Safe House

by Jenny Carroll

  "I worked as a camp counselor," I explained to her. "And then Ruth and I spent two weeks at the dunes, up at Lake Michigan."

  "You're lucky," Claire said wistfully. "I've just been stuck at the stupid quarries all summer."

  Pleased by this smooth entré into the subject I'd been longing to discuss with her, I started to say, "Hey, yeah, that's right. You must have been there, then, the day Amber Mackey went missing—"

  That's what I started to say, anyway. I didn't get a chance to finish, however. That was because, to my utter disbelief, a red Trans Am pulled up to the bus stop, and Ruth's twin brother Skip leaned out of the T-top to call, "Jess! Hey, Jess! What are you doing here? D’ju and Ruth have another fight?"

  All the geeks—the backpack patrol, Ruth and I called them, because of their enormous, well, backpacks—turned to look at me. There is nothing, let me tell you, more humiliating than being stared at by a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys.

  I had no choice but to call back to Skip, "No, Ruth and I did not get into a fight. I just felt like riding the bus today."

  Really, in the history of the bus stop, had anyone ever uttered anything as lame as that?

  "Don't be an idiot," Skip said. "Get in the car. I'll drive you."

  All the nerds, who'd been staring at Skip while he spoke, turned their heads to look expectantly at me.

  "Um," I said, feeling my cheeks heating up and thankful my tan hid my blush. "No, thanks, Skip. Claire and I are talking."

  "Claire can come, too." Skip ducked back inside the car, leaned over, and threw open the passenger door. "Come on."

  Claire was already gathering up her books.

  "Great!" she squealed. "Thanks!"

  I followed more reluctantly. This was so not what I'd had in mind.

  "Come on, Claire," Skip was saying as I approached the car. "You can get in back—"

  I saw Claire, who was a willowy five-foot-nine if she was an inch, hesitate while looking into the cramped recesses of Skip's backseat. With a sigh, I said, "I'll get in back."

  When I was wedged into the dark confines of the Trans Am's rear seat, Claire threw the passenger seat back and climbed in.

  "This is so sweet of you, Skip," she said, checking out her reflection in his rearview mirror. "Thanks a lot. The bus is okay, and all, but, you know. This is much better."

  "Oh," Skip said, fastening his seatbelt. "I know. You all right back there?" he asked me.

  "Fine," I said. I had, I knew, to turn the conversation back to the subject of the quarries. But how?

  "Great." Skip threw the car into gear and we were off, leaving the geeks in our dust. Actually, that part I sort of enjoyed.

  "So," Skip said, "how are you ladies this morning?"

  See? This is the problem with Skip. He says things like "So, how are you ladies this morning?" How are you supposed to take a guy who says things like that seriously? Skip's not ugly, or anything—he looks a lot like Ruth, actually: a chubby blond in glasses. Only, of course, Skip doesn't have breasts.

  Still, Skip just isn't dream date material, despite the Trans Am.

  Too bad he hasn't seemed to figure that out yet.

  "I'm fine," Claire said. "How about you, Jess?"

  "I'm fine," I said, from the manger-sized backseat. Then I took the plunge. "What were you saying, Claire? About being at the quarry the day Amber disappeared?"

  "Oh," Claire said. The wind through the T-top was unstyling her bob, but Claire didn't appear to care. She ran her fingers through it delightedly. You don't get that kind of fresh air on the bus.

  "My God, what a nightmare that was. We'd all just been hanging out, you know, all day. No big deal. Some of those guys from the football team, they brought a grill, and they were barbecuing, and everyone was, you know, pretty drunk, even though I warned them they'd get dehydrated, drinking beer in the sun—" For someone whose primary goal was to bake her skin to a crisp, Claire had always been surprisingly health-conscious. One of the reasons it took her so long to achieve the tan she wanted each summer was that she insisted on slathering herself with SPF 15.

  "And then the sun went down, and some people started packing up their stuff to, you know, go home. And that's when Mark—Leskowski, you know? He and Amber were going out for, like, ever. Anyway, he was all, 'Has anybody seen Amber?' And we all started looking for her, through the woods, you know, and then, thinking maybe she'd tripped or something, in the water. I mean, we thought maybe she'd fallen in, or something. The drop's pretty steep. When we couldn't find her, we figured, well, she must have gone home with somebody else, or whatever. We didn't say that to Mark, of course, but that's what we were all thinking."

  Claire turned to look at me, her pretty blue eyes troubled. "But then she never came home. And the next day, as soon as it was light, we all went back to the quarry, you know, to look for her."

  "But you didn't," I said, "find anything."

  "Not that day. Her body didn't show up until Sunday morning." Claire went on, "A bunch of people tried to call you, you know. Hoping you could help find her. This one girl, Karen Sue Hankey, she says you found some kid over the summer who'd been lost in a cave, so we thought maybe you still had, you know, that whole psychic thing going—"

  That psychic thing. That was one way of putting it, anyway.

  I was seriously going to kill Karen Sue Hankey.

  "I wasn't exactly reachable last weekend," I said. "I was up at—" I broke off, noticing we were approaching the turnoff to Pike's Creek Road. "Hey, Skip, turn here."

  Skip obediently took the turn. "And I'm turning here because?"

  "I want, um, a cruller," I said, since there was a Dunkin' Donuts near the garage where Rob worked.

  "Ooh," Claire said. "Crullers. Yum. You don't get crullers on the bus."

  When we buzzed past Rob's uncle's garage, I sank down real low in the seat, so in case Rob was outside, he wouldn't see me.

  Rob was outside, and he didn't see me. He was bent inside the hood of an Audi, his soft dark hair falling forward over his square-jawed face, his jeans looking properly snug and faded in all the right places. It was warm out, even though it wasn't quite eight in the morning yet, and Rob had on a short-sleeved shirt, revealing his nicely pronounced triceps.

  It had been nearly three weeks since I'd last seen him. He'd shown up at the Wawasee All-Camp recital, where I'd had a solo. I'd been surprised … I hadn't expected him to come four hours, one way, just to hear me play.

  And then, since I had to go out with my parents afterwards—and let's face it, my parents would not approve of Rob, a guy with a criminal record who comes, as they say in books, from the wrong side of the tracks—he just had to get back on his bike afterward and drive four hours home. That's a long way to go, just to hear some girl you aren't even going out with play a nocturne on her flute.

  It got me thinking. You know, since he'd driven so far to hear me play. Maybe he liked me after all, in spite of the whole jailbait thing.

  Except, of course, that I'd been back two days already, and he still hadn't called.

  Anyway, that brief glimpse of Rob, checking that Audi's oil, was all I was probably going to see of him for a while, so I watched until we pulled into the parking lot of the Dunkin' Donuts and I couldn't see him anymore.

  Hey, I know it was uncool to be scoping on boys at the same time as I was trying to solve a murder. But Nancy Drew still had time to date Ned Nickerson, didn't she, in between solving all those mysteries?

  Except of course, Ned wasn't on probation, and I don't think any of those mysteries Nancy solved involved a dead cheerleader.

  While Skip and Claire went to the counter to get crullers, I said I had to make a call. Then I went to the payphone by the door to the rest-room and dialed 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU.

  Rosemary was glad to hear from me, even though of course we had to keep the call brief. Rosemary is totally risking her job, doing what she does for me. You know, sending me those photos and reports on missing kids. Those files are
n't supposed to leave the office.

  But I guess Rosemary thinks it is worth it, if even one kid gets found. And since we've started working together, we've found a lot of kids, between the two of us. We kind of have to cool it, of course, so no one gets too suspicious. We average about a kid a week, which, let me tell you, is way better than 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU was doing before I came along.

  The good thing about working with Rosemary, as opposed to like the FBI or the police or something, is that Rosemary is totally discreet and would never, say, call the National Enquirer and have them come to my house to interview me. Having too many reporters around has a tendency to send Douglas into an episode. That is why I lied last spring, and told everyone I didn't have my psychic powers anymore.

  And up until recently, everyone believed it.

  Everyone except Karen Sue Hankey, apparently.

  Anyway, after Rosemary and I were through chatting, I hung up, and walked out to find Skip telling Claire about the time in third grade when he and I shot his GI Joe into space using a lead pipe and gunpowder extracted from about three hundred Blackcats. I noticed that he left out the part about putting a Roman candle inside my Barbie's head, an act about which I had not been consulted and which had not been part of our space shuttle program as I'd understood it. Also the part where we nearly blew ourselves up.

  "Wow," Claire said as she licked sugar off her fingertips. "I always saw you two hanging out together, but I never knew you did cool stuff like that."

  "Oh, yeah," I overheard Skip say. "Jess and I go way back. Way back."

  Hello. What was this all about? Just because I'd spent two weeks hanging out with the guy at his parents' lakehouse did not mean I wanted to renew a relationship that had been formed due to a mutual love of explosives and which had disintegrated as soon as our parents discovered our illicit hobby and took away all our firecrackers. Skip and I had nothing in common. Nothing except our past.

  "Ready to go?" Skip asked brightly as I came up to their table. "We better get a move on, or we'll be late for homeroom."

  Homeroom. I forgot all about my annoyance with Skip.

  "Hey, Claire," I asked her as we headed back toward the car. "That Friday Amber disappeared. Did she and Mark Leskowski hang out with the rest of you the whole day, or did they ever go off by themselves?"

  "Are you kidding?" Claire tossed her copper-colored curls, which, in spite of having become windblown, still looked fresh and pretty. Claire was that kind of girl. "Those two were inseparable. I mean, Mark sits in front of me first period, and let me tell you, it was like he had to pry himself out of that girl's arms...."

  I raised my eyebrows. No wonder Amber had never made it into her seat before the first bell.

  "What about the day she disappeared?" I asked. "Were they still … inseparable."

  Claire nodded. "Oh, yeah. They were all over each other. We were joking about how they were going to come down with some serious poison ivy, what with the number of trips they took into the woods with each other in order to 'be alone.'"

  I climbed into the backseat. "And that last time they went off together, to be alone—was that how Mark came back?"

  Claire plopped down into the passenger seat. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, did he come back alone?"

  Claire tilted her head to one side as she thought about it. Beside her, Skip started up the car. I wondered what Rob, back at the garage, would think if he'd known I'd driven right by him and hadn't even said hi.

  "You know," Claire said, "I can't imagine that he did. Come back alone, I mean. I wasn't paying that close attention—those guys aren't really my crowd, you know? I mean, that whole cheerleading, football thing. That is so not my scene. I mean, if they gave just half the amount of money to support the drama department as they do the athletics department, we could put on a lot better shows. We could have rented costumes, instead of making them ourselves, and we could get mikes so we don't have to scream to be heard in the back row—"

  I could see that Claire was slipping off track. To steer her back to the subject at hand, I said, "You're right. It isn't fair. Somebody should do something. So you didn't see Mark come back alone from any of his and Amber's trips into the woods together?"

  "No," Claire said. "I don't think so. I mean, somebody would have said something if Mark had come back alone. Don't you think? Don't you think somebody would have said 'Hey, Mark, where's Amber?'"

  "You'd think so," Skip said.

  "Yes," I said, thoughtfully. "Wouldn't you?"

  C H A P T E R

  5

  They held Amber Mackey's memorial service later that day. Instead of having it in a church or a funeral home or whatever, they had it in the gym.

  That's right. The gym of Ernest Pyle High School.

  And they had it during seventh period. Attendance was mandatory. The only person who was not there, actually, was Amber. I guess Principal Feeney drew the line at letting Amber's parents drag her coffin out in front of all two thousand of their daughter's peers.

  The band played a slowed-down rendition of the school song, I guess so it would sound sad. Then Principal Feeney got up and talked about what a great person Amber had been. I doubt he had ever even met her, but whatever. He looked good in the dark gray suit he'd donned for the occasion.

  When the principal was done talking, Coach Albright came out and said a few words. Coach Albright is not known for his eloquence as a speaker, so fortunately he didn't say much. He just announced that his players would be wearing black armbands on their uniforms for the season in honor of Amber. Never having been to a sporting event at my school, I had no idea what he was talking about until Ruth explained it to me.

  Then Mrs. Tidd, the cheerleading coach, got up and said a bunch of stuff about how much they were going to miss Amber, especially when it came to her ability to do standing back tucks. Then she said that, in honor of Amber, both the varsity and junior varsity cheerleading squads had put together an interpretive dance.

  Then—and I kid you not—the cheerleaders and Pompettes did this dance, in the middle of the gym floor, to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," from Titanic.

  And people cried during it. I swear. I looked around, and people were totally crying.

  It was a good dance and all. You could tell they'd worked totally hard on it. And they'd only had like two days or something to memorize it.

  Still, it didn't make me feel like crying. Seriously. And I don't think I'm like a hardened person or anything. I just hope that when I die, nobody does an interpretive dance at my memorial service. I can't stand that kind of thing.

  I can tell you what did make me feel like crying, though. The fact that, as the dance was going on, some people walked into the gym. I was sitting midway up the bleachers—Ruth wanted to make sure we could see everything, and she hadn't even known, at the time, that there was going to be an interpretive dance—but I could still make out their features. Well enough to know they weren't high-school students.

  They weren't high-school teachers, either.

  What they were was Feds.

  Seriously. And not just any Feds, either, but my old friends Special Agents Johnson and Smith.

  You would think that, by now, they'd have given up. I mean, they've been following me around since May, and they still don't have anything solid to pin on me. Not like what I'm doing is even wrong. I mean, okay, yeah, I help reunite missing kids with their families. Oooh, lock me up. I'm a dangerous criminal.

  Except of course they don't want to lock me up. They want me to work for them.

  But I have a real problem with working for an institution that routinely railroads people who might conceivably be innocent of the crimes with which they've been accused, just like The Fugitive....

  And apparently it wasn't enough, my telling them I no longer had the power to find missing people. Oh, no. They have to tap my phone, and read my mail, and follow me all the way to Lake Wawasee.

  And now they have the nerve to s
how up at a memorial service for one of my dead friends....

  And yeah, okay, Amber wasn't really my friend, but I sat behind her for like half an hour every single weekday for six years. That has to count for something, right?

  "I'm outta here," I said to Ruth as I started gathering up my things.

  "What do you mean, you're outta here?" Ruth demanded, looking alarmed. "You can't leave. It's an assembly."

  "Watch me," I said.

  "They've got student council members posted at all the exits," Ruth whispered.

  "That's not all they got posted by the exits," I said, and pointed at Special Agents Johnson and Smith, who were talking to Principal Feeney off to one side of the gym.

  "Oh, God," Ruth breathed, when she saw them. "Not again."

  "Oh, yes," I said. "And if you think I'm sticking around here to get the third degree about Courtney Hwang, which is for sure why they're here, you got another think coming, sister. See you around."

  Without another word, I inched my way over to the far end of the bleacher—past a number of people who gave me dirty looks as I went by, though because I'd stepped on their toes, not because they were mad at me about Amber—until I'd reached the gap between the bleachers and the wall. This I slithered through without any major difficulty—although my landing, in my platform espadrilles, was no ten-pointer, let me tell you. After that, it was an easy stroll beneath the bleachers to the nearest door, where I planned to fake an illness and be given leave to make my way to the nurse's office....

  Except of course when I emerged from beneath the bleachers and saw the student council member guarding that particular exit, I knew I wouldn't have to fake an illness.

  No, I felt pretty genuinely sick.

  "Jessica," Karen Sue Hankey said, clutching the pile of Remember Amber booklets she'd handed out to each of us as we filed in. The booklet, four pages long, had color copies of photos of Amber in various cheerleader poses, interposed with the printed lyrics to "My Heart Will Go On." Most people, I'd noticed as I'd made my way beneath the bleachers, had dropped theirs.