Hirsch didn’t continue right away. He looked at the two kids, then to Sergeant D’Angelo. Finally he said, “Yeah. The house is gone. This may be a small police department in a small town, but we have access to pretty much any piece of information that’s part of the public record,” he said. “After you came in here, we did a computer search for the Pendragons…and found nothing.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” asked Courtney. “No police record?”
“No, I mean absolutely nothing,” said Hirsch. A hint of frustration was creeping into his voice. “No birth certificates, no driver’s licenses, no social security numbers, no bank accounts, no deeds, no electric bills, no school records, no credit cards, no nothing! The Pendragons didn’t just disappear-it’s like they never even existed!”
Hirsch paced faster. He was getting upset because what he was saying didn’t make sense, yet it was true.
Finally Mark said, “B-But they do exist, don’t they? I mean, we know them.”
“I know!” snapped Hirsch. “I’ve had dinner at their house. I’ve driven Bobby to Boy Scouts. Here’s another one for you: We scanned back copies of the newspaper where Mr. Pendragon works and couldn’t find a single article he had written. But I remember reading them. I’ve discussed some of those articles with him.”
This was getting stranger by the second. Disappearing is one thing. But having someone’s whole history vanish seemed downright impossible.
“W-What about Uncle Press?” asked Mark nervously.
“Again, nothing,” answered Hirsch. “There is nothing we can find to prove that any of these people ever existed….”
“Except in our memories,” added Courtney.
That was a chilling thought. If what the captain said were true, the only thing left of Bobby and his family were the memories they all held…and the parchment papers in Mark’s bag. Captain Hirsch sat back down at the table and looked to the kids with pleading eyes. This had turned his orderly policeman’s mind inside out.
“Kids,” he said with a touch of desperation. “Help me out here. If there is anything you can add, anything that might help us figure out what happened to the Pendragons, please tell us.”
Mark and Courtney had plenty to add. It was all sitting in Mark’s backpack on the table in front of them. All they had to do was slide it over to Captain Hirsch. He would read the pages and take over. That’s what adults did. They took over and fixed things. It wasn’t Courtney’s call-the letters were to Mark. If they were going to tell the police about the pages, it would have to be Mark’s decision.
Courtney saw that he was staring at the pack. She knew exactly what was going through his mind. He was debating whether or not to give over the pages. He then looked to her and they made eye contact. Courtney wished that she had some way of helping him make the decision, but she honestly didn’t know the right thing to do. So she gave him a slight, helpless shrug that said, “You’re on your own.”
“Well?” asked Hirsch. “Can you guys think of anything else?”
Mark took a deep breath, turned to Hirsch and said, “No. We’re just as confused as you are.”
Decision made. Courtney picked up on Mark’s lead and added, “Yeah. We’re pretty freaked out.”
Hirsch took a deep, tired sigh and stood up saying, “Okay, we’re going to start an investigation. Tell your parents, tell your friends, tell anybody who’ll listen. If they hear anything about the Pendragons, have them call me. Okay?”
Courtney and Mark nodded. Hirsch then gave each of them a business card with his phone number on it. Mark grabbed his pack and they headed out.
Once they were out of the building, they walked silently for a long while. The police station was right near Stony Brook Avenue, which was the main business street in town. Most of the shops and restaurants were there. Since there was no mall in Stony Brook, the “Ave” as they called it was where everybody hung out. But Courtney and Mark weren’t interested in any of the temptations that the Ave held that day. They walked by the CD Silo without even a glance into the window; they weren’t tempted by the smell of the best french fries in the world coming from Garden Poultry Deli; they had no interest in ice cream from The Scoop; and they didn’t even think of going to the library. The front steps of the library was where everyone stopped first on a trip to the Ave because you were sure to find someone you knew there.
But not today. Not for Courtney and Mark. Somehow these familiar haunts didn’t seem so familiar anymore. Everything looked the same, but the last few hours had opened their eyes to the possibility that the world didn’t work exactly the way they thought it did. Between Bobby’s adventure and the strange disappearance of the Pendragons, everything they’d ever believed was thrown into question. With thoughts like this running through their heads, somehow grabbing a box of fries at Garden Poultry Deli didn’t seem all that appetizing. So the two walked past the usual places where their friends hung out and went into a small, quiet pocket park that was sandwiched between two buildings. They sat down on a park bench and stared at the ground.
Finally Mark looked to Courtney and asked softly, “Should I have told them about Bobby’s letter?”
“I don’t know,” was Courtney’s reply. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Mark tried to put his feelings into words. “I have a feeling,” he began, “that there’s an important reason Bobby is sending me his story.”
“Why? We haven’t even read what he wants yet,” said Courtney.
“Yeah, I know. But I think it’s more than that. I’ve got a feeling that something big is going on and Bobby’s only one part of it. There’s some serious stuff going on here. I mean like, cosmic stuff. Am I being weird?”
“Weird?” chuckled Courtney. “How could anything sound weird now?”
“Exactly! The idea of Travelers who understand languages, and territories, and flumes that send you across space and time…that stuff changes everything we know about how things work.”
This made Courtney fall silent. Mark was right. Up until now she was only thinking about Bobby and the Pendragons. But the implications of what they were reading were totally huge. Too huge to comprehend.
Mark continued, “As we were sitting with the police, I thought about what might happen if I gave them Bobby’s story. I came up with two possibilities. One was that they’d announce it to the world, there’d be a huge furor and we’d be smack in the center of it. Remember, I might still get more pages. I don’t think Bobby would want that kind of uproar, especially if he wants me to help him. If he did, he would have started right off by telling me to take his story to the newspapers.”
“What’s the other possibility?” asked Courtney.
“The exact opposite might happen. The stuff Bobby wrote about might be so disturbing to the world that they’d bury the whole thing and pretend it never happened…kind of like the aliens from Roswell, or the Kennedy assassination. People don’t like to hear that their nice, orderly world isn’t what they thought it was. I wouldn’t blame them; I’m not so thrilled about it myself.”
“There’s a third possibility,” added Courtney. “People may think we’re responsible. Everyone always wants easy answers and the easiest answer is that we made the whole thing up. It would be easier for people to think it’s all a hoax than to believe there are people who jump through wormholes and travel through the universe.”
It was hard to believe that only a few hours ago their biggest concern was that Bobby Pendragon had missed a basketball game.
Courtney looked to Mark and asked, “What do you think we should do?”
Before he could answer, someone reached in from behind, grabbed his backpack and yanked it out of his hands! Courtney and Mark looked up in surprise.
“What’cha got, Dimond? More magazines?” It was Andy Mitchell, the kid who caught Mark in the boys’ room reading Bobby’s first journal. He fumbled with the clasps on Mark’s pack, trying to open it.
Mark jumped to his feet, shouting, “M-Mitchell. G-give it back!”