by Meg Cabot
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? J
ust 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."
