Safe House

"And do you and Rob," she went on, "always drive fifteen miles out of town just to make out?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "It's more exciting that way."

"I see," Special Agent Smith said, again. "And the fact that Rob has the keys to his uncle's garage, where he works, and the two of you could have gone there, a place that is significantly closer and quite a bit cleaner than that house on the pit road . . . you still expect me to believe you?"

"Yes," I said, with some indignation. "We can't go to his uncle's garage to make out. Somebody might find out, and then Rob'd get fired."

Special Agent Smith propped her elbow up onto the table where we sat in the police station, then dropped her forehead into her hand.

"Jessica," she said, sounding tired. "You declined an invitation to your own best friend's lakehouse because you heard it didn't have cable television. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you would so much as enter a house like the one on the pit road if you didn't absolutely have to?"

I narrowed my eyes at her. "Hey," I said. "How'd you know about the cable thing?"

"We are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jess. We know everything."

This was distressing. I wondered if they knew about Mrs. Hankey's lawsuit. I figured they probably did.

"Well," I said. "Okay. I admit it's a little gross in there. But—"

"A little gross?" Special Agent Smith sat up straight. "I'm sorry, Jessica, but I think I'm well enough acquainted with you to know that if any boy—but especially, I suspect, Rob Wilkins—took you into a house like that to be intimate, we'd have a homicide on our hands. Namely, his."

I tried to take umbrage at this assessment of my personality, but the fact was, Jill was right. I could not understand how any girl would let a boy take her to such a place. Better to get down and dirty in his car than in that disgusting frat house.

Frat house? Rat house was more like it.

I am certainly not saying that if a girl is going to lose her virginity, it has to be on satin sheets or something. I am not that big of a prude. But there should at least be sheets. Clean ones. And no refuse from trysts past lying around on the floor. And a person should at least take his empty beer bottles to the recycling plant before even thinking of entertaining....

Oh, what was the point? She had me, and she knew it.

"So can we please," Special Agent Smith said, "drop this ridiculous story that you and Mr. Wilkins went to that house in order to get hot and heavy? We know better, Jessica. Why won't you just admit it? You knew Heather was in that house, and that's why you and Rob went there."

"I swear—"

"Admit it, Jessica," Jill said. "You had a vision you'd find her there, didn't you?"

"I did not," I said. "You can ask Rob. We went to—"

"We did ask Rob," Special Agent Smith said. "He said that the two of you went to the quarry to look for Heather and just happened to stumble across the house."

"And that's exactly how it did happen," I said, proud that Rob had thought up such a good story. It was far better, I realized, than my make out story. Though I certainly wished my make-out story was true.

"Jessica, I sincerely hope, for your sake, that that isn't true. The whole idea of you two just stumbling over a kidnapping victim accidentally strikes us as … well, as a little suspicious, to say the least."

I narrowed my eyes at her. I still had Rob's watch with me—it wasn't like we were under arrest or anything, and they'd taken all of our valuables to hold for safekeeping. Oh, no. We were just being held for questioning.

Which was what Special Agents Johnson and Smith had been doing for the past two hours. Questioning us.

And now it was close to dawn, and you know what? I was really, really tired of being questioned.

But not so tired that I missed the implication in her words.

"What do you mean, it sounds 'suspicious'?" I demanded. "What are you suggesting?"

Special Agent Smith only regarded me thoughtfully with her pretty blue eyes.

I let out a laugh, even though I didn't really see anything all that funny about it.

"Oh, I get it," I said. "You think Rob and I did it? You think Rob and I kidnapped Heather and beat her up and left her for dead in that bathtub? Is that what you think?"

"No," Special Agent Smith said. "Mr. Wilkins was working in his uncle's garage at the time Heather first disappeared. We have a half dozen witnesses who will attest to that. And you, of course, were with Mr. Leskowski. Again, we have quite a number of people who saw you two together."

My jaw sagged. "Oh, my God," I said. "You checked on my alibi? You didn't wake Mrs. Wilkins up, did you? Tell me you didn't call Rob's mom and wake her up. Jill, how could you? Talk about embarrassing!"

"Frankly, Jessica," Special Agent Smith said, "your embarrassment doesn't concern me at all. All I am interested in is finding out the truth. How did you know Heather Montrose was in that house? The police searched there twice after learning another girl had disappeared. They didn't find anything. So how did you know to look there?"

I glared at her. Really, it was one thing to have the Feds following you around and reading your mail and tapping your phone and all. It was quite another to have them going around, waking up your future mother-in-law in the middle of the night to ask questions about your dinner with another boy, who wasn't even her son.

"Okay, that's it," I said, folding my arms across my chest. "I want a lawyer."

It was at this point that the door to the little interrogation room—a conference room, Special Agent Smith had called it, but I knew better—opened, and her partner came in.

"Hello, again, Jessica," he said, dropping into a chair beside me. "What do you want a lawyer for? You haven't done anything wrong, have you?"

"I'm a minor," I said. "You guys are required to question me in the presence of a parent or guardian."

Special Agent Johnson sighed and dropped a file onto the tabletop. "We've already called your parents. They're waiting for you downstairs."

I nearly beat my head against something. I couldn't believe it. "You told my parents?"

"As you pointed out," Special Agent Johnson said, "we are required to question you in the presence—"

"I was just giving you a hard time," I cried. "I can't believe you actually called them. Do you have any idea how much trouble I'm going to be in? I mean, I completely snuck out of the house in the middle of the night."

"Right," Special Agent Johnson said. "Let's talk about that for a minute, shall we? Just why did you sneak out? It wasn't, by any chance, because you'd had another one of your psychic visions, was it?"

I couldn't believe this. I really couldn't. Here Rob and I had done this fabulous thing—we'd saved this girl's life, according to the EMTs, who said that Heather, though she was only suffering from a broken arm and rib and some severe bruising, would have been dead by morning due to shock if we hadn't come along and found her—and all anybody could do was harp on how we'd known where she was. It wasn't fair. They should have been throwing a parade for us, not interrogating us like a couple of miscreants.

"I told you," I said. "I don't have ESP anymore, okay?"

"Really?" Special Agent Johnson flipped open the file he'd put on the table. "So it wasn't you who put in the call to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU yesterday morning, telling them where they could find Courtney Hwang?"

"Never heard of her," I said.

"Right. They found her in San Francisco. It appears she was kidnapped from her home in Brooklyn four years ago. Her parents had just about given up hope of ever seeing her again."

"Can I go home now?" I demanded.

"A call was placed to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU at approximately eight in the morning yesterday from the Dunkin' Donuts down the street from the garage where Mr. Wilkins works. But you wouldn't know anything about that, of course."

"I lost my psychic abilities," I said. "Remember? It was on the news."

"Yes, Jessica," Special Agent Johnson said. "We are aware that you told reporters that. We are also aware that, at the time, your brother Douglas was experiencing some, shall we say, troublesome symptoms of his schizophrenia, that were perhaps exacerbated by the stress of your being so persistently pursued by the press...."

"Not just the press," I said, with some heat. "You guys had a little something to do with it, too, remember?"

"Regrettably," Special Agent Johnson said, "I do. Jessica, let me ask you something. Do you know what a profile is?"

"Of course I do," I said. "It's when law enforcement officers go around arresting people who fit a certain stereotype."

"Well," Special Agent Johnson said, "yes, but that's not exactly what I meant. I meant a formal summary or analysis of data, representing distinctive characteristics or features."

"Isn't that what I just said?" I asked.

"No."

Special Agent Johnson didn't have much of a sense of humor. His partner was much more fun … though that wasn't saying much. Allan Johnson, it had often occurred to me, just might be the most boring person on the entire planet. Everything about him was boring. His mouse-colored hair, thinning slightly on top and parted on the right, was boring. His glasses, plain old steel frames, were boring. His suits, invariably charcoal gray, were boring. Even his ties, usually in pale blues or yellows, without a pattern, were boring. He was married, too, which was the most boring thing about him of all.

"A profile," Special Agent Johnson said, "of the type of person who might commit a crime like the ones we've experienced this week—the strangulation of Amber Mackey, for instance, and the kidnapping of Heather Montrose—might sound something like this: He is most likely a white heterosexual male, in his late teens or early twenties. He is intelligent, perhaps highly so, and yet suffers from an inability to feel empathy for his victims, or anyone, for that matter, save himself. While he might seem, to his friends and family, to be a normal, even high-functioning member of society, he is, in fact, wracked with inner misgivings, perhaps even paranoia. In some cases, we have found that killers like this one act the way they do because inner voices, or visions, direct them to—"

That's when it hit me. I'd be listening to his little speech, going, Hmmm, white heterosexual male, late teens, sounds like Mark Leskowski, highly intelligent, inability to feel empathy, yeah, that could be him. He's a football player, after all, but a quarterback, which takes some smarts, anyway. Then there's that whole "unacceptable" thing.

Only it can't be him, because he was with me when Heather was kidnapped. And according to the EMTs, those wounds she'd sustained were a good six hours old, which meant whoever had done it—and Heather still wasn't talking—had attacked her at around eight in the evening. And Mark had been with me at eight....

But when Allan got to the part about inner voices, I sat up a little straighter.

"Hey," I said. "Wait just a minute here...."

"Yes?" Special Agent Johnson broke off and looked at me expectantly. "Something bothering you, Jessica?"

"You've got to be kidding me," I said. "You can't seriously be trying to pin this thing on my brother."

Jill looked thoughtful. "Why on earth would you think we were trying to do that, Jess?"

My jaw dropped. "What do you think I am, stupid or something? He just said—"

"I don't see what would make you jump to the conclusion," Special Agent Johnson said, "that we suspect Douglas, Jessica. Unless you know something we don't know."

"Yes," Special Agent Smith said. "Did Douglas tell you where you could find Heather, Jessica? Is that how you knew to look in the house on the pit road?"

"Oh!" I stood up so fast, my chair tipped over backwards. "That's it. That is so it. End of interview. I am out of here."

"Why are you so angry, Jessica?" Special Agent Johnson, not moving from his chair, asked me. "Could it be perhaps because you think we might be right?"

"In your dreams," I said. "You are not pinning this one on Douglas. No way. Ask Heather. Go ahead. She'll tell you it wasn't Douglas."

"Heather Montrose did not see her attackers," Special Agent Johnson said lightly. "Something heavy was thrown over her head, she says, and then she was locked in a small enclosed space—presumably a car trunk—until some time after nightfall. When she was released, it was by several individuals in ski masks, from whom she attempted to escape—but who dissuaded her most emphatically. She can only say that their voices sounded vaguely familiar. She recalls very little, other than that."

I swallowed. Poor Heather.

Still, as a sister, I had a job to do.

"It wasn't Douglas," I said vehemently. "He doesn't have any friends. And he certainly has never owned a ski mask."

"Well, it shouldn't be hard to prove he had nothing to do with it," Special Agent Smith said. "I suppose he was in his room the whole time, as usual. Right, Jessica?"

I stared at them. They knew. I don't know how, but they knew. They knew Douglas hadn't been in the house when Heather had disappeared.

And they also knew I hadn't the slightest idea where he'd been, either.

"If you guys," I said, feeling so mad it was a wonder smoke wasn't coming out of my nostrils, "even think about dragging Douglas into this, you can kiss good-bye any hope you might have of me ever coming to work for you."

"What are you saying, Jessica?" Special Agent Johnson asked. "That you do, indeed, still have extrasensory perception?"

"How did you know where to find Heather Montrose, Jessica?" Jill asked in a sharp voice.

I went to the door. When I got to it, I turned around to face them.

"You stay away from Douglas," I said. "I mean it. If you go near him—if you so much as look at him—I'll move to Cuba, and I'll tell Fidel Castro everything he ever wanted to know about your undercover operatives over there."

Then I flung the door open and stalked out into the hallway.

Well, they couldn't stop me. I wasn't under arrest, after all.

I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't. I mean, I knew the United States government was eager to have me on its payroll, but to stoop to suggesting that if I did not come to their aid, they would frame my own brother for a crime he most certainly did not commit . . . well, that was low. George Washington, I knew, would have hung his head in shame if he'd heard about it.

When I got to the waiting area, I was still so mad I almost went stalking right through it, right out the door and on down the street. I couldn't see properly, I was so mad.

Or maybe it was because I'd just gone for so long without sleep. Whatever the reason, I stalked right past Rob and my parents, who were waiting for me—on different sides of the room—in front of the duty desk.

"Jessica!"

My mother's cry roused me from my fury. Well, that and the fact that she flung her arms around me.

"Jess, are you all right?"

Caught up in the stranglehold that served as my mother's excuse for a hug, I blinked a few times and observed Rob getting up slowly from the bench he'd been stretched out across.

"What happened?" my mom wanted to know. "Why did they keep you in there for so long? They said something about you finding a girl—another cheerleader. What's this all about? And what on earth were you doing out so late?"

Rob, across the room, smiled at the eye-roll I gave him behind my mother's back. Then he mouthed, "Call me."

Then he—very tactfully, I thought—left.

But not tactfully enough, since my dad went, "Who was that boy over there? The one who just left?"

"No one, Dad," I said. "Just a guy. Let's go home, okay? I'm really tired."

"What do you mean, just a guy? That wasn't even the same boy you were with earlier. How many boys are you seeing, anyway, Jessica? And what, exactly, were you doing out with him in the middle of the night?"

"Dad," I said, taking him by the arm and trying to physically propel him and my mother from the station house. "I'll explain when we get to the car. Now just come on."

"What about the rule?" my father demanded.

"What rule?"

"The rule that states you are not to see any boy socially whom your mother and I have not met."

"That's not a rule," I said. "At least, nobody ever told me about it before."

"Well, that's just because this is the first time anyone's asked you out," my dad said. "But you can bet there are going to be some rules now. Especially if these guys think it's all right for you to sneak out at night to meet with them—"

"Joe," my mother whispered, looking around the empty waiting room nervously. "Not so loud."

"I'll talk as loud as I want," my dad said. "I'm a taxpayer, aren't I? I paid for this building. Now I want to know, Toni. I want to know who this boy is our daughter is sneaking out of the house to meet...."

"God," I said. "It's Rob Wilkins." I was more glad than I could say that Rob wasn't around to hear this. "Mrs. Wilkins's son. Okay? Now can we go?"

"Mrs. Wilkins?" My dad looked perplexed. "You mean Mary, the new waitress at Mastriani's?"

"Yes," I said. "Now let's—"

"But he's much too old for you," my mother said. "He's graduated already. Hasn't he graduated already, Joe?"

"I think so," my dad said. You could tell he was totally uninterested in the subject now that he knew he employed Rob's mother. "Works over at the import garage, right, on Pike's Creek Road?"

"A garage?" my mother practically shrieked. "Oh, my God—"

It was, I knew, going to be a long drive home.

"This," my father said, "had better have been one of those ESP things, young lady, or you—"

And an even longer day.

C H A P T E R

14

I didn't get to school until fourth period.

That's because my parents, after I'd explained about rescuing Heather, let me sleep in. Not that they were happy about it. Good God, no. They were still excessively displeased, particularly my mother, who did NOT want me hanging out anymore with a guy who had no intention, now or ever, of going to college.

My dad, though … he was cool. He was just like, "Forget it, Toni. He's a nice kid."

My mom was all, "How would you know? You've never even met him."

"Yeah, but I know Mary," he said. "Now go get some sleep, Jessica."

Except that I couldn't. Sleep, that is. In spite of the fact that I lay in my bed from five, when I finally crawled back into it, until about ten thirty. All I could think about was Heather and that house. That awful, awful house.

Oh, and what Special Agent Johnson had said, too. About Douglas, I mean.

All Douglas's voices ever do is tell him to kill himself, not other people.

So it didn't make sense, what Special Agent Johnson was suggesting. Not for a minute.

Besides, Douglas didn't even drive. I mean, he had a license and a car and all.

But since that day they'd called us—last Christmas, when Douglas had had the first of his episodes, up where he was going to college—and we went to get him, and Mike drove his car back, it had sat, cold and dead, under the carport. Even Mike—who'd have given just about anything for a car of his own, having stupidly asked for a computer for graduation instead of a car, with which he might have enticed Claire Lippman, his lady love, on a date to the quarries—wouldn't touch Douglas's car. It was Douglas's car. And Douglas would drive it again one day.

Only he hadn't. I knew he hadn't because when I went outside, after Mom offered to give me a lift to school, I checked his tires. If he'd been driving around out by that pit house, there'd have been gravel in them.

But there wasn't. Douglas's wheels were clean as a whistle.

Not that I'd believed Special Agent Johnson. He'd just been saying that about Douglas to see if I maybe knew who the real killer was and just wasn't telling, for some bizarre reason. As if anybody who knew the identity of a murderer would go around keeping it a secret.

I am so sure.

I got to Orchestra in the middle of the strings' chair auditions. Ruth was playing as I walked in with my late pass in hand. She didn't notice me, she was so absorbed in what she was playing, which was a sonata we'd learned at music camp that summer. She would, I knew, get first chair. Ruth always gets first chair.

When she was done, Mr. Vine said, "Excellent, Ruth," and called the next cellist. There were only three cellists in Symphonic Orchestra, so it wasn't like the competition was particularly rough. But we all had to sit there and listen while people auditioned for their chairs, and let me tell you, it was way boring. Especially when we got to the violins. There were about fifteen violinists, and they all played the same thing.

"Hey," I whispered, as I pretended to be rooting around in my backpack for something.

"Hey," Ruth whispered back. She was putting her cello away. "Where were you? What's going on? Everyone is saying you saved Heather Montrose from certain death."

"Yeah," I said modestly. "I did."

"Jeez," Ruth said. "Why am I always the last to know everything? So where was she?"

"In this disgusting old house," I whispered back, "on the pit road. You know, that old road no one ever uses anymore, off Pike's Quarry."

"What was she doing there?" Ruth wanted to know.

"She wasn't exactly there by choice." I explained how Rob and I had found Heather.

"Jeez," Ruth said again, when I was through. "Is she going to be all right?"

"I don't know," I said. "Nobody will say. But—"

"Excuse me. Would you two please keep it down? You are ruining this for the rest of us."

We both looked over and saw Karen Sue Hankey shooting us an annoyed look.

Only she was shooting it at us over a wide, white gauze bandage, which stretched across her nose and was stuck in place on either cheekbone with surgical tape.

I burst out laughing. Well, you would have, too.

"Laugh all you want, Jess," Karen Sue said. "We'll see who's laughing last in court."

"Karen Sue," I choked, between chortles. "What have you got that thing on for? You look completely ridiculous."

"I am suffering," Karen Sue said, primly, "from a contused proboscis. You can see the medical report."

"Contused pro—" Ruth, who'd gotten a perfect score on the verbal section of her PSATs, went, "For God's sake. All that means is that your nose is bruised."

"The chance of infection," Karen Sue said, "is dangerously high."

That one killed me. I nearly convulsed, I was laughing so hard. Mr. Vine finally noticed and said, "Girls," in a warning voice.

Karen Sue's eyes glittered dangerously over the edge of her bandage, but she didn't say anything more.

Then.

When the bell for lunch finally rang, Ruth and I booked out of there as fast as we could. Not, of course, because we were so eager to sample the lunch fare being offered in the caf, but because we wanted to talk about Heather.

"So she said 'they,'" Ruth said as we bent over our tacos, the entree of the day. Well, I bent over my taco. Ruth had crumbled hers all up with a bunch of lettuce and poured fat-free dressing all over it, making a taco salad. And a mess, in my opinion. "You're sure about that? She said, 'They’re coming back'?"

I nodded. I was starving, for some reason. I was on my third taco.

"Definitely," I said, swilling down some Coke. "They."

"Which makes it seem likely," Ruth said, "that more than one person was involved in Amber's attack, as well. I mean, if the two attacks are related. Which, face it, they must be."

"Right," I said. "What I want to know is, who's been using that house as their party headquarters? Somebody's been letting loose there, and pretty regularly, from the looks of it."

Ruth shuddered delicately. I had, of course, described the house on the pit road in all its lurid detail. . . including the condom wrappers.

"While I suppose we should be grateful, at least, that they—whoever theyare—are practicing safe sex," Ruth said with a sigh, "it hardly seems like the kind of place one might refer to as a love shack."

"No kidding," I said. "The question is who have they—whoever they are—been taking there? Girl-wise, I mean. Unless, you know, they're having sex with each other."

Ruth shook her head. "Gay guys would have fixed the place up. You know, throw pillows and all of that. And they would have recycled their empties."

"True," I said. "So what kind of girl would put up with those kind of conditions?"

We looked around the caf. Ernest Pyle High was, I suppose, a pretty typical example of a mid-western American high school. There was one Hispanic student, a couple of Asian-Americans, and no African-Americans at all. Everyone else was white. The only difference between the white students, besides religion—Ruth and Skip, being Jewish, were in the minority—was how much their parents earned.

And that, as usual, turned out to be the crux of the matter.

"Grits," Ruth said simply, as her gaze fell upon a long table of girls whose perms were clearly of the at-home variety, and whose nails were press-on, not salon silk-wrapped. "It has to be."

"No," I said.

Ruth shook her head. "Jess, why not? It makes sense. I mean, the house is way out in the country, after all."

"Yeah," I said. "But the beer bottles on the floor. They were imports."

"So?"

"So Rob and his friends"—I swallowed a mouthful of taco—"they only drink American beer. At least, that's what he said. He saw the bottles and went, Townies."'

Ruth eyed me. "Has it ever occurred to you that the Jerk might be covering up for his bohunk friends?"

"Rob," I said, putting my taco down, "is not a jerk. And his friends aren't bohunks. If you will recall, they saved me from becoming the U.S. Army's number one secret weapon last spring...."

"I am not trying to be offensive," Ruth said. "Honest, Jess. But I think you might be too besotted with this guy to see the writing on the wall—"

"The only writing I'm looking at," I said, "is the writing that says Rob didn't do it."

"I am not suggesting that he did. I am merely saying that some of his peers might—"

Suddenly an enormous backpack plonked down onto the bench beside mine. I looked up and had to restrain a groan.

"Hi, girls," Skip said. "Mind if I join you?"

"Actually," Ruth said, her upper lip curling. "We were just leaving."

"Ruth," Skip said, "You're lying. I have never seen you leave a taco salad unfinished."

"There's a first time for everything," Ruth said.

"Actually," Skip said, "what I have to say will only take a minute. I know how you girls value your precious dining moments together. There's a midnight screening of a Japanese anime film at the Downtown Cinema this weekend, and I wanted to know if you'd be interested in going."

Ruth looked at her brother as if he'd lost his mind. "Me?" she said. "You want to know if I'd go to the movies with you?"

"Well," Skip said, looking, for the first time since I'd known him—and that was a long, long time—embarrassed. "Not you, actually. I meant Jess."

I choked on a piece of taco shell.

"Hey," Skip said, banging me on the back a few times. "You all right?"

"Yeah," I said, when I'd recovered. "Um. Listen. Can get I back to you on that? The movie thing, I mean? I've kind of got a lot going on right now...."

"Sure," Skip said. "You know the number." He picked up his backpack and left.

"Oh . . . my . . . God," Ruth said as soon as he was out of earshot. I told her to shut up.

Only she didn't.

"He loves you," Ruth said. "Skip is in love with you. I can't believe it."

"Shut up, Ruth," I said, getting up and lifting my tray.

"Jessica and Skip, sittin' in a tree." Ruth could not stop laughing.

I walked over to the conveyor belt that carries our lunch trays into the kitchen and dumped it. As I was dumping it, I saw Tisha Murray and a few of the other cheerleaders and jocks—and Karen Sue, who followed the popular crowd wherever they went, thus making her deserving of Mark's nickname for her, the Wannabe—leaving the caf. They were going outside to lounge by the flagpole, which was where all the beautiful people in our school sat on nice days, working on their tans until the bell rang.

"Skip's never been out on a date before," Ruth said, coming up behind me to dump her own tray. "I wonder if he'll know not to bring his backpack along."

Ignoring Ruth, I followed Tisha and the others outside.

It was another gorgeous day—the kind that made sitting inside a classroom really hard. Summer was over, but somebody had forgotten to tell the weatherman. The sun beat down on the long, outstretched legs of the cheerleaders in the grass beneath the flagpole, and on the backs of the jocks who stood above them. I could not see Mark anywhere, but Tisha was sitting on the grass with one hand shading her eyes, talking to Jeff Day.

"Tisha," I said, going up to her.

She swung her face toward me, then gaped.

"Ohmigod," Tisha cried, scrambling to her feet. "There she is! The girl who saved Heather! Ohmigod! You are, like, a total and complete hero. You know that, don't you?"

I stood there awkwardly as everyone congratulated me for being such a hero. I don't think I'd ever been spoken to by so many popular kids all at once in my life. It was like, suddenly, I was one of them.

And gee, all I'd had to do was have a psychic vision about one of their friends, and then gone and saved her life.

See? Anyone can be popular. If's not hard at all.

"Tisha," I said, trying to be heard over the cacophony of excited voices around me. "Can I talk to you a minute?"

Tisha broke free from the others and came up to me, her tiny bird-head tilted questioningly. "Uh-huh, Ms. Hero," she said. "What is it?"

"Look, Tisha." I took her by the arm and started steering her, slowly, away from the crowd and toward the parking lot. "About that house. Where I found Heather. Did you know about that place?"

Tisha pushed some of her hair out of her eyes. "The house on the pit road? Sure. Everyone knows about that house."

I was about to ask her if she knew who'd scattered their beer bottles throughout the house, and what was up with that skanky old mattress, when I was distracted by a familiar sound. It was a sound that, for a long time now, my ears had become totally attuned to, separating it out from all other sounds.

Because it was the sound of Rob's engine.

Well, his motorcycle's engine, to be exact.

I turned around, and there he was, coming around the corner and into the student lot, looking, I have to say, even better in daylight than he had the night before in moonlight. When he pulled up beside me, cut the engine, and took off his helmet, I thought my heart would burst at how handsome he looked in his jeans, motorcycle boots, and T-shirt, with his longish dark hair and bright gray eyes.

"Hey," he said. "Just the person I wanted to see. How are you doing?"

Conscious that the curious gazes of the entire student population of Ernest Pyle High School—well, at least the people who were enjoying the last minutes of their lunch break out of doors, anyway—were upon us, I said, casually, "Hi. I'm fine. How about you?"

Rob got off his bike and ran a hand through his hair.

"I'm okay, I guess," he said. "You're the one who got the third degree, not me. First from the Feds and then from your parents. Or am I wrong about that?"

"Oh, no," I said. "You're right. They weren't too happy. None of them. Allan and Jill and Joe and Toni."

"That's what I thought," Rob said. "So I figured I'd come over on my lunch break and, you know, see if you were all right. But you seem fine." His gray-eyed gaze skittered over me. "More than fine, actually. You dressed up for any particular reason?"

I had on another one of my new outfits from the outlet stores. It consisted of a black V-neck cropped shirt, a pink miniskirt, and black platform sandals. I looked trés chic, as they'd say in French class.

"Oh," I said, glancing down at myself. "Just, you know. Making an effort this year. Trying to stay out of trouble."

Rob, to my delight, scowled at the skirt. "I don't see that happening real soon, Mastriani," he said. Then his gaze strayed toward my wrist. "Hey. Is that my watch?"

Busted. So busted. I'd found his watch, a heavy black one, covered with buttons that did weird things like tell the time in Nicaragua and stuff, in the pocket of his leather jacket—a jacket that was now hanging in a place of honor off one of my bedposts.

Of course I'd worn it to school. What girl wouldn't?

"Oh, yeah," I said, with elaborate nonchalance. "You loaned it to me last night. Remember?"

"Now I do," Rob said. "I was looking everywhere for that. Hand it over."

Bumming excessively, I unstrapped it. I know it was ridiculous, me wanting to hang onto the guy's watch, of all things, but I couldn't help it. It was like my trophy. My boyfriend trophy.

Except, of course, that Rob wasn't really my boyfriend.

"Here you go," I said, handing it to him. He took it and put in on, looking down at me like I was demented or something. Which I probably am.

"Do you like this watch or something?" he wanted to know. "Do you want one like it?"

"No," I said. "Not really." I couldn't tell him the truth, of course. How could I?

"Because I could get you one," he said. "If you want. But I would think you'd want, you know, one of those ladies' watches. This one looks kind of stupid on you."

"I don't want a watch," I said. Just your watch.

"Well," he said. "Okay. If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

He looked down at me. "You're kind of weird," he said. "You know that, don't you?"

Oh, well, this was just great. My boyfriend rides all the way over on his lunch break to tell me he thinks I'm weird. How romantic.

Thank God Tisha and the rest of those guys were too far away to hear what he was saying.

"Well, look, I have to get back," he said. "You stay out of trouble. Leave the police work to the professionals, understand? And call me, okay?"

"Sure," I said.

He squinted at me in the sunlight. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah," I said.

But of course I wasn't. Well, I mean, I was, and I wasn't. What I really wanted was for him to kiss me. I know. Retarded, right? I mean, me wanting him to kiss me, just because Tisha and a whole bunch of people were watching.

But it was kind of like the reason I'd wanted to hang onto his watch. I just wanted everyone to know I belonged to somebody.

And that that somebody was not Skip Abramowitz.

Now, I am not saying that Rob read my mind or anything. I mean, I'm the psychic, not him.

And I am not even saying that maybe I somehow put the suggestion in his head, either. My psychic powers extend toward one thing, and one thing only, and that's finding missing people, not putting suggestions into boys' heads that they should kiss me.

But be that as it may, Rob rolled his eyes, said, "Aw, screw it," wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, pulled me forward, and kissed me roughly on the top of my head.

And then he got on his bike and rode away.

C H A P T E R

15

Two things happened right after that.

The first was that the bell rang. The second was that Karen Sue Hankey, who had seen the whole thing, went, in her shrill voice, "Oh, my God, Jess. Let a Grit kiss you, why don't you?"

Fortunately for Karen Sue—and for me, I guess—Todd Mintz was standing nearby. So when I dove at her—which I did immediately, of course—with the intention of gouging her eyes out with my thumbs, Todd caught me in midair, swung me around, and said, "Whoa there, tiger."

"Let go of me," I said, red-hot anger replacing the joy that had, just moments before, been coursing through me, causing me to suspect that my heart might explode. "Seriously, Todd, let me go."

"Yeah, let her go, Todd," Karen Sue called. She had dashed up the steps to the main building, and knew she was a safe enough distance away that even if Todd did let go of me—which he didn't seem to have any intention of doing—I'd never catch up to her before she'd ducked into the safety of the building. "I could use another five thousand bucks."

"I bet you could!" I roared. "You could take it and go buy yourself a freaking clue!"

Only I didn't say freaking.

"Oh, very nice," Karen Sue called down from the top of the steps. "Exactly the kind of language I'd expect from a girl whose brother is a murder suspect."

I froze, conscious of the fact that everyone around us was ducking for cover. Or maybe they were just going off to class. It was hard to tell.

"What," I asked, as Todd, sensing from my paralysis that I was no longer a threat to anyone, put me down again, "is she talking about?"

Todd, a big guy in a crew cut who looked as if he wished he were just about anywhere than where, in fact, he was, shrugged.

"I don't know, Jess," he said uncomfortably. "There's just this rumor going around—"

"What rumor?" I demanded.

Todd shifted his weight. "I, um, gotta get to class. I'm gonna be late."

"You tell me what freaking rumor," I snapped, "or I guarantee, you'll be crawling to class on your hands and knees."

Only again, I didn't say freaking.

Todd didn't look scared, though. He just looked tired.

"Look, Jess," he said. "It's just a rumor, okay? Jenna Gibbon's older sister is married to a deputy sheriff with the county, and she said he told her that it looked like they might bring your brother in for questioning, because he fits some kind of profile, and because he doesn't have an alibi for either of the times the attacks occurred. Okay?"

I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't believe it.

Because they'd done it again. Special Agents Johnson and Smith, I mean. They'd said they were going to, and, by God, they had.

Well, and why not? They were with the FBI. They could do anything, right? I mean, who was going to stop them?

One person. Me.

I just couldn't figure out how. I fumed about it for the rest of the day, causing more than one teacher to ask me if perhaps I wouldn't be happier sitting in the guidance office for the rest of the day.

I told them I would—at least there, I figured, I would be free of annoying questions like what's the square root of sixteen hundred and five, what's the pluperfect for avoir—but unfortunately, none of them followed through with their threat. When the bell rang at three, I was still free as a bird. Free enough to go stalking past Mark Leskowski, on my way to Ruth's car, without so much as a second glance.

"Jess," he called after me. "Hey, Jess!"

I turned at the sound of my name, and was mildly surprised to see Mark leave his car, which he'd been unlocking, and hurry up to me.

"Hey," he said. He had on a pair of Ray Bans, which he lifted as he looked down at me. "How are you? I was hoping I'd run into you. I hope I didn't get you into trouble last night."

I just blinked up at him. All I could think about was how, at any minute, the Feds might be hauling Douglas in for questioning about a couple of crimes he in no way could have committed.

If, that is, I didn't come clean about the ESP thing, and promise to help them find their stupid criminals.

"You know," Mark said, I guess judging from my blank expression that I didn't know what he was talking about. "When I dropped you off. Your parents looked kind of … mad."

"They weren't mad," I said. "They were concerned." And about Douglas, not me. Because Douglas hadn't been home. He had been off somewhere, alone....

"Oh," Mark said. "Well, anyway. I just wanted to make sure you were, you know, all right. That was pretty terrific, how you found Heather and all."

"Yeah," I said, noticing Ruth coming toward us. "Well, you know. Just doing my job, and all. Listen, I gotta—"

"I was thinking," Mark said, "that maybe if you aren't doing anything this weekend, you and I could, uh, I don't know, hang out."

"Yeah, whatever," I said, though truthfully, the thought of going to see Japanese anime with Skip was a lot more appealing than "uh, I don't know, hanging out" with Mark. "Why don't you give me a call?"

"I'll do that," Mark said. He waved at Ruth as she went by, studying us so intently she nearly barked her shins on her own car's bumper. "Hey," he said to her. "How you doing there?"

"Fine," Ruth said, unlocking the driver's door to her car. "Thanks."

Mark opened his own driver's side door, reached inside his car, and pulled out a duffel bag. Then he closed the door again and locked it. At our glances, which I suppose he perceived as curious—though in my case, it was merely glazed—he went, "Football practice," then shouldered the bag, and headed off in the direction of the gym.

"Jess," Ruth said when he was out of earshot. "Did I hear that correctly? Did Mark Leskowski just ask you out?"

"Yeah," I said.

"So that's how many people who've asked you out today? Two?"

"Yeah," I said, climbing into the passenger seat after she unlocked it from the inside.

"Jeez, Jess," she said. "That's like a record, or something. Why aren't you happier?"

"Because," I said, "one of the guys who asked me out today was, up until recently, a suspect in his own girlfriend's murder, and the other one is your brother."

Ruth went, "Yeah, but isn't Mark off the hook now, on account of what happened to Heather?"

"I guess so," I said. "But...."

"But what?" Ruth asked.

"But . . . Ruth, Tisha says they all knew about that house. Almost like . . . they're the ones who hang out there."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it must have been one of them."

"One of who?"

"The in crowd," I said, gesturing toward the football field, where we could see the cheerleaders and some of the players already out there, practicing.

"Not necessarily," Ruth said. "I mean, Tisha knew about the house. She didn't say she'd ever been in there partying, did she?"

"Well," I said. "No. Not exactly. But—"

"I mean, come on. Don't you think those guys could find a nicer place to party? Like Mark Leskowski's parents' rec room, for instance? I mean, I hear the Leskowskis have an indoor/outdoor pool."

"Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Leskowski disapprove of Mark's friends bringing their girlfriends over for a quickie in their rec room."

"Puh-lease," Ruth said as we cruised out of the parking lot and turned onto High School Road. "Why would any of them kill Amber? Or try to kill Heather? They're all friends, right?"

Right. Ruth was right. Ruth was always right. And I was always wrong. Well, almost always, anyway.

I guess I didn't really believe—in spite of what Tisha had told me, about all of them knowing about the house on the pit road—that they'd actually been involved in Amber's murder and Heather's attack. I mean, seriously: Mark Leskowski, wrapping his hands around his girlfriend's neck and strangling her? No way. He'd loved her. He'd cried in the guidance office in front of me, he'd loved her so much.

At least, I think that's why he'd been crying. He certainly hadn't been crying about his chances at winning a scholarship being endangered by his status as a murder suspect. I mean, that would have been just plain cold. Right?

And what about Heather? Did I suppose that Jeff Day or someone else on the team had tied Heather up and left her in that bathtub to die? Why? So she wouldn't narc on Mark?

No. It was ridiculous. Tisha's theory about the deranged hillbillies made more sense. Maybe the cheerleaders and the football team parried in the house on the pit road, but they weren't the ones who'd left Heather there. No, that had been the work of someone else. Some sick, perverted individual.

But not—absolutely not—my brother.

I made sure of that, the second I got home. Not, of course, that I'd had any reason to doubt it. I just wanted to set the record straight. I stalked up the stairs—my mother wasn't home, thank God, so I didn't have to listen to any more lectures about how unsuitable it was of me to sneak out in the middle of the night with a boy who worked in a garage—and banged once on Douglas's bedroom door. Then I threw it open, because Douglas's bedroom door doesn't have a lock. My dad took the lock off, after he slit his wrists in there and we had to break the door down to get to him.

He's so used to me barging in, he doesn't even look up anymore.

"Get out," he said, without lifting his gaze from the copy of Starship Troopers he was perusing.

"Douglas," I said. "I have to know. Where were you last night from five o'clock until eight, when you came back to the house?"

He looked up at that. "Why do I have to tell you?" he wanted to know.

"Because," I said.

I wanted to tell him the truth, of course. I wanted to say, Douglas, the Feds think you may have had something to do with Amber Mackey's murder, and Heather Montrose's attack. I need you to tell me you didn't do it. I need you to tell me that you have witnesses who can verify your whereabouts at the time these crimes occurred, and that your alibi is rock solid. Because unless you can tell me these things, I may have to take an after-school job working with some particularly nasty people.

In other words, the FBI.

But I wasn't sure I could say these things to Douglas. I wasn't sure I could say these things to Douglas because it was hard to tell anymore what might set off one of his episodes. Most of the time, he seemed normal to me. But every once in a while, something would upset him—something seemingly stupid, like that we were out of Cheerios—and suddenly the voices—Douglas's voices—were back.

On the other hand, this was something serious. It wasn't about Cheerios or reporters from Good Housekeeping magazine standing in our yard wanting to interview me. Not this time. This time, it was about people dying.

"Douglas," I said. "I mean it. I need to know where you were. There's this rumor going around—I don't believe it or anything—but there's this rumor going around that you killed Amber Mackey, and that last night you kidnapped Heather Montrose and left her to die."

"Whoa." Douglas, who was lying on his bed, put down his comic book. "And how did I do this, supposedly? Using my superpowers?"

"No," I said. "I think the theory is that you snapped."

"I see," Douglas said. "And who is promoting this theory?"

"Well," I said, "Karen Sue Hankey in particular, but also most of the junior class of Ernie Pyle High, along with some of the seniors, and, um, oh, yeah, the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"Hmmm." Douglas considered this. "I find that last part particularly troubling. Does the FBI have proof or something that I killed these girls?"

"It's just one girl that's dead," I said. "The other one just got beat up."

"Well, why can't they ask her who beat her up?" Douglas wanted to know. "I mean, she'll tell them it wasn't me."

"She doesn't know who did it," I said. "She said they wore masks. And I figure even if she did know, she's not going to say. I am assuming whoever did this to her told her he'd finish the job if she talked."

Douglas sat up. "You're serious," he said. "People really do suspect me of doing this?"

"Yeah," I said. "And the thing is, the Feds are saying that unless I, you know, become a junior G-man, they're going to pin this thing on you. So before I sign up for my pension plan, I need to know. Have you got any kind of alibi at all?"

Douglas blinked at me. His eyes, like mine, were brown.

"I thought," he said, "that you'd told them you lost your psychic abilities."

"I did," I said. "I think my finding Heather Montrose in the middle of nowhere last night kind of tipped them off that maybe I hadn't been completely up front with them on that particular subject."

"Oh." Douglas looked uncomfortable. "The thing is, what I was doing last night . . . and the night that other girl disappeared . . . well, I was sort of hoping nobody would find out."

I stared at him. My God! So he had been up to something! But not, surely, lying in wait at that house on the pit road for an innocent cheerleader to go strolling by. . . .

"Douglas," I said. "I don't care what you were doing, so long as it didn't involve anything illegal. I just need something—preferably the truth—to tell Allan and Jill, or my butt is going to have 'Property of the U.S. Government' on it for the foreseeable future. So long as they have something on you, they own me. So I have to know. Do they have something on you?"

"Well," Douglas said, slowly. "Sort of...."

I could feel my world tilting, slowly … so slowly . . . right off its axis. My brother, Douglas. My big brother Douglas, whom all my life, it seemed, I'd been defending from others, people who called him retard, and spaz, and dorkus. People who wouldn't sit near him when we went to the movies as kids because sometimes he shouted things—that usually didn't make sense to everyone else—at the screen. People who wouldn't let their kids swim in the pool near him, because sometimes Douglas simply stopped swimming and just sank to the bottom, until a lifeguard noticed and fished him out. People who, every time a bike, or a dog, or a plaster yard gnome disappeared from the neighborhood, accused Douglas of having been the one who'd taken it, because Douglas . . . well, he wasn't all there, was he?

Only of course they were wrong. Douglas was all there. Just not in the way they considered normal.

But maybe, all this time … maybe they'd been right. Maybe this time Douglas really had done something wrong. Something so wrong, he didn't even want to tell me about it. Me, his kid sister, the one who'd learned how to swing a punch when she turned seven, just so that she could knock the blocks off the kids down the street who were calling him a freakazoid every time he passed by their house on the way to school.

"Douglas," I breathed, finding that my throat had suddenly, and inexplicably, closed. "What did you do?"

"Well," he said, unable to meet my gaze. "The truth is, Jess . . . the truth is . . ." He took a deep breath.

"I got a job."

C H A P T E R

16

The first call came right after dinner.

It was a quiet affair, dinner that night. Quiet because every single person at the table was angry with somebody else.

My mother, of course, was angry at me for having snuck out the night before with Rob Wilkins, a boy of whom she did not approve because a) he was too old for me, b) he had no aspirations for attending college, c) he rode a motorcycle, d) his mother was a waitress, and e) we did not know who Mr. Wilkins was or what he did, if anything, or if there even was a Mr. Wilkins, which Mary Wilkins had never admitted either way, at least in the presence of my father.

And she didn't even know about the whole probation thing.

My father was mad at my mother for being what he called an elitist snob and for not being more grateful that Rob had insisted on accompanying me on another of what he referred to as my idiotic vision quests, and making sure I didn't get myself killed.

I was mad at my dad for calling my psychic visions idiotic, when they had, as a matter of fact, saved a lot of lives and reunited a lot of families. I was also mad at him for thinking that, without some guy to watch over me, I could not take care of myself. And of course I was mad at my mom for not liking Rob.

Meanwhile, Douglas was mad at me because I had told him he had to 'fess up to Mom and Dad about the job thing. I fully understood why he didn't want to—Mom was going to flip out at the idea of her baby boy soiling his fingers at any sort of menial labor. She seemed to be convinced that the slightest provocation—like him maybe lifting a sponge to wipe the milk he'd spilled on the kitchen counter—was going to set him off into another suicidal tailspin.

But Dad was the one who was really going to bust a gut when he found out, and I don't mean from laughing, either. In our family, if you worked, you worked at one of Dad's restaurants, or not at all. That whole thing where they'd let me spend the summer as a camp counselor? Yeah, that had only come about because of the intensive musical training I would be receiving while I was at Wawasee. Otherwise, you can bet I'd have been relegated to the steam table at Joe's.

So I wasn't too happy with Mom, Dad, or Douglas during that particular meal, and none of them were too happy with me, either. So when the phone rang, you can bet I ran for it, just as a way to avoid the uncomfortable silence that had hung over the table, interrupted only by the occasional scraping fork, or request for more parmesan.

"Hello?" I said, snatching up the receiver from the kitchen wall phone, which was the closest one to the dining room.

"Jess Mastriani?" a male voice asked.

"Yes," I said, with some surprise. I had expected it to be Ruth. She's about the only person who ever calls us. I mean, unless something is wrong at one of the restaurants. "This is she."

"I saw you talking to Tisha Murray today," the person on the other end of the phone said.

"Uh," I said. "Yeah." The voice sounded weird. Sort of muffled, like whoever it was was calling from inside a tunnel or something. "So?"

"So if you do it again," the voice said, "you're going to end up just like Amber Mackey."

I took the receiver away from my ear and looked down at it, just like they always do in horror movies when the psychopathic killer calls (generally from inside the house). I've always thought that was stupid, because it's not like you can see the person through the phone. But you know, it must be instinctive or something, because there I was, doing it.

I put the phone back up to my ear and went, "You're kidding me with this, right?"

"Stop asking questions about the house on the pit road," the voice said. "Or you'll be sorry, you stupid bitch."

"What are you going to do," I asked, "when I hang up and star-six-nine you, and five minutes later, the cops show up and haul your ass into jail, you freaking perv?"

The line went dead in my ear. I banged down the receiver and pushed the star button, then the number six, then the number nine. A phone rang, and then a woman's voice said, "The number you are trying to call cannot be reached by this method."

Damn! They'd called from an untraceable line. I should have known.

I hung up and went back into the dining room.

"I wish Ruth would stop calling us during dinner," my mother said. "She knows we eat at six thirty. It really isn't very thoughtful of her."

I didn't see any reason to disabuse her of the idea that it had been Ruth on the phone. I was pretty sure she wouldn't have liked hearing the truth. I plunked down into my seat and picked up my fork.

Only suddenly, I couldn't eat. I don't know what happened, but I had a piece of pasta halfway to my lips when suddenly my throat closed up and the table—and all of the food on it—went blurry.

Blurry because my eyes had filled up with tears. Tears! Just like Mark Leskowski, I was crying.

"Jess," my mother said, curiously. "Are you all right?"

I glanced at her, but I couldn't really see her. Nor could I speak. All I could think was, Oh, my God. They are going to do to me what they did to Heather.

And then I felt really, really cold, like someone had left the door to the walk-in freezer at Mastriani's wide open.

"Jessica?" my dad said. "What's wrong?"

But how could I tell them? How could I tell them about that phone call? It would just upset them. They would probably even call the police. That was all I needed, the police. Like I didn't have the FBI practically camped in my front yard.

But Heather … what had happened to Heather … I didn't want that to happen to me.

Suddenly Douglas shoved his salad plate to the floor. It shattered with a crash into a million pieces.

"Take that," he yelled at the bits of lettuce with ranch dressing littering the floor.

I blinked at him through my tears. What was going on? Was Douglas having an episode? I could tell by the expressions on my parents' faces that they thought so, anyway. They exchanged worried glances....

And while their attention was focused on one another, Douglas glanced at me, and winked....

A second later, my mother was on her feet. "Dougie," she cried. "Dougie, what is it?"

My dad, as always, was more laconic about the whole thing. "Did you take all your medication today, Douglas?" he asked.

Then I knew. Douglas was faking an episode—to get them off my back about the crying thing. I felt a wave of love for Douglas wash over me. Had there ever, in the history of time, been such a cool big brother?

While my parents were distracted, I reached up and wiped the tears from my eyes with the backs of my wrists. What was happening to me? I never cried. This thing with Amber, and now with Heather, was getting way personal. I mean, now they were after me. Me!

Between the Feds thinking Douglas was the killer, and the real killers threatening that I was going to be their next victim, I guess I had a reason to cry. But it was still demoralizing, seeing as how it was such a Karen-Sue-Hankey thing to do.

While I was trying to get my emotions under control, and my parents were questioning Douglas about his mental health, the phone rang again. This time, I practically knocked my chair over, diving to get it.

"It's for me," I said quickly, lifting the receiver. "I'm sure."

No one so much as glanced in my direction. Douglas was still getting the third degree for his assault on his dinner salad.

"Jessica?" a voice I did not recognize asked in my ear.

"It's me," I said. And then, turning my back on the scene in the dining room, I said in a low rapid voice, "Listen, you loser, if you don't quit calling me, I swear I'm going to hunt you down and kill you like the dog that you are."

The voice went, sounding extremely taken aback, "But, Jess. This is the first time I've called you. Ever."

I sucked in my breath, finally realizing who it was. "Skip?"

"Yeah," Skip said. "It's me. Listen, I was just wondering if you'd thought about what we discussed today at lunch. You know. The movie. This weekend."

"Oh," I said. My mother came into the kitchen and went to the pantry, from which she removed a broom and dustpan. "Yeah," I said. "The movie. This weekend."

"Yeah," Skip said. "And I thought maybe, before the movie, we could go out. You know, for dinner or something."

"Uh," I said. My mother, holding the broom and dustpan, was standing there staring at me, the way lions on the Discovery Channel stare at the gazelles they are about to pounce on. All her concern for Douglas seemed to be forgotten. This was, after all, the first time I had ever been asked out within her earshot. My mother, who'd been a cheerleader herself—and Homecoming Queen, Prom Queen, County Fair Princess, and Little Miss Corn Detassler—had been waiting sixteen years for me to start dating. She blamed the fact that I hadn't been out on a million dates already, like she had at my age, on my slovenly dress habits.

She didn't know anything about my right hook.

Well, actually, I think she did now, thanks to Mrs. Hankey's lawsuit.

"Yeah, about that, Skip," I said, turning my back on her. "I don't think I can go. I mean, my curfew is eleven. My mom would never let me stay out for a movie that didn't even start until midnight."

"Yes, I would," my mother said loudly, to my utter horror and disbelief.

I brought the phone away from my ear and stared at her. "Mom," I said, flabbergasted.

"Don't look at me that way, Jessica," my mom said. "I mean, I am not completely inflexible. If you want to go to a midnight show with Skip, that's perfectly all right."

I couldn't believe it. After the grief she'd been giving me about Rob, I was pretty sure she was never letting me out of the house again, let alone with a boy.

But apparently it was just one particular boy I was banned from seeing socially.

And that boy was not Skip Abramowitz.

"I mean," my mother went on, "it's not like your father and I don't know Skip. He has grown into a very responsible young man. Of course you can go to the movies with him."

I gaped at her. "Ma," I said. "The movie doesn't even start until midnight."

"So long as Skip has you home right after it ends," my mother said.

"Oh," came a voice from the receiver, which I was holding limply in my hand. "I will, Mrs. Mastriani. Don't worry!"

And just like that, I had a date with Skip Abramowitz.

Well, it wasn't like I could get out of it after that. Not without completely humiliating him. Or myself, for that matter.

"Mom," I yelled when I had hung up. "I don't want to go out with Skip!

"Why not?" Mom wanted to know. "I think he's a very nice boy."

Translation: He doesn't own a motorcycle, has never worked in a garage, and did really well on his PSATs.

And, oh, yeah, his dad happens to be the highest-paid lawyer in town.

"I think you're being unfair, Jessica," my mother said. 'True, Skip may not be the most exciting boy you know, but he's extremely sweet."

"Sweet! He blew up my favorite Barbie!"

"That was years ago," my mom said. "I think Skip's grown into a real gentleman. You two will have a wonderful time." She grew thoughtful. "You know, I just found a skirt pattern the other day that would be perfect for a casual night out at the movies. And there are a few yards of gingham left over from those curtains I made for the guest room. . . ."

See, this is the problem with having a stay-at-home mom. She thinks up little projects to do all the time, like making me a skirt from material left over from curtains. I swear sometimes I'm not sure who she's supposed to be, my mother or Maria von Trapp.

Before I could say anything like, "No, thanks, Mom. I just spent a fortune at Esprit, I think I can manage to find something to wear on my own," or even, "Mom, if you think I'm not planning on coming down with something Saturday night just before this date, you've got another think coming," Douglas came into the kitchen, holding his dinner plate, and said, "Yeah, Jess. Skip's really neat."

I shot him a warning look. "Watch it, Comic-Book Boy," I growled.

Douglas, looking alarmed, noticed Mom standing there with the broom. "Oh, hey," he said, putting his empty dinner plate down in the sink. "I'll clean it up, don't worry. It was my fault, anyway."

My mom snatched the broom out of his reach. "No, no," she said, hurrying back into the dining room. "I'll do it."

Which was kind of sad. Because of course she was only doing it because she didn't want Douglas messing with bits of broken glass. His suicide attempt last Christmas had convinced her that he wasn't to be trusted around sharp objects.

"See," Douglas said, as the swinging door closed behind her, "what I go through for you? Now she's going to be watching me like a hawk for the next few days."

I suppose I should have been grateful to him. But all I could think was that things would be a lot less stressful if Douglas would just come clean.

"Why don't you go tell them now?" I asked. All right, begged. "Before Entertainment Tonight. You know Mom never lets a fight last more than five minutes into ET."

Douglas was rinsing his plate.

"No way," he said, not looking at me.

I nearly burst a capillary, I was so mad.

"Douglas," I hissed. "If you think I'm not telling the Feds, you're out of your mind. I can't let them go around thinking they have something on me. I'm telling them. And if they know, how long do you think it's going to be before Mom and Dad find out? It's better for you to tell them than the damned FBI, don't you think?"

Douglas turned the water off.

"It's just that you know what Dad's going to say," he said. "If I'm well enough to work behind the counter at the comic book store, I'm well enough to work in the kitchens at Mastriani's. But I can't stand food service. You know that."

"Who can?" I wanted to know. But when your dad owned three of the most popular restaurants in town, you didn't have much of a choice.

"And Mom." Douglas shook his head. "You know how Mom's going to react. That out there? That was nothing."

"That's why I'd tell them now," I said, "before they find out from somebody else. I mean, for God's sake, Douglas. You've been working there for two weeks already. You think they aren't going to hear about it from somebody?"

"Look, Jess," Douglas said. "I'll tell them. I swear I will. Just let me do it my own way, in my own time. I mean, you know how Mom is—"

The swinging door to the dining room banged open, and my mother, carrying the now full dustpan, came into the kitchen.

"You know how Mom is what?" she asked, looking suspiciously from Douglas to me and then back again.

Fortunately, the phone rang.

Again.

I leapt for it, but I was too late. My dad had already picked up the extension in the den.

"Jess," he yelled. "Phone for you."

Great. My mother's eyes lit up. You could totally tell that she thought it was starting for me. You know, the popularity that she had had when she was my age, which had so far eluded me during my tenure at Ernie Pyle High. As a daughter I was, I knew, pretty disappointing to her, because I wasn't already going steady with a guy like Mark Leskowski. I guess at this point, even a date with Skip was preferable to no date at all.

Or Rob.

Too bad she didn't know that the kind of calls I'd been receiving all night were not exactly from members of the pep squad, wanting to discuss the next day's bake sale.

No, more like members of the death squad, wanting to discuss my imminent demise.

But when I picked up, I found that it wasn't my prank caller at all. It was Special Agent Johnson.

"Well, Jessica," he said. "Have you given any thought to our conversation this morning?"

I looked at my mom and Douglas. "Uh, do you guys mind?" I asked. "This is kind of personal."

My mom's eyebrows furrowed. "It isn't that boy, is it?" she wanted to know. "That Wilkins person?"

That Wilkins person. It was almost as bad as the Jerk.

"No," I said. "It's another boy."

Which wasn't technically even a lie. And which made my mom smile as happily as she left the room as if I'd just been voted Most Likely to Marry a Doctor. Douglas left too, only he didn't look half so happy as Mom did.

"Which conversation?" I asked Special Agent Johnson, as soon as my mother was gone. "Oh, you mean the one where you suggested my brother might, in fact, be Amber Mackey's killer? And that if I didn't help you track down your little Ten Most Wanteds, you'd haul him in for questioning about it?"

"Well, I don't think I put it quite like that," Special Agent Johnson said. "But that, in essence, is why I'm calling."

"I hate to break it to you," I said, "but Douglas has got a rock solid alibi for the times both those girls disappeared. Just ask his new employers down at Comix Underground."

There was silence on the line. Then Special Agent Johnson chuckled.

"I was wondering," he said, "how long it would take for him to work up the courage to tell you."

I felt a jolt of rage. You knew? I was going to scream into the receiver.

But then it hit me. Of course he'd known. He and his partner had known all along. They'd just been using the fact that I didn't know to yank my chain.

Well, that's what they get paid for. Covert operations.

"If you're done having your little fun with me," I said—with more irritation than was perhaps necessary, but I felt tears threatening again—"you might actually want to do some work for a change. I mean, I know it's more fun for you all to try to get me to do your job for you, but in this particular case, I think you've got the expertise."

I told him about my mysterious caller. Special Agent Johnson was, I must say, mightily interested.

"And you say you didn't recognize the voice?" he asked.

"Well," I said. "It sounded kind of muffled."

"He probably put something over the mouthpiece of the phone he was using," Special Agent Johnson said, "for fear you might recognize him. Let me ask you something. Was the voice distinctive in any way? Any accents, or anything?"

For some reason, I found myself remembering the Grit Test. You know, the pen versus pin thing.

"No," I said, with some surprise at myself for not having realized it before. "No accent at all."

"Good," Special Agent Johnson said. "Good girl. All right, we'll work on seeing if we can come up with the number this person called from."

"Well, I would think you should be able to come up with that pretty easily," I said. "Seeing as how you've had my phone tapped since like, forever."

"That's very funny, Jessica," Special Agent Johnson said, dryly. "You are aware, of course, that the Bureau would never do anything to violate a U.S. citizen's rights during an investigation."

"Haw," I said. Somehow, knowing Special Agent Johnson was on the case made me feel better. Crazy, huh, considering how much having the Feds following me around all the time used to bug me? "Haw, haw."

"And don't worry, Jessica," Special Agent Johnson said. "You and your family are in no danger. We'll post plenty of operatives outside your home tonight."

Too bad that isn't what they chose to destroy in order to assure me of how serious they were about their threats. Our home, I mean.

Instead, they burned down Mastriani's.

C H A P T E R

17

You'd have thought I'd be able to catch a break, wouldn't you? I mean, it wasn't like I'd gotten any sleep the night before. No, they had to make sure I didn't get any the next night, either.

Well, okay, I got some. The call didn't come until after three.

Three in the morning, I mean.

But when it did come, there was no sleep for anyone in the Mastriani household. Not for a long, long time.

I, of course, thought it was for me.

And why not? It wasn't like the phone had rung—not even once that night—for anybody else in the house. No, all of my mother's dreams for me were finally coming true: I was Miss Popularity, all right.

Too bad the only dates I was getting were dates with, um, death.

Well, and Skip Abramowitz.

When the phone started ringing its head off at three A.M., I shot out of bed before I was even fully awake and dove for the extension in my room, as if somehow, by catching it on the second ring, I was going to keep the rest of the house from waking up.

Yeah, nice try.

The voice on the other end of the line was familiar, but it wasn't one of my new friends. You know, the ones who'd promised to kill me if I talked to Tisha Murray anymore about the house on the pit road.

It was, instead, a woman's voice. It took me a minute to realize it was Special Agent Smith.

"Jessica," she said when I answered. And then, when my dad got on the line in his bedroom, and went, blearily, "Hullo?" she added, "Mr. Mastriani."

My dad and I didn't say anything. He, I think, was still trying to wake up. I, of course, was tensing for what I knew was going to follow … or thought I knew, anyway. Someone else was missing. Tisha Murray, maybe.

Or Heather Montrose. Despite the guard they'd put on her room in the hospital, someone had managed to sneak in, and finish the job they'd started. Heather was dead.

Either that, or they'd found someone. They'd found someone trying to sneak into my house to kill me.

But of course it wasn't that at all. It wasn't any of those things.

"I'm sorry to wake you, sir," Jill said, sounding as if she meant it. "But I think you should know that your restaurant, Mastriani's, is on fire. Could you please—"

But Jill never got to finish, because my dad had dropped the phone and was, if I knew him, already reaching for his pants.

"We'll be right there," I said.

"No, Jessica, not you. You should—"

But I never found out what I have should have done, because I'd hung up.

When I met him at the front door a few seconds later, I saw that I'd been right. My dad was fully dressed—well, he had on pants and shoes. He was still wearing his pajama top as a shirt. When he saw me, he said, "Stay here with your mother and brother."

I, however, had gotten dressed, too.

"No way," I said.

He looked annoyed but grateful at the same time, which was quite a feat, if you think about it.

As soon as we stepped outside, we could see it. An orange glow reflected against the low hanging clouds in the night sky. And not a small glow, either, but something that looked like that burning-of-Atlanta scene out of Gone With the Wind.

"Christ almighty," my dad said when he saw it.

I, of course, was busy consulting with my friends across the street. The ones in the white van.

"Hey," I said, tapping on the rolled up window on the driver's side. "I gotta go downtown with my dad. Stay here and keep an eye on the place while I'm gone, okay?"

There was no response, but I hadn't expected any. People who are supposed to be covertly following you don't like it when you come up and start talking to them, even if their boss knows that you know they're there.

Well, you know what I mean.

The drive downtown took no time at all. At least, it didn't usually. And yet it seemed to take ages that night. Our house is only a few blocks from downtown … a fifteen-minute stroll, at most, a four-minute drive. The streets, at three in the morning, were empty. That wasn't the problem. It was that orange glow hanging in the sky above our heads that we couldn't take our eyes off of. A couple of times, my dad nearly drove off the side of the road, he was so transfixed by it. It was a good thing, actually, that I was there, since I'd taken the wheel and gone, "Dad."

"Don't worry," I said to him, a minute later. "That isn't it. That orange light? That's probably, you know, heat lightning."

"Staying in one place?" my dad asked.

"Sure," I said. "I read about it. In Bio."

God, I am such a liar.

And then we turned the corner onto Main. And there it was.

And it wasn't heat lightning. Oh, no.

Once, a long time ago, the people who lived across the street from us had a log roll out of their fireplace and set the living room curtains on fire. That was how I'd expected the fire at Mastriani's to be. You know, flames in the windows, and maybe some smoke billowing out of the open front door. The fire department would be there, of course, and they'd put the flames out, and that would be the end of it. That's what had happened with our neighbors. Their curtains were lost, and the carpet had to be replaced, along with a couch that had gotten completely soaked by the fire hoses.

But you know that night—the night the curtains caught fire—the people who lived across the street slept in their own—somewhat smoky-smelling—beds. They hadn't needed to go stay with relatives or in a shelter or a hotel or anything, because of course their house was still standing.

The fire at Mastriani's was not that kind of fire. It was not that kind of fire at all. The fire at Mastriani's was a writhing, breathing, living thing. It was, to put it mildly, awesome in its destructive power. Flames were shooting thirty, forty feet in the air from the roof. The entire building was a glowing ball of fire. We couldn't get closer than two hundred feet away from it, there were so many fire engines parked along the street. Dozens of firefighters, wielding hoses spitting streams of water, weaved a dreamy, dance-like pattern in front of the building, trying to douse the flames.

But it was a losing battle. You did not need to be a fire marshall to tell that. The place was engulfed, consumed in flames. It was not even recognizable anymore. The green and gold awning above the door, that shielded customers from the rain? Gone. The matching green sign, with MASTRIANI'S spelled out across it in gold script? Gone. The window boxes on the second floor administrative offices? Gone. The new industrial freezers? Gone. The make-out table where Mark Leskowski and I had sat? Gone. Everything, gone.

Just like that.

Well, not just like that, actually. Because as my dad and I got out of the car and picked our way toward the place, carefully stepping over the hoses that, pulsing like live snakes, crisscrossed the road, we could see that a lot of people were working very hard to save what appeared to me, anyway, to be a lost cause. Firefighters shouted above the hiss of water and the roar of the flame, coughing in the thick, black smoke that instantly clogged the throat and lungs.

One of them noticed us and said to stand back. My dad yelled, "I own the place," and the firefighter directed us to a group of people who were standing across the street, their faces bathed in orange light.

"Joe," one of them yelled, and I recognized him as the mayor of our town, which is small. If there were going to be a catastrophic fire threatening not only one prominent downtown business, but the businesses around it as well, you would expect the mayor to be there.

"Jesus, Joe," the mayor said. "I'm sorry."

"Was anybody hurt?" my dad asked, coming to stand between the mayor and a man I knew from his periodic inspections to be the fire chief. "Nobody's been hurt, have they?"

"Naw," the mayor said. "Coupla Richie's guys, trying to be heroes, went in to make sure nobody was still inside, and got a chestful of smoke for their efforts."

"They'll be okay," Richard Parks, the fire chief, said. "Nobody was in there, Joe. Don't worry about that."

My dad looked relieved, but only moderately so. "What are the chances of it spreading?" Mastriani's was a freestanding structure, a Victorian-type house flanked on either side by a New Age bookstore and a bank branch, with a shared parking lot behind it. "The bank? Harmony Books?"

"We're watering them down," the fire chief said. "So far, so good. Coupla sparks landed on the roof of the bookstore and went out right away. We got here in time, Joe, don't worry. Well, in time to save the neighboring structures, anyway."

His voice was sorrowful. And why not? He'd eaten at Mastriani's a lot. Just like every single man there, pointing a hose at it.

"What happened?" my dad asked in a stunned voice. "I mean, how did it start? Does anybody know?"

"Couldn't say," Captain Parks told us. "Folks over at the jailhouse heard an explosion, looked out, saw the place was on fire. Couldn'ta been more than eight, nine minutes ago. Place went up like a cinder."

"Which suggests," a woman's voice said, "an accelerant to me."

We all looked around. And there stood Special Agents Smith and Johnson, looking concerned and maybe a little worse for wear. To be roused from a dead sleep two nights in a row was a little rough, even for them.

"My thinking exactly," the fire chief said.

"Wait a minute." My dad, his face scratchy-looking with a half-night's growth of beard bristle, stared at the FBI agents. "What are you saying? You're saying somebody purposefully started this fire?"

"No way it coulda spread that fast, Joe," the fire chief said, "or burned so hot. Not without some kind of accelerant. From the smell, I'm guessing gasoline, but we won't know until the fire's out and the place has cooled down enough for us to—"

"Gasoline?" My dad looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. Seriously. All these veins I had never noticed before were standing out in his forehead, and his neck looked kind of skinny, like it could barely support the weight of his head.

Or maybe it was just that, in the bright light from the fire, I was getting my first really good look at him in a while.

"Why in God's name would anybody do this?" my dad demanded. "Why would anybody deliberately burn the place down?"

The sheriff, whom I hadn't noticed before, cleared his throat and went, "Disgruntled employee, maybe."

"I haven't fired anybody," my dad said. "Not in months."

That was true. My dad didn't like firing people, so he only hired people he was pretty sure were going to work out. And mostly, his instincts were right on.

"Well," the sheriff said, gazing almost admiringly at the blaze across the street. "There'll be an investigation. That's for sure. Case of arson? You can bet your insurance company'll be all over it. We'll get to the bottom of it. Eventually."

Eventually. Sure. Or they could, I supposed, just have asked me. I'd have been able to tell them who started it. I knew good and well.

Well, actually, what I knew was the why. Not the who. But the why was clear enough.

It was a warning. A warning about what would happen to me if I didn't quit asking questions about the house on the pit road.

Which was so unfair. My dad. My poor dad. He'd done nothing to deserve this, nothing at all.

Looking at him, at his face as he tried to joke with the mayor and the sheriff and the fire chief, my heart swelled with pity. He was joking, but inside, I knew, his heart was breaking. My dad had loved Mastriani's, which he'd opened shortly after he and my mom had married. It had been his first restaurant, his first baby … just like Douglas was Mom's first baby. And now that baby was going up in a puff of smoke.

Well, not really a puff, actually. More like a wall. A great big wall of smoke that would soon be floating across the county like a storm cloud.

"Don't even think about it, Jess," Special Agent Johnson said, not without some affability.

I turned to blink at him. "Think about what?"

"Finding out who did this," Allan said, "and going after them yourself. We're talking about sorne dangerous—and fairly sick—criminals here. You leave the investigating to us, understand?"

For once, I was perfectly willing to do so. I mean, I was mad and everything. Don't get me wrong. But a part of me was also scared. More scared even than I'd been when I'd seen Heather all tied up in that bathtub. More scared than I'd been on that motorcycle, careening through the darkness of those woods.

Because this—the fire—was more terrible, in a way, than either of those things. This was awful, more awful than Heather's broken arm, and way more awful than me tipping over beneath an eight-hundred-pound bike.

Because this . . . this was out of control. This was dangerous. This was deadly.

Like what had happened to Amber.

"Don't worry," I said, gulping. "I will."

"Yeah," Special Agent Johnson said, clearly not believing me. "Right."

And then I heard it. My mom's voice, calling out my dad's name.

She came toward us, picking her way through the fire hoses, with a trench coat thrown over her nightgown and Douglas holding onto her elbow to keep her from tripping in her high-heeled sandals. My dad, seeing her, started forward, meeting her just beside one of the biggest fire engines.

"Oh, Joe," my mom said, sighing as she watched the flames that still seemed to rise so high into the sky, they were practically licking it. "Oh, Joe."

"It's all right, Toni," my dad said, taking her hand. "I mean, don't worry. The insurance is all paid up. We're totally covered. We can rebuild."

"But all that work, Joe," my mom said. Her gaze never left the fire, as if it had transfixed her. And you know, even though it was this horrible thing, it was still beautiful, in a way. The firefighters had given up trying to put the flames out, and were instead concentrating on keeping them from spreading to the buildings next door. And so far, they were doing a good job.

"All your hard work. Twenty years of it." I saw my mom tilt her head until it was resting on my dad's shoulder. "I'm so sorry, Joe."

"It's okay," my dad said. He let go of her hand, and put his arm around her instead. "It's just a restaurant. That's all. Just a restaurant."

Just a restaurant. Just my dad's dream restaurant, that's all, the one he'd worked hardest and longest on. Joe's, my dad's less-expensive restaurant, brought in barely half the income of Mastriani's, and Joe Junior's, the take-out pizza place, even less than that. We were, I knew, going to be hurting financially for a while, insurance or no insurance.

But my dad didn't seem to care. He gave my mom a squeeze and said, with only somewhat forced jocularity, "Hey, if something had to go, I'm glad it's this and not the house."

They didn't say anything else after that. They just stood there with their arms around each other and their heads together, watching a big part of their livelihood go up in smoke.

Douglas came up to me. I didn't tell him what I was thinking, which was that the last time I'd seen our parents standing like that, it had been outside the emergency room, when he'd slashed his wrists last Christmas Eve.

"I guess," Douglas said, "now probably wouldn't be a good time to tell them, right?"

I looked at him. "Tell them what?"

"About my new job."

I couldn't help smiling a little at that.

"Uh, no," I said. "Now would definitely not be a good time to tell them about your new job."

And so the four of us stood and watched Mastriani's burn down.

C H A P T E R

18

By the time I got to school the next day, it was noon, and everyone—everyone in the entire town—had heard what had happened. When I walked through the doors of the caf—it was my lunch period when Mom dropped me off—all these people came rushing up to me to express their condolences. Really, just like somebody had died.

And, in a way, I guess, somebody had died. I mean, Mastriani's was an institution in our town. It was where people went when they wanted to splurge, like on a birthday, or before prom or something.

But I guess not anymore.

I think I've mentioned how extremely not popular I am at my Ernest Pyle High. I mean, I don't have what you would call school spirit. I could really care less if the Cougars win State, or even if they win, period. And I don't think I've ever been invited to a party. You know the ones, where somebody's parents aren't home, so everybody comes over with a keg and trashes the place, like in the movies?

Yeah, I've never been invited to one of those.

So I guess you could say I was pretty surprised by the outpouring of sympathy for my situation from a certain segment of the student population at Ernie Pyle High. Because it wasn't just Ruth and Skip and people from the Orchestra who came up to say they were sorry to hear about what had happened.

No, Todd Mintz came up, and a bunch of the Pompettes, and Tisha Murray and Jeff Day, and even the king of the popular crowd himself, Mark Leskowski.

It was almost enough to take a girl's mind off the fact that there was someone out there who wanted her dead—and who'd see that she got that way, if she came too close to the truth.

"I can't believe it," Mark said, plopping his truly magnificent rear end down on the bench beside me and regarding me with those deep brown eyes. "I mean, we were just there, you and I."

"Yeah," I said, uncomfortably aware of the number of envious glances coming my way. After all, with Amber gone, Mark was fair game. I saw more than one cheerleader nudge the girl next to her and point to the two of us, sitting there with our heads so close together at the otherwise empty table.

Of course, they had no way of knowing that my heart belonged—and always would—to another.

"At least nobody was hurt," Mark said. "I mean, could you imagine if it had happened during the dinner rush or something?"

"It would have been hard," I said to him, "for whoever poured gasoline all over the place, to have done so without anybody noticing during the dinner rush."

Mark's dark eyebrows lifted. "You mean somebody did it on purpose? But why? And who?"

"My guess would be whoever killed Amber and then beat up Heather. And they did it as a warning," I said. "To me. To back off."

Mark looked stunned. "God," he said. "That sucks."

It was more or less an adequate representation of my feelings on the matter, and so I nodded.

"Yeah," I said. "Doesn't it?"

It was right after that that the bell rang. Mark said, "Hey, listen. Maybe we could get together or something this weekend. I mean, if you're up for it. I'll give you a call."

Okay, I'll admit it. It was kind of cool to have the best-looking guy in school—vice-president of the senior class, quarterback, and all around hottie—say things to me like "I'll give you a call." I mean, don't get me wrong: he was no Rob Wilkins or anything. There was that whole "unacceptable" thing, which was a little, I don't know, militaristic for me.

But hey. He'd asked me out. Twice now. All of a sudden, I had a clue as to how my mom must have felt, when she was in school. You know, Little Miss Corn Detassler and all of that. I could see why she'd been so excited for me when Skip had called. Being popular—well, it's pretty fun.

Or at least it was, up until Karen Sue Hankey came up to me on my way to my locker and went, in her snotty Karen-Sue-Hankey voice, "Missed you at chair auditions this morning."

I froze, one hand on my combination lock. The auditions for chair placement in Orchestra. I had completely forgotten. After all, I had been dealing with some pretty heavy stuff lately … threats to my life, and the destruction of a large portion of my family's business. It wasn't any wonder I hadn't been able to keep my schedule straight.

But wait a minute . . . the winds had been scheduled for Thursday.

Which was today.

"I suppose, since you missed them," Karen Sue said, "you'll have to be last chair until next semester's tryouts. Too bad. Mr. Vine is posting the placements after school and I'm betting I'll be—Hey!"

The reason Karen Sue yelled "Hey" is because I pushed her. Not hard or anything. I just had to get somewhere, and fast, and she was in my way.

And that somewhere was the teachers' lounge, where I knew Mr. Vine spent fifth period, decompressing after freshman Orchestra.

I tore down the hall, bumping into people rushing off to class, and not even saying excuse me. It wasn't fair. It totally wasn't fair. A person with an excused absence like mine—and my absence was excused—should be allowed to audition like everybody else, not relegated to last chair just because some psycho had burned her parents' restaurant down.

The thing was, I had totally learned to sight read over the summer. I had had this big plan of blowing Mr. Vine away with my awesome new musical abilities. I didn't want to be first chair or anything, but I definitely deserved third, maybe even second. No way was I going to take last chair. Not lying down, anyway.

I skidded to a halt in front of the door to the teachers' lounge. I was going to be late for Bio, but I didn't care. I banged on the door.

As I was doing so, somebody touched my shoulder. I turned around, and was surprised to see Claire Lippman, who hardly ever spoke to me in the hallways. Not because she was snotty or anything, just because, usually, she had her head buried in a script.

"Jess," she said. Claire did not look good. Which was also unusual, because Claire is one of those, you know, raving beauties. The kind you maybe don't notice right off, but the more you look at her, the more you realize that she is perfect.

She didn't look so perfect just then, though. She'd chewed all the lipstick off her lower lip, and the pink sweater she'd flung around her shoulders—she was wearing a white sleeveless top—was in grave danger of slipping off and landing on the floor.

"Jess, I …" Claire looked up and down the hallway. It was clearing out, as people darted into class. "I really need to talk to you."

I could tell something was wrong. Really wrong.

"What's wrong, Claire?" I asked, putting my hand on her arm. "Are you—"

All right. Are you all right. That's what I'd been going to ask her.

Only I never got the chance, because of two things that happened at almost the same time.

The first was that the door to the teachers' lounge opened, and Mr. Lewis, the chemistry teacher, stood there, looking down at me like I was crazy, because of course people aren't supposed to bother teachers when they are in the lounge.

The second thing that happened was that Mark Leskowski emerged from the guidance office, which was across the hall from the teachers' lounge, holding a stack of college applications they'd evidently been keeping there for him.

"What may I do for you, Miss Mastriani?" Mr. Lewis asked. I had never had Chemistry, but he apparently knew my name from last spring, when I'd been in the paper so much.

"Hey," Mark said, to Claire and me. "How you two doing?"

Which was when Claire did an extraordinary thing. She spun around and took off down the hallway, so fast that she didn't even notice her sweater slip off her shoulders and fall to the carpet.

Mr. Lewis, looking after her, shook his head.

"Drama club," he muttered.

Mark and I—staring after Claire, who disappeared around the corner, heading in the direction of the drama wing, where the auditorium and stuff were—glanced at one another. Mark rolled his eyes and shrugged, as if to say, "Dames. What can you do?"

"See ya," he said, and started off in the opposite direction, toward the gym.

Not knowing what else to do, I bent down and picked up Claire's sweater. It was really soft, and when I glanced at the tag, I saw why. One hundred percent cashmere. She was going to miss this. I'd hang onto it, I decided, until I saw her again.

"Well, Miss Mastriani?" Mr. Lewis said, startling me.

I asked to see Mr. Vine. Mr. Lewis sighed, then went and got him.

Mr. Vine, when he came to the door, seemed to find my concern that I would be relegated to last chair in the flute section very amusing.

"Do you really think," he said, his eyes twinkling, "that I'd do that to you, Jess? We all know why you weren't there. Don't worry about it. Meet me right after last period today and we'll hold your audition. All right?"

I felt relief wash over me. "All right," I said. "Thanks a lot, Mr. Vine."

Shaking his head, Mr. Vine went back into the lounge. When the door closed, I heard him laughing.

But I didn't care. I had my audition. That's all that mattered.

Or at least, that's all that mattered to me, then. But as the day wore on, something else began to nag me.

And it wasn't the same thing that had been nagging me all week, either. I mean, the fact that somebody was going around, attacking cheerleaders, making threatening phone calls to the local psychic, and burning down her parents' restaurant.

No, it was something more than that. It was something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

It wasn't until the middle of seventh period that I realized what it was.

I was scared.

Seriously. I was walking around the hallways of Ernest Pyle High School, feeling frightened out of my mind.

Oh, not like I was a quivering mess, or anything. I wasn't going around, grabbing people and weeping into their shirtfronts.

But I was scared. I was scared about what was happening at home, at my house on Lumley Lane. The Feds were still watching it—heck, they were probably watching me, though I hadn't noticed any tails as I flitted through the hallways.

But that wasn't all. It wasn't just that I was scared. It was that I knew something was wrong. Something more than just Mastriani's exploding and Amber being dead and Heather hospitalized.

Look, I'm not saying it was a psychic thing. Not at all. Not then.

But there was definitely something not right going on, and it wasn't just that all these things had been happening, and the Feds, so far as I knew, didn't even have a suspect, let alone an arrest. It was more than that. It was …

Creepy.

Like the idea of being out a date with Skip. Only much, much worse.

Which was why, midway through seventh period, I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know. I guess I snapped. My hand shot up into the air before I knew what was happening.

And when Mademoiselle MacKenzie, not particularly thrilled to have me interrupt in the middle of our in-depth look at the never-ending battle of wills between Alix and Michel (Alix mes du sel dans la boule de Michel), asked, "Qu’est-ce que vous voulez, Jessica?" and I went, in English, "I need the hall pass," she made no effort whatsoever to hide her annoyance.

"Can't you wait," she wanted to know, "for the bell?"

It was a logical question, of course. It was two-thirty. Only a half hour of school left.

But the answer was no. No, I couldn't wait. I couldn't even say why, but one thing I definitely knew I could not do was wait.

Disgusted, Mademoiselle MacKenzie handed me the wooden bathroom pass, and I beat it out of there before she could say "Au revoir."

But I didn't head for the bathroom. Instead, I went downstairs—the language labs are on the third floor—to the guidance office. I wasn't even sure why I was heading in that direction until I saw them. The doors to the guidance office, and across from it, the teachers' lounge.

That's when I knew. Claire. Claire, touching my shoulder, just before fifth period. She had wanted to tell me something, but she hadn't gotten the chance. Her eyes—those pretty blue eyes—had widened as she'd looked down at me, and filled—I knew it now, though at the time, I think I had been too worried about myself, and my stupid chair position, to notice—with fear.

Fear. Fear.

I burst into the guidance office and startled Helen, the secretary, half out of her wits.

"I need to know what class Claire Lippman's in," I said, throwing my books down onto her desk. "And I need to know now."

Helen stared up at me, her expression friendly but quizzical. "Jess," she said. "You know I can't just give you confidential student—"

"I need to know now!" I yelled.

The door to Mr. Goodhart's office opened. To my surprise, not just Mr. Goodhart, but also Special Agent Johnson, stepped out into the waiting area.

"Jessica?" Mr. Goodhart looked perplexed. "What are you doing here? What's wrong?"

Helen had hit the button on her computer keyboard that made Minesweeper, which she'd been playing, disappear. Now she was bringing up the student schedules. Mr. Goodhart noticed and went, "Helen, what are you doing?"

"She needs to know where Claire Lippman is," Helen said. "I'm just looking it up for her."

Mr. Goodhart looked more perplexed than ever. "You know you can't tell her that, Helen," he said. "That's confidential."

"Why do you need to know where this girl is, Jessica?" Special Agent Johnson asked. "Has something happened to her?"

"I don't know," I said. Which was the truth. I didn't know. Except …

Except that I did.

"I just need to know," I said. "Okay? She said she had something to tell me, but then she didn't get a chance to, because—"

"Claire Lippman," Helen said, "has PE seventh period."

"Helen!" Mr. Goodhart was genuinely shocked. "What's the matter with you?"

"Thanks," I said, gathering up my books and giving the secretary a grateful smile. "Thanks a lot."

I was almost out the door when Helen called, "Except that she isn't there, Jess...."

I froze.

And then slowly spun around.

"What do you mean, she isn't there?" I asked carefully.

Helen was studying her computer screen with a concerned expression. "I mean she isn't there," she said. "According to this afternoon's attendance rosters, Claire hasn't been in class since . . . fourth period."

"But that's impossible," I said. Suddenly I felt funny all over. Really. Like someone had shot me full of Novocain. My lips were numb. So were my arms, holding onto my books. "I saw her just before fifth."

"No," Helen said, reaching for some printouts. "It's right here. Claire Lippman has skipped fifth through seventh."

"Claire Lippman has never skipped a class in her life," Mr. Goodhart—who would know, being her guidance counselor—declared.

"Well," Helen said, "she has today."

I must have looked like I was going to pass out or something, because suddenly, Special Agent Johnson was at my side, holding onto my elbow, going, "Jess? Jessica? Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not all right," I said. "And neither is Claire Lippman."

C H A P T E R

19

It was my fault, of course.

What had happened to Claire, I mean.

I should have listened. I should have taken her by the arm and dragged her someplace quiet and listened to what she had to tell me.

Because whatever it had been, I was convinced, was directly linked to the fact that she was missing now.

"It's a beautiful day out," Mr. Goodhart said. "Maybe she just took off. I mean, you know how she likes to sunbathe, and with this Indian summer we've been having, attendance, especially in the afternoon, has been sliding...."

I was sitting on one of the orange vinyl couches, my books in my lap, my arms limp at my side. I looked up at Mr. Goodhart and said, my voice sounding as tired as I felt, "Claire didn't skip class. They got her."

Special Agent Johnson had called Jill, and now the two of them were sitting across from me, staring, like I was some new breed of criminal they had only read about in text books at FBI training school or something.

"Who got her, Jessica?" Special Agent Smith asked, gently.

"They did." I couldn't believe she didn't know. How could she not know? "The same ones who got Amber. And Heather. And the restaurant."

"And who are they, Jessica?" Special Agent Smith leaned forward. She was looking like her old self again, her bob curling just right, her suit neatly pressed. Today she had on the diamond studs. "Do you know, Jess? Do you know who they are?"

I looked at them. I was so tired. Really. And not just from hardly having gotten any sleep the past couple days. I was tired inside, bone-tired. Tired of being afraid. Tired of not knowing. Just tired.

"No, of course I don't know who they are," I said. "Do you? Do you have any idea at all?"

Special Agent Smith and Special Agent Johnson exchanged glances. I saw him shake his head, just a little. But then Jill said, "Allan. We have to tell her."

I was too tired to ask what she meant. I didn't care. I truly didn't. Claire Lippman, I was convinced, was lying dead somewhere, and it was all my fault. What was my brother Mike going to say when he found out? He'd been in love with Claire for as long as I could remember. Granted, he'd never uttered a word to her in his life, that I knew of, but he loved her just the same. That year she'd starred in Hello, Dolly, he'd gone to every single performance, even the kiddie matinee. He'd gone around humming the title song for weeks afterward.

And I hadn't even been able to protect her for him. The love of my brother's life.

"Jessica," Special Agent Smith said. "Listen to me a minute. Amber. Amber Mackey, you know, the dead girl?"

I looked at her. There was enough energy left in me—not a lot, but enough—to go, very sarcastically, "I know who Amber Mackey is, Jill. She only sat in front of me every day for six years."

"Agent Smith," Special Agent Johnson said in a sharp voice. "That information is confidential and not for—"

"She was pregnant," Special Agent Smith said. She said it fast and she said it to me. "Amber Mackey was seven weeks pregnant when she was killed, Jess. The coroner just completed his autopsy, and I thought—"

I blinked at her, once. Then twice. Then I said, "Pregnant?"

Mr. Goodhart, who'd been leaning against Helen's desk, watching us, went, "Pregnant?"

Even Helen went, "Pregnant? Amber Mackey?"

"Please," Special Agent Johnson said. You could tell he was way annoyed. "This is not something we want spread around. The victim's family hasn't even been told. I would ask that you keep this information to yourself for the time being. It will, of course, get out, as these things invariably do. But until then—"

But I wasn't listening to him anymore. All I could think was: Amber. Pregnant. Amber. Pregnant. Amber. Pregnant.

Which meant only one thing, of course. That Mark Leskowski was the father. The father of Amber's baby. He had to be. Amber would never have slept with anybody else. I mean, I was surprised she'd slept with him. She just hadn't been that type of girl, you know.

But I guess I'd been wrong. I guess she had been that type of girl.

But I'll tell you what type of girl she wasn't: The type to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy. Not Amber. How many bake sales had she organized to raise funds for the single moms of the county? How many car washes had she held to help out the March of Dimes? How many times had she passed me a Unicef carton and asked for my spare change?

Suddenly, I wasn't feeling tired anymore. It was like energy was pouring through me . . . almost like I was filled with electricity again, like I'd been that day I'd been struck by lightning.

Okay, well, not quite like that. But I was no longer exhausted.

And I'll tell you something else: I wasn't scared.

Not anymore.

Because I had remembered one more thing. And that was that the fear I'd seen in Claire Lippman's eyes? Yeah, that hadn't been there when she'd first started speaking to me. No, the fear hadn't shown up until later. Not until Mark Leskowski—Mark Leskowski—had strolled out of the guidance office and said hello to us.

Mark Leskowski. The father of Amber's baby.

Mark Leskowski, who'd sat at Table Seven—the make-out table—at Mastriani's and told me, when I'd asked him what he was going to do if his plans of making it to the NFL didn't work out, "failure is not an option."

And your sixteen-year-old girlfriend giving birth to your baby, out of wedlock, the same year you were being scouted by colleges? That, to Mark, would certainly fall under the category of "unacceptable."

I stood up. My books fell to the floor.

But I was still holding onto Claire's sweater. It had never left my fingers, all afternoon.

"Jessica?" Jill climbed to her feet as well. "What is it? What's wrong?"

When I didn't answer her, Special Agent Johnson said, in a commanding voice, "Jessica. Jessica, do you hear me? Answer Special Agent Smith, please. She asked you a question. Do you want me to call your parents, young lady?"

But it didn't matter. What they were saying, I mean. It didn't matter that Helen, the secretary, was looking up my home number, or that Mr. Goodhart was waving his hand in front of my face, yelling my name.

Oh, don't get me wrong. It was annoying. I mean, I was trying to concentrate, and all these people were hopping around me like Mexican jumping beans or whatever.

But it didn't matter. It didn't really matter what they said or did, because I had Claire Lippman's sweater. Her pink cashmere sweater that her mother, I now knew—though there was no rational way I could know this—had given to her for her sixteenth birthday. The sweater smelled like Happy, the perfume Claire always wears. Her grandmother gave her a new bottle every Christmas. People complimented her on her perfume all the time. They didn't know it was just Happy, from Clinique. They thought it was something exotic, something super expensive. Even Mark Leskowski, who sat in front of Claire in homeroom every day—Leskowski, Lippman—had said something about it once. Asked her what it was called. He'd wanted to buy a bottle, he'd said, for his girlfriend.

His girlfriend Amber. Whom he'd killed.

Just like he was going to kill Claire.

Suddenly, I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe because it was so hot. It was hot, and something was covering my mouth and nose. I was suffocating. I couldn't get out. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.

Something hard hit me in the face. I started, and then found myself blinking into Mr. Goodhart's face. Special Agents Johnson and Smith had him by both arms.

"I told you," Allan was yelling, "not to hit her!"

"What was I supposed to do?" Mr. Goodhart demanded. "She was having a fit!"

"It wasn't a fit." Jill looked really mad. "It was a vision. Jessica? Jessica, are you all right?"

I stared at the three of them. My cheek tingled where Mr. Goodhart had slapped it. He hadn't hit me very hard.

"I've got to go," I said to them, and, clutching Claire's sweater, I left the office.

They followed me, of course. It wasn't easy, though, because no sooner had I stalked out into the hallway than the bell rang. The last bell of the day. Kids poured out of the classrooms and into the corridors, slamming their locker doors, high-fiving one another, making plans to meet up at the quarries later. The halls were teeming with people, crowded with bodies, everyone streaming toward the exits.

And I let them take me. I let the tide sweep me away, through the doors and out toward the flagpole, where the buses were waiting to take people home. Everyone but the kids who'd come in their own cars or who had to stay after for ball practice or tutoring or detention.

Everyone but Claire. Claire wouldn't be making her bus today.

"Jessica," I heard someone yell behind me. Special Agent Johnson.

Somebody was waiting by the flag pole. Somebody familiar. He was easy to make out in the hordes streaming toward the buses, because he was a head taller than most of them and was standing still, besides.

Rob. It was Rob.

A part of me was glad to see him. Another part of me didn't notice him at all.

"Jess," he said when he saw me. "Oh, my God. I heard what happened last night. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I said. I didn't slow down. I walked right past him.

Rob, falling into step beside me, went, "Mastriani, what's the matter with you? Where are you going?"

"There's something I have to do," I said. I was walking fast, so fast that I was pretty sure I had lost Special Agents Johnson and Smith somewhere back in the crowd in front of the buses.

"What do you have to do?" Rob wanted to know. "Mastriani, why are we here?"

Here was the football field, off to one side of the student parking lot. It was under the metal bleachers surrounding the field that Ruth and I had ducked, that day last spring when we'd been caught in the storm. The storm that had changed everything.

It didn't look much different, the football field, than it had that day, except that now it was in use. Coach Albright was standing in the middle of it with a whistle in his mouth, as his players streamed out from the locker room for practice. Most of the cheerleaders were already there. They were holding auditions for Amber's position. It was sad and all, but what were they supposed to do? They couldn't do a pyramid with just nine girls. They needed a tenth. The bleachers were crowded with girls eager to take Amber's spot. When they saw Rob and me, they stopped chatting amongst themselves and stared. Maybe they thought I was there to try out. I don't know.

"Jess," Rob said. "What is the matter with you? You're acting really weird. Weirder than usual, even."

Coach Albright noticed us and blew his whistle. "Mastriani," he yelled. He knew me only too well from my many altercations with his more fractious players. "What are you doing here? Are you here for the tryouts?"

I didn't answer him. I was scanning the field, looking for one person and one person only.

"If you ain't here for the tryouts," Coach Albright yelled, "get off the field. I don't need you around, making my boys nervous."

I saw him, finally. He was just coming out from the gym, his shoulder pads making him look bigger than he actually was . . . though of course, he was pretty big without them. The bright sun shone down on his bare head as he hurried, helmet in hand, toward the rest of the team.

I headed toward him, meeting him halfway.

"Jess," he said, in some surprise, looking from me to Rob, who stood just behind me, then back again. "What's up?"

I held out my hand. The hand that wasn't clutching Claire's sweater. I held out my hand and said, "Give them to me."

Mark looked down at me, a half smile on his face. He was playing it cool.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"You know," I said. "You know good and well."

"What's going on here?" Coach Albright demanded, stomping over to us. He was followed by most of the rest of the team—Todd Mintz, Jeff Day—and more than a few of the cheerleaders. It wasn't every day a civilian walked out onto the field and interrupted practice.

Especially one who wasn't even part of their crowd.

"Mark, this girl giving you a hard time?" Coach Albright asked.

"No, Coach," Mark said. He was still smiling. "She's cool. Jess, what's going on?"

"You know what's going on," I said, in a voice that didn't sound like mine. It was harder than my voice had ever been. Harder and, in a way, sadder, at the same time. "You all know." I looked around at the other ball players. "Every last one of you knows."

Todd, blinking in the strong sunlight, went, "I don't know."

"Shut up, Mintz," Jeff Day said.

Coach Albright looked from me to Mark and then back again. Then he went, "Look, I don't know what this is about, but if you got a problem with one of my players, Mastriani, you bring it to me during office hours. You do not interrupt practice—"

I stepped forward and sank my fist into Mark Leskowski's gut.

"Now give me," I said, as he dropped to his knees with a gasp, "your car keys."

Everything happened at once after that. Mark, recovering with amazing quickness, lunged at me, only to find himself in a headlock, courtesy of Rob. I was yanked off my feet by Jeff Day, who planned, I think, on hurling me over the nearest goalpost. He was stopped by Todd Mintz, who grabbed him by the Adam's apple and squeezed.

And Coach Albright, in the middle of the fray, blew and blew on his whistle.

There was a jingle, and something bright fell from Mark's waistband into the grass. Rob snatched it up and said, "Mastriani." By that time, Jeff, unable to breathe with Todd crushing his larynx, had dropped me. I reached up and caught the keys on the fly, one-handed.

And then I turned around and started for the student parking lot.

"You can't do this," I heard Mark bleating behind me. "This is illegal. Illegal search and seizure. That's what this is."

"Consider yourself," Rob said, "under citizen's arrest."

They were following me. They were all following me, Rob and Mark and Todd and Jeff, Coach Albright, and the cheerleaders. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, leading the village children to their doom, I led the Ernest Pyle High School football team and pep squad to Mark Leskowski's BMW, which was parked, I saw when I got to it, just a little bit away from Ruth's Cabriolet and Skip's Trans Am.

"Oh, my God," Ruth said, when she saw me. "There you are. I've been looking all over for you. What's . . ."

Her voice trailed off as she got a look at what was behind me.

"This is bullshit," Mark bellowed.

"Mastriani," Coach Albright yelled. "You put those keys down. . . ."

Only I didn't listen to him, of course. I walked right up to Mark's car and put the key in the lock to the trunk.

Which was when Mark tried to make a break for it. Only Rob wouldn't let him. He reached out almost casually and grabbed hold of the back of Mark's shirt.

"Let me go," Mark screamed. "Lemme freaking go!"

Only he didn't say "freaking."

I turned the key, and the BMW's trunk popped open.

And that's how Special Agents Johnson and Smith found us, a minute or so later. With the entire in crowd of Ernest Pyle High School crowded around Mark Leskowski's BMW, while Rob Wilkins hung onto Mark, and Todd Mintz hung onto Jeff Day (who'd also tried to get away at the last minute).

And me half-in, half-out of Mark Leskowski's trunk, trying to get Claire Lippman to start breathing again.

C H A P T E R

20

"Well, that certainly sucked," Claire said, later that evening.

"Tell me about it," I said.

"No, I mean, really. Like, I was sure I was going to die."

"You looked dead," Ruth pointed out.

"Really?" Claire seemed very interested in this piece of information. "How, exactly, did I look?"

Ruth, sitting on the windowsill across from Claire Lippman's hospital bed, glanced at me, as if unsure whether or not to answer the question.

"No, really," Claire said. "I want to know. So in case I ever have to do a death scene, I'll know how to look."

"Well," Ruth said, hesitantly. "You were really pale, and your eyes were closed, and you weren't breathing. But that was on account of the tape over your mouth."

"And the heat," Skip pointed out. "Don't forget the heat."

"It was a hundred and ten inside that trunk," Claire said cheerfully. "That's what the EMTs said, anyway. I would have died of dehydration way before Mark got around to killing me."

"Uh," Ruth said. "Yeah. About that. That's the part I'm not real clear on. Why did Mark want to kill you, again?"

Claire rolled her pretty blue eyes. "Duh," she said. "Because he saw me talking to Jess."

Ruth looked over at me, where I was sitting between the dozens of huge floral arrangements people had been sending to Claire ever since she'd been admitted. She was due to be released in the morning, so long as the results of her CAT scan confirmed she had not, in fact, suffered a concussion. But still the flowers kept coming.

Claire Lippman was actually a lot more popular than I had ever realized.

"Explanation, please," Ruth said.

"It's really very simple," I said. "Amber Mackey got pregnant—"

"Pregnant!" Ruth cried.

"Pregnant!" her twin brother echoed.

"Pregnant," I said. "And she told Mark she wanted to keep the baby. In fact, Amber wanted him to marry her, so they could raise their child together, be a little happy family. That's what they were talking about that day at the quarry, when Claire said she saw Amber and Mark keep going off together, alone. Amber's pregnancy."

"Right," Claire said. "Only a pregnant girlfriend was not part of Mark's plan for the future."

"Far from it," I said. "Getting married, or even paying child support, was going to totally mess up Mark's football career. It was, in his book, 'unacceptable,' So, near as we can figure it out—and he hasn't confessed, mind you—Mark beat Amber up, in the hopes that she'd change her mind, and left her somewhere—probably in his trunk. They're checking it for fibers now. When that didn't manage to convince Amber to see things his way, he killed her and tossed her body into the quarry."

"Okay," Ruth said. "I can see all that, I guess. But what about Heather? Wasn't Mark with you when Heather disappeared?"

"Yes," I said. "He was. That was the point of Heather's attack. Mark was starting to feel the heat, you know, with the Feds breathing down his neck, so he figured if another girl got attacked at a time during which he had a rock-solid alibi, he'd be in the clear."

"And what's more rock-solid," Skip said, "than the fact that he was with the FBI's friend, Lightning Girl."

"Right," I said. "Well, more or less. And you know, it worked. When Heather disappeared, no one suspected Mark."

"Except you," Claire pointed out.

"Well," I said, a little guiltily. "I didn't exactly suspect Mark." Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd been convinced no one as hot as he was could be a criminal. Stupid me. "But that house … I knew there was something up with that house. So when I started asking around about it, Mark got scared again and had Jeff Day—the same guy who'd kidnapped, and then later beat up, Heather—make some threatening phone calls. And then, when that didn't seem to be working, Mark and Jeff broke into Mastriani's, poured gasoline all over the place, then lit a match and burned the place down."

At least according to Jeff Day, who'd started crying like a baby the minute the cops arrived, then spilled his guts like a squashed caterpillar.

"Mark's biggest mistake," I went on, "was enlisting the help of someone like Jeff Day in getting him out of his little jam. I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense, since Jeff is used to taking direction from Mark, on account of Mark being the team quarterback and all. But Jeff needs a lot of direction. He was always coming up to Mark and asking him what to do … especially right before the first class of the day, homeroom."

"Where Mark sat in front of me," Claire said. She was taking her role as victim very seriously, and waved her arm, the one with the IV in it, as much as possible, to bring attention to her infirmity. "So of course this morning, when he and Jeff were whispering before the bell rang, something about the way they looked … so sneaky . . . triggered something. I just knew. I can't say how I knew. I just put two and two together. But you can't go to the police, you know, with a hunch. But I figured I could go to Jess—"

"But when she tried," I said, "Mark caught her. And she was so startled—"

"I ran," Claire said gravely. "Like a startled fawn."

I wasn't so sure about the fawn part. Claire was kind of tall for a fawn. A gazelle, maybe.

"But Mark went around the side of the building," I said, "and caught up with her, and—"

"—hit me right back here," Claire said, touching the back of her head, "with something heavy. And when I woke up again, I was in his trunk."

"My guess is he was going to take her to the house on the pit road," I said, "and do to her what he'd done to Amber...."

"So what," Ruth asked, "is going to happen? To Mark, I mean?"

"Well," I said. "With the help of Jeff's testimony—which I'm sure he'll give in exchange for a reduced sentence for his part in the whole thing—Mark's going to prison. For a long time."

Which was really going to mess up his plan for getting drafted right out of college by the NFL.

Before anyone could say anything in reply to this, Claire's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Lippman, came back into the room.

"Oh, thanks, kids," Mrs. Lippman said, "for keeping our baby entertained while we were gone. Here, Claire, a mint-chocolate-chip shake, just like you asked."

Claire immediately lost all of the animation she'd had when talking to Ruth and Skip and me. Instead, she fell back against the pillows, and let her head loll a little.

She was really milking this for all she was worth. Well, she was in the drama club, after all.

"Thanks, Mom," she said weakly.

"Well, uh," I said. "We better go."

"Yeah," Ruth said, slipping off the windowsill. "Visiting hours are up anyway. Bye, Claire. Bye, Dr. and Mrs. Lippman."

"Bye, kids," Dr. Lippman said.

But Mrs. Lippman couldn't let it go with a simple good-bye. No, she had to come over and give me a big hug and call me her little girl's savior and tell me that if there was anything—anything at all—she or her husband could do for me, I needed only to ask. The Lippmans—along with, surprise, surprise, Heather's parents—were starting a Restore Mastriani's Fund. I wished that instead they were starting a Pay Off Karen Sue Hankey's Medical Bills Fund, so that Mrs. Hankey would drop her suit against me.

But beggars can't be choosers, I guess, so all I said, as Mrs. Lippman attempted to squeeze the life out of me, was, "Uh, you're welcome."

Barely escaping with my ribs intact, I followed Ruth and Skip out into the hall.

"Whew," Ruth said. "Now I know where Claire gets her sense of the dramatic."

"Tell me about it," I said, scrubbing Mrs. Lippman's lipstick off my cheek, where she'd kissed me.

"Should we stop by and see Heather?" Skip asked as we made our way to the elevators.

"They released her already," I said. "Broken arm, couple of busted ribs, and a concussion, but otherwise, she's going to be all right."

"Physically," Ruth said, punching the button marked DOWN. "Mentally, though? After having been through what she went through?"

"Heather's pretty tough," I said. The elevator came, and we all got on it. "She'll be back out there, shaking her pompons, in no time."

"Yeah, but what is she going to shake those pompons for?" Ruth wanted to know. "I mean, without Mark and Jeff, the Cougars don't have much of a chance of making it to State. Or anywhere, for that matter."

"Well," I said. "There's always the basketball team. None of them, as far as I know, have murdered anyone lately."

"So, Jess," Skip said, as the doors opened to the hospital lobby. "How does it feel to be a hero? Again?"

"I don't know," I said. "Not so great, really. I mean, if I'd have been able to figure it out sooner, I might have saved Amber. Not to mention Mastriani's."

"How did you figure it out?" Ruth asked. "I mean, how'd you know Claire was locked inside Mark's trunk?"

It was a question I knew I'd get asked eventually, though I'd been hoping against hope to avoid it. How was I going to explain that for a moment, I'd been Claire, inside that trunk? And all because she'd dropped her sweater … a sweater I'd just returned to her, by the way.

"I don't know," I lied. "I just … I just knew is all."

Ruth looked at me sarcastically. "Yeah," she said. "Right. Just like this summer, with Shane and the pillow. I get it."

Ruth got it, all right. I just hoped nobody else did.

"What pillow?" Skip wanted to know.

"Never mind," I said. "Listen, you guys, I better get home. My mom's having a big enough cow as it is, what with the restaurant, and now Douglas and this job thing. Not to mention Karen Sue's lawsuit—"

"I can't believe she's really suing," Skip said, looking indignant. "I mean, after Jess pretty much single-handedly caught a murderer and all, in her own school."

"Well," I said, a little sheepishly. "I did almost break Karen Sue's nose. Not that she didn't deserve it."

Ruth tactfully changed the subject.

"So what's with that, anyway?" Ruth asked. "Douglas, I mean. Comix Underground is totally skeevy. Why would anyone want to work there? It's always packed with members of the turtle patrol."

"Hey," Skip said, sounding offended. Skip, I knew, often shopped at Comix Underground.

"I don't know," I said with a shrug. "He's Douglas. He's always marched to a different drummer."

"I'll say." Ruth shook her head. "God, I'm sure glad I'm not living in your house. It's going to be like World War—" She broke off, and, looking toward the sliding doors by the ambulance bay, said, "Well, I was going to say World War Three, but I think I'm going to have to amend that to World War Four."

I followed her gaze. "What? What are you talking about?"

Skip saw him before I did. "Whoa," he said. "Alert the Pentagon. The Mastriani household has just gone to Def Con One."

And then I saw him. And froze in my tracks.

"Mike!" I couldn't believe it. "What are you doing here?"

Mike had obviously just come from the airport. He had an overnight bag with him and looked, to put it mildly, like crap. He hurried up to us and said, "How is she? Is she all right?"

"Why are you here?" I demanded. "Didn't Mom and Dad just drop you off at Harvard last week? What are you doing back?"

Michael glared down at me. "You think I could stay there, knowing what happened?"

"Mike," I said. "For God's sake. The insurance is going to pay to rebuild the place. It is not that big a deal. I mean, yeah, it's sad and all, but when I talked to Dad a little while ago, he was totally into the idea of redesigning, He is going to kill you when he finds out you—"

"I don't care about the stupid restaurant," Mike said, his voice filled with scorn. "I didn't come back for that. It's Claire I care about."

I blinked at him. "Claire?"

"Yes, Claire." Mike looked down at me worriedly. "Claire Lippman. How is she? Is she going to be all right?"

I could only stare up at him with, I am sorry to say, my mouth hanging open. Claire? He'd come all the way back from college—probably blown an entire semester's allowance buying an airline ticket at the last minute—because of Claire, a girl who'd never spoken to him before in her life? Were both my brothers insane?

It was Ruth who said, "Claire's going to be fine, Michael." I was proud of her for being so calm. Ruth had had her own little crush on Mike awhile back. Her summer romance with Scott had apparently cured her of it, however. "She's just, you know, being held overnight for observation."

"I want to see her," Mike said. "What room is she in?"

"Four-seventeen," Skip said, at the same time that I finally burst out with, "Are you crazy? You flew a thousand miles just to make sure a girl who doesn't even know you're alive is okay?"

Mike looked down at me and shook his head, completely unimpressed by my outburst. "Tell Mom and Dad," he said, "that I'll be home in a little while."

Then he started for the hospital elevators with a little swagger in his step, as if he were Clint Eastwood or somebody.

"Visiting hours are over," I yelled after him.

But it didn't do any good. He was like a man possessed. He disappeared into an elevator, his shoulders thrown back and his head held high.

"That," Ruth said, gazing after him, "is the most romantic thing I have ever seen."

"Are you kidding?" I was appalled. "It's completely … well, it's … it's …"

"Romantic," Ruth finished for me.

"Sick," I corrected her.

"I don't know," Skip said. "Claire's kind of hot."

Ruth and I looked at him. Then we both looked away in disgust.

"Well," Skip said, "she is."

Ruth took me by the arm and started steering me from the hospital. "Come on," she said. "We'll stop at the Thirty-one Flavors on the way home, and you can pick up a pint of Rocky Road for your mom. That'll help, you know, when you break the news about Mikey."

We walked out into the mild evening air. The sun had only just set, and the sky to the west was all purple and red. It occurred to me that Mark was probably looking at the same sky. Only he'd be looking at it from behind bars—from now on.

Talk about unacceptable.

"First thing we'll do tomorrow," Ruth was saying as we started for her car, "is reschedule your chair audition—"

I groaned. I had forgotten all about Mr. Vine and my after-school appointment with him.

"Then," Ruth said, "you're going to have to get Rosemary to send you some photos of kids who've got some reward money posted for their return. You're going to need some extra cash, what with the restaurant and Karen Sue's lawsuit and all."

I groaned louder.

"And then, I'm sorry, but we're going to have to do something about your hair. I've been thinking about this, and I really believe what you need are some highlights. Saturday nights they do free coloring at the beauty college—"

"Hey," Skip said. "Saturday night Jess and I are going to the movies."

"Oh, you are not," Ruth said grumpily. "I can't have my brother dating my best friend. It's too gross."

Skip looked taken aback. "But—"

"Shut up, Skip," Ruth said. "It's gross, and you know it. Besides, she doesn't like you. She likes that guy over there."

Curious what she meant, I looked where Ruth was pointing. . . .

And saw Rob, leaning against his bike, waiting for somebody.

And that somebody, I knew, was me.

He straightened up when he saw me and waved.

"Oh," I said. "Uh, I'll see you guys later, okay?"

"Whatever," Ruth said airily. "Come on, Skip."

"But—" Skip was looking at Rob with suspicion and, it must be admitted, a small amount of dismay.

"Sorry, Skip," I said, patting him on the arm as Ruth led him away. "But Ruth's right, you know. It'd never work. I can't stand all that hobbit stuff."

Then, giving Skip a big smile to show how sorry I was, I hurried over to where Rob was standing.

"Hey," I said, my smile turning shy.

"Hey," Rob said. His smile wasn't shy at all. "How are you doing?"

"Oh," I said with a shrug. "Okay, I guess."

"How about Claire?"

His mentioning Claire reminded me of Mike. I couldn't help scowling a little as I said, "Oh, she's going to be fine."

Rob didn't seem to notice the scowl. "Thanks to you," he said.

"And you," I said. "I mean, you kept Mark from getting away."

"That was nothing," Rob said modestly. "Anyway, I stopped by to see if you wanted a ride home. Do you?"

"You bet," I said. "Hey, did your mom tell you about my dad's scheme to keep all the staff from Mastriani's on payroll while the new restaurant's being built? He's converting Joe Junior's from counter service to waitress-only service."

"She told me," Rob said with a grin. "Your dad's a good guy. Oh, hey, here, I almost forgot."

He turned from the side compartment, where he'd been fishing out his spare helmet for me, and dropped something heavy into my hand. I looked down and was shocked to see that I was holding his watch.

"But," I said, "this is your watch."

"Yeah," Rob said, "I know it's my watch. I thought you wanted it."

"But what are you going to use?" I wanted to know. Although I have to admit that, while I was asking this, I was already strapping the thing on.

"I don't know," Rob said. "I'll make do." When he turned to hand me the helmet and saw that his watch was already on my wrist, he shook his head. "You really are weird," he said. "Do you know that?"

"Yes," I said, and stood up on my tiptoes to kiss him....

Only before I got a chance to, somebody nearby cleared his throat and said, "Uh, Miss Mastriani?"

I turned my head. And stared.

Because there, standing in front of a black four-door sedan—clearly an unmarked law-enforcement vehicle—stood a tall man I had never seen before. The man, who was wearing a hat and a trench coat even though it was like seventy degrees outside, said, "Miss Mastriani, I am Cyrus Krantz, director of Special Operations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I happen to be Special Agent Johnson and Smith's immediate supervisor."

I glanced at the car behind him. It had tinted windows, so I couldn't tell if anyone else was inside of it.

"Yeah," I said. "So?"

Which probably sounded pretty rude and all, but I had way better things to do than hang around outside the county hospital talking to the FBI.

"So," Cyrus Krantz said, seemingly unmoved by my rudeness, "I'd like a word with you."

"Everything I've got to say," I told him, pulling Rob's spare helmet over my head, "I already told Jill and Allan." I swung a leg over Rob's bike and settled in behind him. "Ask them about it. They'll tell you."

"I have asked Special Agents Johnson and Smith about it," Cyrus Krantz replied, enunciating their proper titles, which I had neglected to use, with care. "I found their answers to my questions unsatisfactory, which is why I've had them removed from your case, Miss Mastriani. You will now be dealing with me, and me alone. So—"

I lifted up the visor to my helmet and stared at him in shock. "You what?"

"I've removed them from your case," Cyrus Krantz repeated. "Their handling of you has, in my opinion, been amateurish and entirely unfocused. What is clearly needed in your case, Miss Mastriani, is not kid gloves, but an iron fist."

I could only stare. "You fired Allan and Jill?"

"I removed them from your case." Cyrus Krantz, director of Special Operations, turned around and opened the rear passenger door of the car behind him. "Now, get into this car, Miss Mastriani, so that you can be taken to our regional headquarters for questioning about your involvement in the Mark Leskowski case."

I tightened my grip around Rob's waist. My mouth had gone dry.

"Am I under arrest?" I managed to croak.

"No," Cyrus Krantz said. "But you are a material witness in possession of vital—"

"Good," I said, snapping my helmet's visor back into place. "Go, Rob."

Rob did as I asked. We left Cyrus Krantz in our dust.

The only problem, of course, is that I'm pretty sure he knows where I live.