briefly to their mom on the phone, then scrubbed her
hands very carefully, put on surgical gloves, cleaned out Amanda’s wound, injected a tiny shot of anesthetic and gave Amanda a stitch. What normal teenager can do that? What normal household has that on hand? Theirs did.

“You know how to do that?” I’d said, my jaw hanging open.

Ravenna had grinned. “Mom hates doctors,” she’d explained. Later, when I asked my mom and dad about it, they’d exchanged
significant looks, sighed, and hadn’t answered my question.

“Zoe Costas?” Ravenna called out now softly. She was speaking in a low voice and checking over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching, but she couldn’t keep the enthusiasm out of her voice. She opened up her arms and before I knew it, she’d pulled me toward her. “How are you? Girl, I missed you. How’s your mom? Iris? Pen?”

I
quickly told her that everyone was fine. I couldn’t stop looking at her, though. There were things she did—a way of crinkling up her eyes when she smiled, moving her hands when she talked—that reminded me of Amanda. And her smell—part drugstore hand cream, part musky body spray, reminded me of home and my life before Orion. Of my dad.

“I’m so sorry about—about everything,” she said into my ear
as she hugged me again. “Someday we’re going to have to talk all about it.”

“Okay,” I mumbled. I didn’t trust myself to say much else without crying. In fact, I was already sniffling. I wiped a tear away with the back of my sleeve, hoping the others wouldn’t see. A totally ridiculous idea, as they were all staring at me.

Though they weren’t staring because I was crying.

“Um, Zoe?” Nia said.
“Why are you hugging my brother’s girlfriend?”

There was a second where I was so confused by Nia’s question I didn’t even understand what she meant. “Cisco’s girlfriend?” I repeated. “I don’t think so. This is Amanda’s sister, Ravenna.”

“No it’s not,” Nia said. “That’s Rosie. Rosie O’Connor. She’s a college student in D.C. She met Cisco when he was at some soccer clinic near her dorm. They’ve
been going out for months.”

“Yeah,” said Hal. “I’ve met her.” He looked at Ravenna. “I mean, you.” He turned back to me. “At the
As You Like It
performance at school.”

“She’s been to my
house
,” Nia said.

Openmouthed, I turned to Ravenna. “Is this true?” I said.

She nodded. And then she smiled. This huge, light-up-the-sky smile that made me remember why everyone had always wanted to be her
friend. “My name is Rosie now.” She turned to Nia and Hal. “But Zoe’s right too. I
am
Ariel’s, I mean,
Amanda’s
sister.”

“But how—?” I started.

“The Cisco thing?” Rosie laughed. “I wasn’t looking for anything like that—it just happened.” Of course. Ravenna had always dated the cutest guy in her grade when we lived in Pinkerton. She had that wholesome, J. Crew, straight-A-student thing going
on—no one had been able to resist it. Even in undercover mode, dating probably did “just happen.”

“But you’re in college,” I said. “Aren’t you too old for him?”

“My mom thought so,” Nia said. Hal snorted a laugh into his hand, pretending to pass it off as a cough. Mrs. Rivera is awesome—warm, protective, supportive—but if she doesn’t like something one of her kids is doing, she doesn’t make
a secret of it.

“Cisco’s only two years younger than I am.” Ravenna seemed not in the least bothered by Nia’s attitude or Hal’s barely disguised guffaw. “He’s a junior and I’m a freshman. And look—”

We all turned to see Cisco climbing the last of the steps into the temple, leading a few teams of students, his face showing first surprise, then confusion, then confused happiness. “Guys,” he said
to the students he was leading. “Go write down some quotes. I need to check in with my sister over there.”

“Hey,” he said, shooting his butter-melting smile at Ravenna, then Nia, then the rest of us, then back to Ravenna. I’d never seen Cisco look at anyone the way he was looking at Ravenna.
Wow
, I thought, he really likes her. “What are you doing down here in tourist-land? I thought campus was
way up there.” He gestured in a northerly direction.

“Oh, you know,” Ravenna said. “Internship stuff.”

“In your jogging clothes?” Cisco raised his eyebrows.

“Cisco!” Nia said, her voice a whisper that was also, somehow, a shout. “Do you realize that your girlfriend also happens to be Amanda’s sister?” If she’d said, “also happens to be a two-headed bullfighting leprechaun,” she wouldn’t have
needed to adjust her tone of voice.

Cisco’s eyes grew wide. “Rosie?” he said. I don’t know what reaction Nia was expecting him to have, but Cisco seemed, more than anything, to be impressed. “Really?”

She nodded. “Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you. You understand, right?”

But Cisco couldn’t even take that question in yet. “Really?” he repeated. “You’ve been Amanda’s sister—” He paused.
“The whole time?”

“Well, since she was born.” Ravenna laughed.

“I guess that would be true,” he mused, running his fingers through his gorgeous dark hair. “And you just happened to run into these guys? Because you’re working at your internship?” You could hear the doubt in his voice growing as the startling coincidences started to mount.

“No,” she said, her voice serious now. She smiled at
him. She held his gaze, making sure he knew she was sincere. “Of course not . . . you
do
understand?” she said. “You don’t think I was using you, do you?”

Cisco ran his hand through his hair. “Look, Rosie. I don’t care what your name is, I know who you are.”

“Okay,” she said smiling in relief. The two of them just stared at each other that way a couple of beats until Nia said, “Guys?”

“Right,”
Rosie said. She ducked her head, indicating that we should step out of the way. We followed her to a relatively hidden spot to one side of Lincoln’s seat.

“Is Amanda coming?” Callie asked.

Rosie shook her head. “I don’t think so. She told me to find you at the World War Two Memorial, but when I got there and saw the guards, I followed you here.”

“Amanda told you—” Nia said. “Does that mean
you’ve seen her?”

“No,” Rosie said. “I wish. She sends me notes. In code. I haven’t seen her since we chalked my dad’s car.”

“That was
you
?” Hal said. “We saw another figure in the surveillance video, but didn’t know who it was.”

“And hello?” Callie said. “Thornhill
is
your dad?”

“You didn’t figure that out already?”

“We knew,” Nia said. She doesn’t ever like to admit she doesn’t know something.
“But we didn’t
know
know. I mean, for sure.”

“What happened to your mom?” I said. “We saw a newspaper clipping about a car accident—was that real?”

“It was,” Rosie said, swallowing hard.

“Your mom was killed?” I said. “By the Official?”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he meant to kill her,” Rosie said. I could tell that this was painful for her to talk about. She slowed down as if she
couldn’t tell this story without going into all the details. “She was running. We were always running, except for the time we were in Pinkerton. There, we were happy. We knew we had to leave, but we didn’t want to. We stayed too long, and when we learned it was time to go, we didn’t want to leave. We waited . . . too long. We let the guys who were after us get too close. We got away that time, then
later, they found us again. My mom was trying to lose the Official’s people one night. She was driving. It was late. Roads were slippery. I think her death actually set Dr. Joy back, because with Mom gone, Amanda just took off. She was just starting to come into her powers, realizing what she could do, and she freaked out. And of course, with her abilities, she was able to disappear totally. I think
she would settle somewhere for months at a time, but then she’d take off again. Even knowing all the tricks my mom taught us over the years, I couldn’t find her. I’d get a clue as to her whereabouts, I’d come running, but it seemed that when I got to wherever she last was, the trail was always cold. So I set out to find my dad. That’s how I ended up out here.”

“Do you think my dad was killed
by accident too?” I said. “Or do you think—?” I could barely speak the words. It was something I hadn’t let myself say out loud before. I know it may sound obvious. If I was reading a book or watching a show on TV, I would have assumed that the bad guys did it. But this was my dad.
My
dad. The one with the saggy belly I’d laid my head against when I was sick. The one who used to sing “Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot” when he washed dishes after dinner. The one who used to love to tell stupid jokes. How could he have been murdered? How could the life he was supposed to have, the life he deserved, how could that have been stolen from him? From me?

Rosie put her hands on my shoulders, looked at me hard. I could see in her eyes that she understood what I was feeling. “All I know is something I
heard
my
dad saying one time. He said there are lots of ways of making it appear as if someone had a heart attack, when in actuality he was poisoned. Also, he said your dad had to be killed. He said your dad was like him—a soldier. They’d been raised together. As a team, they would have been impossible to stop. For a long time, George didn’t want to get involved at all. He didn’t want to put you,
your mom, and your sisters in danger. But in the year before he died, he and my dad had been in communication. They’d decided to work together. My dad said George had been getting ready to move your family underground, and then join him.”