The Key to Finding Jack by Ewa Jozefkowicz (best classic books to read TXT) 📕

Rowan there, who he hung out with for most of the trip. This guy was a teacher and he’d been volunteering at a Peruvian school. If only he’d said more in that last message…’

‘What last message?’

‘Jack sent me a message a few days before the earthquake, saying that he had a surprise for me. He was going to send me all the details in an email about where to meet him, which never happened. Your dad rang me the other day to ask about this, and I wish I had something more to tell him. But it looks like Jack never got a chance to send that email.’

‘I have a feeling he went to volunteer at a school,’ I said. I told Simon all the information we had from Finny. ‘But how would we ever find out which one? I bet there are thousands in Peru. Maybe slightly fewer if you remove the ones who don’t accept English-speaking teachers.’

‘A school? Normally you have to sign up for these volunteering schemes months in advance.’

‘But you know what Jack’s like. He would have found some way around that. Or maybe this Rowan guy he met knew of a place that needed volunteers.’

Simon’s eyebrows shot up as I was talking. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said, and gestured for us to follow him. He took us upstairs to his bedroom – a tiny room mostly filled up by his bunk bed and a desk beneath it. He fiddled with something on his laptop and a map appeared on the opposite wall to us. I noticed that Simon had done the same thing as Jack – he’d covered the wall with whiteboard paper. That way he could label the map with a red marker at specific points. There were also black dotted circles going outwards from a central location.

‘This is where Jack got off the bus on Wednesday night,’ he said, grabbing a pencil and tapping the centre of the smallest circle. ‘According to Ariane, they arrived after six p.m. The earthquake hit before four in the morning the next day, around ten hours later. So the question is, what could Jack have done in that time? There are loads of possible answers, but the one thing we know for certain is that he didn’t go to Lima, which is excellent news because that would have been really close to the epicentre of the earthquake.’

Keira tracked the circles with her finger.

‘What are these?’

‘The first is a rough outline of where you might get to if you walked for a couple of hours. Jack loves walking, but even he probably wouldn’t manage more than a two-hour stretch with a backpack. Plus, he would have wanted to get a hostel for the night, and by the time he got off the bus, it wouldn’t have been long until it got dark.’

‘And this one?’

‘That’s a rough estimate of how far you could get by bus in ten hours. I think it’s doubtful that he would have got on another bus straight away. I imagine he would have waited until morning and got one the next day, but there’s a chance that he did. I wanted to leave it there as a possibility. The other thing is that he knew I was flying into Lima airport – here – and I don’t think he would have made me do a long bus journey to meet him straight after my flight, so that is another thing to think about. You see this blue line, here? That’s where you can get to within a five-hour bus ride from Lima. I know five hours is a shot in the dark, but I needed to have some sort of estimate of where he might have asked me to meet him.’

There was a small area like a lop-sided eye where the blue circle overlapped with the outer black one.

‘So do you reckon this is where we should be looking?’ I asked.

‘It’s a good place to start.’

There were two towns within the ‘eye’, Nazca and Ica. Other than that, there was a tiny lake and two large national parks, one shaped like a baseball bat.

‘It’s mostly desert in these parts, apart from a few areas of greenery. There are sand dunes everywhere and tourists go dune-boarding – it’s the Peruvian equivalent of snowboarding. I was going to check it out with Jack, but there’s quite high wind at this time of year. We’d have had sand blasted in our faces.’

‘Is there a way that you could find out where all of the schools are in this area?’

Simon frowned.

‘I’ll see if there’s anything on this map that allows me to do that.’ I watched over his shoulder as he fiddled with the different dropdown menus. At first, petrol stations appeared on the map, then hospitals, and finally, he managed to locate schools.

There weren’t nearly as many of them in the ‘eye’ as I’d imagined. They were mostly clustered in and around the towns, which wasn’t surprising.

‘Can you bring up the names?’ I asked, not quite sure what I was hoping to see.

‘I’ll have to hover over them and then the name will come up. Or, wait – this programme lets me download all of them into a spreadsheet.’

Within a few seconds, we were looking at a list of schools, with their addresses and phone numbers.

‘I think we need to try calling them to find out whether they have seen Jack,’ I decided.

‘Do you think it’s possible he would have arrived at one of these schools within ten hours? Even if he’d hitched a ride, or taken a bus, he would’ve got there at nighttime, wouldn’t he? And then the… then the earthquake would have happened,’ said Keira, looking at the floor.

‘Yes, but these areas were luckily outside the immediate danger zone,’ said Simon. ‘I checked all of this yesterday. Anyone living east of here,’ he said, pointing to a dotted straight yellow line that I hadn’t registered, ‘would have experienced tremors and power outage.