Sabotaged

24

Jonah scrambled over the rocks, hoping he could get to the real chest before the tracer boy moved away. As far as Jonah was concerned, one rock looked pretty much like any other. Without the tracer boy standing there, Jonah might have to search for a long, long time.

The tracer boy stepped to the next rock, the tracer chest balanced on his shoulder. It was that other rock where he bent down and found the chest, Jonah thought, the rock shaped like a witch’s nose… The tracer boy was walking faster now. He was three rocks away. Jonah crouched low and dived forward, straight through the tracer boy.

The witch-nose rock was hard, with razor-sharp edges.

“Note to self,” Jonah mumbled. “Don’t tackle rocks.”

He’d scraped both the palm of his right hand and his right knee-ripping right through his blue jeans. And, for the first time, Jonah realized that his dive might have been for nothing: What if some time change affected the chest, too, and the real one isn’t here? he wondered.

But it was right there at the base of the witch-nose rock. Waves still slapped against the lower half of the chest, but it was wedged in so tightly that it wasn’t being battered like the boards from the boat.

Jonah reached down and tugged on the handles. Once again, Jonah was in awe of the tracer boy’s strength: Jonah had to tug so hard, and the tracer boy had picked up the chest as if it was nothing.

Maybe it wasn’t wedged in as tightly, in original time, Jonah rationalized.

Grunting, he managed to free the chest from between the rocks and drag it up to more level, dry ground. The chest was fairly small-not much bigger than Jonah’s backpack for school. Jonah turned it on its side and started trying to figure out its latch.

Dare began barking.

“Don’t worry, boy, if it’s a million dollars’ worth of gold coins, I’ll share,” Jonah muttered. “Or if it’s the clue to solving all our mysteries, you’ll get to go home too.”

Dare kept barking.

“Okay, okay-what?” Jonah looked up.

Dare was twisting back and forth between Jonah and the tracer boy. But the tracer boy was barely visible now. He hadn’t stopped to look at what was in the chest. He was just carrying it away, back toward the Indian village. Only his head and the tracer chest on his shoulder showed above the tall grasses.

“Never mind,” Jonah told the dog. “We can find our way back on our own.”

Dare whined and tilted his head to the side, as if he didn’t trust Jonah’s sense of direction. Or, as if he wanted Jonah to picture how worried Katherine and Andrea would be if the tracer boy showed up back in the village and Jonah was nowhere in sight.

Jonah fiddled for a moment longer with the latch, which was made of some sort of ornate metal. But he couldn’t really focus anymore. His hands shook.

“All right,” Jonah told Dare. “Since you miss the girls so much…”

Jonah lifted the chest and stepped to the next rock. At first he tried to hold the chest in front of him, by both handles. But that made it hard to walk. His legs kept hitting the chest.

Jonah glanced ahead at the tracer boy, at how effortlessly he carried his tracer chest.

When in Rome…, Jonah thought, one of his mother’s expressions. Only, here would it be, When on Roanoke Island, do what the fake Indians do?

With difficulty, Jonah managed to raise the chest to the level of his shoulder and slide it into position. He staggered forward.

“Really, I am in good shape,” Jonah told the dog. “I play soccer. And basketball.”

His arms were going numb from holding the chest up so high.

In the end, Jonah found he had to drag the chest most of the way, just to keep up with the tracer boy. He didn’t even look at the ridges he made in the sandy soil. He kept himself going by imagining exactly what sort of treasure might be inside. Gold coins actually wouldn’t be very useful right now-maybe the chest contained food that John White had brought from England.

Surely the trunk was watertight enough that the food wouldn’t have been ruined? Surely, if there was food in both the tracer and real versions of the trunk, that would mean it was safe to eat?

Jonah was afraid he might begin drooling, thinking of this possibility.

Maybe the chest contained weapons meant for hunting food: knives, compact bows and arrows.

Maybe Jonah was adapting to this time period a little too well: He was actually hoping for weapons instead of gold.

The tracer boy entered the Indian village with the bearing of a warrior coming home from a great victory. A few steps behind, Jonah decided the least he could do was put the chest back on his shoulder before he walked into the village. He stumbled into the clearing on the tracer boy’s heels.

“Oh, no, Jonah, what happened to you?” Andrea gasped.

Jonah looked down. Beneath the torn place in his jeans, his knee was caked with dried blood. He had scrapes from the rocks on his arms, as well as his hands. He put on a grin, hoping he just looked like some battered action hero at the end of a movie. Indiana Jones, maybe. Or Jason Bourne.

“I found a treasure chest,” Jonah offered. “It was a little rough, getting to it.”

He hoped Andrea and Katherine didn’t notice that the tracer boy wasn’t so battered.

“You think John White really was doing some of that privateering himself?” Jonah asked, to distract them. “Stealing Spanish gold?”

“No, no, not him,” Andrea said, wincing. “It couldn’t be…”

The tracer boy was placing the tracer chest down on the ground, in front of John White. Jonah was surprised to see that the real man was completely joined with his tracer-both men were sleeping. But the second tracer boy was shaking the tracer man awake.

“Quick-put the real chest where the tracer chest is,” Andrea said. “So my grandfather won’t be confused if…”

“Quick”? Jonah thought. Do you know how heavy this is?

But he managed to drop the chest onto the ground in roughly the proper location. The chest didn’t join completely with its tracer; it didn’t shift into position the way a person would have.

Or, like a person should, Jonah thought.

Katherine nudged the real chest into place, exactly lined up with the tracer.

“Just in case,” she muttered. “At least we can do that much to fix time.”

Andrea crouched down in the same spot as the tracer boy. She began jostling her grandfather’s shoulder the same way, too.

“Wake up,” she whispered in his ear. “Oh, please, wake up!”

Jonah looked at Katherine. She shook her head.

“He’s been asleep the whole time,” she said. “That’s better for us, but… it’s breaking Andrea’s heart.”

Andrea was shaking her grandfather’s shoulder harder and harder.

“Andrea, you’re going to hurt him!” Jonah said sharply.

Andrea let go and slumped down to the ground. She put her head in her hands.

“Why doesn’t anything work?” she moaned. “The food pellet didn’t hurt me, so I gave him the food. I gave him water. I cleaned his wound again-he should be healing! He should be awake!”

Katherine moved over and gently put her arm around Andrea’s shoulder.

Hey! I could have done that! Jonah thought. He remembered how he’d vowed, way back at the beginning, to take care of Andrea. He hadn’t realized how complicated that would be. He was glad that Katherine seemed to know what to do.

“Let’s just watch,” Katherine said softly. “See what happens.”

The tracer version of John White was awake now. Jonah found that it really bothered him to look at the old man’s face, with the eerie staring eyes superimposed over the closed eyelids.

“Open it,” John White whispered, the tracer and the real man together. And then the tracer sat up, his upper half separating from the real man. Jonah winced-that didn’t look right either. But then he got distracted, watching the tracer.

The tracer John White was still talking, though Jonah couldn’t hear him anymore. He gestured, clearly giving directions for exactly how to open the chest. The boy who’d found it was crouched by the chest, his hands on the latch.

“We might as well see what’s inside too,” Jonah said, trying to sound casual, as if he was used to half tracers giving ghostly instructions.

He put his hands in the exact same position as the tracer boy’s and mimicked every movement. When the boy finally raised the lid, Jonah had to push a little harder. He hoped neither of the girls noticed how much it strained his muscles.

“So what’s in there?” Katherine asked. “Andrea’s family fortune?”

The tracer boy was already lifting the first item out of the chest. Jonah looked at it, did a double take, and then glanced down into the open chest.

“Paintbrushes?” Jonah said in disbelief. “Who bothers carrying art supplies halfway around the world?”