Fourteen

Emma

Mrs. Gustano threw her arms around Emma.

“You saved us!” she cried.

“Should we chase him?” Finn asked, as if he were about to take off running himself.

“Oh, no—that wouldn’t be safe,” Mrs. Gustano said, putting a firm hand on Finn’s shoulder.

Emma just ruffled her brother’s hair.

“We don’t have to,” she announced with a grin. “Don’t worry. I put a tracker on him. When I touched his name badge. So we’ll know everywhere he goes. As long as he doesn’t discover it and take it off.”

Mrs. Gustano’s jaw dropped.

“You’re even more of an evil genius than my Emma,” she said. “I mean, not really evil, but the exact opposite in this case.”

She was still staring off after the fleeing “police officer.” He’d reached his car down at the bottom of Ms. Morales’s driveway, scrambled into it, and was now speeding away.

“How’d you know he was fake?” Finn asked, tugging on Emma’s arm. Or maybe he was patting it in a congratulatory way. It was a little hard to tell. “You were upstairs! I thought you were still asleep!”

“I woke up just in time,” Emma said. She tried to make her smile a little modest, but that wasn’t possible. She could feel the corners of her mouth stretching out as far as they would go. “I could see out of the window upstairs and . . . Well, you know how much time we spent talking to cops when Mom was missing. No real cop would park that crookedly and then just amble up to the door. And I heard what he said. He didn’t identify himself, which the cops always did unless one of us said their names first. And did you see the . . . what’s it called? . . . the font of the writing on his name badge? Totally wrong.”

Mrs. Gustano started laughing. At least, Emma thought it was laughter. It sounded a little hysterical.

“You’re amazing,” she said.

“I just notice things,” Emma said, and this time she did manage to make it sound like she wasn’t bragging, but stating a fact.

Mrs. Gustano was maybe holding on to Emma a little too tightly.

“What’s going on?”

It was Ms. Morales. She appeared at the top of the stairs, rubbing her eyes and blinking in the sunlight from the upper-story window. She looked like she’d just jumped out of bed—she was still putting her arms into the sleeves of a silky robe.

And then Mom and Chess and Joe and Kona and Natalie crowded in behind Ms. Morales, all of them asking questions, too.

Emma waited for Mrs. Gustano to answer, but she didn’t. So Emma pulled away. She shut the door, then spun back to tell the whole crowd, “Everything’s fine.”

“It’s fine now,” Finn added quietly.

Finally Mrs. Gustano seemed to recover enough to tell the story as the whole crew came pouring down the stairs. Chess slipped in beside Emma and Finn in the midst of the hubbub.

“Good job,” he said, sounding like a proud big brother.

But he didn’t look like he thought the crisis was past. His eyes seemed huge in his pale face. His hair stuck up all over the place just as badly as Finn’s (and likely just as badly as Emma’s, too, though she hadn’t checked). Only when he glanced toward Natalie on the other side of the room did he reach up to start slicking it down.

Just then, Joe slid an iPad into Emma’s hands.

“Want to put in the code for that tracker, so we can see where that guy went?”

“Oh, right,” Emma said, typing away. She liked working with Joe—he already had the right website on the screen. Maybe because he knew the Greystone kids had gotten all the same electronic gizmos he’d used in the other world.

A map appeared on the screen, with one flashing light blinking across it.

“He’s turning out of this neighborhood . . . ,” Joe murmured.

“Here, Dad,” Kona said behind them.

Emma turned to see that Kona was holding out two laptops.

“The surveillance footage you wanted,” Kona said.

“That’s the Cuckoo Clock!” Finn exclaimed, pointing at one of the screens. “Are you checking to see if that fake police guy was there yesterday at the same time as us? Was he watching us then?”

“No, that’s the Cuckoo Clock now,” Emma corrected her brother. “See how empty the parking lot is?” In the grainy surveillance video, the normally cheerful, busy restaurant looked a little forlorn. “But why—”

“I think I’ve figured out a way to locate every spot anyone’s ever crossed over between the worlds,” Joe said. “For some reason, that restaurant is one of them.”

Because of the angel wing carving, Emma thought. The coin.

Was now a good time to gather the adults together and tell them about the coin? And show it to them and see if any of them could figure it out?

No—Joe was too fixated on staring back and forth between the two laptops and the iPad.

“So that’s the only reason you’re watching our house on your other laptop,” Finn said, as if this was a huge relief. “Because we used it as a crossing point. But Mom took the lever away from there, so—”

“We don’t know how many levers are out there, Finn,” Emma said, a little too sharply.

She looked back at the flashing light on the iPad and tried to mentally translate the lines of the map into the familiar streets of her own town. The fake police officer’s blip was twisting along a curvy stretch now—was that the street that Finn called Roller Coaster Road?

“Oh no,” Chess said, sounding as pained as if someone had stabbed him.

“What?” Kona and Joe both asked at once.

“That’s . . . that’s the route back to our house,” Chess mumbled. “What if he’s going there?”

“We already knew the bad guys have used our house as a crossing point,” Finn said. He sounded like he was trying to be brave, but couldn’t keep his voice from shaking. “Other-Natalie’s grandma told us that. It won’t matter if he goes there or not.”

But it does, Emma thought. Because their house wasn’t just a house. It wasn’t just a thing. It was where the Greystones had lived for eight years, the only place Emma remembered living. It was where they’d raced home from school every day, where Mom had tucked them into bed every night, where they’d read books and played games and drawn pictures and created inventions. Where they’d felt safe.

It was home.

Helplessly the three Greystone kids and Kona and Joe watched the flashing light on the iPad wind closer and closer to the Greystones’ neighborhood on the map. When the blip of light turned the last corner, Kona put the Cuckoo Clock laptop down on the couch and held out the one showing the Greystones’ house.

It only took a few moments for the fake police car to appear in the surveillance footage on that screen. The car pulled up in front of the Greystones’ house. The silver-haired fake police officer got out and ambled—no, sauntered—up to the front porch. He looked around, and then seemed to look straight up into the surveillance camera. Joe must have placed it in the porch light.

The silver-haired fake police officer smiled. He ripped off his fake name badge, flung it to the ground, and ground it under his heel.

On the iPad, the blip of light blinked completely out.

“He found the tracker,” Emma groaned. “Okay, so what? At least we can still watch and see . . .”

The fake police officer moved to the edge of the porch and crouched down to reach into the mulch in the nearest flower bed. He seemed to be prying up one of the stepping stones the Greystone kids had each made in kindergarten, when they’d pressed their hands in plaster.

“Why does he want my handprint?” Finn whimpered.

“I think that one’s mine,” Emma said. “Because, see, the edges are decorated with plus and minus signs. But . . .”

The fake police officer raised and lowered the stepping stone, as if he was calculating how much it weighed. Then he reared his arm back—and hurled the stepping stone toward the porch light.

On the laptop screen, Emma’s handprint stone seemed to fly closer and closer.

And then suddenly the screen showed nothing but fuzz.

“He broke the surveillance camera!” Emma wailed. “He knew we were watching all along! He did that on purpose!”