“That’s a great idea!” Luke said. “Nobody will ever know we weren’t the real inventors of the zipper.”
“I’ll know,” Isabel said quietly. But she didn’t make a big deal about it, because she couldn’t think of a better way for the team to earn money.
By this time, the sun had set in the west over New Jersey, across the Hudson River. There was a chill in the air. The Flashback Four wrapped their clothes around themselves tightly.
“Well, we’re not going to invent the zipper tonight,” Luke told the others. “Right now, we’d better find a place to sleep.”
CHAPTER 2A CRAZY IDEA
WHILE THE FLASHBACK FOUR WERE FIGURING OUT what to do next in 1912, there was a full-scale panic going on in the twenty-first-century office of Pasture Company (motto: “If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture”) in Boston, Massachusetts.
Miss Z picked up her phone and put it down again without dialing a number. Then she looked at her computer screen, and looked away from it.
“What are we going to do now?” she shouted to her assistant, Mrs. Ella Vader, gesturing wildly and nearly falling out of her wheelchair.
Miss Z suffered from ALS—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It’s a nervous-system disease that weakens muscles. There’s no cure for it. But right now, ALS was not her biggest problem. No, Miss Z’s biggest problem was the Flashback Four.
It was impossible to know if Luke, David, Julia, and Isabel were dead or alive. She didn’t know what had happened to them at the moment she’d tried to whisk them back home from the deck of the Titanic. All she knew was that the kids had not arrived in her office, as expected.
Instead, she had inadvertently transported a Titanic deckhand named Thomas Maloney into the twenty-first century. Now he was sitting across from her, playing with the electric pencil sharpener on her desk. He was a big man, and he looked angry. Who could blame him?
“Mr. Maloney, tell me exactly what happened those last few moments on the Titanic,” Miss Z asked.
“Like I told ya,” he said, “I was at the front of the ship. It was tiltin’ forward. The captain told me not to let anybody up there ’cause they might get swept off into the sea. Then these four kids show up and ask me to take a picture of ’em with some funny-lookin’ camera. I told ’em to get out of there and get into a lifeboat, but they wouldn’t budge. They offered me a thousand bucks to let ’em take the picture, so I say okay. And that’s all I remember. Next thing I knew, I was here with you.”
“And you have no idea what happened to the children?” asked Mrs. Vader.
“Nope.”
“This is bad,” said Miss Z.
While she fretted, Mr. Maloney looked around the office and the modern wonders it contained. He wasn’t so impressed by Miss Z’s computer or her time-traveling smartboard. It was the little things that astonished him. Thomas Maloney had never seen a fluorescent light, a Post-it Note, or wall-to-wall carpeting.
He stood up unsteadily and went over to the window. When he looked down at the streets of Boston, he grabbed hold of the windowsill for support. It was twenty-three floors up. He had never been so high. He had never even been inside an elevator.
A helicopter buzzed past the window, and Thomas Maloney looked at it with fear and wonder in his eyes.
“Holy hotcakes! What in the blazes was that?” he shouted.
But the wheels in his head were turning. He had recently read H. G. Wells’s book The Time Machine and understood the concept of time travel. It had sunk into his brain that he had been transported over a hundred years into the future. And he was no dummy. There must be a way to turn this into money, he figured.
“So lemme get this straight,” Mr. Maloney said. “You sent them kids back to my time with that doohickey, but instead of bringin’ ’em back here again, you brought me instead. That right?”
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Vader. Miss Z was too upset to answer.
Thomas Maloney picked up a pencil off Miss Z’s desk and stuck it in her electric pencil sharpener. He marveled as it whirred and put a point on the pencil in a few seconds. The only way he had ever sharpened a pencil before was with a knife, painstakingly shaving the wood away. He stuck the pencil back in the machine and sharpened it over and over again, watching it get smaller and smaller.
“Will you please stop that?” asked Mrs. Vader.
Miss Z was deep in thought. The Flashback Four were stuck in 1912, possibly for the rest of their lives. How would she tell their parents what had happened to them? There were four signed permission slips in her desk drawer. Within the hour, the parents would realize their children were missing. Then the phone calls would begin.
There would be lawsuits, for sure. Multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Miss Z had made a large fortune with Findamate, the online dating service she had created, but if the kids were gone, it would ruin her. She’d have nothing left, and her reputation would be shot.
Reputation? She realized that was the least of her worries. The police would get involved, of course. There would have to be a criminal investigation. How could she ever explain what had happened to these four kids? The cops would probably dig up her backyard looking for the bodies. And they wouldn’t find any.
She would go to jail, of course, and spend the rest of her life there. Everything she had ever accomplished would have been for nothing. She would always be remembered for the mysterious kidnapping of those four children, who were never heard from again.
And what was she going to do with this Maloney guy? He seemed like a real troublemaker.
Maloney was looking at the photos all over the walls, many of which had not been shot until long after his lifetime. He
