Jakarta Missing by Jane Kurtz Read Free Book Online

blazed through her mind, one right after the other.
    The first was, Jakarta is coming home.
    The second was, Now everything will be perfect.
    FROM DAKAR’S BOOK OF LISTS AND THOUGHTS
    True stories of mysterious and unexplained things I know about personally
    1. Mom heard Grandma’s voice after Grandma was dead.
    2. After being this incredibly important thing to the children of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant suddenly disappears from the Bible. Where did it go? Is it hidden somewhere in Ethiopia? A lot of Ethiopians believe it is. I know King Solomon’s Ethiopian son couldn’t really have flown through the air when he was stealing the Ark, the way the story says. But Dad says the legends could have sprung out of real true facts.
    3. In a museum in Cairo there is something made out of sycamore wood that looks totally like a glider. Where would the ancient Egyptians have seen something like that? Also, I’ve seen some ancient Egyptian carvings on the temple wall at Abydos, and I can tell you they look like airplanes and helicopters.
    4. Even scientists can’t figure out how the pyramids were really made. Or the giant obelisks that are a thousand years old that we saw at Axum in Ethiopia. Or how those huge churches at Lalibela could have been carved out of stone—inside and out—in the eleventh or twelfth century. The Ethiopians say that angels helped. Did they?
    5. When we were camping at Lake Naivasha, Dad told us scary stories by Edgar Allan Poe. One was “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the other was “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Then he said, I’ll tell you a true story. Poe wrote a story about some shipwrecked sailors who killed and ate a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later some real shipwrecked sailors killed and ate a man named Richard Parker. Dad said that’s called synchronicity. He said some people think stuff like that is an incredible coincidence, but the guy named Jung who made up the word thought the universe was made up of patterns too complicated for humans to understand and everything is all linked together in mysterious ways.
    6. Mom has had synchronicity happen to her. When she had just graduated from college, she was reading a National Geographic about Indonesia and decided that was where she wanted to go more than anyplace in the world. That afternoon she was at her job as a waitress in Nowhere, North Dakota, and she started talking with an interesting-looking stranger who ordered ham and eggs in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out he had gotten lost on his way to a place where he was supposed to interview teachers for a school in Indonesia.
    7. The quest I went on in Maji with Jakarta. Did we really rescue Mom from the hoodies and the Allalonestone?

FIVE

    T he best thing about the next morning was Mom pushing the hair out of Dakar’s eyes and looking right at her with astonishingly blue eyes. Mom saying, “Dakar! You need to eat breakfast before you go to school.”
    â€œI love it when you boss me around,” Dakar said, truly happy. “Will you fix me pancakes? Please please please?”
    There were soft shadows under Mom’s eyes, but otherwise she looked strong. The Allalonestone hoodies— if they’d even really had hold of Mom again—had definitely let go. They weren’t going to pull Mom under this time. “Maybe Saturday for pancakes,” she said. “Or how about the first morning Jakarta is back? Remember when I used to make you birthday pancakes? When Jakarta comes home, it’ll be as good as a birthday, won’t it?”
    â€œBetter.” Dakar hugged Mom, remembering those birthday mornings, the candles melting on top of a stack of whole wheat pancakes. She and Jakarta had gotten the idea from a book. What book? Jakarta would know.
    Unfortunately birthday mornings came in boarding school, too. At the end of the month everyone got to sit at a birthday table and have