Risked (The Missing ) Read Free

trying to remember when everything was revealed,” she said, starting new searches of her own. She clicked through one screen after another until she came to a list of dates. “Okay, here we go. This says the family was killed in 1918. At first the Soviet leaders said only the tsar had been executed, so there were all sorts of stories floating around about what had happened to the rest of the family. Somehow it was almost always the youngest daughter, Anastasia, that people thought had escaped—a woman showed up in Germany years later claiming to be her, and even some of the Romanov relatives believed her.”
    “Why Anastasia?” Jonah asked. “Why not one of the other girls? Or the boy?”
    “I don’t know,” Mom said, tilting her head thoughtfully. “Maybe it was because Anastasia had a reputation for being feisty, and the other girls didn’t. The son, though—he was so sick to begin with. . . . It was kind of amazing he lived as long as he did, anyway.”
    “He had hemophilia,” Katherine said, sounding likesuch an expert. Which was ridiculous, because Jonah knew she hadn’t known that a moment ago. She was just reading from the computer screen.
    “Right,” Mom said.
    “And there wasn’t a cure for that back then, but there is now, right?” Katherine said. Jonah could tell she was trying to catch Jonah’s eye without Mom noticing. At least one of the other missing children from history—Emily, the girl they’d helped most recently—had been endangered in her original life by an illness.
    But Mom was frowning.
    “I’m not sure there’s a cure for hemophilia even now,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s treatable. We can look that up too—”
    Jonah didn’t have the patience for a long detour. He put his hand protectively over the mouse.
    “Katherine can do that later,” he said. “Keep explaining—what were you saying about bones?”
    “Well, the rumors kept flying for decades, because the people who murdered the Romanovs hid the bodies,” Mom said. She pointed to a chunk of text on the screen. “It was about sixty years before anyone found any of them, and—look here—even that was kept secret until 1989, about the time the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart. There were tests done on the bones after that, and scientists saidit was the tsar, his wife, three of the daughters, the family’s doctor, and three loyal servants. The bodies of the son and one of the daughters were missing.”
    “So Anastasia and Alexis could have escaped!” Jonah exclaimed. “The fact that their bones weren’t with the rest of the family’s—isn’t that kind of proof that they did?”
    Mom was scanning the computer screen.
    “Well, there was some disagreement about whether it was Anastasia or Maria whose bones were missing,” she said. “And anyhow—here it is—in 2007 someone found other bones nearby, and they did DNA tests and then the scientists pretty much said, ‘It’s a hundred percent certain. These are the missing Romanov bones. The whole family died in 1918. No one escaped.’ Tragic, isn’t it?”
    Now Jonah was the one trying to catch Katherine’s eye. The year 2007 wasn’t that long ago. If he and Katherine had changed something in history that led to the death of Anastasia and Alexis Romanov in 1918, wouldn’t time agents like JB have tried to keep it secret as long as they could?
    Would JB have even bothered to tell Jonah and Katherine what had happened?
    Was there any way to undo whatever had changed Anastasia’s and Alexis’s fates?
    “JB, we really need an explanation,” Jonah muttered,softly enough that there was no way Mom could hear.
    The doorbell rang just then, and the sound made Jonah jump.
    “I’ll get it,” he said, sliding out of the chair.
    If that’s JB—wow, that was quick, he thought.
    He just needed to be prepared to play along with whatever story JB would come up with to explain his presence to Jonah’s parents.
    Jonah rushed down the