Code Name Cassandra

I don't know what was occupying Rob's thoughts so much that he didn't see the white van on our tail. Maybe he was having an epiphany of his own. Hey, it could happen.

But anyway, what happened was, eventually we had to pull off Lake Shore Drive in order to get where Keely was, and little by little, the traffic thinned out, and we still didn't notice the van purring along behind us. I don't know for sure, of course, because we weren't paying attention, but I like to think it stayed at least a couple car lengths away. Otherwise, well, there's no other explanation for it. We're just idiots. Or at least I am.

Anyway, finally we pulled onto this tree-lined street that was one hundred percent residential. I knew exactly which one Keely was in, of course, but I made Rob park about three houses away, just to be on the safe side. I mean, that much I knew. That much I was paying attention to.

We stood in front of the place where Keely was staying. It was just a house. A city house, so it was kind of narrow. On one side of it ran a skinny alley. The other side was attached to the house next door. Keely's house hadn't been painted as recently as the one next to it. What paint was left on it was kind of peeling off in a sad way. I would call the neighborhood sketchy, at best. The small yards had an untended look to them. Grass grows fast in a humid climate like the one in northern Illinois, and needs constant attention. No one on this street seemed to care, particularly, how high their grass grew, or what kind of garbage lay in their yards for that grass to swallow.

Maybe that was the purpose of the high grass. To hide the garbage.

Rob, standing next to me as I gazed up at the house, said, "Nice-looking crack den."

I winced. "It's not that bad," I said.

"Yeah, it is," he said.

"Well." I squared my shoulders. I wasn't sweaty anymore, after having so much wind blown on me, but I soon would be, if I stood on that hot sidewalk much longer. "Here goes nothing."

I opened the gate in the low chain-link fence that surrounded the house, and strode up the cement steps to the front door. I didn't realize Rob had followed me until I'd reached out to ring the bell.

"So what exactly," he said, as we listened to the hollow ringing deep inside the house, "is the plan here?"

I said, "There's no plan."

"Great." Rob's expression didn't change. "My favorite kind."

"Who is it?" demanded a woman's voice from behind the closed door. She didn't sound very happy about having been disturbed.

"Hello, ma'am?" I called. "Hi, my name is Ginger Silverman, and this is my friend, Nate. We're seniors at Chicago Central High School, and we're doing a research project on parental attitudes toward children's television programming. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions about the kinds of television programs your children like to watch. It will only take a minute, and will be of invaluable help to us."

Rob looked at me like I was insane. "Ginger Silverman?"

I shrugged. "I like that name."

He shook his head. "Nate?"

"I like that name, too."

Inside the house, locks were being undone. When the door was thrown back, I saw, through the screen door, a tall, skinny woman in cutoffs and a halter top. You could tell she'd once taken care to color her hair, but that that had sort of fallen by the wayside. Now the ends of her hair were blonde, but the two inches of it at the top were dark brown. On her forehead, not quite hidden by her two-tone hair, was a dark, crescent-moon-shaped scab, about an inch and a half long. Out of one corner of her mouth, which was as flat and skinny as the rest of her, dangled a cigarette.

She looked at Rob and me as if we had dropped down from another planet and asked her to join the Galaxian Federation, or something.

"What?" she said.

I repeated my spiel about Chicago Central High School—who even knew if there was such a place?—and our thesis on children's television programming. As I spoke, a small child appeared from the shadows behind Mrs. Herzberg—if, indeed, this was Mrs. Herzberg, though I suspected it was—and, wrapping her arms around the woman's leg, blinked up at us with big brown eyes.

I recognized her instantly. Keely Herzberg.

"Mommy," Keely said curiously, "who are they?"

"Just some kids," Mrs. Herzberg said. She took her cigarette out of her mouth and I noticed that her fingernails were very bleedy-looking. "Look," she said to us. "We aren't interested. Okay?"

She was starting to close the door when I added, "There's a ten-dollar remuneration to all participants. . . ."

The door instantly froze. Then it swung open again.

"Ten bucks?" Mrs. Herzberg said. Her tired eyes, under that crescent-shaped scab, looked suddenly brighter.

"Uh-huh," I said. "In cash. Just for answering a few questions."

Mrs. Herzberg shrugged her skinny shoulders, and then, exhaling a plume of blue smoke at us through the screen door, she went, "Shoot."

"Okay," I said eagerly. "Um, what's your daughter's—this is your daughter, isn't it?"

The woman nodded without looking down. "Yeah."

"Okay. What is your daughter's favorite television show?"

"Sesame Street," said Mrs. Herzberg, while her daughter said, "Rugrats," at the same time.

"No, Mommy," Keely said, nagging on her mother's shorts. "Rugrats."

"Sesame Street," Mrs. Herzberg said. "My daughter is only allowed to watch public television."

Keely shrieked, "Rugrats!"

Mrs. Herzberg looked down at her daughter and said, "If you don't quit it, I'm sending you out back to play."

Keely's lower lip was trembling. "But you know I like Rugrats best, Mommy."

"Sweetheart," Mrs. Herzberg said. "Mommy is trying to answer these people's questions. Please do not interrupt."

"Um," I said. "Maybe we should move on. Do you and your husband discuss with one another the kinds of television shows your daughter is allowed to watch?"

"No," Mrs. Herzberg said shortly. "And I don't let her watch junk, like that Rugrats."

"But, Mommy," Keely said, her eyes filled with tears, "I love them."

"That's it," Mrs. Herzberg said. She pointed with her cigarette toward the back of the house. "Outside. Now."

"But, Mommy—"

"No," Mrs. Herzberg said. "That's it. I told you once. Now go outside and play, and let Mommy talk to these people."

Keely, letting out a hiccuppy little sob, disappeared. I heard a screen door slam somewhere in the house.

"Go on," Mrs. Herzberg said to me. Then her eyebrows knit. "Shouldn't you be writing my answers down?"

I reached up to smack myself on the forehead. "The clipboard!" I said to Rob. "I forgot the clipboard!"

"Well," Rob says. "Then I guess that's the end of that. Sorry to trouble you, ma'am—"

"No," I said, grabbing him by the arm and steering him closer to the screen door. "That's okay. It's in the car. I'll just go get it. You keep asking questions while I go and get the clipboard."

Rob's pale blue eyes, as he looked down at me, definitely had ice chips in them, but what was I supposed to do? I went, "Ask her about the kind of programming she likes, Nate. And don't forget the ten bucks," and then I bounded down the steps, through the overgrown yard, out the gate …

And then, when I was sure Rob had Mrs. Herzberg distracted, I darted down the alley alongside her house, until I came to a high wooden fence that separated her backyard from the street.

It only took me a minute to climb up onto a Dumpster that was sitting there, and then look over that fence into the backyard.

Keely was there. She was sitting in one of those green plastic turtles people fill with sand. In her hand was a very dirty, very naked Barbie doll. She was singing softly to it.

Perfect, I thought. If Rob could just keep Mrs. Herzberg busy for a few minutes …

I clambered over the fence, then dropped over the other side into Keely's yard. Somehow, in spite of my gymnast-like grace and James Bondian stealthiness, Keely heard me, and squinted at me through the strong sunlight.

"Hey," I said as I ambled over to her sandbox. "What's up?"

Keely stared at me with those enormous brown eyes. "You aren't supposed to be back here," she informed me gravely.

"Yeah," I said, sitting down on the edge of the sandbox beside her. I'd have sat in the grass, but like in the front yard, it was long and straggly-looking, and after my recent tick experience, I wasn't too anxious to encounter any more bloodsucking parasites.

"I know I'm not supposed to be back here," I said to Keely. "But I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. Is that okay?"

Keely shrugged and looked down at her doll. "I guess," she said.

I looked down at the doll, too. "What happened to Barbie's clothes?"

"She lost them," Keely said.

"Whoa," I said. "Too bad. Think your mom will buy her some more?"

Keely shrugged again, and began dipping Barbie's head into the sandbox, stirring the sand like it was cake batter, and Barbie was a mixer. The sand in the sandbox didn't smell too fresh, if you know what I mean. I had a feeling some of the neighborhood cats had been there a few times.

"What about your dad?" I asked her. "Could your dad buy you some more Barbie clothes?"

Keely said, lifting Barbie from the sand and then smoothing her hair back, "My daddy's in heaven."

Well. That settled that, didn't it?

"Who told you that your daddy is in heaven, Keely?" I asked her.

Keely shrugged, her gaze riveted to the plastic doll in her hands. "My mommy," she said. Then she added, "I have a new daddy now." She wrenched her gaze from the Barbie and looked up at me, her dark eyes huge. "But I don't like him as much as my old daddy."

My mouth had gone dry … as dry as the sand beneath our feet. Somehow I managed to croak, "Really? Why not?"

Keely shrugged and looked away from me again. "He throws things," she said. "He threw a bottle, and it hit my mommy in the head, and blood came out, and she started crying."

I thought about the crescent-shaped scab on Mrs. Herzberg's forehead. It was exactly the size and shape a bottle, flying at a high velocity, would make.

And that, I knew, was that.

I guess I could have gotten out of there, called the cops, and let them handle it. But did I really want to put the poor kid through all that? Armed men knocking her mother's door down, guns drawn, and all of that? Who knew what the mother's bottle-throwing boyfriend was like? Maybe he'd try to shoot it out with the cops. Innocent people might get hurt. You don't know. You can't predict these things. I know I can't, and I'm the one with the psychic powers.

And yeah, Keely's mother seemed like kind of a freak, protesting that her kid only watches public television while standing there filling that same kid's lungs with carcinogens. But hey, there are worse things a parent could do. That didn't make her an unfit mother. I mean, it wasn't like she was taking that cigarette and putting it out on Keely's arm, like some parents I've seen on the news.

But telling the kid her father was dead? And shacking up with a guy who throws bottles?

Not so nice.

So even though I felt like a complete jerk about it, I knew what I had to do.

I think you'd have done the same thing, too, in my place. I mean, really, what else could anybody have done?

I stood up and said, "Keely, your dad's not in heaven. If you come with me right now, I'll take you to him."

Keely had to crane her neck to look up at me. The sun was so bright, she had to do some pretty serious squinting, too.

"My daddy's not in heaven?" she asked. "Where is he, then?"

That was when I heard it: the sound of Rob's motorcycle engine. I could tell the sound of that bike's engine from every single other motorcycle in my entire town.

I know it's stupid. It's more than stupid. It's pathetic, is what it is. But can you really blame me? I mean, I really did harbor this hope that Rob was pining for me, and satisfied his carnal longing for me by riding by my house late at night.

He never actually did this, but my ears had become so accustomed to straining for the sound of his bike's engine, I could have picked it out in a traffic jam.

The real question, of course, was why Rob had left Mrs. Herzberg's front porch when he had to know I wasn't finished with my business in her backyard.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

Which was why I didn't suffer too much twinging of my conscience when I looked down at Keely and said, "Your daddy's at McDonald's. If we hurry, we can catch him there, and he'll buy you a Happy Meal."

Did I feel bad, invoking the M word in order to lure a kid out of her own backyard? Sure. I felt like a worm. Worse than a worm. I felt like I was Karen Sue Hanky, or someone equally as creepy.

But I also felt like I had no other choice. Rob's bike roaring to life just then meant one thing, and one thing only:

We had to get going. And now.

It worked. Thank God, it worked. Because Keely Herzberg, bless her five-year-old heart, stood up and, looking up into my face, shrugged and said, "Okay."

It was at that moment I realized why Rob had taken off. The screen door that led to the backyard burst open, and a man in a pair of fairly tight-fitting jeans and some heavy-looking work boots—and who was clutching a beer bottle—came out onto the back porch and roared, "Who the hell are you?"

I grabbed Keely by the hand. I knew, of course, who this was. And I could only pray that his aim, when it came to moving targets, left something to be desired.

The sound of Rob's motorcycle engine had been getting closer. I knew now what he was doing.

"Come on," I said to Keely.

And then we were running.

I didn't really think about what I was doing. If I had stopped and thought about it, of course, I would have been able to see that there was no way that we could run faster than Mrs. Herzberg's boyfriend. All he had to do was leap down from the back porch and he'd be on us.

Fortunately, I was too scared of getting whacked with a beer bottle to do much thinking.

Instead, what I did was, while we ran, I shifted my grip on Keely from her hand to her arm, until I had scooped her up in both hands and she was being swept through the air. And when we reached the part of the fence I'd jumped down from, I swung her, with all my strength, toward the top of the fence. . . .

And she went sailing over it, just like those sacks of produce Professor Le Blanc had predicted I was going to be spending the rest of my life bagging.

Professor Le Blanc was right. I was a bag girl, in a way. Only what I bagged wasn't groceries, but other people's mistreated kids.

I heard Keely land with a scrape of plastic sandals on metal. She had made it onto the lid of the Dumpster, where, I could only hope, Rob would grab her. Now it was my turn.

Only Keely's new bottle-throwing dad was right behind me. He had let out a shocked, "Hey!" when I'd thrown Keely over the fence. The next thing I knew, the ground was shaking—I swear I felt it shudder beneath my feet—as he leaped from the porch and thundered toward me. Behind us a screen door banged open, and I heard Mrs. Herzberg yell, "Clay! Where's Keely, Clay?"

"Not me," I heard Clay grunt. "Her!"

That was it. I was dead.

But I wasn't giving up. Not until that bottle was beating my skull into pulp. Instead, I jumped, grabbing for the top of the fence.

I got it, but not without incurring some splinters. I didn't care about my hands, though. I was halfway there. All I had to do was swing my leg over, and—

He had hold of my foot. My left foot. He had grabbed it, and was trying to drag me down.

"Oh, no, you don't, girlie," Clay growled at me. With his other hand, he grabbed the back of my jeans. He had apparently dropped the beer bottle, with was something of a relief.

Except that in a second, he was going to lift me off that fence, throw me to the ground, and step on me with one of those giant, work-booted feet.

"Jess!" I heard Rob calling to me. "Jess, come on!"

Oh, okay. I'll just hurry up now. Sorry about the delay, I'm just putting on a little lipstick—

"You," Clay said, as he tugged on me, "are in big trouble, girlie—"

Which was when I launched my free foot in the direction of his face. It connected solidly with the bridge of his nose, making a crunching sound that was quite satisfying, to my ears.

Well, I've never liked being called girlie.

Clay let go of both my foot and my waistband with an outraged cry of pain. And the second I was free, I swung myself over that fence, landed with a thump on the roof of the Dumpster, then jumped straight from the Dumpster onto the back of Rob's bike, which was waiting beneath it.

"Go!" I shrieked, throwing my arms around him and Keely, who was huddled, wide-eyed, on the seat in front of him.

Rob didn't waste another second. He didn't sit around and argue about how neither Keely nor I were wearing helmets, or how I'd probably ruined his shocks, jumping from the Dumpster onto his bike, like a cowboy onto the back of a horse.

Instead, he lifted up his foot and we were off, tearing down that alley like something NASA had launched.

Even with the noise of Rob's engine, I could still hear the anguished shriek behind us.

"Keely!"

It was Mrs. Herzberg. She didn't know it, of course, but I wasn't stealing her daughter. I was saving her.

But as for Keely's mother …

Well, she was a grown-up. She was just going to have to save herself.

C H A P T E R

11

I don't know what your feelings on McDonald's are. I mean, I know McDonald's is at least partly responsible for the destruction of the South American rain forest, which they have apparently razed large sections of in order to make grazing pastures for all the cattle they need to slaughter each year in order to make enough Big Macs to satisfy the demand, and all.

And I know that there's been some criticism over the fact that every seven miles, in America, there is at least one McDonald's. Not a hospital, mind you, or a police station, but a McDonald's, every seven miles.

I mean, that's sort of scary, if you think about it.

On the other hand, if you've been going to McDonald's since you were a little kid, like most of us have, it's sort of comforting to see those golden arches. I mean, they represent something more than just high-fat, high-cholesterol fast food. They mean that wherever you are, well, you're actually not that far from home.

And those fries are killer.

Fortunately, there was a Mickey D's just a few blocks away from Keely's house. Thank God, or I think Rob would have had an embolism. I could tell Rob was pretty unhappy about having to transport Keely and me, both helmetless, on the back of his Indian … even though it was completely safe, with me holding onto her and all. And it wasn't like he ever went more than fifteen miles per hour the whole time.

Well, except when we'd been racing down that alley to get away from Clay.

But let me tell you, when we pulled into the parking lot of that McDonald's, I could tell Rob was plenty relieved.

And when we stepped into the icy air-conditioning, I was relieved. I was sweating like a pig. I don't mind the crime-fighting stuff so much. It's the humidity that bugs me.

Anyway, once we were inside, and Keely was enjoying her Happy Meal while I thirstily sucked down a Coke, Rob explained how he'd been listening attentively to Mrs. Herzberg's description of her television-viewing habits, when her boyfriend appeared as if from nowhere, preemptively ending their little interview with a fist against the door frame. Sensing trouble, Rob hastily excused himself—though he did fork over the promised ten-dollar bill—and came looking for me.

Thank God he had, too, or I'd be the one with a footprint across my face, as opposed to Clay.

I tried to pay him back the ten he'd given to Mrs. Herzberg. He wouldn't take my money though. Also, he insisted on paying for Keely's Happy Meal and my giant Coke. I let him, thinking if I were lucky, he might expect me to put out for it.

Ha. I wish.

Then, once we'd compared notes on our adventures with Clay, I left Rob sitting with Keely while I got on the pay phone and dialed Jonathan Herzberg's office.

A woman answered. She said Mr. Herzberg couldn't come to the phone right now, on account of being in a meeting.

I said, "Well, tell him to get out of it. I have his kid here, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with her."

I didn't realize until after the woman had put me on hold that I'd probably sounded like a kidnapper, or something. I wondered if she was running around the office, telling the other secretaries to call the police and have the call traced or something.

But I doubt she had time. Mr. Herzberg picked up again almost right away.

"Hey," I said. "It's me, Jess. I'm at a McDonald's—" I gave him the address. "I have Keely here. Can you come pick her up? I'd bring her to you, but we're on a motorcycle."

"Fifteen m-minutes." Mr. Herzberg was stammering with excitement.

"Good." I started to hang up, but I heard him say something else. I brought the phone back to my ear. "What was that?"

"God bless you," Mr. Herzberg said. He sounded kind of choked up.

"Uh," I said. "Yeah. Okay. Just hurry."

I hung up. I guess that's the only good part about this whole thing. You know, that sometimes, I can reunite kids with the parents who love them.

Still, I wish they didn't have to get so mushy about it.

It was after I'd hung up and felt around in the change dispenser to see if anybody had left anything behind—hey, you never know—that I noticed the van.

I walked over to where Rob and Keely were sitting.

"Hey," I said. "We got visitors."

Rob looked around the restaurant. "Oh, yeah?"

"Outside," I said. "The white van. Don't look. I'll take care of it. You stay here with Keely."

Rob shrugged, and dipped a fry into some ketchup. "No problem," he said.

To Keely, I said, "Your dad's on his way."

Keely grinned happily and sucked on the straw in her milk shake.

I went up to the counter and ordered two cheeseburger meals to go. Then I took the two bags and the little cardboard drink holder and went out the door opposite the one where the van was sitting. Then I walked all the way around the outside of the restaurant, past the drive-through window and the Dumpsters out back, until I came up behind the van.

Then I opened the side door and climbed on in.

"Ooh," I said appreciatively. "Nice air you got in here. But you'll wear out the battery if you sit here and idle for too long."

Special Agents Johnson and Smith turned around and looked at me. They both had sunglasses on. Special Agent Smith lifted hers up and looked at me with her pretty blue eyes.

"Hi, Jessica," she said, in a resigned sort of way.

"Hi," I said. "I figured you guys might be getting hungry, so I brought you this." I passed her the drinks and the bags with the cheeseburgers and fries in them. "I super-sized it for you."

Special Agent Smith opened her bag and looked inside it. "Thanks, Jess," she said, sounding pleasantly surprised. "That was very thoughtful."

"Yes," Special Agent Johnson said. "Thank you, Jessica."

But he said it in this certain way that you could just tell he was kind of, you know. Unhappy.

"So how long have you guys been following me?" I asked.

Special Agent Johnson—who hadn't even touched his food—said, "Since shortly after you left the camp."

"Really?" I thought about this. "All the way from there? I didn't notice you."

"We are professionals," Special Agent Smith pointed out, nibbling on a fry.

"We're supposed to be, anyway," Special Agent Johnson said, in this meaningful way that made his partner put down the fry she was eating and look guilty. "How'd you know we were here, anyway?" he asked me.

"Come on," I said. "There's been a white van sitting on my street back home for months now. You think I wouldn't notice?"

"Ah," Special Agent Johnson said.

We sat there, all three of us, basking in the air-conditioning and inhaling the delicious scent of fries. There was a lot of stuff in the back of the van, stuff with blinking red and green buttons. It looked like surveillance equipment to me, but I could have been wrong. Nice to know the government wasn't wasting the taxpayers' money on frivolous things like the monitoring of teen psychics.

Finally, the luscious odor of Mickey D's proved too much for Special Agent Smith. She reached into her bag again and this time pulled out one of the cheeseburgers, then began unwrapping it. When she noticed Special Agent Johnson glaring at her disapprovingly, she went, "Well, it's just going to get cold, Allan," and took a big bite.

"So," I said. "How you two been?"

"Fine," Special Agent Smith said, with her mouth full.

"We're doing all right," Special Agent Johnson said. "We'd like to talk to you, though."

"If you wanted to talk to me," I said, "you could have just stopped by. I mean, you obviously know where to find me."

"Who's the little girl?" Special Agent Johnson said, nodding toward the window, where Rob and Keely were sitting.

"Oh, her?" I leaned forward and, since he obviously didn't want them, dug my hand into Special Agent Johnson's fries and pulled out a bunch for myself. "She's my cousin," I said.

"You don't have any cousins that age," Special Agent Smith said, after taking a sip from the soda I'd bought her.

"I don't?"

"No," she said. "You don't."

"Well," I said. "She's Rob's cousin, then."

"Really?" Special Agent Johnson took out a notepad and a pen. "And what's Rob's last name?"

"Ha," I said, with my mouth full of fry. "Like I'd tell you."

"He's kind of cute," Special Agent Smith observed.

"I know," I said, with a sigh.

The sigh must have been telling, since Special Agent Smith went, "Is he your boyfriend?"

"Not yet," I said. "But he will be."

"Really? When?"

"When I turn eighteen. Or when he is no longer able to resist the overwhelming attraction he feels for me and jumps my bones. Whichever comes first."

Special Agent Smith burst out laughing. Her partner didn't look so amused though.

"Jessica," he said. "Would you like to tell us about Taylor Monroe?"

I cocked my head innocently to one side. "Who?"

"Taylor Monroe," Special Agent Johnson said. "Disappeared two years ago. An anonymous call was placed yesterday to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU, giving an address in Gainesville, Florida, where the boy could be found."

"Oh, yeah?" I picked at a loose thread on my jeans. "And was he there?"

"He was." Special Agent Johnson's gaze, reflected in the rearview mirror, did not waver from mine. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Jess?"

"Me?" I screwed up my face. "No way. That's great, though. His parents must be pretty happy, huh?"

"They're ecstatic," Special Agent Smith said, taking a sip from her Coke. "The couple who took him—they apparently couldn't have children of their own—are in jail, and Taylor's already been returned to his folks. You never saw a more joyous reunion."

"Aw," I said, genuinely pleased. "That's sweet."

Special Agent Johnson adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see my reflection more clearly. "Very nicely done," he said drily. "I almost believed you had nothing to do with it."

"Well," I said. "I didn't."

"Jessica." Special Agent Johnson shook his head. "When are you finally going to admit that you lied to us last spring?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe when you admit that you made a big mistake marrying Mrs. Johnson and that your heart really belongs to Jill here."

Special Agent Smith choked on a mouthful of cheeseburger. Special Agent Johnson had to ram her on the back a couple of times before she could breathe again.

"Oh," I said. "That go down the wrong pipe? I hate when that happens."

"Jessica." Special Agent Johnson spun around in his seat—well, as much as he could with the steering wheel in the way—and eyed me wrathfully. Really. Wrathful is about the only way I can describe it. Hey, I took the PSATs. I know what I'm talking about.

"You may think you got away with something last spring," he growled, "with that whole going-to-the-press thing. But I am warning you, missy. We are on to you. We know what you've been up to. And it's just a matter of time—"

Over Special Agent Johnson's shoulder, I saw a Passat come barreling through the intersection. Brakes squealing, it pulled into the McDonald's parking lot and came to a stop a few spaces down from the van. Jonathan Herzberg popped out from the driver's seat, so anxious to see his daughter he forgot to take off his seat belt. It strangled him, and he had to sit back down and unsnap it before he could get up again.

"—before Jill or I or someone catches you at it, and—"

"And what?" I asked. "What are you going to do to me, Allan? Put me in jail? For what? I haven't done anything illegal. Just because I won't help you find your little murderers and your drug lords and your escaped convicts, you think I'm doing something wrong? Well, excuse me for not wanting to do your job for you."

Special Agent Smith laid a hand on her partner's shoulder. "Allan," she said, in a warning voice.

Special Agent Johnson just kept glaring at me. He'd been so upset, he'd knocked over his fries, and now they lay all over the floor beneath his feet. He had already squashed one into the blue carpeting beneath the gas pedal. Behind him, Jonathan Herzberg was hurrying into the restaurant, having already spotted his daughter through the window.

"One thing you can do for me, though," I said, amiably enough. "You can tell me who tipped you off that I'd left the campgrounds."

I saw them exchange glances.

"Tipped us off?" Special Agent Smith ran her fingertips through her light brown hair, which was cut into a stylish—but not too stylish—bob. "What are you talking about, Jess?"

"Oh, what?" I rolled my eyes. "You expect me to believe the two of you have been sitting in this van outside of Camp Wawasee for the past nine days, waiting to see when I'd leave? I don't think so. For one thing, there aren't nearly enough food wrappers on the floor."

"Jessica," Special Agent Smith said, "we haven't been spying on you."

"No," I said. "You've just been paying somebody else to do it."

"Jess—"

"Don't bother to deny it. How else would you have known I was leaving the camp?" I shook my head. "Who is it, anyway? Pamela? That secretary who looks like John Wayne? Oh, wait, I know." I snapped my fingers. "It's Karen Sue Hanky, isn't it? No, wait, she's too much of a crybaby to be a narc."

"You," Special Agent Johnson said, "are being ridiculous."

Ridiculous. Yeah. That's right.

I watched through the plate glass window as Jonathan Herzberg snatched up his daughter and gave her a hug that came close to strangling her. She didn't seem to mind, though. Her grin was broader than I'd ever seen it—way bigger than it had been over the Happy Meal.

Another joyous reunion, brought about by me.

And I was missing it.

Ridiculous. They were the ones going around spying on a sixteen-year-old girl. And they said I was being ridiculous.

"Well," I said. "It's been fun, you guys, but I gotta motor. Bye."

I got out of the van. Behind me, I heard Special Agent Johnson call my name.

But I didn't bother turning around.

I don't like being called missy any more than I liked being called girlie. I was proud that I'd at least managed to restrain myself from slamming my foot into Special Agent Johnson's face.

Mr. Goodhart was really going to be pleased by the progress I'd made so far this summer.

C H A P T E R

12

"So Rob said. "Was it worth it?"

"I don't know," I said with a shrug. "I mean, her mom didn't seem that bad. She might have gotten out on her own, eventually."

"Yeah," Rob said. "After enough stitches."

I didn't say anything. Rob was the one who came from the broken home, not me. I figured he knew what he was talking about.

"She claims her favorite TV show is Masterpiece Theater," Rob informed me.

"Well," I said. "That doesn't prove anything. Except, you know, that she wanted to impress us."

"Impress Ginger and Nate," he said, with one raised eyebrow, "from Chicago Central High? Yeah, that's important."

"Well," I said. I rested my elbows on my knees. We were sitting on a picnic table, gazing out over Lake Wawasee. Well, the edge of Lake Wawasee, anyway. We were about two miles from the actual camp. Somehow, I just couldn't bring myself to go back there. Maybe it was the fact that when I set foot through those gates, I was going to be fired.

Then again, maybe it was because when I set foot through those gates, I'd have to say good-bye to Rob.

Look, I'll admit it: I'm warm for the guy's form. Anybody here have a problem with that?

And it was really nice, sitting there in the shade with him, listening to the shrill whirr of the cicadas and the birdsong from the treetops. It seemed as if there wasn't another human being for miles and miles. Above the trees, clouds were gathering. Soon it was going to rain, but it looked as if it would hold off for a little while longer—besides, we were somewhat protected by the canopy of leaves over our heads.

If it had been dark enough, it would have been a perfect make-out spot.

Well, if Rob didn't have this total prejudice against making out with girls sixteen and under.

It was as I was sadly counting the months until I turned seventeen—all eight and a half of them; Douglas could have told me exactly how many days, and even minutes, I had left—that Rob reached out and put his arm around me.

And unlike when Pamela had done the exact same thing, I did not mind. I did not mind at all.

"Hey," Rob said. I could feel his heart thudding against my side, where his chest pressed against me. "Stop beating yourself up. You did the right thing. You always do."

For a minute, I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. Then I remembered. Oh, yeah. Keely Herzberg. Rob thought I'd been mulling over her, when really, I'd just been trying to figure out a way to get him to make a pass at me.

Oh, well. I figured what I was doing was working so far, if the arm around me was any indication. I sighed and tried to look sad … which was difficult, because I was sort of having another one of those epiphanies, what with the breeze off the lake and the birds and Rob's Coast deodorant soap smell and the nice, heavy weight of his arm and everything.

"I guess," I said, managing to sound uncertain even to my own ears.

"Are you kidding?" Rob gave me a friendly squeeze. "That woman told her kid that her father was dead. Dead! You think she was playing with a full deck?"

"I know," I said. Maybe if I looked sad enough, he'd stick his tongue in my mouth.

"And look how happy Keely was. And Mr. Herzberg. My God, did you see how stoked he was to have his kid back? I think if you'd have let him, he'd have written you a check for five grand, right there and then."

Jonathan Herzberg had been somewhat eager to offer me compensation for the trouble I'd taken, returning his daughter to him … a substantial monetary reward I had politely turned down, telling him that if he absolutely had to fork his money over to somebody, he should donate it to 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU.

Because, I mean, let's face it: you can't go around taking rewards for being human, now can you?

Even if it does get you fired.

"I guess," I said again, still sounding all sad.

But if I'd thought Rob was going to fall for my whole poor-little-me routine, it turned out I had another think coming.

"You can forget it, Mastriani," he said, suddenly removing his arm. "I'm not going to kiss you."

Jeez! What's a girl have to do around here to get felt up?

"Why not?" I demanded.

"We've been over this before," he said, looking bored.

This was true.

"You used to kiss me," I pointed out to him.

"That was before I knew you were jailbait."

This was also true.

Rob leaned back, propping himself up on his elbows and gazing out at the trees across the water. In a month or two, all the green leaves he was looking at now would be blazing red and orange. I would be starting my junior year at Ernest Pyle High School, and Rob would still be working in his uncle's garage, helping his mother with the mortgage on their farmhouse (his father had split, as Rob put it, when he was just a little kid, and hadn't been heard from since), and fiddling around with the Harley he was rebuilding in their barn.

But really, if you thought about it, we weren't so different, Rob and I. We both liked going fast, and we both hated liars. Our clothing ensemble of preference was jeans and a T-shirt, and we both had short dark hair … mine was even shorter than Rob's. We both loved motorcycles, and neither of us had aspirations for college. At least, I didn't think I did. And I know my grades didn't exactly leave a whole lot of hope for it.

Our similarities completely outweighed our differences. So what if Rob has no curfew, and I have to be home every night by eleven? So what if Rob has a probation officer, and I have a mother who makes me dresses for homecoming dances I'll never go to? People really shouldn't let those things get in the way of true love.

I pointed this out to him, but he didn't look very impressed.

"Look." I flopped down on top of the picnic table, turned toward him on one elbow, holding my head in one hand. "I don't see what the problem is. I mean, I'm going to be seventeen in eight and a half months. Eight and a half months! That's nothing. I don't see why we can't—"

I was lying in just such a way that Rob's face was only a couple of inches from mine. When he turned to look at me, our noses almost bumped into one another.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you," Rob asked, "that you're supposed to play hard to get?"

I looked at his lips. I probably don't need to tell you that they're really nice lips, kind of full and strong-looking. "What," I wanted to know, "is that going to get me?"

I swear to you, he was a second away from kissing me then.

I know he said he wasn't going to. But let's face it, he always says that, and then he always does—well, almost always, anyway. I swear that's why he avoids me half the time … because he knows that for all he says he isn't going to kiss me, he usually ends up doing it anyway. Who knows why? I'd like to think it's because I'm so damned irresistible, and because he's secretly in love with me, in spite of what it says in the Cosmo quiz.

But I wasn't destined to find out. Not just then, anyway. Because just as he was leaning over in the direction of my mouth, this unearthly siren started to wail …

… and we were both so startled, we wrenched apart.

I swear I thought a tornado alarm was going off. Rob said later he thought it was my dad, with one of those klaxon things old ladies set off when a mugger is attacking them.

But it wasn't either of those things. It was a Wawasee County police cruiser. And it whizzed by the campground we were parked at like a bullet. . . .

Only to be followed by another.

And another.

And then another.

Four squad cars, all headed at breakneck speed in the direction of Camp Wawasee.

I should have known, of course. I should have guessed what was wrong.

But my psychic abilities are limited to finding people, not predicting the future. All I knew was that something was definitely wrong back at the camp … and it wasn't my psychic powers telling me that, either. It was just plain common sense.

"What," Rob wanted to know, "have you done now?"

What had I done? I wasn't sure.

"I have," I said, "a very bad feeling about this."

"Come on." Rob sighed tiredly. "Let's go find out."

They didn't want to let us in at the gate, of course. Rob had no visitor's pass, and the security guard looked down his nose at my employee ID and went, "Only time counselors are allowed to leave the camp is Sunday afternoons."

I looked at him like he was crazy. "I know that," I said. "I snuck out. Now are you going to let me back in, or not?"

You could totally tell the guy, who couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty, had tried for the local police force and hadn't made it. So he'd opted to become a security guard, thinking that would give him the authority and respect he'd always yearned for. He sucked on his two overlarge front teeth and, peering at Rob and me, went, " 'Fraid not. There's a bit of a problem up at the camp, you know, and—"

I put down the face shield of my helmet and said to Rob, "Let's go."

Rob said to the security guard, "Nice talkin' to ya."

Then he gunned the engine, and we went around the red-and-white barrier arm, churning up quite a bit of dust and gravel as we did so. What did it matter? I couldn't get more fired than I already was.

The security guard came out of his little house and started yelling, but there wasn't much he could do to make us turn around. It wasn't like he had a gun, or anything.

Not that guns had ever stopped us before, of course.

As we drove up the long gravel road to the camp, I noticed how still and cool the woods were, especially with the coming rainstorm. The sky above us was clouding up more with every passing moment. You could smell the rain in the air, fresh and sweet.

Of course it wasn't until I was about to be kicked out of there that I'd finally begun to appreciate Camp Wawasee. It was too bad, really. I'd never even gotten a chance to float around the lake on an inner tube.

When we pulled up to the administrative offices, I was surprised at how many people were milling around. The squad cars were parked kind of haphazardly, and there was no sign of the cops who'd been driving them. They must, I figured, be inside, talking to Dr. Alistair, Pamela, and Ms. John Wayne.

But there were campers and counselors aplenty, which I thought was a little weird. If there'd been some sort of accident or crisis, you'd have thought they'd have tried to keep it from the kids. . . .

… And that's when I realized that they couldn't have kept it from the kids, even if they'd wanted to. It was five-thirty, and the kids and their counselors were streaming into the dining hall for supper. The dining staff prepared meals at exactly the same time every day, crisis or no crisis.

All of the kids were staring curiously at the squad cars. When they noticed Rob and me, they looked even more curious, and began whispering to one another. Oddly enough, I saw no members of Birch Tree Cottage in the crowds. . . .

But I saw a lot of other people I knew, including Ruth and Scott, who made no move whatsoever to approach me.

That's when I realized I still had my helmet on. Of course no one was saying hi. No one recognized me. As soon as I'd dragged the heavy thing off, Ruth came right over, and, as Rob pulled his helmet off as well, said, very sarcastically, "Well, I see you managed to find that ride you were looking for."

I shot her a warning look. Ruth can really be very snotty when she puts her mind to it.

"Ruth," I said. "I don't think I've ever formally introduced you to my friend, Rob. Ruth Abramowitz, this is Rob Wilkins. Rob, Ruth."

Rob nodded curtly to Ruth. "How you doing," he said.

Ruth smiled at him. It was not her best effort, by any means.

"I'm doing very well, thank you," she said primly. "And you?"

Rob, his eyebrows raised, said, "I'm good."

"Ruth." One of the residents of Tulip Tree Cottage pulled on Ruth's T-shirt. "I'm hungry. Can we go in now?"

Ruth turned and said to her campers, "You all go in now, and save a place for me. I'll be there in a minute."

The kids went away, with many glances not only at me and Rob, but at the squad cars. "What are the police doing here?" more than one of them asked loudly of no one in particular.

"Good question," I said to Ruth. "What are the police doing here?"

"I don't know." Ruth was still looking at Rob. She had seen him before, of course, back when he and I had had detention together. Ruth used to come pick me up, so my parents wouldn't find out about my somewhat checkered disciplinary record.

But I guess this was the first time she'd ever seen Rob from close up, and I could tell she was memorizing the details for later analysis. Ruth's like that.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" I demanded. "The place is crawling with cops, and you don't know why?"

Ruth finally wrenched her gaze from Rob and fastened it onto me instead.

"No," she said. "I don't know. All I know is, we were down at the lake, having free swim and all, and the lifeguard blew his whistle and made us all go back inside."

"We thought it was on account of the storm," Scott said, nodding toward the still-darkening sky above us.

It was at this point that Karen Sue Hanky strolled up to us. I could tell by the expression on her pointy rat face that she had something important to tell us … and by the unnatural glitter in her baby-blue eyes, I knew it was something I wasn't going to like.

"Oh," she said, pretending she had only just noticed me. "I see you've decided to join us again." She glanced flirtatiously at Rob. "And brought along a friend, I see."

Even though Karen Sue had gone to school with Rob, she didn't recognize him. Girls like Karen Sue simply don't notice guys like Rob. I suppose she thought he was just some random local I'd picked up off the highway and brought back to camp for some recreational groping.

"Karen Sue," I said, "you better hurry and get into the dining hall. I heard a rumor they were running low on wheatgrass juice."

She just smiled at me, which wasn't a very good sign.

"Aren't you funny," Karen Sue said. "But then I suppose it's very amusing to you, what's going on. On account of it all being because of you telling that one little boy to hit that other little boy." Karen Sue flicked some of her hair back over her shoulder and sighed. "Well, I guess it just goes to show, violence doesn't pay."

Overhead, the clouds had gotten so thick, the sun was blocked out almost entirely. Inside the dining hall, the lights had come on, though this usually didn't happen until seven or eight o'clock, when the cleaning crew was at work. In the distance, thunder rumbled. The smell of ozone was heavy in the air.

I stepped forward until Karen Sue's upturned nose was just an inch from mine, and she stumbled back a step, tripping over a root and nearly falling flat on her face.

When she straightened, I asked her just what the heck she was talking about.

Only I didn't say heck.

Karen Sue started talking very quickly, and in a voice that was higher in pitch than usual.

"Well, I just went into the administrative offices for a second because I had to make sure the fax from Amber's doctor had come—about how her chronic ear infections prevent her from taking part in the Polar Bear swim—and I just happened to overhear the police talking to Dr. Alistair about how one of the boys from Birch Tree Cottage went to the lake, but no one saw him come out of it—"

I reached out and grabbed a handful of Karen Sue's shirt, on account of how she was slowly backing farther and farther away from me.

"Who?" I demanded. Even though it was still about seventy-five degrees, in spite of the coming rainstorm, my skin was prickly with goose bumps. "Who went into the lake and didn't come out of it?"

"That one you were always yelling at," Karen Sue said. "Shane. Jessica, while you were gone"—she shook her head—"Shane drowned."

C H A P T E R

13

Thunder rumbled again, much closer this time. Now the hair on my arms was standing up not because I was cold, but because of all the electricity in the air.

I grabbed hold of Karen Sue's shirt with my other hand as well, and dragged her toward me. "What do you mean, drowned?"

"Just what I said." Karen Sue's voice was higher than ever. "Jess, he went into the lake and he never came out—"

"Bull," I said. "That's bull, Karen. Shane's a good swimmer."

"Well, when they blew the whistle for everyone to get out," Karen Sue said, her tone starting to sound a little hysterical, "Shane never came onto shore."

"Then he never went into the water in the first place," I hissed from between gritted teeth.

"Maybe," Karen Sue said. "And maybe if you'd been here, doing your job, and hadn't gone off with your boyfriend"—she sneered in Rob's direction— "you'd know."

Everything, the trees, the cloudy sky, the path, everything, seemed to be spinning around. It was like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up in the tornado. Except that I was the only thing standing still.

"I don't believe you," I said again. I shook Karen Sue hard enough to make her pink headband snap off and go flying through the air. "You're lying. I ought to smash your face in, you—"

"All right." Suddenly, the world stopped spinning, and Rob was there, prying my fingers off Karen Sue's shirt. "All right, Mastriani, that's enough."

"You're lying," I said to Karen Sue. "You're a liar, and everyone knows it."

Karen Sue, white-faced and shaking, bent down, picked up her headband, and pushed it shakily back into place. There were some dead leaves stuck to it, but she apparently didn't notice.

I really wanted to jump her, knock her to the ground, and grind her rat face into the dirt. Only I couldn't get at her, because Rob had me around the waist, and wouldn't let go, no matter how hard I struggled to get away. If Mr. Goodhart had been there, he'd have been way disappointed in me. I seemed to have forgotten all the anger-management skills he'd taught me.

"You know what else, Karen Sue?" I shouted. "You can't play flute for squat! They weren't even going to let you in here, with your lousy five out of ten on your performance score, except that Andrew Shippinger came down with mono, and they were desperate—"

"Okay," Rob said, lifting me up off my feet. "That's enough of that."

"That was supposed to be my cabin," I yelled at her, from over Rob's shoulder. "The Frangipanis were supposed to be mine!"

Rob had turned me around so that I was facing Ruth. She took one look at me and went, "Jess. Cool it."

I said fiercely, "He's not dead. He's not."

Ruth blinked, then looked from me to Scott and back again. I looked at them, too, and realized from the way they were staring at me that something weird was going on with my face. I reached up to touch it, and felt wetness.

Great. I was crying. I was crying, and I hadn't even noticed.

"She's lying," I said one last time, but not very loudly.

Rob must have decided the fight had gone out of me, since he put me down—though he kept one hand glued to the back of my neck—and said, "There's one way to find out, isn't there?"

He nodded toward the administrative offices. I wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands and said, "Okay."

Ruth insisted on following Rob and me, and Scott, to my surprise, insisted on coming with her. It sunk into my numbed consciousness that there was something going on there, but I was too worried about Shane to figure it out just then. I'd think about it later. When we stepped into the building, the John Wayne look-alike secretary stood up and said, "Kids, they still don't know anything yet. I know you're worried, but if you could just stay with your campers—"

"Shane is my camper," I said.

The woman's thick eyebrows went up. She stared at me, apparently uncertain as to how best to reply.

I helped her out.

"Where are they?" I demanded, striding past her and down the hall. "Dr. Alistair's office?"

The secretary, scrambling out from behind her desk, went, "Oh, wait. You can't go back there—"

But it was too late. I'd already turned the corner and reached the door marked "Camp Director." I threw it open. Behind a wide desk sat the white-haired, red-faced Dr. Alistair. In various chairs and couches around his office sat Pamela, two state troopers, a sheriff's deputy, and the sheriff of Wawasee County himself.

"Jess." Pamela jumped to her feet. "There you are. Oh, thank God. We couldn't find you anywhere. And Dr. Alistair said you didn't show up for a meeting with him this afternoon—"

I looked at Pamela. What was she playing at? She, of all people, should have known where I was. Hadn't Jonathan Herzberg called and told her all about my returning his daughter to him?

I didn't think this was an appropriate time to bring that up, however. I said, "I was unavoidably detained. Can someone please tell me what's going on?"

Dr. Alistair stood up. He didn't look like a world-famous conductor anymore, or even a camp director. Instead, he looked like a frail old man, though he couldn't have been more than sixty years old.

"What's going on?" he echoed. "What's going on? You mean to say you don't know? Aren't you the famous psychic? How could you not know, with your special, magic powers? Hmm, Miss Mastriani?"

I glanced from Dr. Alistair to Pamela and back again. Had she told him? I supposed she must have.

But the astonished look on her face implied that she had not.

"I'll tell you what's going on, young lady," Dr. Alistair said, "since your psychic powers seem to be failing you at the moment. One of our campers is missing. Not just any camper, but one of the boys assigned to your care. Ostensibly, he's drowned. For the first time in our fifty-year history, we've had a death here at the camp."

I flinched as if he'd hit me. Not because of what he'd said, though that was bad enough. No, it was what he hadn't said, the thing that was implied in his tone:

That it was all my fault.

"But I'm surprised you didn't know that already." Dr. Alistair's tone was mocking. "Lightning Girl."

"Now, Hal," the sheriff said in a gruff voice. "Why don't we just calm down here? We don't know that for sure. We don't have a body yet."

"The last time anyone saw him alive, he was on the way to the lake with the rest of his cabin. He isn't anywhere on the campgrounds. The boy's dead, I tell you. And it's entirely our fault! If his counselor had been there to keep an eye on him, it wouldn't have happened."

My throat was dry. I tried to swallow, but couldn't. Outside, lightning flashed, followed almost immediately by a long roll of thunder.

Then the heavens unloosed. Rain beat against the windows behind Dr. Alistair's desk. One of the state troopers, looking out at the downpour, said, in a morose voice, "Gonna be hard to drag that lake now."

Drag the lake? Drag the lake?

"Wasn't there a lifeguard?"

Rob. Rob was trying to help. Rob was trying to deflect some of the blame from me. Sweet of him, of course, but a useless effort. It was my fault. If I'd been there, Shane never would have drowned. I wouldn't have let him.

"It seems to me," Rob said reasonably, "if the kid was swimming, there ought to have been a lifeguard. Wouldn't the lifeguard have noticed someone drowning on his watch?"

Dr. Alistair squinted at him through the lenses of his bifocals. "Who," he demanded, "are you?" Then he spied Ruth and Scott in the doorway. "What is this?" he demanded. "Who are you people? This is my private office. Get out."

None of them moved, although Ruth looked like she really wanted to run somewhere far away. Somewhere where there weren't any sheriff deputies or angry camp directors. It was just like the time her brother Skip had been stung by the bee, only instead of someone going into anaphylactic shock, someone—namely me—was dying a slower death … of guilt.

"Well," Rob said. "Wasn't there a lifeguard?"

The sheriff said, "There was. He didn't notice anything unusual."

"That's because," I said, more to myself than anyone else, "Shane never went into the water." It wasn't something I knew with any certainty. Just something I suspected.

But that didn't stop Dr. Alistair from looking at me from behind his wire-rimmed glasses and demanding, "And I suppose, since you weren't there, you're able to tell that using your special powers?"

It was at this point that Rob took a step toward Dr. Alistair's desk. The sheriff put out a hand, however, and said, "Easy, son." Then, to Dr. Alistair, he said, "Just what are you talking about, Hal?"

"Oh, you don't recognize her?" Dr. Alistair looked prim. I wondered if maybe losing a camper had sent him around the bend. He'd never been one of the most stable people, anyway, if his erratic behavior during all-camp rehearsal had been any indication: Dr. Alistair frequently became so enraged with the horn section, he threw his conducting baton at them, only missing because they'd learned to duck.

"Jessica Mastriani," he went on, "the girl with the psychic power to find missing people. Of course it's a little late for her help now, isn't it? Considering the fact that the boy's already dead."

"Oh, Hal." Pamela stood up. "We don't know that. He might just have run away." She looked at me. "Wasn't there some altercation earlier today?"

I nodded, remembering the tick incident, and the fact that I had refused to give Lionel a strike for punching Shane.

More than that, however, I remembered the look Shane had given me when I'd lied to him about that photo of Taylor Monroe. He hadn't believed me. He hadn't believed a word I'd said.

Was this his way of getting back at me for lying to him?

If only, I thought, I could go to sleep right now. If I went to sleep right now, I'd be able to find out exactly where Shane was. Maybe if I could get Dr. Alistair really mad, he'd clock me with his baton, the way he was always trying to clock the horn players. Could I find missing kids while unconscious? Was that the same as being asleep?

Probably not. And I doubted the sheriff would let Dr. Alistair clock me, anyway. Rob definitely wouldn't. I wondered if protectiveness was listed as one of the "10 Ways to Tell He Thinks of You as More Than Just a Friend."

Like it mattered now. Now that it looked as if I might have killed a kid. Well, indirectly, anyway.

"What about the other boys from Birch Tree Cottage?" I asked. "Did anybody talk to them? Ask them if they'd seen Shane?" Dave? Where was Dave? He'd promised to look after them. . . .

"We've got some officers interviewing them now," the sheriff said to me. "In their cabin. But so far … nothing."

"He was last seen on his way to the lake with the others," Dr. Alistair insisted stubbornly.

"Doesn't mean he drowned," Rob pointed out.

Dr. Alistair looked at him. "Who," he wanted to know, "are you? You're not one of the counselors." He looked at Pamela. "He's not one of the counselors, is he, Pamela?"

Pamela reached up to run a hand through her short blond hair. "No, Hal," she said tiredly. "He's not."

"He's my friend," I said. I didn't say Rob was my boyfriend because, well, he's not. Plus I thought it might look even worse than it already did, me being gone for hours, then showing up with some random guy in tow. "And we were just leaving."

But my efforts to cover up the truth about my feelings for Rob proved to be for nothing as Dr. Alistair said, pretty nastily, "Leaving? Oh, well, isn't that special. You seem to have a knack, Miss Mastriani, for being unavailable when you're needed most."

My mouth fell open. What was this? I wondered. If he was going to fire me, why didn't he just get it over with? I had to hurry up and get to sleep if we were ever going to find Shane.

"What about those special powers of yours?" Dr. Alistair went on. "Don't you feel the slightest obligation to help us find this boy?"

Even then, I still didn't get what was going on. I just thought Dr. Alistair was crazy, or something.

I think Rob must have felt the same thing, because he reached out and grabbed one of my arms, just above the elbow, like he was going to pull me out of the way if Dr. Alistair whipped out that baton and started firing.

I went, "I don't have special powers anymore, Dr. Alistair."

"Oh?" Dr. Alistair's shaggy white eyebrows went up. "Is that so? Then where were you all afternoon?"

I felt my stomach drop, as if I'd been on an elevator. Except, of course, that I wasn't. How had he known? How had he known?

"Okay," Rob said, steering me toward the door—I guess because I was so stunned, I wasn't moving. "We're going now."

"You can't go anywhere!" Dr. Alistair thumped on his desk with his fist. "You are an employee of Lake Wawasee Camp for Gifted Child Musicians, and you—"

Something finally got through the haze of confusion his question about where I'd been all afternoon had cast around me. And that something was the fact that he was still speaking to me as if I worked for him.

"Not anymore," I interrupted. "I mean, I'm fired, aren't I?"

Dr. Alistair looked alarmed. "Fired?" at the same time as Pamela said, "Oh, Jess, of course not. None of this is your fault."

Not fired? Not fired? How could I be not fired? I had taken off for hours, without offering a single explanation as to where I'd been. And while I'd been gone, one of the kids in my charge had disappeared. And I wasn't fired?

The uncomfortable feeling that had been creeping over me since I'd set foot in Dr. Alistair's office got stronger than ever. And suddenly I knew what I had to do.

"If I'm not fired," I said, "then I quit. Come on, Rob."

Pamela looked stricken. "Oh, Jess. You can't—"

"You can't quit," Dr. Alistair cried. "You signed a contract!"

He said a bunch of other things, but I didn't wait to hear them. I left. I just walked out.

Rob and the others followed me out into the waiting area. The John-Waynish secretary was there, talking on the phone. She lowered her voice when she saw us, but didn't hang up.

"Are you crazy, Jess?" Ruth wanted to know. "Quitting, when you didn't have to? They weren't going to fire you, you know."

"I know," I said. "That's why I had to quit. Who would want to hang on to an employee like me? I'll tell you who: someone with ulterior motives."

"I don't really understand any of this." Scott, speaking for the first time, looked concerned. "And it probably isn't any of my business. But it seems to me if you really do have psychic powers and all of that, and people want you to use them, shouldn't you, I don't know, do it? I mean, you could probably make a lot of money at it."

Rob and I just stared at him incredulously. Ruth's look was more pitying.

"Oh," she said. "You poor thing."

It was right then that the double glass doors to the administrative building blew open. We all backed out of the way as two people, holding dripping umbrellas, stepped into the office waiting room.

It wasn't until they shook the umbrellas closed that I recognized them. And when I did, I groaned.

"Oh, jeez," I said. "Not you again."

C H A P T E R

14

"Jess." Special Agent Smith shook rainwater from her hair. "We need to talk."

I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't. I mean, it is one thing to have the FBI following you wherever you go.

But it is quite another to have the people who are supposed to be anonymous tails come up and start talking to you. It simply isn't done. Everyone knows that. I mean, how uncool can you get?

"Look," I said, holding up my right hand. "I really don't have time for this right now. I am having a personal crisis, and—"

"It's going to become really personal," Special Agent Johnson said—his lips, I noticed, looked thinner than usual—"if Clay Larsson gets his hands on you."

"Clay Larsson?" I tried to think who they were talking about. Then it dawned on me. "You mean Keely's new dad?" .

"Right." Special Agent Johnson threw Rob a look. "His cousin's mother's boyfriend."

Rob screwed up his face and went, "My what?"

I didn't blame him. I was confused, too.

"After you left him this afternoon," Special Agent Johnson explained, "Mr. Larsson rightly guessed that the person who had kidnapped his girlfriend's daughter was someone who'd been hired by the child's father. He therefore paid a little visit to your friend Mr. Herzberg, who returned to his office after his rendezvous with you at the McDonald's."

"Oh." God, I'm a moron sometimes. "Is he … I mean, he's all right and everything, right?"

"He's got a broken jaw." Special Agent Johnson referred to the notepad he always carries around. "Three fractured ribs, a concussion, a dislocated knee, and a severely contused hip bone."

"Oh, my God." I was shocked. "Keely—"

"Keely is fine." Special Agent Smith's voice was soothing. "We have her in protective custody, where she'll remain while Mr. Larsson is still at large."

I raised my eyebrows. "You guys didn't catch him?"

"We might have," Special Agent Johnson pointed out—rather nastily, if you ask me, "if certain people had been a bit more forthcoming about their activities earlier today."

"Whoa," I said. "You are not pinning this on me. It doesn't have anything to do with me. I'm just an innocent bystander in this one—"

"Jess." Special Agent Johnson frowned down at me. "We know. Jonathan Herzberg told us everything."

My mouth fell open. I couldn't believe it. That rat! That dirty rat!

It was Rob who asked suspiciously, "He told you everything, did he? With a broken jaw?"

Special Agent Johnson flipped back a few pages in his notepad, then showed it to us. There, in shaky handwriting I didn't recognize—it certainly wasn't Allan Johnson's precise script—was Jonathan Herzberg's version of the events leading up to his assault by his ex-wife's boyfriend. My name appeared frequently.

The louse. The louse had ratted me out. I couldn't believe it. After everything I'd done for him …

"Jess." Special Agent Smith, in her powder blue suit, looked more like a real estate broker than she did an FBI agent. I guess that was the point. "Clay Larsson is not a particularly stable individual. He has an arrest record a mile long. Assault and battery, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer … He is a very dangerous and volatile person, and from what Mr. Herzberg tells us, we have reason to believe that, at this point in time, he has a particular grudge against … well, against you, Jess."

Considering the foot I'd smashed into his face, I could readily believe this. Still, it wasn't as if Clay Larsson knew who I was, much less where I lived.

"Well, that's just the thing," Special Agent Smith said, when I voiced these thoughts. "He does know, Jess. You see, he … well, he pretty much tortured Keely's father until he told him."

Rob said, "Okay. That's it. Let's go get your stuff, Mastriani. We're out of here."

It took me longer than it had taken Rob to digest what I'd just heard, though. Clay Larsson, who clearly had even worse anger-management issues than I did, knew who I was and where I lived, and was coming after me to exact revenge for (a) kicking him in the face, and (b) kidnapping his girlfriend's daughter, whom she, in turn, had kidnapped from her ex-husband?

How did I ever get to be so lucky? Really. I want to know. I mean, have you ever, in your life, met anyone with worse luck than mine?

"Well," I said. "That's great. That's just great. And I suppose you two are here to protect me?"

Special Agent Johnson put his notepad away, and when he did, I saw that his pistol was in its shoulder holster, ready for action.

"That's one way of putting it," he said. "It is in the national interest to keep you alive, Jess, despite your assertions that you no longer possess the, er, talent that originally brought you to the attention of our superiors. We're just going to hang around here and make sure that, if Mr. Larsson makes it onto Camp Wawasee property, you are protected."

"The best way to protect Jess," Rob said, "would be to get her out of here."

"Precisely," Agent Johnson said. He looked Rob up and down, like he was seeing him for the first time—which I guess he was, up close, anyway. The two of them were about the same size—a fact which seemed to surprise Agent Johnson a little. For somebody who was supposed to be inconspicuous, the agent was pretty tall.

"We're planning on taking her to a safe house until Mr. Larsson has been captured," he said to Rob.

"I don't think so," Rob said at the same time that Ruth, standing behind him, went, "Oh, no. Not again."

"Excuse me," I said to Special Agent Johnson. "But don't you remember the last time you guys took me somewhere I was supposed to be safe?"

Special Agents Johnson and Smith exchanged glances. Agent Smith said, "Jess, this time, I promise you—"

"No way," I said. "I'm not going anywhere with you two. Besides"—I looked out the double glass doors at the rain which was still streaming down— "I've got some unfinished business here."

"Jess," Special Agent Smith began.

"No, Jill," I said. Don't ask me when my relationship with Special Agents Johnson and Smith had graduated to a first-name basis. I think it was around the time I'd bought them their first double cheeseburger meal. "I'm not going anywhere. I have things to do here. Responsibilities."

"Jessica," Special Agent Smith said. "This really isn't the time to—"

"I mean it," I said. "I have to go."

And I went. I walked right out of there, right out into the rain. It was still coming down—not as hard as before, maybe, but there was plenty of it. It only took a few seconds for my shirt and jeans to get soaked.

I didn't care. I hadn't lied to them. I had things to do. Finding Shane, wherever he was, was first and foremost on my list. Was he out, I wondered, as I stalked with my head bent in the direction of Birch Tree Cottage, in this storm? Had he found shelter somewhere? Was he dry? Was he warm? Did I even care? As many times as I'd wanted to wring his stupid neck—and I'd thought about it, fairly seriously, several times a day—did I really care what happened to him?

Yeah, I did. And not just because that oversized Mullet Head was capable of making such beautiful music. But because, well, I sort of liked him. Surprising, but true. I liked the annoying little freak.

Thunder rumbled overhead, though it was farther away than before. Then Rob came jogging up behind me.

"That was some dramatic exit," he said. His shirt and jeans, I noted, were also quickly becoming soaked.

"My specialty," I said.

"You're going the wrong way."

I stopped in the middle of the path and looked around, forgetting for a second that Rob had never been to Camp Wawasee, and so would have no way of knowing which way was the right way to Birch Tree Cottage.

"No, I'm not," I said.

"Yes, you are." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "The bike's that way."

I realized what he meant, then shook my head. "Rob," I said. "I can't leave."

"Jess."

Rob hardly ever calls me by my first name. More often than not, he refers to me the way he used to in detention, where we were, basically, nothing but discipline files, badly in need of sorting—by last name only.

So when he does call me by my first name, it usually means he's being very serious about something. In this case, it appeared to be my personal safety.

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to disappoint him.

"No," I said. "No, Rob. I'm not going."

He didn't say anything right away. I squinted up at him, the rain making it hard to see. He was looking down at me, his pale blue eyes filled with something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Not love, certainly.

"Jess," he said in a low, even voice. "You know I think you're a pretty down girl. You know that, don't you?"

I blinked. It wasn't easy to look up at him, with all that rain coming down in my eyes. Plus it was pretty dark. The only way I could see him was in the light from one of the lamps along the pathways, and that was pretty dim.

But he certainly looked serious.

I nodded. "Okay," I said. "We'll call that one a given, if you want."

"Good," he said. The rain had plastered his dark hair to his face and scalp, but he didn't seem to notice. "Then maybe when I say this next part, you'll understand where I'm coming from. I did not drive all the way up here to watch you get your brains hacked out by some psycho, okay? Now you get that ass"—he pointed to the one in question—"on my bike, or I swear to God, I'm going to put it there for you."

Now I knew what was in his eyes. And it wasn't love. Oh, definitely not.

It was anger.

I wiped rainwater from my eyes.

And then I said the only thing I could say: "No."

He made that half-disgusted, half-amused smile he seems to wear fifty percent of the time he's with me, then looked off into the distance for a second … though what he saw out there, I couldn't say. All I could see was rain.

"I have to find Shane," I shouted above a rumble of thunder.

"Yeah?" He looked down at me, still smiling. "I don't give a crap about Shane."

Anger bubbled, hot and dark, inside me. I tried to tamp it down. Count to ten, I told myself. Mr. Goodhart had suggested a long time ago that I count to ten when I felt like slugging someone. Sometimes it even worked.

"Well, I do," I said. "And I'm not leaving here until I know he's safe."

He stopped smiling.

I should have guessed what was coming next. Rob's not the kind of guy who goes around saying stuff just to hear himself talk.

Still, he's never gotten physical with me before. Not the way he did then.

I like to think that, if it had come down to it, I could have gotten away. I really think I could have. Okay, yeah, he had me upside down, which is pretty disorienting. Also, my arms were pinned, which certainly puts a girl at a disadvantage.

But I am thoroughly convinced that, with a few well-placed head-butts—if I could have gotten my head near his, which I am convinced I could have, given enough time—I could have gotten away.

Unfortunately, our tender interlude in the woods was interrupted before I was able to bring it to any sort of head-butting climax.

"Son." Special Agent Johnson's voice rang out through the rain and mist. "Put the girl down."

Rob was already striding purposefully toward his bike. He did not even slow down.

"I don't think so," was all he said.

Then Special Agent Johnson stepped out from between the trees. Even though I was upside down, I could still see he had his gun drawn—which surprised me, I must say.

It seemed to surprise Rob, too, since he froze, and stood there for a second or two. Now that I was upside down, I began to realize that my previous assumption—you know, that I was soaked—had actually been erroneous. I was not soaked. There had been no rainwater, for instance, on my stomach.

But now that I was upside down, there certainly was.

And might I add that this was not a pleasant sensation?

"You," Rob said to Special Agent Johnson, "are not going to shoot me. What if you hit her?"

"It would be unfortunate," Special Agent Johnson said, "but since she has been a thorn in my side since the day we met, it wouldn't upset me too much."

"Allan!" I was shocked. "What would Mrs. Johnson say if she could hear you now?"

"Put her down, son."

Rob flipped me over, and put me back on my feet. While this was happening, Special Agent Johnson came up and took my arm. He still had his gun out, to my surprise. But he was pointing it into the air.

"Now get on your motorcycle, Mr. Wilkins," he said to Rob, "and go home."

"Hey." Now that some of the blood was receding from my head, I could think straight. "How did you know his last name? I never told you that."

Special Agent Johnson looked bored. "License plate."

"Oh," I said.

I glanced back at Rob, standing in the rain, with his T-shirt all sticking to him. You could see his abs through the drenched material. It occurred to me that this, too, was like a scene from a music video. You know, the totally hot guy standing in the rain after his girlfriend dumps him?

Except that I so totally was not dumping him. I was just trying to find a kid. That was all.

Only nobody was letting me.

Then something else occurred to me: If Rob's T-shirt was that wet, then what about mine?

I looked down, and promptly folded my arms across my chest.

It was better this way, I thought. I mean, not about our wet T-shirts, but the fact that they were making him go away. Because I knew it would be a lot easier to ditch the Wonder Twins than it would Rob. FBI agents I didn't mind head-butting. But when it came down to it, I think hurting Rob would have been hard.

"I'll call you," I said to Rob over my shoulder, as Special Agent Johnson started to pull me back toward the center of the camp.

"Do me a favor, Mastriani," Rob said.

"Sure," I said. It was hard to walk backward through the rain, but Special Agent Johnson was pulling so hard on me, I didn't have much choice. "What?"

"Don't."

And then Rob turned and started walking away. It didn't take long for the rain and mist to swallow him up. A minute later, I heard the engine of his Indian rev up.

And then he was gone.

I looked up at Special Agent Johnson, who, unlike Rob, did not look sexy drenched in rainwater.

"I hope you're happy now," I said to him. "That guy might have been my boyfriend someday, if you hadn't come along and ruined it."

Special Agent Johnson was busy dialing some numbers on his cell phone. He said, "Do your parents know about you and Mr. Wilkins, Jess?"

"Of course they do," I said very indignantly. "Though I have my own life, you know. My parents do not dictate whom I see or do not see socially."

This was such an outrageous string of lies, I'm surprised my tongue didn't shrivel up and fall off.

Special Agent Johnson didn't look like he believed any of them, either.

"Do your parents know," he went on, as if our conversation hadn't been interrupted, "that Mr. Wilkins has an arrest record? And is currently on probation?"

"Yes," I said, as sassily as I could. Then, because I couldn't resist, I went, "Although they aren't too clear on just what he's on probation for. . . ."

Special Agent Johnson just looked down at me, frowning a little. He went, "That information is, of course, confidential. If Mr. Wilkins has not chosen to share it with … your parents, I don't see that I can."

Jeez! Shot down again! How was I ever going to find out what Rob had done to land him in the cinderblock jungle? Rob wouldn't tell me, and, not surprisingly, I couldn't get a straight answer out of the Feds, either. It couldn't have been that bad, or he'd have served time and not just gotten probation. But what was it?

It didn't look like I'd ever find out now. No, I'd managed to ruin that little relationship, hadn't I?

But what was I supposed to do? I mean, really?

Whoever was on the other end of Special Agent Johnson's cell phone must have picked up, since he said into it, "Cassie secured. Repeat, Cassie secured."

Then he hung up.

"Who," I demanded, "is Cassie?"

"I beg your pardon," Special Agent Johnson said, putting his phone away. "I ought to have said Cassandra."

"And who's Cassandra?"

"No one you need to worry about."

I glared at him. Now that I'd been out in the rain so long, I didn't even care how wet I was. I mean, it wasn't like I couldn't get any wetter.

Or more miserable.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I remember now. Seventh grade. We did mythology. Cassandra was like a psychic, or something."

"She had a talent," Special Agent Johnson admitted, "for prophecy."

"Yeah," I said. "Only she was under this curse, and—" I shook my head in disbelief. "That's my code name? Cassandra?"

"You'd have preferred something else?"

"Yeah," I said. "How about no code name?"

I was having, I decided, a pretty bad day. First a psycho wife-beater tries to kill me, then my boyfriend walks out on me. Now I find out I have a code name with the FBI. What next?

Special Agent Smith appeared from the shadows, sheltered under a big black umbrella.

"Look at you two," she said when she saw us. "You're soaked." She moved until the umbrella was covering all three of us. Well, more or less.

"I managed to secure some rooms," she said, "at a Holiday Inn a few miles away. I don't think Mr. Larsson will think to look for Jess there."

"Do I get my own room?" I asked hopefully.

"Of course not." Special Agent Smith smiled at me. "We're roomies."

Great. "I'm a remote hog," I informed her.

"I'll live," she said.

This was horrible. This was terrible. I couldn't go stay in a cushy Holiday Inn while Shane was out in the wilderness somewhere … or worse, dead. I had to find him.

Only how was I going to do that? How was I going to find him, and not let Allan and Jill know what I was up to?

"I have to," I said, my throat dry, "get my stuff."

"Of course." Special Agent Johnson looked at his watch. It was one of those ones that light up. "We'll escort you back to your cabin to gather your belongings."

Jeez!

Still, I think Special Agents Johnson and Smith began to regret their assignment to Project Cassandra more than ever when we stepped into Birch Tree Cottage and observed the level of chaos there. The kids were off the wall. When we walked in, we narrowly escaped being hit by a flying chunk of bow rosin. Arthur was playing his tuba, in spite of the no-practicing-outside-of-the-music-building rule; Lionel was screaming for silence at the top of his lungs; Doo Sun and Tony were sword-fighting with a pair of violin bows …

And in the middle of it all, a lady police officer was standing with her hands over her ears, pleading ineffectively with her charges: "Please! Please listen to me, we're going to find your friend—"

I strode into the kitchen, opened the fuse box, and threw the switches.

Plunged into semi-darkness, the boys froze. All noise ceased.

Then I stepped out from the kitchen—

—and instantly became part of a Jessica sandwich as all of the boys surrounded me, clinging to various parts of my body and crying my name.

"All right," I yelled, after a while. "Simmer down. Simmer down!"

I disentangled myself from their embrace, then sank down onto a bed—Shane's empty bed, I saw, when lightning again lit the now darkened room. The bed was haphazardly made, with musical note sheets. Shane would have preferred, I was fairly certain, bedding emblazoned with football paraphernalia. Nevertheless, the sheets gave off a Shane-like odor that, for once, I found comforting.

"All right," I said, interrupting the cries of "Jess, where have you been?" and "Didja hear about Shane?"

"Yes, I heard about Shane," I said. "Now I want to hear your version of what happened."

The boys looked at one another blankly, then shrugged, more or less in unity.

"He was with us on the way to the lake," Sam volunteered.

Lionel's accent worsened, I realized, when he was stressed. It took me a minute to figure out his next words: "But I think he did not go in the water."

"Really, Lionel?" I peered down at the little boy. "Why do you think that?"

"If Shane had gone into the water," Lionel said thoughtfully, "he would have tried to push my head under. But he did not."

"So he didn't actually make it into the lake?" I asked.

The boys shrugged again. Only Lionel nodded with anything like assurance.

"I think," Lionel said, "that Shane ran away. He was very angry with you, Jess, for not giving me the strike."

As usual, he pronounced my name Jace. And, as usual, Lionel was right. At least I thought so. I think Shane had been angry with me … angry enough that maybe—just maybe—he wanted to teach me a lesson.

Shane, I thought to myself. Where are you? And what are you up to?

Suddenly, the lights came back on. Special Agent Smith came out of the kitchen, then nodded toward my room. "Are those your belongings in there?"

I nodded.

"I'll pack them for you," she said, and disappeared into my room, while her partner leaned against the front doorjamb and looked at his watch again.

"Who's that guy?" Tony wanted to know.

"Is that your boyfriend?" Doo Sun asked.

"Is that Rob?" Arthur started to ask, but I slapped a hand over his mouth … probably as much to my own surprise as his.

"Shhh," I said. "That's not Rob. That's just a, um, friend of mine."

"Oh," Arthur said, when I'd removed my hand. "Have you been eating McDonald's?"

I picked up Shane's pillow and lowered my face into it. Oh, Lord, I prayed. Give me the strength not to kill any more little boys today. One is really enough, I think.

Special Agent Smith came out of my room, holding a duffel bag.

"I think I've got everything," she said. "Are these Gogurts yours, or should I leave them for the children?"

Arthur, his eyes very bright, swiveled his head toward me.

"Hey," he said. "What is she doing? Is that your stuff?"

"Are you leaving?" Lionel's chin began to tremble. "Are you going, Jace?"

Exasperated—this was not how I'd wanted to break the news to the boys that I was leaving—I said to Special Agent Smith, "The Gogurts and the cookies and the chips and stuff aren't mine. Don't pack them."

Special Agent Smith looked confused. "There are no cookies, Jess. Just these Gogurt things."

"No cookies?" I stared at her. "There should be. There should be cookies and chips and Fiddle Faddle."

"Fiddle what?" Special Agent Smith looked more confused than ever.

"Fiddle Faddle," the boys shouted at her.

"No." Special Agent Smith blinked. "None of that. Just these Gogurts."

Still clutching Shane's pillow, I stood up and looked down at the boys.

"Did you guys eat all that candy and stuff I confiscated from you the other day?"

They looked at one another. I could have sworn they had no idea what I was talking about.

"No," they said, shaking their heads.

"I tried," Arthur confessed. "But I couldn't reach it. You put it up too high."

Too high for Arthur.

But not, I realized, for the largest resident of Birch Tree Cottage … besides me, of course.

I became aware of several things all at once. One, that Ruth and Scott—followed by Dave—were stepping up onto the front porch … come to say goodbye, I guessed.

Two, the rain outside had suddenly stopped. There was only the most distant rumbling from the sky now, as the storm moved out toward Lake Michigan.

And three, the smell from Shane's pillow, which I still clutched, had become overwhelming.

And that was because all at once, I knew where he was.

And it wasn't at the bottom of Lake Wawasee.

C H A P T E R

15

Look, what do you want me to say? I don't understand this psychic stuff any more than you do. Back when I'd been a special guest at Crane Military Base, they'd run a bunch of tests on me, and basically what they'd found out was that when I slip into REM-stage sleep, something happens to me. It's like the webmaster of my brain suddenly downloads some information that wasn't there before. That's how, when I wake up, I know stuff.

Only this time, it had happened while I was awake. Really. Right while I was standing there clutching Shane's stinky pillow.

And I hadn't felt a thing. In the comic books my brother Douglas is always reading, whenever one of the characters gets a psychic vision—and they do, frequently—he scrunches up his face and goes, "Uhnnnn …"

Seriously. Uhnnn. Like it hurts.

But I am telling you, downloading a psychic vision—or however they come—doesn't hurt. It's like one second the information is not there, and a second later, it is.

Like an e-mail.

Which was why, when I looked up from that pillow, it was really hard to contain myself. I mean, I didn't want to shout out what I knew for Special Agents Johnson and Smith to hear. I wasn't exactly anxious to let them in on this new development, considering all the time and effort I'd spent, assuring them I'd lost all psychic power entirely.

Still, when I finally did get a chance to impart what seemed, to me, like some pretty miraculous stuff, no one was very impressed.

"A cave?" Ruth's voice rose to a panic-stricken pitch. "You want me to go into a cave to look for that miserable kid? No, thanks."

I shushed her. I mean, it wasn't like the Feds weren't in the next room, or anything.

"Not you," I said. "I'll do the actual, um, cave entering." I didn't want to offend her by telling her the truth, which was that Ruth was the last person I'd ever pick to go spelunking with.

"But a cave?" Ruth still looked skeptical. "Why would he run off and hide in a cave?"

"Two words," I said. "Paul Huck."

"Who," Ruth whispered, "or should I say, what is a Paul Huck?"

"He's a guy who ran away to a cave," I explained quietly, "when he felt he was being persecuted."

We had to talk in whispers, because we were sequestered in my tiny cubicle of a bedroom, while outside, Special Agents Johnson and Smith sat guarding the perimeter. I was supposed to be saying good-bye to the boys and my friends. The Feds had very generously allotted me ten minutes to do this. I suppose their line of thinking was, Well, she can't get up to much trouble in that tiny room, now can she?

What they did not know, however, was that (a) the window in my tiny room actually opened wide enough for just about any size body to slip through, (b) two bodies had already slipped through it, in order to perform a small favor for me, and (c) instead of saying good-bye, like I was supposed to be doing, to Ruth and Scott and Dave, I was waiting for an opportunity to sneak out and find Shane, whom I knew now was not only not dead, but still on Camp Wawasee property.

"Remember," I whispered to Ruth, "at the first Pit, when they read off the rules and regulations? One of them was that Wolf Cave was off-limits. What kid, hearing about Paul Huck and feeling persecuted himself, isn't going to make a beeline for that cave? Plus he took all the junk food, and my flashlight is missing."

Ruth went, in this very meaningful tone, "Do you have any other reason to suspect he might be there, Jess?"

The surprising answer was, "Yes."

Ruth raised her eyebrows. "Really? What about all that stuff about how you need to enter REM-stage sleep in order to achieve … you know?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe I don't need it, if I'm worked up enough. . . ."

I didn't know how to put into words what had happened when I'd hugged Shane's pillow. How the smell of his shampoo had filled my head with an image of him, huddled in the glow of a flashlight, and stuffing his face with Fiddle Faddle.

I don't know how it had happened, or if it would ever happen again. But I had had a vision, while wide-awake, of a missing person. . . .

And I was going to act on that vision, and right what I'd made wrong.

"If you ask me," Ruth said, "the stupid kid isn't worth the trouble."

"Ruth." I shook my head at her. "What kind of Camp Wawasee attitude is that?"

"He's a pill," Ruth said.

"You wouldn't say that," I assured her, "if you'd ever heard him play."

"He can't be that good."

"He is. Believe me." The memory of the hauntingly beautiful music Shane had played was as sharp in my head as the vision I'd had of him, shoveling Doritos into his mouth by flashlight.

Ruth sighed. "If you say so. Still, if I were you, I'd let him stay out there and rot. He'll come back on his own when the food runs out."

"Ruth, a kid got lost in that cave and died, remember? That's why it's off-limits. For all I know, Shane might not be able to find his way out, and that's why he's still in there."

Ruth looked skeptical. "And what makes you think you'll be able to find your way out, if he can't?"

I tapped my head. "My built-in guidance system."

"Oh, right," Ruth said. "I forgot. You and my dad's Mercedes."

Suddenly, the stillness that had fallen over the camp after the heavy rainstorm was ripped apart by an explosion so loud it made thunder sound like a finger-snap. Ruth clapped her hands over her ears.

"Whoa," I said, impressed. "Right on cue. That boyfriend of yours sure knows how to create a diversion."

Ruth lowered her hands and went primly, "Scott isn't my boyfriend." Then she added, "Yet. And he should know about diversions. He was an Eagle Scout, after all."

The door to my bedroom flew open. Special Agent Smith stood there, gun drawn.

"Thank God you're all right," she said when she saw me. Her blue eyes were wide with anxiety. "That can only be him. Clay Larsson, I mean. Stay here while Agent Johnson and I go to investigate, all right? We're leaving Officer Deckard and one of the sheriff's deputies, too—"

"Sure," I said calmly. "You go on."

Special Agent Smith gave me a nervous smile I suppose she meant to be reassuring. Then she shut the door.

I stood up. "Let's get out of here," I said, and headed for the window.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Ruth muttered unhappily as she followed me. "You know, they're probably overreacting with this whole Clay Larsson thing, but what if he really is, you know, out there, looking for you?"

I gave her a disgusted look over my shoulder before I dropped out the window. "Ruth," I said. "It's me you're talking to. You think I can't handle one little old wife-beater?"

"Well," Ruth said. "If you're going to put it that way …"

We slithered out the window as quietly as we could. Outside, except for a mysterious bright orange glow from the parking lot, it was dark. It wasn't as hot as it had been, thanks to the rain.

But everything, everything was wet. My sneakers, and the cuffs of my jeans, which had only just started to dry off, were soon soaked again. Drops of water fell down from the treetops every time a breeze stirred the leaves overhead. It was quite unpleasant … as Ruth did not hesitate to point out, at her first opportunity.

"My ankles itch," she whispered.

"No one said you had to come," I whispered back.

"Oh, sure," Ruth hissed. "Leave me behind to deal with the cops. Thanks a lot."

"If you're going to come with me, you have to quit complaining."

"Okay. Except that all of this rain is making my allergies act up."

I swear to you, sometimes I think it would be easier if I just didn't have a best friend.

We'd only gone about a dozen yards when we heard it—footsteps swiftly approaching us. I hissed at Ruth to put out her flashlight, but it turned out our caution had been for nothing, since it was only Scott and Dave, hurrying to join us.

"Hey," I said to them as they came trotting up. "Good job, you guys. They totally fell for it."

Scott ducked his head modestly. "You were right, Jess," he said. "Tampons do make good fuses."

I glanced at Ruth. "And you said detention was a waste of my time."

Ruth only shook her head. "The American public education system," she said, "was clearly not designed with ingrates like you in mind."

Dave glanced over his shoulder at the thick black smoke pouring from the parking lot into the night sky.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. He was panting, smudged with dirt, and covered in dead leaves and clearly exhilarated. I knew what he was thinking: Never, in his seventeen years of trumpet-playing, Dungeons-&-Dragon-dice-throwing geekdom, had he ever done anything so dangerous … and fun. "I was going to see if I could get extra credit for this from my chemistry teacher next semester. Lighting a van on fire with a Molotov cocktail has to be good for at least ten bonus points."

"You guys," Ruth said, "are insane."

Scott looked wounded. "Hey," he said. "We used appropriate caution. No children or animals were harmed in the execution of this prank."

"No law enforcement officials, either," Dave added.

"I am surrounded," Ruth murmured, "by lunatics."

"Enough already," I whispered. "Let's go."

We ended up not actually needing our flashlights to see our way around the lake. The storm had passed, leaving behind a sky that was mostly clear. A shiny new moon shone down on us—just a sliver, but it shed enough of a glow for us to see by, at least while there were no trees overhead to block its light—along with a light dusting of stars.

If I hadn't realized it before, from the allergy remark, I knew by the time we were halfway around the lake that bringing Ruth along had been a big mistake. She simply would not shut up … and not because she wanted the whole world to know about her itching, watery eyes, but because she wanted Scott to know how big and brave she thought he was, taking on the FBI all by himself … well, okay, with Dave's help, but still. I sincerely hoped I didn't sound like that when I talked to Rob—you know, all sugary sweet and babyish. I think if I did, Rob would have told me to knock it off already. I hoped so, anyway.

I don't know what Dave was thinking as we made our way along the shore. He was pretty quiet. It had been, I reflected, a big day for both him and Scott. I mean, they had gotten to meet a real live psychic, thwart some FBI agents, and blow up a van, all in one day. No wonder he wasn't very talkative. It was a lot to process.

I was having trouble processing some stuff of my own. The Rob thing, if you want the truth, bothered me a lot more than the whole thing where I managed to find a kid without catching forty winks first—especially considering the fact that I am a vital, independent woman who has no need of a man to make her feel whole. I mean, I said I'd call him, and he'd said don't? What kind of baloney was that? Is it my fault I have this very important career, and that sometimes I am forced to think first not of my own personal safety, but about the children? Couldn't he see that this wasn't about him, or even me, but a missing twelve-year-old, who, it's true, couldn't stop making fart jokes, but nevertheless didn't deserve to perish in the wilds of northern Indiana?

Of course, there was also the small matter of my having dragged poor Rob into all of this in the first place. I mean, he'd come all the way up here, and driven me all around Chicago, and helped me deal with Keely, just because I'd asked him to. And he hadn't expected anything at all in return. Not even a single lousy kiss.

And all he'd gotten for it was a pistol brandished at him by a member of the FBI.

I guess, when you took into account all of these facts, it wasn't any wonder he didn't want me to call him anymore.

But while this was perhaps the most personally troubling of the problems that were on my mind as we trudged toward Wolf Cave, it was by no means the only one. There was also, of course, the puzzling little matter of just how Dr. Alistair had found out about me. I didn't believe Pamela had told him. It was strange that he had known where I was that afternoon, when Pamela hadn't even known. I mean, I'm sure she suspected, but I hadn't discussed my plans concerning Keely Herzberg with her. I figured the less people who knew about it, the better.

So how had Dr. Alistair known?

Then the moonlight vanished as we moved from the lake's shore to the deeply wooded embankment where Wolf Cave was located. If I had thought the wet grass was bad, this was about ten times worse. The incline was really steep, and since it was mostly unused, there was no path to follow … just slick, wet ground cover, mostly mud and dead leaves. The others had no choice but to turn on their flashlights now, if we didn't want to break our necks tripping over some root, or something.

In spite of our efforts to approach the cave quietly, we must have made a considerable amount of noise—especially considering the fact that Ruth would not shut up about her stupid ankles. It was pretty quiet, that deep in the woods. There were crickets chirping, but for the first time since I'd arrived at the camp, no cicadas screamed. Maybe the rain had drowned them all.

So it couldn't have been all that hard for Shane to hear our approach.

Which might have explained why, when we finally reached the mouth of Wolf Cave—just a dark spot under an outcropping of boulders, jutting from the side of the steep hill we'd just climbed—there was no sign of Shane. . . .

Well, unless you count the candy wrappers and empty boxes of Fiddle Faddle that lined the narrow entrance.

I borrowed Ruth's flashlight and shined it into the cave—really, the mouth was surprisingly small … only three feet high and maybe two feet wide. I did not relish squeezing through it, let me tell you.

"Shane," I called. "Shane, come out of there. It's me, Jess. Shane, I know you're in there. You left all this Fiddle Faddle out here."

There was a sound from within the cave. It was the sound of someone crawling.

Only the sound was going away from us, not coming closer.

"Let's just leave him in there," Ruth suggested. "The little jerk completely deserves it."

Scott seemed sort of shocked by her callousness. "We can't do that," he said. "What if he gets lost in there?"

Ruth's eyelashes fluttered behind the lenses of her glasses. "Oh, Scott," she cooed in that unnaturally sweet voice. "You're so right. I never thought of that."

Yuck.

"Maybe," Dave said, "there's another way in. You know, a wider side entrance. Most caves have more than one."

"Shane," I called into the cave. "Look, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry I didn't give Lionel a strike. I swear he's got one now, okay?"

No response. I tried again.

"Shane, everybody is really worried about you," I called. "Even Lionel missed you. Even the girls from Frangipani Cottage miss you. In fact, they miss you the most. They're holding a candlelight vigil for you right now. If you come out, we can panty-raid them while they're praying for you. Seriously. I'll even donate a pair of my own panties to the cause."

Nothing. I straightened up.

"I'm going to have to go in there after him," I said softly.

"I'll go with you," Dave volunteered. Which was pretty gallant of him, if you think about it. But I suppose he was only doing it because he felt guilty over letting Shane slip away from him in the first place.

My gaze flicked over him. "You'll never fit."

Which was true. The only person small enough, of the four of us, to fit through that hole was me, and they all knew it.

"Besides," I said. "This is between me and Shane. I better go on my own. You guys stay here and make sure he doesn't sneak out any of those side entrances you were talking about."

Nobody needed to tell Ruth twice to stay put. She plunked down onto a nearby boulder and immediately began rubbing her chigger-ravaged ankles. Scott and Dave offered me a couple of caving tips from their days as Cub Scouts—if you shine your flashlight into a hole, and can't see the bottom of it, that's a hole you should avoid.

Armed with this piece of information, I dropped down to my knees and began to crawl. It was no easy task, crawling on all fours and trying to see where I was going at the same time. Still, I managed not to fall down any bottomless holes. At least, not right away. Instead, I found myself inching along a narrow—but dry, at least—tunnel. There were, much to my gratification, no bats and nothing slimy. Just a lot of dried leaves, and the occasional scrunched Dorito.

One thing you had to hand to Shane: if it was attention he was after, he sure knew how to get it. His camp counselor was crawling through a hole in the ground after him, following his trail of Snicker bar wrappers and cookie crumbs. What more could a kid ask?

Still, the deeper I went, the more I thought he might be taking things a little far. I called out to Shane a few times, but the only response I heard was more scraping of jeans against rock. For a chubby kid, Shane sure could crawl fast.

There was no way to tell how deep we'd gone—a quarter of a mile? half?—into the earth before I noticed the cave was starting to widen a bit. Now I glimpsed stalactites, and what I knew from sixth grade bio were stalagmites—stalactites point down from the ceiling, while stalagmites shot up from the ground (stalactite, ceiling; stalagmite, ground. That's how Mr. Hudson explained it, anyway). Both, I remembered, were formed by the precipitation of calcite, whatever that was. Which meant, of course, that the cave wasn't as snug and dry as it seemed.

Not that I minded. That meant there'd be less chance of encountering any woodland creatures who might otherwise have chosen to make their home here, which suited me fine.

Soon the cave started widening. Eventually, it was big enough for me actually to stand up. As the way widened, I found myself in a cavern about the size of my room back home.

Only, unlike my room back home, it was filled with creepy shadows, and a floor that seemed to slope up toward the ceiling at the sides. Pointy stalactites loomed everywhere, and even when you shined your flashlight on them, you couldn't tell if they were hiding some bats, or if the stuff growing at their base was just a fungus or what.

I learned something that night. I really don't like caves too much. And I don't think I'll be telling the story of Paul Huck again to young and impressionable children when there happens to be a cave nearby.

Fortunately, Shane seemed as creeped out by the shadowy room as I was, since, even though there were several other tunnels opening out from it, he hadn't budged. The beam from my flashlight soon crossed his, and I studied him as he sat in his Wranglers and his blue- and red-striped shirt, glaring at me.

"You're a damned liar," was the first thing he said tome.

"Oh, yeah?" There was an eerie echo in the cavern. Somewhere water was dripping, a steady plink, plink, plink. It appeared to be coming from one of the wider tunnels off the chamber we were in. "That's a nice thing to say to somebody who just crawled into the bowels of the earth to find you."

"How'd you know where to look?" Shane demanded. "Huh? How'd you know I'd be in the cave?"

"Easy," I said, sauntering over to him. "Everyone knows you took that Paul Huck story way too seriously."

"Bullshit!" Shane's voice bounced off the walls of the cave, his bullshit repeating itself over and over until it finally faded away.

I blinked at him. "Excuse me?"

"You used your powers to find me," Shane hollered. "Your psychic powers! You still have them. Admit it!"

I stopped coming toward him. Instead, I shined my flashlight on his face, picking up cookie crumbs and a Dorito-orange mouth.

"Shane," I said. "Is that what this was about? Getting me to prove I still have ESP?"

"Of course." Shane wiggled his butt against the hard cave floor, his lip curled disgustedly. "Why else? I knew you were lying about it. I knew the minute I saw that kid's picture in your hand, that first night. You're a liar, Jess. You know that? You can give me all the strikes you want, but the truth is, you're no better than me. Worse, maybe. Because you're a liar."

I narrowed my eyes at him. The kid was a piece of work.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "And you're one to talk. Do you have any idea how many people are out there looking for you? They all think you drowned in the lake."

"Too bad they didn't ask you, huh, Jess?" Shane's eyes were very bright in my flashlight's beam. "You could have set them straight, huh?"

"Your mom," I went on. "Your dad. They're probably worried sick."

"Serve them right," Shane said in a sullen tone. "Making me come to this stinking camp in the first place."

I crossed the rest of the distance between us, then sank down beside Shane, leaning my back against the hard stone wall.

"You know what, Shane?" I said. "I think you're a liar, too."

Shane made an offended sound. Before he could say anything else, I went on, not looking at him, but at the weird shadows across the way.

"You know what I think?" I said. "I think you like playing the flute. I don't think you'd be able to play that well if you didn't like it. You may have perfect pitch and all of that, but playing like that, that takes practice."

Shane started to say something, but I just kept on going.

"And if you really hated it that much, you wouldn't practice. So that makes you as big a liar as I am."

Shane protested, quite colorfully, that this was untrue. His use of four-letter words was really very creative.

"You want to know why I tell people I can't do the psychic thing anymore, Shane?" I asked him, when I got tired of listening to him sputter invectives. "Because I didn't like my life too much back when they all thought I could still do it. You know? It was too … complicated. All I wanted was to be a normal girl again. So that's why I started lying."

"I'm not a liar," Shane insisted.

"Okay," I said. "Let's say you aren't. My question to you would be, why aren't you?"

He just stared at me. "W-what?"

"Why aren't you lying? If you hate coming here to Lake Wawasee so much, why don't you just tell everyone you can't play anymore, same way I told everyone I can't find people anymore?"

Shane blinked a few times. Then he laughed uncertainly. "Yeah, right," he said. "That'd never work."

I shrugged. "Why not? It worked for me. You're the only one who knows—outside of a few close friends—that I've still got this 'gift' of mine. Why can't you do the same thing? Just play bad."

Shane stared at me. "Play bad?"

"Sure. It's easy. I do it every year when our orchestra teacher holds chair auditions. I play badly—just a little badly—on purpose, so I don't get first chair."

Shane did a surprising thing then. He looked down at his hands. Really. Like they weren't attached to him. He looked down at them as if he were seeing them for the first time.

"Play bad," he whispered.

"Yeah," I said. "And then go out for football. If that's what you really want. Personally, I think giving up the flute for football is stupid. I mean, you can probably do both. But hey, it's your life."

"Play bad," he murmured again.

"Yeah," I said again. "It's easy. Just say to them, Yes, I had a gift. But then I lost it. Just like that." I snapped my fingers.

Shane was still gazing down at his hands. May I add that those hands—those hands that had made that achingly sweet music—were not too clean? They were grimy with dirt and potato chip crumbs.

But Shane didn't seem to care. "I had a gift," he murmured. "But then I lost if."

"That's it," I said. "You're getting the hang of it."

"I had a gift," Shane said, looking up at me, his eyes bright. "But then I lost it."

"Right," I said. "It will, of course, be a blow to music-lovers everywhere. But I'm sure you'll make a very excellent receiver."

Shane's look of appreciative wonder turned to one of disgust. "Lineman," he said.

"I beg your pardon. Lineman."

Shane continued to stare at me. "Jess," he said. "Why did you come looking for me? I thought you hated me."

"I do not hate you, Shane," I said. "I wish you would stop picking on people who are smaller than you are, and I would appreciate it if you would stop calling me a lesbian. And I can guarantee, if you keep it up, someday someone is going to do something a lot worse to you than what Lionel did."

Shane just stared at me some more.

"But I do not," I concluded, "hate you. In fact, I decided on my way over here that I actually like you. You can be pretty funny, and I really do think you'll be a good football player. I think you'd be good at anything you set your mind to being."

He blinked at me, his chubby, freckled cheeks smudged with dirt and chocolate.

"Really?" he asked. "You really think that?"

"I do," I said. "Although I also think you need to get a new haircut."

He pulled on the back of his mullet and looked defensive. "I like my hair," he said.

"You look like Rod Stewart," I informed him.

"Who's Rod Stewart?" he wanted to know.

But this seemed beyond even my descriptive ability at that particular moment. So I just said, "You know what? Never mind. Let's just go back to the cabin. This place is giving me the major creeps."

We turned back toward the way we'd come. Which was when I noticed something.

And that's that we were not alone.

"Well, lookie what we have here," said Clay Larsson.

C H A P T E R

16

I would just like to take this opportunity to say that I, for one, had not believed Special Agents Johnson and Smith when they'd announced that Mrs. Herzberg's boyfriend was on some kind of killing rampage, and that I was his next intended victim. I think I was pretty much under the impression that they were just trying to scare me, to get me alone with them somewhere so that they could make their observations of me without interruption.

For instance, had I gone with them to the Holiday Inn, Special Agent Smith would have undoubtedly gotten up very early and then sat there, with pen poised on notepad, at my bedside, to see if I'd wake up babbling about where Shane was, thus proving that I had lied about having lost my telekinetic powers, or whatever.

That's what a part of me had thought. I had never—unlike Rob—taken very seriously the idea that there might be a man unhappy enough with my recent behavior to want me, you know. Dead.

At least, I didn't believe it until he was standing in front of me, with one of those long, security-guard-type flashlights in his hands. . . .

One of those flashlights that would actually make a really handy weapon. Like if you wanted to conk somebody over the head with it. Someone who, for example, had kicked you in the face earlier that day.

"Thought you'd seen the last of me, dincha, girlie?" Clay Larsson leered down at Shane and me. He was what you'd call a large man, though I couldn't say much for his fashion sense. He looked no prettier now, in the glow of my flashlight, than he'd looked in broad daylight.

And he was even less appealing now that he had the imprint of the bottom of my Puma tattooed across the bridge of his nose. There were deep purple and yellow scars around his eyes—bruising from the nasal cartilage I'd crushed with my kick—and his nostrils were crusted over with blood.

These were, of course, the unavoidable consequences of being kicked in the face. I couldn't really hold the contusions against him, fashion-wise. It was the razor stubble and the halitosis that he really could have done something about.

"Look," I said, stepping in front of Shane. "Mr. Larsson, I can appreciate that you might be upset with me."

It might interest you to know that, at this point, my heart wasn't beating fast or anything. I mean, I guess I was scared, but usually, in situations like this, I don't tend to realize it until the whole thing is over. Then, if I'm still conscious, I usually throw up, or whatever.

"But you have to understand"—as I spoke, I was backing up, pushing Shane slowly toward one of the other tunnels that branched out from the cavern we were in—"I was only doing my job. I mean, you have a job, right?"

Looking at him, of course, I couldn't think what kind of moron might have hired him for any job. I mean, who would willingly employ anybody who gave so little thought to his personal grooming and hygiene? Look at his shirt, for Pete's sake: it was stained. Stained with what I really hoped was chili or barbecue sauce. It was certainly red, whatever it was.

But whatever: Clearly, a complete lack of adequate forethought had gone into Clay's ensemble, and I, for one, considered it a crying shame, since he was not, technically, an unattractive man. Maybe not a Hottie, but certainly Do-able, if you got him cleaned up.

"I mean, people call me up," I said, continuing to back up, "and they say their kid is missing or whatever, and I, well, what am I supposed to do? I mean, I have to go and get the kid. That's my job. What happened today was, I was just doing my job. You're not really going to hold that against me now, are you?"

He was moving slowly toward me, the beam from his flashlight trained on my face. This made it kind of hard for me to see what he was doing, other than inexorably coming at me. I had to shield my eyes with one hand, while, with the other, I kept pushing Shane back.

"You made Darla cry," Clay Larsson said in his deep, really quite menacing voice.

Darla? Who the heck was Darla?

Then it hit me.

"Yes," I said. "Well, I'm sure Mrs. Herzberg was quite upset." I wanted to point out to him that I had it on pretty good authority that he, in fact, had probably made Keely's mother cry a lot more often than I had—throwing bottles at people tends to do that—but I felt at this juncture in our conversation, it might not be the wisest thing to bring up.

"But the fact is," I said instead, "you two shouldn't have taken Keely away from her father. The court awarded him custody for a reason, and you didn't have any right to—"

"And"—Clay didn't seem to have heard my pretty speech—"you broke my nose."

"Well," I said. "Yes. I did do that. And you know, I'm really sorry about it. But you did have hold of my leg, remember? And you wouldn't let go of it, and I guess, well, I got scared. You aren't going to hold a grudge against me for that, are you?"

Evidently, he had every intention of doing so, since he said, "When I'm through with you, girlie, you're gonna have a new definition for scared."

Definition. Wow. A four-syllable word. I was impressed.

"Now, Mr. Larsson," I said. "Let's not do anything you might regret. I think you should know, this place is crawling with Feds. . . ."

"I saw 'em." I couldn't see his expression because of the light shining in my eyes, but I could hear his tone. It was mildly ironic. "Runnin' toward that burning van. Right before I saw you and your friends outside." He seemed to be grinning. "I was glad when I saw you were the one who went in."

"Oh, yeah?" I didn't know what else to say. Keep him talking, was all I could think to do. Maybe Ruth or one of the boys would hear him, and run for help. . . .

That is, if we weren't too deep underground for them to hear us.

"I like caves," Clay Larsson informed me. "This is a real nice one. Lots of different ways in. But only one way out … for you, anyway."

I did not like the sound of that.

"Now, Mr. Larsson," I said. "Let's talk this over, okay? I—"

"Couldn't have picked a better place for what I got planned if you'd tried," Clay Larsson finished for me.

"Oh," I said, gulping. My throat, which had been having a tendency lately, I noticed, to run a little on the dry side, felt like the Sahara. Oh, yeah, and remember how I said my heart wasn't beating fast?

Well, it was. Fast and hard.

"Um," I said. "Okay." I tried to remember what I'd learned in counselor training about conflict resolution. "So what I hear you saying, Mr. Larsson, is that you are unhappy with the way I took Keely from you—"

"And kicked me in the face."

"Right, and kicked you in the face. I hear you saying that you are somewhat dissatisfied with this turn of events—"

"You hear that correctly," Clay Larsson assured me.

"And what I would like to say to you"—I tried to keep my voice pleasant, like they'd said to in counselor training, but it was hard on account of how hard I was shaking—"is that this disagreement seems to be between you and me. Shane here really had nothing to do with it. So if it's all right with you, maybe Shane could just slip on out—"

"And run for those Fed friends of yours?" Clay Larsson's tone was as disgusted as mine had been pleasant. "Yeah. Right. No witnesses."

I swallowed hard. Behind me, I could feel Shane's breath, hot and fast, on the back of my arm. He was clinging to the belt loops of my jeans, strangely silent, for him. I wouldn't have minded a reassuring belch, but none seemed forthcoming. Under the circumstances, I regretted the crack I'd made about his hair.

Could I stall long enough to get Shane into a position so he could make it through one of those tunnels and escape? The opening I'd followed him through was way too narrow for Clay Larsson to fit into. If I could just distract him long enough …

"This isn't," I pointed out, "the way to go about ensuring that Mrs. Herzberg gets visitation rights, you know. I mean, a court of law would probably look askance at her sharing a household with a guy who had, um, attempted murder."

Clay Larsson asked, "Who said anything about attempted?"

And suddenly, the light that had been in my eyes danced crazily against the ceiling as Clay Larsson lifted the flashlight, with the intention, I supposed, of bringing it down on my head.

I screamed, "Run!" to Shane, who wasted no time doing so. He popped through the narrow tunnel behind us quicker than anybody in Alice in Wonderland had ever plunged down a rabbit hole. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone.

It seemed to me like following him would be pretty smart. . . .

But first I had to deal with this heavy flashlight coming at me.

Being small has its compensations. One of them is that I'm fast. Also, I can compress myself into spaces otherwise unfit for human occupation. In this case, I ducked behind this stalactite/stalagmite combo that had made a sort of calcite pillar to one side of the hole Shane had slipped through. As a result, Clay Larsson's flashlight connected solidly with the rock formation, instead of with my head.

There was an explosion of stone shards, and Clay Larsson said a very bad word. The calcite formation split in half, the stalactite plunging from the ceiling like an icicle off the gutter. It fell to the floor with a clatter.

As for me, well, I kept going.

Only along the way, somehow, I dropped my flashlight.

Considering what happened next, this might have been for the best. Clay, seeing the bright white beam, swung his own flashlight—with enough force for it to make a whistling noise as it sailed through the air—in the direction he thought I was standing. There was another loud clatter, this one from his heavy metal flashlight as it connected with the cavern wall.

He hadn't been kidding about the attempted murder thing. If that had been my head, I thought, with a touch of queasiness, I'd have a handy space near my brain stem right about now to keep loose change.

"Nice trick," Clay grunted, as he squatted down to retrieve my flashlight. "Only now you can't see to get out of here, can you, girlie?"

Good point. On the other hand, I could see what mattered most, and that was him.

And, more to the purpose, he couldn't see me. I figured I'd better press that advantage while I still had it.

The question was, how? I figured I had several options. I could simply stay where I was, until the inevitable moment I was once again caught in the sweeping arc of his flashlight … and now he had two flashlights, so make that two sweeping arcs.

My second option was to attempt to follow, as quickly as I could, Shane down his rabbit hole. The only problem with this plan was that any rock I happened to kick loose on my way there would give me away. Could I really outcrawl a guy that size? I didn't think so.

My third alternative was the one I liked the least, but which seemed to be the one I was stuck with. So long as the guy had me to worry about, he wasn't going to mess with Shane. The longer I could keep him from trying to go after the kid, the better Shane's chances of somehow escaping.

And so it was, with great regret, that I made a sound to distract Clay, luring him toward where I hid, and away from Shane.

What I had not counted on was Clay Larsson being smart enough—and let's face it, sober enough—to fake me out. Which was exactly what he did. I'd thrown a pebble one way, thinking he'd follow the sound, and immediately darted in the opposite direction. . . .

Only to find, to my great surprise, that Mr. Larsson had whipped around and, fast as a cat, blocked my path.

I threw on the brakes, of course, but it was too late.

Next thing I knew, he'd tackled me.

As I went flying through the air, narrowly missing several stalactites, I had time to reflect that really, Professor Le Blanc was right: I had been lazy, never learning to read music. And I swore to myself that if I got out of Wolf Cave alive, I would dedicate the rest of my life to combating musical illiteracy.

I hit the floor of the cave with considerable force, but it was Clay Larsson's heavy body, slamming into mine, that drove all the wind from me. It also convinced me that moving again would probably be excessively painful—quite possibly even fatal, due to the massive internal injuries I was pretty sure I'd just incurred. As I lay there, dazed from the blow—which felt as if it had broken every bone in my body—I had time to wonder if they would ever find our skeletal remains, or if Shane and I would just be left to rot in Wolf Cave until the next camper, some other Paul Huck wannabe, stumbled across us.

This was a depressing thought. Because, you know, there were a lot of things I'd wanted to do that I'd never gotten a chance to. Buy my own Harley. Get a mermaid tattoo. Go to prom with Rob Wilkins (I know it's geeky, but I don't care: I think he'd look hot in a tux). That kind of stuff.

And now I was never going to get to.

So when Clay Larsson went, "Nightie-night, girlie," and raised his steel flashlight high in the air, I was more or less resigned to my death. Dying, I felt, would actually be a relief, as it would make the mind-numbing pain I felt in every inch of my body go away.

But then something happened that didn't make any sense at all. There was a thud, accompanied by a sickening, crunching noise—which I, as a veteran fistfighter, knew only too well was the sound of breaking bone—and then Clay Larsson's heavy body came slamming into mine again. . . .

Only this time, it appeared to be because the man was unconscious.

Suddenly recovering my mobility, I reached for his flashlight, which had fallen harmlessly to one side of my head, and shined it in the direction from which I'd heard the thudding sound. . . .

And there stood Shane, holding on to one end of the stalactite that had broken off from the cave ceiling, which he had clearly just swung, baseball-bat style, at Clay Larsson's head. . . .

And hit it out of the park.

Shane, looking down at Clay's limp, still form sprawled across my legs, dropped the stalactite, then glanced toward me.

I went, "Way to go, slugger."

Shane burst into tears.

C H A P T E R

17

"Well," I said. "What was I supposed to think? I mean, after that whole don't-call-me thing."

Rob, sounding—as usual—half-amused and half-disgusted with me, said, "I knew what you were after, Mastriani. You wanted to get rid of me so you could ditch the Feds and go after the little guy."

Shane—who was tucked into the bed beside mine in the Camp Wawasee infirmary, a thermometer in his mouth—made a noise that I suppose was meant to signal his objection to being called a little guy.

"Sorry," Rob said. "I meant little dude."

"Thank you," Shane said sarcastically.

"No talking," the nurse admonished him.

"And you were okay with that?" I asked Rob. "I mean, letting me ditch the Feds, and you, in order to go after Shane?"

I suppose it was kind of weird, the two of us working out our recent relationship difficulties while the camp nurse fussed over me and Shane. But what else were we supposed to talk about? My recent brush with death? The expressions Ruth, Scott, and Dave had worn when Shane and I, bruised and battered, crawled out of Wolf Cave and asked them to call the police? The look on Rob's face when he'd roared up a minute or so later and heard what had happened in his absence?

"Of course I wasn't okay with that." Rob paused while the nurse butted in to take my pulse. Seemingly pleased by the steadiness of its beat, she moved away to do the same to Shane.

"But what was I supposed to do, Mastriani?" Rob went on. "The guy pulled a gun on me. Not like I thought he'd shoot me, but it was clear nobody—most specifically you—wanted me around."

I said defensively, "That isn't true. I always want you around."

"Yeah, but only if I'll go along with whatever harebrained idea you've come up with. And let me tell you, going into a cave in the middle of the night with a killer on the loose? Not one I'd probably go for."

I said, "Well, it all turned out okay."

Rob snorted. "Oh, yeah. Shane?" He turned around and looked at the chubby-cheeked boy in the bed next door. "You agree with that? You think it all turned out okay?"

Shane nodded vigorously. Then, when the nurse reached down and took the thermometer from his mouth, he said, "I think it turned out great."

Rob snorted. "You didn't seem to think so when you first got out of that cave."

Well, that much was true, anyway. Shane had pretty much been in hysterics up until Special Agents Smith and Johnson arrived, along with the sheriff and his deputies, and put a still unconscious Clay Larsson under arrest. They had a hard time dragging him out of that cave, believe me, even using the wider side entrance he'd discovered.

"Yeah," Shane admitted. "But that was before the cops got there. I was afraid he was going to wake up and come after us again."

"After that whack you gave him?" Rob raised his eyebrows. "Never mind football, kid. You've got batting in your blood."

Shane flushed with pleasure at this praise. He had nothing but admiration for Rob, having recognized him as the guy from the story I'd told that first night, the one about the murdering car.

What's more, Rob had pretty much been the only one who'd kept his head in the wake of our crawling out of Wolf Cave. That week's worth of counselor training hadn't prepared Ruth, Scott, or Dave for dealing with a couple of victims of an attempted murder.

"You know, Mastriani," Rob went on, "you have more than just an anger-management problem. You are also the stubbornest damned person I've ever met. Once you get an idea into your head, nothing can make you change your mind. Not your friends. Not the FBI. And certainly not me." He added, "I used to have a dog a lot like you."

This seemed to me to be neither flattering nor very romantic, but Shane found it hilarious. He giggled.

"What happened?" Shane wanted to know. "To the dog that was like Jess?"

"Oh," Rob said. "He was convinced he could stop moving cars with his teeth, if he could just sink them into their tires. Eventually, he got run over."

"I am not," I declared, "a car-chasing dog. Okay? There is absolutely no parallel between me and a dog that's stupid enough to—"

I broke off, realizing with indignation that Rob was chuckling to himself. He was in a much better mood now than he'd been earlier, when he hadn't been sure I wasn't seriously injured. He'd had a lot to say, let me tell you, on the subject of my insisting on staying at Camp Wawasee in order to find Shane, and thus endangering not only my life, but, as it had ended up, a lot of other people's as well.

And, of course, he was right. I'd screwed up. I was willing to admit it.

But, hey, things had turned out all right in the end.

Well, for everybody but Clay Larsson.

"So," I couldn't help asking, "you're not mad at me?"

All he said in reply was, "I think I'll be able to get over it."

But for Rob, that was like admitting—I don't know. His undying love for me, or something. So while I lay there, waiting for the inevitable moment when the nurse was going to decide I was well enough for questioning, I perked up. Why, I thought to myself, I'm going into my junior year! Juniors at Ernie Pyle High are allowed to go to the prom. I could invite Rob, and then I'd get to see him in a tux after all … that is, if he'd go with me. It is kind of weird, I'll admit, to go to prom with a guy who's already graduated, and who knows, maybe if I ask him, he'll refuse. . . .

But by the time prom rolls around, I'll finally be seventeen, so how can he refuse? I mean, really? Resist me? I don't think so.

These happy thoughts were somewhat dampened by the fact that Shane was in the next bed making gagging noises over what he deemed our "mushiness"—though if you ask me, there'd been nothing mushy at all going on … at least, not by Cosmo standards. Or any other standards, really, that I could see.

It was at that moment that the nurse went, "Well, from the sound of it, you two are well enough to take on a few more visitors. And there are a lot of them out there. . . ."

And then the evening became a blur of relieved faces and pointed questions, which we answered according to the story we'd so carefully prepared, Rob and Ruth and Scott and Dave and me, while we'd been waiting for the cops to show up.

"So," Special Agent Johnson said, sinking into a seat close to the one Rob occupied. "Anything you'd like to add to your somewhat sketchy account of just what, exactly, happened out there tonight, Miss Mastriani?"

I pretended to think about it. "Well," I said. "Let me see. I remembered a ghost story I'd told about a cave, so I figured I'd check the one on the camp property for Shane, just in case, and while we were in there, that crazy Larsson guy tried to kill us, and Shane whacked him in the head with a stalactite. That's about it, I think."

Special Agent Johnson didn't look very surprised. He looked over at Shane, who was sitting up in bed, fingering a plastic sheriff's badge one of the deputies had given him for his bravery.

"That sound right to you?"

Shane shrugged. "Yeah."

"I see." Special Agent Johnson closed his notebook, then exchanged a significant look with his partner, who was sitting on the end of my bed. "A hero. And just how, precisely, did you happen upon the scene, Mr. Wilkins? It was my impression that you left the camp some hours ago."

"Well," Rob said. "That's true. I did. But I came back."

"Uh-huh," Special Agent Johnson said. "Yes, I can see that. Any particular reason you came back?"

Rob did something very surprising then. He reached out, took hold of my hand, and said, "Well, I couldn't leave things the way they were with my girl, could I? I had to come back and apologize."

His girl? He had called me his girl! He had taken my hand and called me his girl!

I was grinning so happily, I was afraid my lips might break. Special Agent Johnson, noticing this, looked pointedly toward the ceiling, clearly sickened by my adolescent enthusiasm. But how could I help it? Rob had called me his girl! So what if he'd done it to throw off a federal investigation into my affairs that evening? Prom had never seemed so likely a prospect as it did at that moment.

"Um," Special Agent Johnson said. "I see. Please forgive me if I sound unconvinced. The fact is, Special Agent Smith and I feel that it is a bit of a coincidence, Jess, that you went looking for young Master Shane in Wolf Cave. You certainly didn't mention that he might have been in this cave to anyone when you first learned of his disappearance."

"Excuse me, sir." The nurse appeared and stuck a mug of extremely hot, extremely sugary tea in my hands. "For the shock," she said in an explanatory manner to the agents, even though they hadn't asked, before she handed a similar mug to Shane.

I took a sip. It was surprisingly restorative, in spite of the fact that I was trying to look like someone whose only recent shock had been finding her boyfriend's tongue in her mouth.

Yeah, I know. Wishful thinking, right?

"Jess," Special Agent Smith said. "Why don't you tell us what really happened?"

I sat there, enjoying the warm tea flowing down my insides, and the warm arm flung across my outsides. Talk about a happy camper.

"I already told it," I said, "exactly like it was."

At their raised eyebrows, I added, "No, really. That's it."

"Yes," Shane said. "She's telling the truth, sir."

We all looked over at Shane, who, like me, was downing his own mug of tea. He had, through it all, clung to his bag of Chips Ahoy cookies, and now he slipped one from the bag, and dunked it into his tea.

Special Agent Johnson looked back at me.

"Nice try," he said. "But I don't think so."

"I highly doubt, for instance," Special Agent Smith said, "that that little boy was the one who set off a Molotov cocktail beneath our van."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, obviously," I said, "that could only have been Mr. Larsson."

Both Special Agents Johnson and Smith stared down at me.

"No, really," I said. "To distract you. I mean, come on. The guy's a real psycho. I hope they put him away for a long, long time. Going after a little kid like that? Why, it's unconscionable."

"Unconscionable," Special Agent Johnson repeated.

"Sure," I said defensively. "That's a word. I took the PSATs. I should know."

"Funny how," Special Agent Johnson said, "Clay Larsson happened to know exactly which vehicle was ours."

"Yeah," I said, swallowing a sip of tea. "Well, you know. Criminal genius and all."

"And strange," Special Agent Smith said, "that he would pick our vehicle, out of all the other ones parked in that lot, to set on fire, when he doesn't even know us."

"One of the hardest things to accept," Rob remarked, "about violent crime is its seeming randomness."

They both looked at Rob, and I felt a moment of pride that I was, as he'd so matter-of-factly put it, his girl.

Then Dr. Alistair appeared at the end of my cot, wringing his hands.

"Jessica," he said, glancing worriedly from me to Special Agents Johnson and Smith and then back again. "You're all right?"

I looked at him like he was crazy. Which I was pretty sure he was.

"Oh, thank goodness," he cried, even though I hadn't said anything in reply to his question. "Thank goodness. I do hope, Jessica, that you'll forgive me for my outburst earlier this evening—"

I said, "You mean when you asked me why I didn't get my psychic friends to help me find Shane?"

He swallowed, and darted another nervous look at the agents.

"Yes," he said. "About that. I didn't mean—"

"Yes, you did," I said. "You meant every word." I looked hard at Special Agents Johnson and Smith. "How much did you guys pay him, anyway, to report my every move to you?"

Jill and Allan exchanged nervous glances.

"Jessica," Special Agent Smith said. "What are you talking about?"

"It's so obvious," I said, "that he was your narc. I mean, he scheduled that one o'clock appointment with me, and then when I didn't show up, he called you. That's how you knew I'd left the camp. You didn't have to sit outside by the gates and wait to see if I'd leave. You had someone working on the inside to spare you the trouble."

"That," Special Agent Johnson said, "is patently—"

"Oh, come on." I rolled my eyes. "When are you guys going to get it through your heads that you're going to have to find yourselves a new Cassandra? Because the truth is, this one's retired."

"Jessica," Dr. Alistair cried. "I would never in a million years compromise the integrity of this camp by accepting money for—"

"Aw, shut up," Shane snapped. I could see that his campaign to be kicked out of music camp had now entered high gear. I hadn't any doubt that the traumatic event in Wolf Cave was going to—for the time being, anyway—have a detrimental effect on his ability to play the flute.

Dr. Alistair, looking startled, did shut up, to everyone's surprise.

Special Agent Johnson leaned forward and said, in a low, rapid voice, "Jessica, we know perfectly well that Jonathan Herzberg asked you to find his daughter, and that you, in fact, did so. We also know that this evening, you again used your psychic powers to find Shane Taggerty. You can't go on with this ridiculous charade that you've lost your psychic powers any longer. We know it isn't true. We know the truth." He leaned back and regarded me menacingly.

"And it's only a matter of time," Special Agent Smith added, "before you'll be forced to admit it, Jess."

I digested this for a moment. And then I said, "Jill?"

Special Agent Smith looked at me questioningly. "Yes, Jess?"

"Are you a lesbian?"

After that, the nurse made everyone leave, on account of the fact she was worried Shane was going to make himself sick from laughing so hard.

C H A P T E R

18

"Doug," I said, trailing one hand through the cool, silver water.

Ruth, sprawled across an inner tube a few feet from mine, gazed through the dark lenses of her sunglasses into the clear blue sky overhead. "Do-able," she said, after a moment.

"Agreed," I said. "What about Jeff?"

Ruth adjusted a strap on her bikini. After six weeks of salads, she had finally deemed herself svelte enough for a two-piece. "Do-able," she said.

"Agreed." I leaned my head back and felt the sun beat down on my throat. It was beating down on other places, as well. After several weeks of spending my afternoons floating across the mirrored surface of Lake Wawasee, I was the color of Pocahontas. I would look, I knew, exceptionally good at tonight's all-camp concert, at which I was playing the piece Professor Le Blanc had despaired of me ever learning, except by imitation.

I didn't have to imitate anyone, though. I could read each and every note.

A shout wasn't enough to break the trance-like daze the sun had sent Ruth and me into, but it got our attention. We lifted our heads and looked toward shore. Scott and Dave were playing Frisbee with some of the campers. Scott waved at us, and Dave, distracted, missed a catch, and landed in the sand.

"Dave," I said.

"Do-able," Ruth said.

"Agreed. Scott," I said, watching as he dove to make a catch.

"Hottie," Ruth said. "Of course."

I raised my sunglasses and looked at her from beneath the lenses in surprise.

"Really? He used to be Do-able."

"He's my summer fling," she informed me. "If I say he's hot, he's hot."

I lowered my sunglasses. "Okay," I said.

"Besides," she said. "That whole thing with lighting the Feds' van on fire? That was kind of cool. You might have something with the whole dangerous-guy thing."

"Rob," I said, "is not dangerous."

"Please," Ruth said. "Any guy who drives a motorcycle as his main form of transportation is dangerous."

"Really? Is that better than a guy with a convertible?"

Ruth shrugged. "Sure."

Wow. I leaned back, digesting this. My dangerous boyfriend was driving up to watch me perform at the concert that night. So was my family. I wondered what would happen if I introduced Rob to my mother. Frankly, I couldn't picture my mother and Rob in the same room. It was going to be very—

I felt something brush against the hand I was trailing in the water. I screamed and yanked my fingers away, just as Ruth did the same thing.

Two snorkel-fitted heads popped up from beneath the water and promptly began laughing at us.

"Ha-ha," Arthur cried, pointing at me as he treaded water. "You screamed just like a girl!"

"Like a girl," Lionel echoed incoherently. He was laughing too hysterically to speak.

"Very funny," I said to them. "Why don't you two swim over to the deep area and get a cramp?"

"Yeah," Ruth said. "And don't bother calling for us, because we won't come fish you out."

"Come on, Lionel," Arthur said. "Let's go. These two are no fun."

The two heads promptly disappeared. I watched the ends of their snorkels slice the water's surface as they headed back to shore. The two had become fast friends, once Shane was out of the picture and Lionel no longer spent every waking moment in fear of being tortured.

As I'd predicted, Shane's ability to play the flute had mysteriously disappeared shortly after the Wolf Cave incident, and though it was too late to get him into any self-respecting football camp, several had offered him scholarships, based on his size alone, for the following summer. Mr. and Mrs. Taggerty were not, it was rumored, happy about this, but what could they do? The boy was, according to more than one coach, a natural.

Off over in the direction of Wolf Cave, a cicada began its shrill call—one of the last ones I'd hear, I knew, before they all sank back into the ground to hibernate until next summer.

"So did Dr. Alistair ask you to come back next year?" Ruth wanted to know.

"Yeah," I said, with some disgust. "I suppose so he can supplement his income again by ratting me out to the Feds."

"How'd you know it was him, anyway?" Ruth asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know. I just did. Same way I know they're still monitoring me."

Ruth nearly lost her balance in the inner tube. "They are?" she sputtered. "How do you know?"

I pointed out toward the trees on the side of the lake closest to us. "See that thing over there, glinting in the sun?"

Ruth looked where I was pointing. "No. Wait. Yeah. I guess. What is that?"

"Telephoto lens," I said, lowering my arm. "Watch. Now that he knows we spotted him, he'll drive to some other spot and try again."

Sure enough, the glint disappeared, and far off, we heard the sound of a car engine.

"Ew," Ruth cried. "How creepy! Jess, how can you stand it?"

I shrugged. "What can I do? That's just the way it is, I guess."

Ruth chewed her lower lip. "But aren't you … I mean, aren't you worried they're going to catch you one of these days? In a lie, I mean?"

"Not really." I tilted my head back, letting the sun warm my neck again. "The trick, I guess, is just never to stop."

"Never stop what?"

"Lying," I said.

"Isn't that going to be hard," Ruth asked, "now that … well, you know? Now that your powers are getting stronger?"

I shrugged. "Probably." It wasn't something I liked to think about.

"Hey," I said, to change the subject. "Isn't that Karen Sue over there, on that pink inflatable raft?"

Ruth looked, then made a face. "I can't believe she's wearing one of those headbands in the water. And is that Todd she's with? He is so not Do-able. Did you hear him rehearsing that piece he's playing tonight? Bartok. What a show-off."

"Let's go tip them over," I suggested.

"You've got to be kidding," Ruth said. "That's so …"

I raised my eyebrows. "So what?"

"So childish," Ruth said. Then she grinned. "Let's do it."

And so we did.

About the Author

Jenny Carroll

Born in Indiana, Jenny Carroll spent her childhood in pursuit of air conditioning - which she found in the public library where she spent most of her time. She has lived in California and France and currently resides in New York City with her husband and a one-eyed cat named Henrietta. Jenny Carroll is the author of the hugely popular Mediator series as well as the bestselling Princess Diaries. Visit Jenny at her website, www.jennycarroll.com