Philby spoke up. “Check out any ride, any exhibit, any pavilion, that has to do with flying and that shows up on the maintenance list.”
“Spaceship Earth,” Willa said.
“That goes onto the list,” said Philby, confirming its existence on his list. “And Finn, yes, we should keep the sword with us. But it should be you: that’s what Wayne would want. He could have gotten the fly message to us without all the sword stuff, so the sword must be important.”
“There are seven of us,” Finn said. “Three teams of two and one lookout. The lookout has to get to some place with a view of the—”
“Fireworks,” Philby said.
“No,” Finn said, “the whole park.”
“The control center for the fireworks is at the very top of this temple—the Mayan Temple.”
No one was going to question Mr. Encyclopedia.
Finn arched his head back to look nearly straight up at the top of the Mayan temple.
“How do we get up there?” he asked.
“There’s a door on the east side,” Philby said. “It leads to a staircase that goes all the way up. This time of night, no one will be in there. As long as we don’t touch anything…. Finn, you could all-clear through the door and let someone inside.”
“That would be me,” said Amanda, also looking up. “I was the lookout last time, right?” She didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “Okay, I’ll do it. But I’ll need to borrow someone’s phone in order to reach you.”
30
AS FINN’S MOTHER DRIFTED off to sleep at a few minutes past eleven her body twitched in a serious convulsion that rocked the bed. She sat bolt upright, throwing the covers off the bed. Her husband reached down, pulled the covers back up, and went back to snoring.
The code! Her mind had played tricks on her by replaying as a dream the afternoon spent sorting out the code with Finn and his friends, Willa and Philby.
“Wayne’s missing,” she recalled Finn telling her—accidentally telling her, if she were any judge of her son.
How could she have been so stupid? The code had nothing whatsoever to do with any competition, and everything to do with Wayne going missing. It had all made so much sense in her quick dream: she relived the expressions on the faces of the kids as they worked together to solve the code, the exchanged glances. How could she have been so obtuse to miss it all at the time?
She threw her legs over the edge of the bed, tugged at her nightgown to straighten it, and hurried out of her bedroom and down the hall. Late or not, she had every intention of confronting Finn. The family policy was, no lying. They were not about to change that policy just because Finn was now a teenager—if anything, it was more important than ever.
She opened the door to his room, moved to the bed, and hesitated a moment as she saw her son’s peaceful face cast in the glow of his various electronics. In that instant, the thought crossed her mind to turn around and leave this for the morning. How could she disturb his peace over some dream she’d had? Why was she so suspicious of her own son? Where had her trust gone?
She turned and took two steps back toward the door. But then she spun around sharply, her eyes scanning the floor. She’d been working on Finn for five years—More like ten! she thought—to put his clothes away when he took them off. She’d even bought him his own laundry hamper. Yet every morning, there were his clothes from the day before, strewn about the room as if a tornado had hit.
So where were they?
No boots. No pants. No shirt.
The anger she’d felt in the bedroom resurfaced. This seesaw of emotion was exhausting her. While her adrenaline was still charged, she marched to the bed and gently pulled back the covers.
Fully dressed. No pajamas.
Could this possibly mean…?
She shook his shoulder.
“Finn? Sweetheart?”
She shook him harder. In the past two years he’d taken to sleeping so soundly she could sometimes have a bear of a time waking him.
“Finn, dear?”
Not a twitch. Not a complaint. He didn’t roll over; he didn’t squint or moan or tell her to go away. He didn’t move.
It was as if…
“Oh, Lord…” she said aloud. She stepped back away from the bed, her bottom lip trembling, and crossed her arms, tears forming in her eyes. She returned to his bedside and shook him again.
“Finn? Finn! Finn! This is not funny!”
She shook him so hard that his lifeless, limp, sleeping body just rocked back and forth like…like…
She couldn’t bring herself to admit what it was like.
“Wake up! Wake up!”
Tears spilled from her blotchy face as droplets on his pillow.