"Jonah!" Angela screamed, running over to him. "You're here! I knew it! I knew it wasn't over yet; I knew you'd be coming back to this time period! And now you're finally here!"
Jonah seemed to be struggling to open his eyes. Timesickness, Angela remembered. It was something she hadn't had to think about in a long time.
"Jonah, you're here!" Angela yelled again, impatient for him to get over the timesickness and be able to tell her about all that had happened for him while she was living in 1932. His eyes finally opened, and Angela said again, "Jonah! You made it back!"
She watched as Jonah's eyes widened, and he pushed himself up into a sitting position. "Angela! What are you doing here?"
Angela couldn't resist giving him a little shove. "I thought you'd be happy to see me!" she said teasingly. "I did what your note told me to do! Where's the gratitude? Don't you know how awful it is to be a black female in the 1930s? Don't you know what all I've done for you?" Now that she'd started talking, she couldn't seem to stop. It felt so good to once again be able to talk to someone who could actually understand and acknowledge what she was saying. "I was expecting excitement and hugs—not that it's really safe for a black girl to be seen in public being hugged by a white boy in 1932, but—" she suddenly broke off, noticing that Jonah looked even paler than usual, his eyes still huge. "Jonah, you're as white as a ghost. What's wrong?"
Jonah slumped against the wall of the office, moaning. "I don't understand anything."
"What don't you understand? What's happened since JB and I went to 1932? How did you end up here? Where've you been?" Angela could have kept going with dozens of other questions, but she clamped her mouth shut, realizing that none of her questions were going to be answered unless she gave Jonah a chance to talk.
"I watched what happened to the Lindberghs after you guys got sucked into the monitor," Jonah began. "I saw the whole investigation, and the ransom notes, and the baby—they found the baby a couple months later. He was dead. But he wasn't me! I was—I'll get to that later. Anyway, after Lindbergh found out his baby was dead, he wrote a letter to time travelers in the future, saying that he'd do whatever they wanted him to do if they could give him his son back. Gary and Hodge saw the letter, and that's why they hired him to steal Katherine. But—" He took in a huge gulp of air. "But it gets worse. After he took Katherine, he turned her back into a baby. And then Gary and Hodge pulled me in through the monitor and tried to convince Lindbergh I was his son. And I mouthed to him that I wasn't, but I'm not sure if he understood… anyway, he wasn't really convinced either way, so he gave me the Elucidator to see if I think like a Lindbergh, and I grabbed Katherine and ran out of there as fast as I could."
Angela's head was spinning. Katherine was a baby? Jonah had gotten an Elucidator from Lindbergh? What Jonah had just described must have been what had been happening when she'd seen him running out of the office with Gary and Hodge on his heels. Wait—where was Katherine now?
Jonah wasn't done. "It was a parental-controls Elucidator, of course. It said it could only take me to three places—here, my living room earlier this morning, and the time crash. It started taking me to my living room this morning, but I realized Katherine and I couldn't go there because we'd already lived through that time, so I told it to bring us to the time crash, since it said it could give us thirty minutes before the plane actually arrived. That's when I got the idea to give you a note. So I went there, and I wrote that note and gave it to you, but—" His brow wrinkled in confusion. "But you never read that note! And how can you be here right now, if you never—it doesn't make any sense!"
Jonah's speech was starting to sound almost as disorganized as Tete's had become before he'd stopped talking altogether, and Angela wasn't sure what he was getting at. "What happened after you gave me the note?" she asked, trying to get him back on track.
"After I gave you the note… I got caught by Gary and Hodge. I guess they'd followed me there; I mean, it was pretty easy to figure out where I'd gone, since the Elucidator only gave three options… anyway, they took Katherine away from me and then they—they split time."
"What?" Of all the things Angela had been expecting Jonah to say, all the worst-case scenarios, this was something that hadn't even crossed her mind. "What do you mean, they split time? Like Second did back in the 1600s?"
"I don't really understand how it all worked," Jonah still looked like it was taxing his brain to even think about any of this. "But they made it so that I was still there when the plane landed, with me on it, and that split time… and then they took me off the plane and put Katherine on it and Lindbergh flew it off into the future, with all the other kids still on it. Gary and Hodge were really excited because they'd finally gotten everything they wanted. They said in the other version of time, the one that split, they'd finally have their glorious future with lots of money and there would be no time agents to get them in trouble. And they said the version of time I was in was going to collapse soon because of me and baby me being in the same time period. They left me there with him—with me—with the baby, and… well, there wasn't really anything I could do…" He trailed off for a moment, but Angela could tell he wasn't finished. "The only thing I could think of to do, to fix something, was to give the baby version of me to my parents. So I went to my house to drop him off—I mean, drop me off—and I was trying to think about how to do it, and how to make them believe me, when this lady showed up. She said she was a social worker from the adoption agency, and she somehow knew I'd be there with the baby… and she thought it was my older sister's baby, and apparently my 'older sister' had signed the papers to give the baby up for adoption, and sent me to drop him off… and then she said my sister had left this in her office, and gave it to me to give back to her." He held up what looked like a giant marble, and Angela realized that it was another Elucidator.
"So I don't get it at all!" Jonah continued, his voice now bordering on hysteria. "I was thinking at first that time agents had arranged for me to get this Elucidator, but that doesn't make any sense, because how would any time agents know I was there? Only Gary and Hodge knew I was in that time period. And I don't understand how you're here, because Gary and Hodge changed everything in both versions of time, and now you never stepped onto that plane and saw those babies and talked to the FBI agents, which means you wouldn't have a reason to keep my note, and you never would have traveled through time…"
Angela squinted in confusion, still trying to process all of this new information. "But… of course I've traveled through time. Of course I saw all those babies on the plane and talked to the FBI agents. Of course time agents were the ones who arranged for you to get that Elucidator—" She wasn't sure about that last one, but if Gary and Hodge had wanted Jonah to remain in a collapsing dimension of time with the baby version of himself, it wouldn't make much sense for them to provide him with a way out.
"Then why aren't time agents here now, helping us out?" Jonah challenged.
Angela realized that they'd been standing outside the airfield office for several minutes now. What if Gary and Hodge decided to come back? She glanced around nervously, scanning the perimeter for signs of anything suspicious.
"Are you afraid Gary and Hodge might come back?" Jonah asked, reading her mind.
"Right now I'm afraid of everything," Angela confessed. "You're right. None of this makes sense, so I don't know what we're supposed to do. What if we make a bigger mess of things?" Her initial plan, before she'd heard Jonah's story, had been to go back to 2012 as soon as they were reunited. But by the sounds of it, 2012 by now might be very different than what she remembered.
But the time crash had to have still happened, right? Because she remembered it?
Jonah spoke up. "Let's find JB first. He can help us. And then—"
Right. He doesn't know. Angela winced, not really knowing how to break the news about JB. "I'm not—"
She was interrupted by a shout from one of the reporters way off on the other side of the gate. Hoping she and Jonah hadn't been spotted, Angela placed one hand over Jonah's mouth, and the other on his arm to guide him down to the ground.
The shouting didn't stop; it only seemed to intensify. If Angela strained her ears, she could make out words: "How'd you get in? Hey! Hey, kids, how'd you get in?"
"I think they've seen us," she whispered to Jonah.
"Um, Gary and Hodge?" Jonah squeaked.
"No," Angela assured him. She explained about the reporters, who were now shouting out questions about Lindbergh. "Maybe they'll shut up if we go into the office," she concluded. With a sickening feeling, she remembered that as soon as they went into the office, Jonah would come face to face with catatonic Tete. "But first I have to warn you—" She stopped, still not sure how to say it.
"What?" Jonah looked frightened.
"JB's in the office," Angela blurted out.
"But—that's great!" Jonah exclaimed. "So we don't have to worry about finding him. He can tell us how to do everything else—get Katherine back, get the other kids back, fix my parents…"
Angela's heart broke at Jonah's unbridled enthusiasm. "It's going to be hard for you even to look at him," she warned.
Before she had a chance to elaborate, the shouting from the reporters became louder, the questions more obnoxious: "Could Colonel Lindbergh comment about what it was like to find out that the whole time he was looking for his child, the baby was dead and lying in a shallow grave not even five miles away?"
What do they think it felt like? Angela thought, amazed at their audacity. "Come on," she said to Jonah as the reporters continued to ask questions. "We've got to get away from that." She and Jonah crept around to the door, staying low just in case the reporters actually hadn't seen them yet.
Angela had kind of forgotten that Tete was sprawled practically right front of the doorway. As soon as Jonah entered the room, he froze, staring at the boy in the chair. Angela had had plenty of time to adjust to this sad new reality, but Jonah hadn't. Imagining how Jonah must be feeling right now made her choke up.
"It's like JB's vanished from inside his own body," Angela managed to explain. "I think the un-aging and the time changes made his schizophrenia come back, kind of like his asthma. I've been afraid to leave 1932 to get medicine for him, because I wasn't sure I could get back in to meet you. And the medicine they had in 1932 to treat schizophrenia… I've been afraid to give that to him too."
"Wait—you mean you've stayed in 1932 this whole time? Since—since you arrived in March, the night of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping?"
Angela nodded, thinking back to the night she'd first arrived. "The first thing I saw was the baby already dead on the ground under the ladder—I think JB saw even more. We both went a little crazy, because we thought that was you. We thought we'd failed at everything that mattered."
"I'm not the Lindbergh baby," said Jonah. "I already told you."
"Yeah, well, I knew that as soon as I thought to consult the Elucidator I'd secretly smuggled into 1932 with me without telling JB," Angela explained. "The one I'd been afraid to use until we got to 1932 because I thought it'd mess everything up." She cast another glance at JB/Tete, who was still staring vacantly in his chair. "JB was so grief-stricken at the thought that he'd caused your death that I guess it broke his last connection to being JB, not Tete Einstein," she told Jonah, thinking back to how the whole thing had started, and how Tete had perseverated on the ladder and the idea that he'd done "something bad." "Though I didn't realize it at the time," she continued. "I didn't go to help him right away because I thought he could handle everything better than me anyway."
"I saw on the monitor what JB told Charles Lindbergh and the police," said Jonah. "But the monitor didn't let me see what happened to JB after he left that room."
Angela pulled the locket Elucidator out from under her dress, and explained that she'd used it to get JB out of police custody, and to get food.
"Weren't you afraid it would mess up time too much to have JB show up as a suspect and then disappear?" Jonah asked.
"No." At the time, Angela had been much more concerned about the impact of JB showing up as a suspect and not disappearing. "There were all sorts of crazy tips coming in and suspects and allegations—pretty much everything about that crime and the investigation was insane, so it didn't change anything." She'd learned this from the Elucidator and some news articles she'd read during her first couple days in 1932.
"But you couldn't just tell the Elucidator, 'Make JB sane again'? You couldn't tell it, 'Stop Gary and Hodge from kidnapping Jonah'? Or 'Fix everything that's messed up right now'?" Jonah complained.
Angela rolled her eyes. "Jonah, you of all people know that nothing with an Elucidator is that simple. I have asked it, practically every hour, 'Let me talk to Hadley Correo or some other time agent from the future.' And it always tells me, 'Not possible at this juncture.' It's as frustrating as the Magic Eight Ball I had when I was a kid."
Jonah looked down at the marble Elucidator he was holding, which seemed to be glowing with words now, although Angela couldn't make out what they said. "What if my Elucidator gives a different answer?" Jonah said. Leaning close to his Elucidator, he asked, "Could you let me talk to Hadley Correo or some other time agent? Or maybe JB from some point in the future when he's perfectly sane?"
Angela leaned over to see that Jonah's Elucidator was responding NOT YET. "Well, at least it's a slightly different answer," she pointed out, shrugging.
Suddenly, there was a knock on the door.
