A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,94

at the top edge of the windshield and shredded cornstalks stuck in the grille and the wheel wells, which I was able to pull out. Other than that, we had made it in one piece.

“Everyone okay?” I said, poking my head through the window.

“Millard’s not,” said Emma, and then I heard a retching sound and looked up just in time to see an air-burst of vomit splatter the pavement. I had never seen an invisible person throw up before, and it was something I won’t soon forget.

As he was voiding his guts, I felt my phone—alive again here in the present—buzz madly in my pocket. 24 missed calls, the screen read. 23 voicemails.

I knew who they were from without even looking.

I walked around to the rear of the car and pretended to check something while I surreptitiously listened. The first few messages were mildly concerned. But they got more alarmed and more angry as they went on. The thirteenth went like this: “Mr. Portman, this is your ymbryne speaking. Again. I want you to listen to me very carefully. I am disappointed that you would embark on a journey without informing me. Exceedingly so. But you have no right to take the children with you without my say-so. Return to this house at once. Thank you. All the best.”

I stopped listening after that. I thought about telling the others, then decided against it. They had all known Miss Peregrine wouldn’t approve; there was no reason to agitate them with the voicemails and risk having them decide to turn back.

“All right,” said Millard, stumbling back toward the car. “I have finished.”

I slipped the phone into my pocket. “Sorry you’re not feeling good.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a train we could catch,” he said weakly. “I’m growing a bit weary of automobiles.”

“The rest of the way will be smooth sailing,” I said. “I promise.”

He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

It was the present day once more, and the modern highway system made for a quick ride, in the middle of the night, anyway. Fueled by Paul’s thermos of coffee and an 8-track of Dark Side of the Moon I found in the back of the glove box, the miles peeled away fast. Before I knew it, we’d made it through the rest of Georgia and the whole of South Carolina, and we were within striking distance of the town in northern North Carolina written on the matchbook. After the brief flare-up between Emma and me back in Portal, things had cooled to what felt like subzero temperatures. She had chosen to sit in the back, despite how cramped it was, and Enoch was up front next to me.

I looked up at Emma in the mirror now and then, and when she wasn’t sleeping or staring moodily out the window, she was flipping through Abe’s operations log, reading it by the flickering light of a single pinkie flame. Again, I tried to tell myself that she was going through something. Processing something she’d never been forced to face quite so head-on, because she’d always been far away from Abe, across time, across the sea. But it felt like she was icing me out, punishing me for questioning her. And I didn’t know how much longer I could take it.

It was three thirty in the morning and my butt was almost completely numb when we finally reached the exit. I followed directions from my phone to the address printed on H’s matchbook. We had no idea what we’d find there. A gas station? A café? Another motel?

None of the above. It was a fast-food place called 24-HR OK BURGER. It shone palely in the middle of an empty, black parking lot in a deserted shopping center, and true to its name, it was open, and it looked okay. All the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and a sign on the door read DRIVE-THRU OPEN.

I parked right in front, the only car in the lot. H was not here. No one was here except for one unlucky employee who’d gotten stuck with the graveyard shift. I could see him inside, reading his phone behind the counter.

“Did the matchbook say what time to meet H?” asked Bronwyn.

“No,” I said. “But I don’t think he expected us to come at three thirty a.m.”

“So we’re supposed to just wait here until morning?” said Enoch. “This is idiotic.”

“Just be patient,” said Millard. “He could arrive at any moment. The middle of the night