The Fellowship for Alien Detection (10 page)

Not only was what she'd learned not enough for the authorities, it wasn't going to be enough to publish, either. Sure, it might get her the scholarship, not to mention cause a frothing series of comments on the
New Frontiers Mag-Zine
site, but it was definitely
not
enough for a real newspaper like the
Times
to run it. She needed more.

So, no, Alex, this was not a relief. It was only failure. Only the glimpse of some huge truth, the shadow of a massive story, one she'd spend the rest of the summer, maybe the rest of her life puzzling over, wondering what might have been.

She couldn't give up on it. She just couldn't. Not yet. And so Haley had come up with a plan in three parts.

Part One was an email reply to Alex. Haley had thought about begging for more time, but she felt like Alex's decision was nonnegotiable, so her only choice was to try not to arouse her suspicions:

Hi Alex,

I understand about the danger and that we need to turn around. I'm relieved to know I can still have the scholarship and relieved to know that I'll be out of danger! We are turning around now, and I will update you every few hours about our progress home.

Thanks,

Haley

Part Two of the plan involved a route change: Haley checked her pocket road atlas again. “Dad?”

“Yeah?” Allan called over a shiny country anthem.

“How far to Brownsville?” This was the planned next interview stop on her field study plan. It was near Mammoth Caves National Park, which Haley hadn't thought much of until she'd made this connection to the towns and lights being put underground.

“Last sign I saw said one hundred fifty miles. So, a few more hours. Why, are we late?”

“No, but I got a message from my source there, and she needs to meet later,” Haley lied. “So, we have a few hours to kill, and I just noticed, there's a park called Super Fun Wet! coming up in, like, fifty miles. It's got waterslides, bumper boats, and go-karts.”

Liam jolted upright like a risen zombie. “GO-KARTS, YEEAHHHH!” he moaned.

“Oh, right!” said Allan. “Jill, didn't we go to one of those out in Kansas, back during our cross-country drive?” He was referring to the fabled journey he and Jill had taken back in their twenties to move Jill from Oregon to Connecticut, photographic evidence of which still hung in a collage frame in the guest bathroom.

“That's right!” said Jill. “I'm still mad at you about that stunt you pulled with the go-karts.”

“Hello, people?” said Haley. “So, we're gonna do that, then. Some family fun, okay? Also, they have Wi-Fi, and I really need to do more research.”

This was the absolute only reason Haley was suggesting this stop. To buy time so that she could initiate Part Three of the plan, and that was . . .

She didn't know yet. Part Three was going to have to come from whatever she could find in this last-ditch search, some new clue that might get her closer to uncovering the real story. The way she figured it, she had forty-eight hours left before Alex would know that she hadn't turned around. At that point, not only did the debit card turn off, but Alex would no doubt start calling her parents. And then of course Haley would promptly be in huge, massive trouble, but . . . she didn't care anymore. If she could just crack this story open before time ran out, it would be worth any amount of punishment.

“Sounds great!” said Allan. He turned back to Jill. “It was not a ‘stunt' I pulled. I'm just a superior driver.”

While he and Jill went back and forth playfully, and while Liam pretended to drive a go-kart from his seat (complete with high-pitched screeching noises as he took sharp turns), Haley returned to staring out the window and simmering in her anxious juices. She watched the new road, the new parts of the map, sliding by, with every mile getting closer to a mystery, and yet with every minute getting closer to having to turn around. Unless she could find some way to keep going.

Bardstown, KY, July 4, 12:33 p.m.

Two hours later, in the feathery shade cast by a plastic palm-frond umbrella, at a white table stained in brown-hued blotches of, at best, old ketchup and mustard, beneath the froth of squealing voices, water splashes, lifeguard whistles, frying burgers, and arcade game blips, while her family was tossed to and fro in the unnaturally blue water of a giant wave pool, Haley had her first experience with what Garrett Conrad-Wayne referred to as Scheduled Serendipity.

Most people
, Garrett Conrad-Wayne said,
wait around for good luck to just randomly find them, as if luck is excrement from a bird that is just winging along going about its day, and it just so happens that, through a combination of wind and velocity, and due to no fault of your own, you are standing in the right place at the right moment for that smear of excrement to hit you on the head
.

The journalist knows, however, that luck is more like the excrement of a reclusive, flightless nocturnal ground bird, and it will only splat onto your head if you position yourself directly under the right branch of the right tree in the right part of the jungle at the right time of night
.

Haley wasn't sure if bird poop was the best metaphor, but she got the point: You had to work to have good luck. And she'd been working, and working, and working, and then, there at the table at Super Fun Wet! she had encountered luck again, this time in the form of a typo.

Sitting there, at the only table in the outdoor area that was still in sight of her parents and had any decent Wi-Fi reception, a table that was also directly in the line of the blower from the snack bar grill, which had coated her already-sticky skin with a second layer of film that smelled like the charred edges of hamburgers, Haley had done search after search about United Consolidated Amalgamations. She'd found out that it was a multinational mining company that also owned a small genetic testing laboratory somewhere in Argentina. She'd found out that it was the largest producer of xenotillium, which was used in televisions and reportedly caused fish to grow extra heads in lab studies. She'd found out that it was the world's third-largest miner of coal and the fourth-largest miner of diamonds, not to mention, weirdly, the world's leading producer of frozen fish sticks. She'd found out that you could not find any information about its board of directors, or who its CEO was, or where its corporate offices were, because UCA was protected by some kind of vigilant internet security service.

Searches to do with things Haley had encountered had come up essentially empty as well. A search for UCA Amber merely came up with information about the mine, which had gone out of service in the 1990s. Similar searches for other towns with mines came up with the same dry information. Most of the mines in missing time towns were closed, but even that wasn't a clue because then there were a few that were open. Haley did searches including the term “orange glow,” but those either led back to the We Are the Missing site or similar blogs, or to some kind of pet cleaner called Dander-Off, which was apparently being sued for causing cats and dogs to briefly glow after application.

On and on the search results went, in all kinds of directions except the right one. After an hour and a half, Haley had followed so many links, tried to interpret so many search results and webpages, that she was feeling blurry. Her eyes hurt.

And it was then that she accidentally typed a search for “UCS Gable New Hampshire” and hit enter. Even as she watched the wheel spin and the page load, she saw that her finger had missed the
A
by one letter and typed an
S
. “Ugh,” she muttered to herself.

Search results appeared. And as she was already retyping her search, her eye just happened to catch the second result:

UCS to Inspect Gable Mine on March 23.

For as tired as her brain was, some alert synapse threw up a tiny red flag. Haley paused. Gable was one of the missing time towns where there was also a UCA mine. She looked at the date: March 23. She clicked on the link, and as she did so, she pulled out her tracking notebook and consulted her list of missing time towns.

The page loaded. It was an article from the
Gable Herald
, the town newspaper. In her notebook, she found Gable on her list. Their missing time event had been on March twenty-fourth. Haley read the article. A mine safety group, United Consolidated Safety, had come to Gable to inspect the structural integrity and environmental impact of the closed mine . . . the day before the missing time event.

Another search: United Consolidated Safety was a subsidiary of United Consolidated Solutions.

Search: United Consolidated Solutions was a subsidiary of United Consolidated Amalgamations.

Haley felt her fingers tingle.

She kept digging.

Search: UCS had run a mine safety inspection in Amber the day before the missing time event.

Search: same in Brownsville.

“Whoa,” Haley breathed. This was it! She had the connection. Concrete. Solid. But . . . a minute spent thinking it through told her that this
still
wasn't enough. Because the actual missing time event was still completely unprovable, right? There was no hard evidence. Just people's accounts.

And then Haley found something. She clicked. A small article in the Local News page of a town website:
Mine Inspection Set for July 3
.

That was yesterday. The town was Fort Bluff, Arkansas. With shaking fingers, Haley flicked through her road atlas. There. She did some plotting. Fort Bluff was about four hundred miles away. A long haul for today . . . but they could make it by tonight, when, if all this evidence was right . . . There was going to be a missing time event.

Haley sat back. She stared at the computer, at the road atlas. If she could get to that town—well, not into it, but just near it—if she could
see
this missing time event happen, maybe see that light falling from the sky, and make a video of it, that would be the biggest piece of evidence, the last piece she would need to link the missing time, the shared dreams, and the mining company. . . .
But you're talking about going to where you think there's going to
be
a missing time event
, worried the doubt demon. Yes, she was. She was talking about hunting this story down to its lair.

Could she do this? What would it take? More lies . . . but only a couple more. And at this point, weren't they worth it? Then it would be over and she would have her story.

She already knew the next piece of information she would need. She opened a new browser window and ran a new search. Bingo. Now a couple more calculations. . . . And she had it. It was time to launch Part Three of the plan. First, another email to Alex Keller:

Dear Alex—

Our drive back is going great! We're going to stay the night in—

Haley flipped through her atlas . . .

State College, Pennsylvania. I'll check in again before bed.

—Haley

She sent and was clicking over to another window when there was a ding.
Macabre Kingdom
popped up. Vane was onscreen, standing beside Fang at the Lava Baths, where they'd agreed to meet. A chat from Abby appeared.

Hey! Just had dinner with brass boy! What's new with you?

LOL not much here
, Haley replied. The sight of Abby made her nerves nearly fry. Abby, who'd been worried about her initial lies to her parents. Haley typed quickly:
Can't talk right now. At a water park! Family fun!! More later. —H

She logged out of the Kingdom without waiting for a reply. Abby would never go for this. Better she didn't know.

“Hey, kiddo.” Haley snapped up to find Dad walking over, drying off with a sunset-striped beach towel. “How goes?”

“Oh,” said Haley, trying to sound breezy, “you know, fine.” It was time for the next step in the plan. “Hey, Dad, I did some more research and I want to change the itinerary. Would that be cool?”

“Oh, um, sure, I guess. Why, what's up?”

“Well, I actually found a better source to interview. She has way more interesting stories than the girl I was going to meet in Brownsville.”

“Better, like, weirder alien stuff?” Allan gave her a look somewhere between smile and worried.

“Basically. So, I'd like to go there instead.” Haley flipped to the page on the atlas. “It's here,” she said, pointing to Fort Bluff. “And check it out, there's a Relaxation Depot just up the road, at this exit. With your Frequent Relaxer privileges, it's not too late to switch the reservation, right?”

Allan checked his watch. “Nope. That will be fine. I love that program,” he said with a smile.

“Okay, cool,” said Haley. “The interview will be tomorrow morning, so we have to get there tonight.”

“Sounds good,” said Allan. “You're the boss.”

Haley smiled. And now there was one final piece of the plan to initiate. The missing time events happened late in the evening, close to midnight, and so Haley's plan was to have them arrive near Fort Bluff nice and late. She wasn't exactly sure how she was then going to get within sight of the missing time event at that point, but she'd worry about that later.