It was hard to tell who was more surprised by this question: Mom and Dad, because it took what Aidan was saying so seriously, or Aidan, because it took what he was saying so seriously.
“I’m trying to think,” he said. “Cordelia is the one I knew the most, but she never told me her last name. Just the initial, R. There weren’t enough of us there to need last names. Ming was from China. There was a young woman named Heidi who spoke English. She said she was from Canada, and had been in Aveinieu for twenty years. But I don’t know how that translates to our time. And I never asked her where in Canada. We never really talked about home. I was too busy trying to figure out Aveinieu.”
“I just need one full name,” Officer Pinkus said. “Preferably from the US, since I have more access here.”
Aidan thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t know. We were isolated on the farm. Cordelia had a friend from New York named Joel. But I never met him. He’d left a few years before me. Joel P. Cordelia said he’d wanted to explore more of the world—but he never came back to tell her what he’d found.”
“And Cordelia was from here? Did she tell you when she left?”
“A long time ago. That’s all I know.”
“You stayed with her the whole time?”
Aidan nodded.
“What did she look like?”
“She had this long red hair, with some gray in it. Her skin was tan—she liked to joke that she was lucky that she wasn’t fair like her sister because she would have burned under the Aveinieu sun. It’s not like there’s sunscreen there.”
“Did she make the joke about sunscreen?” Officer Pinkus asked.
“I don’t think so. I did. Why?”
“It was a long shot. If she’d mentioned a particular kind of sunscreen, or sunscreen in general, we might have been able to pinpoint her age better.”
It was the first time I’d realized there hadn’t always been such a thing as sunscreen.
Officer Pinkus is pretty smart, I thought.
And then I thought, But if she’s so smart, why is she acting like she believes Aidan?
It must be to make him talk, I concluded.
But Aidan only had so much to say. She asked him a few more times about other people, but he said he couldn’t remember anything else. Then she asked him why he’d come back, and he explained to her why he’d been banished. That was the word he used: banished.
“It makes sense that there might be viruses or illnesses that we have in this world that they wouldn’t necessarily have the immunity to in another world,” Officer Pinkus said. “Isn’t that right, Raymond?”
Sergeant Jones nodded. “Of course.”
Officer Pinkus closed her notebook. “I think that’s all I need right now,” she said. Then, as if it was an afterthought, she added, “Oh—one more thing. Why the dresser?”
I could see Aidan waver slightly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was surprised, and they never told me how it works. I asked, and Cordelia said she had no idea either. ‘Our brains aren’t big enough to comprehend the connections between worlds,’ she said. She said my guess was as good as hers, and odds were strong that both guesses would be totally wrong.”
Officer Pinkus smiled. “Cordelia sounds like my kind of person. It’s lucky she was the first person you met, and not someone a lot less friendly.”
“I know, right?” Aidan said. “I thought that a lot.”
Mom and Dad exchanged a glance, like Cordelia was a neighbor they needed to go have a talk with.
“Okay, boys,” Officer Pinkus said. “Time for me to chat with your parents. I’m going to trust you to not listen on the other side of the door, okay? I’ll be back tomorrow to check in—and, Aidan, if you think of anything else, or anyone else who was there, be sure to write it down. And if it’s something you feel is urgent to tell me, your parents have my number and you can call anytime, day or night.”
“Thanks,” Aidan said. And even if our parents didn’t get the message, I did:
The way to get Aidan to appreciate you was to listen to what he had to say.
29
Officer Pinkus had asked us not to listen at the door. She hadn’t said anything about listening from the staircase.
I pointed out this loophole to Aidan as we walked upstairs.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said. He went into our room, grabbed his laptop, and headed for the attic.
I definitely got the sense that I was not welcome to follow him.
So I stayed on the top stair and listened. I figured he’d be grateful later, if I found out something interesting to tell him.
I couldn’t hear every word, but I could hear enough.
Cordelia’s name came up a lot. Mom and Dad were asking if the police thought there was a “real Cordelia,” as if the Cordelia from Aveinieu had a counterpart in our world.
At one point, Dad said, “Aidan was always the stable one,” which made me wonder if I was the unstable one. That didn’t sound right.
Mom brought up Wendy McGillis again. The moment she did, the phone rang. I was going to pick it up, but Dad yelled, “Don’t pick up the phone!” I stayed put.
Then I heard a door opening. I worried that my parents had heard me breathing or something. So I backed off, toward my room.
“Don’t pick up the phone if it rings!” Dad yelled again.
Soon I could hear the officers leaving. I decided I should tell Aidan it was okay to come down, so I went up to the attic.
I expected Aidan to be in front of the open dresser, studying it again. But instead he was on the old rocking chair our mom had used when we were babies and she wanted to rock us to sleep. He was working on his laptop and didn’t tell me to go away when he saw me.
“I think it’s over,” I told him. “The police are heading home. Or back to the station. Or wherever it is they go after talking to us.”
I was babbling, which Aidan would have never said was my best state. I then followed up with one of his least-favorite questions for me to ask: “What’re you doing?”
“Just searching,” he said.
I went and looked over his shoulder. He had Aveinieu typed into Google. There weren’t any helpful results.
“How do you know how to spell it?” I asked.
“Cordelia told me. And someone must have told her. So I think if anyone else came back here, that’s how they’d spell it. Though I’ll try other spellings later.”