The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Read online

  Arabella knew I was quick with music and languages, and of course, we’d had a lot of fun teaching ourselves to read lips in fifth grade while practicing to be spies. But how had she guessed I’d picked up French while Mom dragged us through Quebec on the RV trip of the century?

  And what the heck did “The observer is a prince who enjoys hiding his identity wherever he goes” mean? Knowing Arabella, it was probably some random quote. She used to collect quote dictionaries for fun.

  But I didn’t get it. Arabella had been my best friend. Since she’d moved, I’d been imagining running into her in every mall and every movie theater I’d set foot in. Why wasn’t she dropping the tray and running over to me instead of mouthing the words to some arcane French quotation?

  I decided to approach this logically. The observer—that describes me perfectly, but “the observer enjoys hiding his identity”—that had to be her. She was the one who had changed her name. And you don’t want someone to blow your incognito status if it is something that you’re enjoying. So I got the message—I’m Amanda now, not Arabella, and I don’t know anyone here. Including you.

  With a shiver I made a connection to the stories I used to hear my dad and Amy telling. That camp place or school—sometimes it sounded almost like a prison—Arabella had heard those stories too. Arabella had disappeared only a few weeks before my dad had died. Was it possible those two events were connected?

  For the briefest second, I just didn’t care. About the stories, or the danger I’d sensed was lurking in them. Why did this have to be my problem? Why couldn’t I just be a kid and have my best friend back?

  I wanted to run up to her and squeal like other girls my age. I wanted to jump up and down and look ridiculous. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I knew what was at stake. “Amanda, is it?” I said to Justin now. I had to feel how the word Amanda sounded on my lips. If this was her new name, I’d learn to use it. If this was what she wanted, I’d give it to her. In honor of what once was. Of who I had once been. Of the danger my dad had tried so hard to protect my family from.

  “You know her?” Justin asked.

  “For a second, I thought she looked like someone I used to know,” I answered. “But it’s not her.”

  Chapter 3

  The morning after the talent show I had a text waiting for me from Hal when I woke up. That’s weird, I thought, rubbing my eyes as I checked my phone. After all the excitement of rocking the talent show and figuring out the latest Amanda clue, I assumed we’d all be sleeping in—Nia’s death vision or no, we needed sleep.

  HAL 07:53:41

  CORNELIA FOUND SOMETHING. GET OVER

  TO MY HOUSE AS SOON AS YOU CAN.

  Cornelia was Hal’s sister—she’s a technology whiz and good at keeping secrets. Cornelia helped Hal hack into Thornhill’s computer and set up the Amanda Project website to track Amanda. Though I hadn’t been part of all that, I already knew Cornelia because my twin sisters, Pen and Iris, were in her grade at school.

  Cornelia was one of those rare kids who was really rocking middle school. She was good at school and sports, she was a computer genius, and when she had something to say, she just said it. I was always glad to see my sisters hanging out with her.

  Since I’m a “ten seconds to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth” person, I took a really quick shower and slid a note under my mom’s door: Quiz bowl team practice—all day. Which technically was true. One of the secrets to hiding in plain sight is knowing that the more clubs and activities you’re a part of, the better. When you don’t show up for things, people just assume you have somewhere else to be.

  I hopped on my bike and took off. It was weird how used to my mom sleeping in I was getting. Sure, it must be exhausting singing gigs at jazz clubs and the occasional wedding, in addition to teaching music at Endeavor, but she’d never seemed to be this tired before. She’d also never seemed to have this many gigs.

  The fact that she might be lying to me, that the gigs might not really be gigs—this was something I hated to think about. I didn’t want to acknowledge that Mom was never, ever home, even on Mondays when most jazz clubs are closed.

  But I was thinking about it. And I had a suspicion.

  Given all the crazy stuff that’s happened to my family, I knew my suspicion wasn’t the only explanation, but still, I felt it in my gut. Mom had met someone. A guy. A man.

  Ugh. I pedaled harder.

  I know my dad is dead. I know he has been gone four years, but still, I wasn’t ready for my mom to be seeing someone new.

  And honestly? Neither was she. We were told he’d had a heart attack during a late-night sales event at the car dealership where he worked. That wasn’t the whole story, though. My mom knew there was more, and I found out later what she knew. At the time, all I understood was that we were leaving our home in Pinkerton, California, without even arranging for my dad’s ashes to be scattered—there wasn’t even time for a funeral. We’d left a house full of furniture, milk in the fridge, all the artwork we’d made as kids in frames in the hall. We hadn’t even packed our answering machine. Just because “closure” is a word you mostly hear on daytime talk shows doesn’t mean it isn’t real, or not something people need after a death. And—unlike the smile my mom pastes on her face whenever a new acquaintance asks what happened to Dad and she gives some vague line about his passing—it isn’t something you can fake.

  In my mind my dad was still tinkering with cars in the driveway, still standing in front of the coffee maker watching the drips fill the pot on school mornings. He was still there, waiting for us to come home.

  Last winter Amanda and I were watching an old movie called An Affair to Remember on late-night TV, and I was complaining about how unbelievable the movie was. She got a melodramatic, mock-dreamy look in her eyes and said, “Maybe, but you don’t have to understand something to believe that it can be true.” We laughed, because it could have been a line from the movie. But still, she looked at me kind of intensely, like she was hoping what she was staying would stick. I wondered if she’d been talking about the way I make myself disappear. But later, I realized Amanda might not have been talking about that. Maybe her question had been her way of letting me know that she understood I still believed my dad might still be alive somewhere.

  I left my bike in the back of Hal’s house, next to the garage, and since I heard voices in the kitchen, I knocked on the back door. Hal opened it and I could see that he’d been eating breakfast with his whole family.

  Uh-oh, I thought. I was going to have to talk to them.

  “Who’s that?” I heard Hal’s mom call.

  “A friend,” Hal called back. To me, he said, “We’re just finishing breakfast. Want to join us?”

  I shrugged, moving into the room.

  I felt kind of stupid for interrupting them. Since we left Pinkerton I’ve tried to avoid friendships with people who might ask questions like, “Where’s your dad?” or “How come there isn’t any stuff in your house from when you were little?” Sitting down to breakfast with Hal’s family felt dangerously close to the kind of friendship encounter I’d been trying to avoid.

  But Hal’s mom pulled out an extra place setting so quickly it was as if she’d had it waiting for me. She poured me a glass of orange juice, and Hal’s dad said, “One pancake or two?”

  “Don’t worry,” Hal’s mom added. “I didn’t make them.” From the way everyone laughed, I gathered Hal’s mom is not that much of a cook.

  But if there was a picture in Wikipedia next to the entry for “beautiful family,” Hal’s would be it. Mr. Bennett is really quiet, but Mrs. Bennett is the kind of person who, when she’s focused on you, you kind of feel like no one else is in the room. While I inhaled my pancakes—I’d forgotten to eat anything at home—she asked me a litany of questions. Wasn’t I on the newspaper and how does the layout work and isn’t that amazing and what a great thing to be photo editor.

  Cornelia admired the antique pendant I always wear. It�
��s a lachrymatory—a fancy little Victorian silver box with a glass vial inside, originally meant to hold your tears after someone dies. Amanda gave it to me after I admired it on her and I always wear it now, tucked under my shirt. When she’d first left it under my pillow, she’d put a note inside: May you fill this, and heal your heart. “Thanks,” I said to Cornelia now, tucking the pendant back inside my shirt.

  When the doorbell rang, Cornelia ran to get it. Even though she was dressed for soccer in a baggy T-shirt, silky shorts and shin guards, you could tell she was going to be gorgeous—she has huge, beautiful blue eyes, and moves like someone who has never doubted her place in the world.

  Cornelia led Callie and Nia into the kitchen, and Hal stood up anxiously. He looked at Nia quickly, but when he looked at Callie, his gaze lingered. She blushed, looked down, then quickly looked up again, meeting his gaze. Neither one of them noticed Mrs. Bennett’s sharp glance, but I did. She saw exactly what was going on.

  Cornelia started peppering Callie with questions about the talent show, and pretty soon all of us were discussing it. After going over the details, Cornelia said, “Hey Callie, let me show you some videos of the talent show I found online.” I could tell she was making an effort to keep her voice from sounding rehearsed.

  “Meet me in the office,” Cornelia said. “I’m going to grab something from my room.” We’d barely had a chance to sit down in the office when Cornelia was back, carrying a CD.

  “Is that Girl Like Me’s new single?” Nia asked, one eyebrow raised. Girl Like Me was Hal’s band.

  “It’s better than that, if you can believe it,” Cornelia said. “This, people—” She was so excited her face looked like it was about to explode. “This is Thornhill’s hard drive.”

  “What?” said Hal.

  “How did you—?” said Callie.

  “I worked some very special magic,” Cornelia said, twirling the disc on her index finger and clearly enjoying our looks of surprise.

  “I was working in the computer lab after school yesterday, wiping the hard drives of faculty machines that were going to be reassigned. It’s usually pretty boring. After we wipe the data we optimize the drives and beef up the memory and make sure peripherals are mounting, install new system software. You know.”

  When Cornelia said, “You know,” the sad fact was we didn’t. Whatever the reasons Amanda picked us to be her guides, our collective computer savvy was not one of them.

  “When I opened up Thornhill’s machine,” Cornelia went on, “I recognized the IP address right away. I couldn’t believe they’d sent it down to us already. I mean, wouldn’t he need this stuff if he was coming back?”

  I exchanged a glance with Nia. “I suppose no one really believes he’s coming back,” she said.

  “Or maybe someone figured that his machine was fried,” Cornelia said. “Which it was.” Cornelia looked toward Hal. “The data was completely scrambled, and at first I thought that the drive had been ruined by a virus. I had to put the drive into two different machines before I could get it to mount.”

  “So you’re saying the data is gone?” Hal said.

  “Nothing in the world of digital information is ever truly gone,” Cornelia said. “You just need to know where—and how—to get to it. I attached the drive to a functioning system—offline of course.”

  “You’re losing me,” said Hal.

  Cornelia ignored him. “I used recovery software better than what they have at school and it managed to retrieve some data. Then I ran some other programs that go a little deeper.”

  We were waiting for her to start speaking English again.

  “The long and the short of it is, if you put this disc into Mom and Dad’s computer, you’ll be able to see whatever you were trying to access before.”

  “You mean, I’ll be able to see what I was looking at when his machine shut down before?” Hal said. “Like that random list of people who live in Orion?”

  Cornelia nodded.

  “So what are we waiting for?” Callie said.

  Cornelia shrugged, amused. “Just me to stop explaining how I saved the day, as usual.” She slid the CD into the computer and clicked an icon. A list of documents opened.

  Hal leaned forward, excited. “This is exactly what I saw before,” he said, flashing a smile at his little sister. “This is everything that was on Thornhill’s machine. Wait, scroll down. That one.” Hal pointed. “That’s the file.”

  The file was labeled Cast List—Much Ado About Nothing. “Remember—the play this year was As You Like It?” he said. I could hear the pride in Hal’s voice. Back when he’d first broken into Thornhill’s computer, he’d cracked the code. What he didn’t know is that I’d been peering in the window of Thornhill’s office that afternoon, watching him. I didn’t mention that now.

  Cornelia opened the file, passed Hal the mouse, and we all gathered around the screen. There was total silence. We didn’t even breathe.

  Spread before us in a grid was a series of columns, symbols, numbers—coding so confusing it was overwhelming just to imagine figuring it all out. But we could see many names that were familiar.

  Some meant nothing to me. DeLonghi, Habbinson; Cole, Samara—but more of them I recognized.

  “Isn’t that that artist friend of Amanda’s you saw in Baltimore?” Callie said to Hal, pointing to the name Starfield, Frieda.

  “Louise Potts.” Nia had her index finger on Potts, Louise, the woman who ran Amanda’s favorite vintage clothing store Play It Again Sam.

  “When I was looking at this before, I realized that many of the names here”—Hal pointed to the column of names—“correspond to a number there.” He pointed to a second column buried between a slew of dates and figures. All the numbers started with C33.

  “The whole Bragg family is on there,” I said, pointing to Bragg, Heidi; her brother Bragg, Evan; Bragg, John, who is Heidi’s police chief dad; and Bragg, Brittney, Heidi’s local TV news celebrity mom.

  “And that must be Amanda and her family,” Hal said, pointing to Beckendorf, Max; Beckendorf, Annie; Beckendorf, Robin; and Beckendorf, Ariel, which we’d recently learned were Amanda’s family’s real names. “I’d thought it was strange before that so many names caught up in all of this were there, but not Amanda’s.”

  “Robin,” whispered Callie. “That’s the sister Thornhill asked us to try to find in Washington. She might be able to lead us to Amanda.”

  “And here’s Zoe Costas,” Hal said, turning to me with an ironic “You’re famous!” smile.

  I smiled back, but I also squinted at the screen. I saw it too. My name: Costas, Zoe. Right below Costas, Iris, and Costas, Penelope. Above Costas, Constantina.

  And then there was Costas, George.

  George Costas. My dad.

  Chapter 4

  I still can remember the phone call that changed everything. I was watching TV with my mom—a Food Network show about a chef who travels the world trying to find the most disgusting-sounding foods. Bugs, worms, animal intestines, sausages made from blood that are called puddings. The show was almost over and I was annoyed that my mom was going to miss the end. So I was only half listening to her.

  “Yes, this is she,” and then silence, and then the word, “No,” and then her voice starting to shake, “No.”

  I remember she sat down on the floor. Right on the linoleum.

  I remember that the show was still going, but I wasn’t watching anymore.

  I remember that Pen was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework. She was really little then, but she knew something was wrong too. I could see her moon face through the door.

  I remember when my mom started to cry.

  “Constantina’s your mom, and aren’t your sisters Iris and Penelope? So George is your dad.” Hal said now. I was still staring at the screen. I so didn’t want to talk about this.

  I swallowed hard. I thought of six different ways I could make myself disappear. Under the couch. Through the open French
doors. Behind the curtains. Or the desk. Or by holding a book open in front of my face. “Yes . . . George Costas is my dad,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Callie.

  “I wonder why his name is highlighted in yellow like that?” Nia asked.

  I was doing a really good job hiding my emotions, but I know my voice shook when I said, “Maybe because my dad’s dead.”

  I could tell from the silence that no one knew what to say. I guess they were all thinking about whether to say “Sorry,” but they couldn’t tell if that would just make me feel worse.

  I was glad I’d told them. Sort of. I also felt my brain traveling to the hall closet. I could pretend I needed to go to the bathroom and hang in the dark silence for a while, and then slip out the front door.

  But instead I forced myself to look at the computer.

  Hal scrolled down the list again. “Here’s my family,” he said, tight and grim. He looked up at Cornelia. “See, Corn? There’s you.” For the first time, Cornelia didn’t look like she was one step ahead of all of this. Her eyes opened wide. I thought for a second about Iris and Pen. They didn’t know what I did about how my dad had really died.

  Nia crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Am I on that list?” she asked. Hal scrolled through. “There,” he pointed for her.

  Nia leaned forward then shot right back up again. Her eyes narrowed. “My parents are on there too. And Cisco.”

  “Are mine?” Callie asked. Hal scrolled down some more and found hers. “My mom—” Callie said. “Is her name the regular color?”

  “Yes,” Hal confirmed. “It is.”

  Hal scrolled down from her name, and clicked on one of the other names on the list. A new window opened.

  “So let me show you how this whole thing works,” Hal said. “Ever heard of Marguerite Blaine?”

  We all shook our heads.

  “Me neither,” said Hal. He clicked on the paper clip next to her name. “But here’s her driver’s license.” And there it was. A scan of a Indiana license, showing a woman with tight curly hair, big blue eyes and a goofy smile. Hal scrolled down. “She lives in a town called South Whitley. She’s forty-three. Five foot six.” He scrolled down and we saw another license, this time from Maryland.