“Like Monday imminent?”
“Like Monday imminent.” I close my eyes, trying to really think it through. I muse, “Do we take a chance and get tickets for Monday’s six a.m. voyage? If we’re wrong, we’ll miss school, and that’ll be really hard to explain if we have to do it again later in the week. Not to mention expensive. And since none of us is working much at the moment, the money stash is definitely dwindling.”
“How much is a ticket?”
“Like eighty-five bucks.”
“Sheesh.”
“I know, right? Not only do we have to save people, but we also have to spend big bucks to do it. This is getting outrageous.” I turn my head to look at Rowan and smile. “We could always leave you home and save some money.”
“No!”
“I’m kidding. We need you. Twenty-some people to save—heck, if we had any more friends I’d recruit them, too. We need all the help we can get.” I size her up. “I wonder if they have children’s tickets. If you can act like a little kid, we might be able to save money by getting you one.”
She snorts. “Yeah, I’ll tape my boobs down and wear my Burger King crown. That’ll fool ’em. They see five-foot-seven-inch-tall, hippy eleven-year-olds all the time.” She leers at me. “You, on the other hand . . .”
“Did you just call me short?”
“And, apparently, boobless.”
“Sawyer doesn’t think so. How about Charlie? Oh, wait, he can’t even tell because he’s your fake Internet boyfriend.”
“Shut your face, I hate you.”
“I hate you, too.”
• • •
That night Sawyer comes over with a diagram he somehow found of the ferry, showing the locations of the lifeboats and all the life vests. We study the diagram and Trey takes a photo of it and e-mails it to Ben so he can look at it too.
On Friday night we check the weather forecast. It’s unchanged. Ben and Sawyer come over while my parents are out at some Friday-night food truck festival.
My phone vibrates. It’s Tori with her daily call.
I hold my hand up to hush everybody, and answer. “Hey, Tori, how’s it going?”
“There’s something new,” she says, almost breathless.
“Finally,” I say. “What is it?” I cover the mouthpiece and whisper, “She says there’s something new.”
“Two things, actually. The first thing is inside the glassed-in deck. There’s, like, a banner of some sort. Like a long birthday banner, you know? I can’t read what it says, not even with my mom’s binoculars, but I got to thinking that maybe on the first day of the season they might put up a banner of some sort, don’t you think?”
I shrug. “Yeah, sounds reasonable.”
“What?” Rowan whispers.
I kick her.
“What’s the other thing?” I ask Tori. Rowan pinches me, Trey slugs her, and I realize I could probably just put Tori on speakerphone to avoid this situation. “Hang on, Tori—I’m going to put you on speaker.” I snarl at Rowan and press the button. “Okay, go ahead.”
“The other thing is that there’s a new frame added on after the frame of the two buildings in the distance. I can see more buildings—tall ones. It’s definitely a skyline. So I traced it for you guys.”
“Cool, that’s awesome! Downtown Milwaukee is right there, I think, so that makes sense that you can see the city from the water. Do you want to scan it and send it to Sawyer’s e-mail?” I give her Sawyer’s e-mail address. “Send him the victim list, too, would you? Then he can print copies for us.”
“You got it.”
“You sound a little better today,” I say.
“I’m just relieved there’s more. I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of this.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re doing great!” I say, and the others all chime in with their praise. We need to keep her going in these last few days.
“Okay,” she says, like she’s embarrassed. “Let me know what the plan is when you have one.”
“I will,” I say. We hang up.
“What was the first thing?” Rowan asks.
“Give me a second and I’ll tell you, you little pain in the butt.”
“Nose,” Rowan adds.
I grin reluctantly. “Nice. Anyway, she said in the glassed-in cabin there’s a banner hanging, like one of those kinds you see for birthdays and graduations, you know? She can’t read it, but she suggests that they might use a banner like that on opening day of a new season.” The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.
“Seems reasonable,” Ben says.
“Yeah, I think it make sense,” Sawyer says. He pages through the sketches, and then turns to his computer when it beeps to open up the files from Tori.
I look over his shoulder. “Well, they’re not the most stunning revelations we’ve ever had, but it’s progress.”
Sawyer studies his computer screen as the others come around to look.
Trey takes a look at the skyline picture. He squints and looks closer. And then he shakes his head. “Guys?” he says. “That’s not Milwaukee.”
Thirty-Four
We all look at Trey, and then at the skyline sketch.
“Zoom in a little, can you, Sawyer?” Trey asks.
Sawyer expands the page and zooms in.