The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (16 page)

“That’s from Kennedy’s inaugural address,” Nia murmured.
“It’s the one that has the line in it, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’” Nia was almost as good at quotes as Amanda.

“Do those words mean anything to you?” Cisco said. “Do you think you could scramble all the letters and spell out a meeting place Amanda has in mind?”

Callie looked exhausted. “That’s two hundred and forty letters,” she said, coming
up with the number so quickly I realized she must have counted them out of habit. “Do you know how many possible permutations there could be?”

“Do you think they’re the words Amanda was hoping we would find?” Hal said. “There could be more of them out there. We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the places Thornhill wanted us to see. Did she highlight words on every spot on this list?” He
waved the scavenger hunt sheet and I immediately began to feel overwhelmed.

“The ones on the World War Two Memorial make sense,” I suggested. “She
sent
us there, with the postcard.”

“She sent us to the Lincoln Memorial, too,” added Callie. “And the Washington Monument’s a given since it’s right where the bus parked, she could assume everyone would go there.”

“But JFK’s tomb?” Hal said. “That’s
random.”

“Not necessarily,” Nia mused. “If Amanda knew Cisco was coming on this trip, she might have remembered that JFK was one of his personal heroes. It makes complete sense that he would take a picture of his tomb—and she knew Cisco would get that information back to Nia.”

“Am I that obvious?” Cisco asked. Nia raised her eyebrows. “Okay, I guess I am.” He shrugged and gave one of his trademark
sheepish Cisco smiles. And then his face lit up. “Dude!” he said. “Maybe I’m not that transparent. Last fall, I saw Amanda at this party—I was there with my friends and she was hanging out with a crowd of seniors. We got to talking and it turns out we
both
were huge JFK fans. We talked about how Vietnam would have been totally different if he hadn’t been killed. But how would she
know
that I would
go there?”

“She wouldn’t know,” I said. “She’d guess. I think she’s used to guessing. She trusts her own instincts. And usually they’re right on target.”

Hal shook his head—I couldn’t tell if it was in resignation or admiration. “Amanda had been in control of our movements all day. Everything we’ve seen, she’s
wanted
us to see?”

“She must be nearby,” Callie added. “She’s probably just a few
steps ahead of us. Maybe we’re supposed to use the quotes to find her—maybe they’re laying a path.”

Nia picked up the sheet again. “They must mean something,” she said. “I can feel it. They’re like a poem or song lyrics or something. Where you feel like you get it, but you can’t say exactly what it’s about.”

Together we all looked down at our sheet and read the quotes to ourselves in silence.

Train up a child . . . The eyes of the world are upon you . . . It is fitting and proper that we here shall have a new birth of freedom . . . The torch has been passed . . . Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend.

Chapter 18

O
ne of the
things my dad was always really good at was telling stories about misunderstandings. His favorite kind of story was the kind where someone says “I want hotdogs,” but someone else hears “Terrible hot rod,” and all sorts of confusion ensues. He collected these stories the way some people collect stamps, or snow globes, or salt and pepper shakers in the shape of cows. My dad told his stories to people
when he was selling cars on the lot, told them to other parents during our music recitals, told them to my mom when they were doing the dishes and we were in bed, told them on car trips, he told them to my friends when they were over (embarrassing!), and he told them to Amanda.

And once, he told one when our two families were out to dinner together. It was the night of elementary school graduation
and we were at the Greek pizza place, my dad leaning back in his chair with a very sleepy Pen slung over his shoulder. Iris was already asleep on my mom’s lap. Mom was chatting with Amanda’s mom as Amanda and I were asking for our zillionth quarter to play the car driving video game they had next to the door. Rosie, or Ravenna as I called her then, had gone to the movies with a friend. To keep
our attention and give the moms more time to talk—and because he was running out of quarters—my dad said he would tell us a story instead.

I rolled my eyes. I was a rising middle schooler by then, so I was making like I was sick of his stories. Dad said, “All right, Miss Smartypants, how about a scary story?”

Well, I totally wanted to hear that, and I looked at Amanda, hoping we’d be able to
exchange a glance that said, “Awesome.” But she didn’t seem excited by the idea of scary. If I had to name a feeling to match her deadpan gaze, screwed-up mouth, and raised eyebrows, I’d have said she looked a little bit bored, but she was too polite to say so.

My dad started in on his story anyway—all about the legend of some kind of monster named Bloody Fingers. Two Boy Scouts were camping
in a tent, when they heard a voice in the wind, calling and howling and getting closer and closer, “I’m Bloody Fingers and I’m a mile away!” Then, “I’m Bloody Fingers and I’m twenty-five paces away!” But then, when Bloody Fingers got to the Boy Scouts, he turned out to be a five-year-old Cub Scout, who announced in a cheerful voice, “It’s Bloody Fingers. Can I have a Band-Aid?”

Amanda laughed
really hard. She always loved my dad. It was hard to be in a bad mood when he was around.

But then she said, “I have a scary story too. Do you guys want to hear?” After we’d nodded, she started in on a story that still, even today, sends shivers down my spine. I thought about it all the time when we were on the road in the RV. I’d thought Amanda somehow had been able to predict the future. That
she’d sent me a secret message.

The story she told was about a girl whose dad had died before she was born.

“Like your dad?” my dad had interrupted Amanda in the pizza place, switching Pen over to his other shoulder, shaking out his arm, using his concerned adult voice. Later I’ve realized he would have known Amanda’s dad was alive. I guess he was just thinking about what Amanda was feeling
back then.

“No,” Amanda said, her voice calm, her gray-green eyes looking up over his shoulder as if she could see something in the room that we could not. Thinking back to the story after Amanda disappeared, I realized—or wondered—if she was really talking about my dad. If the whole story was about me.

In Amanda’s story, the girl doesn’t believe her father really is dead. All the girl knows
is that her mother was pregnant with her at the time her dad died, and that her mom destroyed every picture of her dad and never mentioned his name. The girl has always assumed this is because her mother can’t bear the pain of losing him. So every year on her birthday, the girl waits until her mother has gone to sleep, and she sneaks outside into her yard. She looks up at the stars and feels the
night air cooling her skin and she just knows that he is out there, watching her.

And then she starts to get secret messages that only she can understand. That make it clear her dad is watching her, and knows things about her. She loves making drawings of trees, and in her tree drawings the trees always look the same—a maple with a thick trunk; spreading, low-hung, heavy branches; a swing made
out of two ropes and a plank.

After the girl’s art teacher hangs up her tree drawings and paintings at the school art show, she gets a photograph in the mail. It has a date stamp on it that shows it was taken the week before. When the girl’s mom sees the photograph in the girl’s hand, she sits down hard in one of the kitchen chairs. “Where did you get that?” she asks the girl and her mom says,
“That’s your father’s tree swing. At the house where he grew up. The house was torn down, but see that fence? That hillside? It’s definitely the one.” Her mom doesn’t notice the date stamp. “Where did you find this?” she asks. “In the attic?” The girl nods. If she tells her mom the photograph arrived in a plain white envelope with no return address, her mother will start watching the mail, and the
girl has a feeling there will be more. She doesn’t want to miss any.

A month later a wooden cigar box appears on the floor of her room. Inside is a deck of cards missing the jack of diamonds. A few weeks after that she’s in the library, reading, and she leaves her book open on the table to ask a question at the reference desk. When she returns, the book is closed, but her place has been held
with a bookmark. The bookmark is a playing card. The missing jack of diamonds.

She tears through the library looking for her father, and it is only then that she realizes she has no idea what he looks like. She has only one picture of him, a blurry shot taken at a distance, and he would have aged since it was taken. She looks at every man in the right age range, but all of them are impossible.
She wonders why he would hide from her? Why would he tease her with all these subtle clues?

And then the next clue arrives. This one comes in the mail again, in a plain white envelope. Inside are two yellowed newspaper clippings, one his obituary and the other an article published a month after his death. Reading them, the girl comes to learn that he died in a car accident—his car drove off a
bridge and his body was never found. The investigation was eventually dropped when the girl’s mother pleaded with the police to have the search called off. She was eight months pregnant at the time and needed closure.

She doesn’t understand any of this, but one night when her mother is out for the evening she has all the clues she’s been collecting spread out on the kitchen table and she’s poring
over them, trying to find a solution in her mind, when she hears a hand on the doorknob. Someone is about to enter the house. She knows it isn’t her mother. She would have heard her car in the driveway. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard any car in the driveway. Her dog hadn’t barked. Who could it be?

The whole time Amanda had been telling the story, she hadn’t broken her concentration or
lost track of the story the way I always did when I was that age. My dad and I were staring at her, totally transfixed by what she was saying, and when she got to this point and stopped, my dad, at least, had his mouth hanging open.

Now, Amanda looked at each of us long and slow, dead in the eye. “Do you think you know what’s going to happen?” she said. I had an idea but I didn’t say it out loud.
It was too terrible. I was really worried about that girl. My dad slowly shook his head too.

“Well,” Amanda said. “No one knows. The police found the door open, the materials on the table, the girl gone. The mother too. They were never seen or heard from again.”

Chapter 19

As we were
finishing up our lunches, Cisco left to help Mr. Fowler. We were starting to think about the next step when the shiny black SUV we’d seen in front of the Institute for Natural Sciences pulled up a few feet away from where we were sitting. An image flashed before me: the rangers in their dark suits coming toward us, their strong grip on our upper arms, their dragging us into their car and gunning the
engine before Cisco or Mr. Fowler could even see.

But that wasn’t what happened. The guards or rangers or whatever they were stayed behind the car’s tinted windows and the only person to emerge from the car was Heidi. We saw one long leg, a high-heeled ankle boot, her skinny jeans, her leather jacket, her slouchy bag and then her pretty face, twisted into a frown. She saw us watching. She waved
like the person driving the car was her mom, not some henchman working for the man who tortured our parents when they were kids and was now coming after us.

Ignoring her I-Girl toadies, Heidi strolled toward us, like we’d all come to this party together.

“Hey, guys,” she said, in a good imitation of a languid, bored, and impartial tone. She looked us up and down like we were wet dogs about to
tramp mud into her white-carpeted living room and then she turned her head so she could get a view of our scavenger hunt sheet. “
The torch has been passed
,” she read. “Where’s that from?”

Nia opened her mouth about to tell Heidi about JFK’s inaugural speech being inscribed on his tomb, but when Callie elbowed her in the ribs, she shut it. But still, she didn’t hide the scavenger hunt sheet—it
was hard with Heidi. You get this feeling when she’s talking to you, like she’s your best friend, and you don’t want your best friend to think that you’re suspicious of her, do you?

“
The eyes of the world are upon you?
” Heidi read. “That’s deep, right?” she giggled.

“What do you want, Heidi?” Nia said, but she let an almost imperceptible stutter betray the fear she still had of the girl. I saw
Hal sigh the tiniest bit. He was still intimidated too.

Heidi turned to Callie. “I’m sure you’ve been diligently checking landmarks and historic monuments off your list?” she said.

“And I’m sure you’ve had somebody do that for you,” Callie snapped. “Let me guess—Lexi, Kelli, and Traci have been scurrying all over D.C. while you got your nails done.”

“Funny,” Heidi said, without laughing or
even cracking a smile. She reached to pick up Callie’s phone. “Can I see your pix?”

Callie quickly pocketed it. Whatever Heidi wanted, Callie was strong enough to know not to give it to her.

Heidi giggled. “What?” she said. “Do I have the plague or something? Are you afraid that if I touch something that belongs to you, you’ll turn into me?” She made a pouty face, and turned back to Nia, whom
she’d had better luck with. “Don’t you
want
to be popular, Nia?” She whispered now so that only Nia and I could hear. “Like your brother?”

Nia shook her head. I could tell from the way she was holding her chin stiffly that she was getting angry. Fortunately, she had the self-possession to stand up and walk away. “I’m going to throw away my garbage,” she said, looking pointedly at Heidi when she
said the word “garbage.”

Callie and Hal got up to throw their bags away too.

Heidi sat down in the vacated space the other guides had left. Next to me. And suddenly I wondered if this had been her plan in being so awful to Nia. For us to be alone.

She looked down at the empanada I was still eating as if it were a dead animal, then she passed me a bag of potato chips. “Here, have something that’s
not
cold and congealed,” she said. Her voice was smooth and I couldn’t help feeling warmed by it. I knew all the things Rosie and Mrs. Leary had told me about her, but somehow they didn’t seem to matter so much right now. I actually caught myself wondering if, aside from the attempted murder and likely involvement with Dr. Joy and the Official—if she wasn’t all that bad.

“I can’t eat potato chips
because I’ll get fat, but my dad packs them for me anyway.” She giggled. Heidi often laughs at things she says as if they’re jokes in a way that makes me wonder if she knows what a sense of humor really is. “
You
don’t need to worry, though,” she went on.

“Uh . . . thanks,” I said, deciding to leave unsaid that I could not have gotten one leg into Heidi’s super-skinny jeans. But then I suddenly
realized that I really, really didn’t want the chips anyway. When I think about Heidi, what she did to Bea Rossiter, I think about what happened to my dad and everything that’s
been
happening—and I couldn’t bring myself to eat her chips.

“Keep the chips,” I said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Heidi gave me a look. Not a dirty look. Well, not exactly. It was more appraising. She usually has completely
unambiguous body language. I think it’s actually the secret to her power. When she’s walking across a room, every single part of her body is pointed toward the destination where she’s headed. She doesn’t overthink.

But now, one toe was pointing back to the I-Girl group, and one toe was pointed to me. She didn’t know which way to turn. And in this moment of hesitation for her, I took a chance.
Maybe it was stupid. Maybe not.

“What are you getting out of all of this? What did he promise you?” I said.

I could tell from the way her pupils didn’t dilate that she wasn’t surprised by my question. Still, she did the best job of pretending she could. “What are you talking about?” she said.

“You know,” I said. “The Official. What did he say he’d give you?”

Heidi sighed and rolled her eyes.
She was half turned away from me, but I knew she didn’t want to walk away. She wanted to tell me. “Was it money?” I said. “Something else?”

Heidi stood, all ambivalence gone. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Zoe Costas. And you’re never going to find your friend. No one is. She’s as gone as your dad.”

I just sat there, my only thought being not to let her see that she had gotten to me. Hands
shaking, I picked up the scavenger hunt sheet. I could hear it rattling as Heidi walked away.