The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (8 page)

“Wow,” I said. Through my shirt, I fingered the pendant. I couldn’t believe my dad had known about all this, had lived with this secret, this fear, and never let on.

“Why didn’t you ever tell us any of this?” Hal said. “If you knew we were looking for Amanda, why didn’t you help?”

“That was
Max’s idea.”

“Who is Thornhill, right?” Hal said.

“Exactly. Max is an amazing leader—always has been—it’s like he has a sense of what people are capable of even before they know it themselves. He told us that if we let you discover the mystery for yourselves you would learn and grow in the process, and gain the skills that you needed to save Amanda. To save all of us.

“God, I wish we could
just keep you hidden from the Official and Joy, keep you safe.” Mr. Bennett looked so distraught, for a second I thought he was going to choke on a sob. He brought himself quickly back under control. “But unfortunately, your abilities, and Amanda’s, the things you can do—not only are they what Joy is after, they seem to be our only chance of finally stopping his project, of putting all this to rest.
Your powers—your connection with Amanda—they allow you to go farther than anyone else.”

“Wow,” Hal said. He looked as overwhelmed as we all felt.

Later, when we were back in the car, almost at the public library where our bikes were waiting, Callie said, “Do you know where my mom is?”

Mr. Bennett shook his head. “She isn’t working with Thornhill, or even in communication with him. But I know
her. She wouldn’t have left you without a very good reason, and I believe she’s still alive.”

“We’ve all been trying to help out with what your family’s been going through,” Mr. Bennett went on. “Ramona—Nia’s mom—I don’t know if you realize the extent that she has been looking out for all four of you during this adventure. She’s been using her volunteer commitments as opportunities to pave the
way for your investigation as much as she can.”

“My mom?” Nia said. “Really?”

“Well.” Mr. Bennett smiled. “She talks a lot about keeping you all safe. Feeling secure and confident so you can reach your potential, which is not a feeling we ever got to have. And well-fed. She dropped off many a casserole at Callie’s after her mom left, made sure there was milk in the fridge. She’s been sending
extra portions of food in your lunch.”

“That sounds like her,” Nia agreed.

“Does my dad know?” Callie asked. “He doesn’t, does he?”

“Very little. For everyone’s safety, we’ve been communicating on a strictly need-to-know basis,” Mr. Bennett said, peering up at us in the backseat through the rear-view mirror.

“What about my mom?” I asked.

“She knows more than she used to, but I can’t go into
details,” Mr. Bennett explained. “I know this is hard, but Thornhill thinks it’s best that you not discuss this with anyone, including your parents. We all know the pieces that we know, but he doesn’t think it is safe for us all to be talking openly—at least not yet.”

“I don’t mean to buck Thornhill,” Hal said, “but does he remember that we’re only ninth graders?”

“He does, but he told me that
if I ever had the chance, to tell you there’s something he wants you to remember instead. He said to remember that not all C33 offspring have powers,” Mr. Bennett said. “Despite her obvious talents, Cornelia doesn’t show any signs of it.” He looked at Nia. “Neither does Cisco. And, Zoe, your sisters, too—nothing. Saving Amanda—saving all of us—is truly up to you four.”

Chapter 10

Sunday night
is always the best night of the week in our house. Whatever scarcity of food there is during the rest of the week, my mom makes up for it on Sundays. She sets the radio to the jazz station, cooks something delicious that’s bound to make lots of leftovers, and the four of us eat together in the dining room. With candles.

When I pulled up to the house on my bike, it was great to see that all the
lights were on downstairs—but it was weird. I felt like I was a visitor from another planet. I felt like I’d been gone for years, not just a day. I knew so much now. About my dad. About what had happened to him and to us.

Inside the house, it was warm. I smelled onions and garlic frying in olive oil, the sweet aromas released by cooking tomatoes. And some kind of meat? I knew we had some kind
of ground beef in the freezer—my mom has been too busy to grocery shop for the longest time, which usually means there’s not much to eat around the house, but when she does take the time to cook, she is amazing at turning whatever random piece of zucchini or crust of Parmesan cheese and half a box of pasta into a meal. And usually that would be a Greek meal. To me, home is all about the smell of
moussaka, lemon and rosemary-scented olives; yeasty, stretchy flatbread; thick, creamy yogurt with just the right kind of tang. And baklava. When my mom invests the time to layer nuts and phyllo dough and butter, the house smells like cinnamon all day—yum. One of the first pictures I took and really loved was of Iris and Pen licking the honey sauce off their fingers when they were four. The print
used to hang on the wall by the stairs in our old house. I wonder where it is now?

I felt so different I half expected my mom to be able to tell just by looking at me, but she glanced at me hurriedly and said only, “Hey, Zo, great you’re here. Can you set the table quick for me?”

My mom has never looked like other people’s mothers. She’s kind of like a bird—her legs are little sticks and her
neck is graceful and long. Her hands are so small she can hardly span an octave on the piano, but she can—she plays beautifully. I’ve never seen her dress casually, except in the early days of the RV trip, when she wore my dad’s old sweatshirt every day and alternated between crying and driving. Usually, she wears silk and finely woven wool jackets with tailored dark jeans and cute shoes. I’ve seen
her mow the lawn in an angora sweater.

Now, she wore a vintage top, skinny jeans, and suede ankle boots that drooped at the top. My sisters were sitting across from each other doing their homework in the breakfast nook, and while I hung up my jacket, my mom stepped away from the stove to lean over them, checking Pen’s math sheet as the wooden spoon in her hand dripped red sauce onto the paper.

“
Think
about it. Half of the factory’s output is four hundred and sixty-eight apples. So what’s a third of the basket? How would you figure that out?”

Because she’s a tiny person, you don’t expect it, but when Mom opens her mouth she sounds like Billie Holiday. Sings like her too.

Pen looked up at her now. Both twins have huge brown eyes set deep into their faces. My mom calls them “Greek eyes,”
which always made my dad laugh out loud.

“There’s two ways to do it,” Iris prompted.

“Don’t help me,” said Pen. She doesn’t like it that Iris has a great math brain and finishes her math homework in half the time.

“How was the library?” my mom said, glancing up at me as she went back to the stove.

“It was great.” By this point, I was pulling out a stack of plates. Brown with wheat stalk designs
on them. Chipped. When we first moved to Orion, my mom rented this house and bought everything we needed to furnish it at an estate sale. It all belonged to an old lady named Eunice—we ended up with five yellowed notepads that say at the top,
From the Desk of Eunice P. Clarke
. Amanda loved Eunice’s things, but I didn’t.

“Mom,” I said, laying down Eunice’s nasty old polyester napkins and her long-dulled
stainless steel forks—also patterned with a wheat stalk on the handles. “Do you ever think about Pinkerton?”

Mom froze in place over the stove, oven mitt poised dramatically. She put one hand out in front of her to grasp the oven’s handle, as if to steady herself. There are silent rules in my house: We don’t talk about Pinkerton. We don’t talk about my dad. “Do you think we’ll ever go back?”

My mom’s eyes begged me not to ask. The skin at my mom’s temples constricted, and she clenched her jaw, I could see that the topic was causing her pain.

But I needed to ask. I need to ask now. “Did Dad—?” I said. “Did Dad tell you about where he grew up?”

“Oh, Zo.” My mom can sing in one note what it might take other people a hundred pages to put into words. And she was almost singing now, so
in the lilting way she spoke those two syllables “Oh, Zo,” I could hear what she meant: I can’t talk about it. She meant: It doesn’t mean I love you any less. She meant: You forgot spoons.

And I got it, I really did. She just couldn’t go there. For years, things had been hard. And now, our life had settled into a routine. Mom actually likes her job, or should I say her two jobs: music teacher
at the high school and jazz singer two nights a week. For Pen and Iris, Pinkerton was a vague memory. Orion was home now.

But not to me
, I wanted to say. I touched the pendant under my shirt. I knew the vial was still inside it. I didn’t know if I would ever do anything with it . . . but I wanted it. I needed it with me the way I’d needed—insisted—on our dining room table having five chairs when
my mom had bought only four. Four chairs would have made it feel more real that my dad was never coming back.

The next morning I was already awake when my mom came into my room.

“Zoe?” she said, shaking my shoulder. “Time to wake up—you’re leaving for Washington extra early, remember?”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Want me to drive you?” she asked.

“No, that’s okay. You stay here and get the girls up .
. . I can ride my bike and meet my friends.” Easier this way. I could slip off and she could stay here, have a few quiet moments before the twins roared away.

Usually it was me wrestling my sisters into readiness, all of us in the kitchen, bumping into each other, pulling glasses down for OJ, or shoving sandwiches into lunch bags; but once I’d stumbled downstairs at this extra-early hour, only
slightly more alert after my shower, it was just me and Mom. She still smelled of the perfume she wore when she was getting ready to go out at night. I couldn’t help but wonder if
she
had slept at all. What time had she gotten home?

She set the kettle on to boil, and laid out on the table a package of Carnation hot chocolate powder and a single-serving box of corn pops—the cereal that, in a variety
pack, everyone in my family leaves for last.

“You’ll have to eat the cereal dry,” Mom said now. “We’re out of milk. I meant to get to the store yesterday, but I got busy—”

“That’s okay,” I answered. For a while after my dad died, we didn’t have the money for food—we ate a lot of tomato soup and mac and cheese from a box. Now, my mom was making okay money, but almost never had the time to shop.

“Hot water?” she said, as the whistle in the dinged-up kettle blew. I pushed my mug across the table so my mom could pour.

Eunice P. Clarke was really fond of small mugs the color of polluted pond water. We have, like, twenty-four of them, and not one is large enough to accommodate a whole packet of cocoa. If you wanted to even get close to the right proportion of water to powder, you had to
mound the cocoa on the water’s surface, so that it looked kind of like a volcano waiting to blow. A volcano with mini marshmallows on top.

“I found this in the mailbox last night,” she said. “You forgot the street number when you wrote out the address.”

“What?” I said, racking my brain to remember the last time I’d written anyone a letter. “Are you sure it isn’t a letter
to
me?”

“You’re the
return address,” she said. “And it’s your handwriting as well.”

I reached for the sealed envelope Mom slid across the table. Already, there was a hollow feeling in my chest. Surprises, I’d come to learn, were never good.

From the moment I touched the envelope, I was sure it was from Amanda. This might sound dumb, but even if she’s running for her life, Amanda loves paper. Every letter I’d ever
gotten from her—before and after her disappearance—had been transformed by her into something beautiful. She’d mark it with her coyote totem, or even just distress it a little with an interesting tear or an artful ink stain. She wasn’t afraid of cheap paper—half her journals were plain old copybooks—but she decorated them with ribbons or glued-on buttons or pictures from magazines. Everything she’d
ever touched she’d made her own.

This envelope was made from paper that was thin, almost more of a gray than a white, like the sky on a day that can’t quite decide whether to rain. I could see that someone had used white pastels to draw rain clouds. It was a funny kind of chalky pastel marking. But there was no denying that it was beautiful once you’d seen that it was there—a drawing of a chameleon,
like the one she’d chalked on my locker the morning she disappeared.

My mom was right about the address. It
was
written in my handwriting, made out to Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. But it was weird. There was no street number on the address. The post office had stamped
INSUFFICIENT ADDRESS—RETURN TO SENDER
. In the upper left hand corner of the envelope, where the return address belongs,
was my name. Again, in my handwriting.

But I had never seen this envelope before.

With shaking hands, I tore it open.

“What is it?” my mom said.

“Umm . . . ,” I said. There was nothing inside.

Part of me was so disappointed, I didn’t even want to bother making up a story. But I did. I lowered my voice, took a deep breath, looked my mom right in the eye.

“I think it’s this chain letter thing
a bunch of friends at school are trying out,” I said. I sometimes hate how good I am at lying.

“Is it connected to the D.C. trip?” my mom said.

“Not really,” I said, but then wondered for a second if maybe it was. As with the postcard, it was leading me to Washington D.C. Could that mean something? I stuffed the note into the pocket of my vest.

My mom raised her eyebrows. She leaned back in
her chair and sighed. Usually she’s too busy, but when we do sit down together and actually talk I am always startled by how little she lets you get away with.

“Mom,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I knew. About Dad. That she didn’t have to hide it from me anymore. “Yesterday—”

But she hadn’t heard me. When I looked up, she was staring out the window, lost in thought. Or maybe she was half
asleep. She was out so much at night these days I’d seen her drift off at the dinner table, and once, when I went by her office at school to ask a question, she had her head down on her desk with her eyes closed.

The cocoa was starting to sink into the water, and as I watched it drop, I gave it a stir before looking at my watch, seeing how late it had gotten, and running out to get on my bike
so I could meet the heinously early bus to D.C.