The speedboat was only twenty feet behind them.
Chipper had his front paws on Emily’s seat to give him a better view of the situation. Jeff took a look at his phone. If Chipper had any great ideas, he was keeping them to himself.
Maybe there was only so much you could expect from a dog. Even a dog like Chipper.
“They’re going to hit us!” Jeff shouted.
This time, Emily turned around. But not, as it turned out, to see how close the speedboat was getting to them.
Emily did something that seemed completely, totally and absolutely insane.
She grabbed hold of the back of the motor with both hands and pulled forward, tipping the motor’s propeller, which was spinning at about a million miles per hour, out of the water.
It made a roar so loud it drowned out the speedboat for a second.
“Emily, what are you do—”
And then Jeff realized. He looked off to the left, and there was the red buoy.
It was the six-foot-tall metal marker that indicated the location of the rock wall just below the surface of the water.
They skimmed right over the submerged wall without touching it. If the motor had been down, there would have been one huge crashing noise and the boat would have come to a jarring halt.
As soon as they’d cleared the underwater fence, Emily dropped the engine back into the water and they kept on going.
Daggert and his friend, however, didn’t fare quite so well.
The speedboat crossed over the wall at high speed. Chipper and Jeff could barely believe what happened when that eighty-horsepower motor struck the rocks.
The front of the boat kept going. The transom — the back end of the boat — was ripped clean off.
Daggert and the driver pitched over the bow — flying through the air like a couple of massive seagulls — and disappeared into the water. No sooner had they landed in the drink than the front of the boat plowed right over them. The back end exploded. Flames and black smoke shot skyward.
“You did it!” Jeff said to Emily. “You did it!” Jeff was on his feet, arms in the air in victory. Chipper’s tail was wagging so vigorously it was making his entire body shake.
Emily steered the boat in a wide arc, heading back in the direction of Shady Acres, while Jeff kept his eyes on the wreckage, waiting to see if one or two heads would bob up above the surface of the water.
They did not.
Chipper barked at Jeff, which he took to mean he had been sent a message. He looked at his phone and saw that Chipper did, in fact, have something to say.
Wow.
Thirty-Four
Jeff wanted to believe they were in the clear, but they still had Bailey and Crawford to worry about.
When Daggert failed to show up in that boat with Chipper and Jeff, his associates would know something had gone wrong. So, even though they were headed back to the relative safety of Shady Acres, it really wasn’t that safe at all. The boy and the dog could not stay there long.
As the three of them approached Shady Acres, they saw two men and a woman standing at the end of the dock: Emily’s father — John Winslow — and Harry Green, from cabin number eight...
And the woman was Aunt Flo!
John grabbed hold of the boat as it reached the dock while Harry secured the front and back lines.
“Aunt Flo!” shouted Jeff, who would have been the first out of the boat if Chipper hadn’t leapt out ahead of him.
She had a slightly dazed expression on her face as she held her arms out to her nephew. As he hugged her, he said, “I was scared they’d killed you.”
Dozily, she said, “I’m still not sure what happened. But Mr. Green kind of filled me in.”
“I saw the whole thing,” Harry said. “And I brought John here up to speed, too. Whatever those men wanted, they sure got what was coming to them.” He was looking out across the lake at the still-burning boat.
“What did they want?” Emily’s father asked.
“Him,” Emily said, pointing to Chipper.
“A dog?” John said.
“You gotta be kidding,” Harry said.
Woozily, Aunt Flo said, “You know I don’t like dogs.”
Together, Jeff and Emily tried to explain what a special dog Chipper was, that he was the product of some secret government research centre. Not surprisingly, the adults were skeptical.
“We can talk to him with our phones!” Emily said. “I set it all up!”
“Come on, this is crazy,” John said.
Jeff handed John Winslow his phone. “Ask him something.”
“Ask him what?”
“Anything you want.”
Emily’s dad looked dubiously at the screen, then said to Chipper, “What’s three hundred and thirty times four hundred and ninety-one?”
Then, instantly,
162,030.
Emily’s dad did a double take.
Jeff asked, “Is that right?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Emily grinned. “Trust me, it’s right.”
“No, it’s a trick,” John said. “It’s the phone answering the question, not the dog. It’s an app or something.” He thought a moment. “I’ve got a better test.” He handed the phone back to Jeff, then knelt down next to Chipper and whispered something directly into his ear that no one else could hear.
He stood and said to Jeff, “If he’s so smart, he can tell you what I told him.”
Jeff read aloud from his phone, “Emily means the world to me and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
Emily looked as though she might tear up. She slipped an arm around her father’s waist and he drew her tightly to him. The man looked stunned. “I don’t know how this is possible.”
Harry said, “I think maybe it is, John.”
Jeff held up his phone so the others could see. “Chipper has more to say.”
They read:
They will be back. With more people.
“What’s he mean?” John asked.
“They’re going to keep looking for him,” Jeff said. “And I guess they’re going to be looking for me, too.”
“Just give them the dog and tell them you’re sorry,” Aunt Flo said. “Tell them you’ll never tell anybody about this!”
Harry put a hand gently on Flo’s arm. “I don’t think that’s going to satisfy them, Flo. Your nephew’s in danger. We have to get him away from here.”
Aunt Flo looked at John. “Didn’t you used to be a police officer? Can’t you do something about this?”
John looked at her helplessly. “I’ve never come up against something like this. But I know some people, I could make some calls and—”
“No,” Jeff said. “Chipper says these people from The Institute monitor all that kind of stuff. Anyway, I think Harry’s right. The part about me — about both of us — being in danger.” He put his hand on Chipper’s head. “But where do we go? How do we get there? I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s where I come in,” Harry said. “I’ll get you and the dog far enough away that you’re safe, and maybe by then we’ll have figured out what to do.”
Jeff looked at Chipper. “How does that sound?”
Okay.
“It’s a deal,” Jeff said. “But how did your van get here? How did you get here?”
“I’d seen what they did to your aunt here, and I was hiding behind one of the cabins. One of them — the woman — saw that I’d stupidly left the keys in the van. She took off with it. Luckily, I’ve got a second set. When they took off up the road, I started to run after them, but I couldn’t exactly catch up to a van. A little while later, I heard this crazy, high-pitched noise coming from the woods.”