by Meg Cabot
Special Agent Johnson held up a hand and said, "No, sir. Don't misunderstand me. I believe Miss Mastriani's story wholeheartedly. I'm only saying that, if it's true, well, then she's a very special young lady, and deserves some very special treatment."
I thought he might be talking about a ticker-tape parade in New York City, like the one they had for the Yankees that time they won the World Series. I wouldn't mind riding on a float, if it didn't go too slow.
But my dad right away suspected he was talking about something else.
"Like what kind of treatment?" he said, suspiciously.
"Well, usually, in cases like these—and I will have you know that we at the FBI respect those with extrasensory perception like Miss Mastriani's very highly. In fact, we often seek out advice from psychics when we find ourselves at a dead end in an investigation."
"I bet. What does that have to do with Jess?" My dad still sounded suspicious.
"Well, we'd like to invite Miss Mastriani—with your permission, of course, sir—to one of our research facilities, so that we can learn more about this astonishing ability of hers."
I immediately flashed back on one of my favorite videos when I'd been a kid, Escape to Witch Mountain. If you've seen that movie, you will recall that the kids in it, who have ESP—or extrasensory perception, as Special Agent Johnson called it—get sent to a special "research facility," where, even though they get their own soda fountain in their room—by which I'd been particularly impressed, since my mother wouldn't even let me have an E-Z Bake Oven for fear I'd burn down the house—they were still, basically, held prisoner.
"Um," I said loudly. Since no one had really been talking to me, everyone turned their heads to look at me. "No, thank you."
Mr. Goodhart, who obviously hadn't seen Escape to Witch Mountain, said, "Now, hold on a second, Jess. Let's hear Special Agent Johnson out. It isn't every day that someone with your special ability comes along. It's important that we try to learn as much as possible about what's happened to you, so that we can better understand the extraordinary ways in which the human mind works."
I glared at Mr. Goodhart. What a traitor! I couldn't believe it.
"I am not," I said, in a voice that was still too loud for Mr. Feeney's conference room, "going to any special research facility in Washington, D.C."
Special Agent Johnson said, "Oh, but this one is right here in Indiana. Only an hour away, at Crane Military Base, as a matter of fact. There we can adequately study Miss Mastriani's extraordinary talent. Maybe she could even help us find more missing people. When you were calling the Missing Children's Organization this morning, Miss Mastriani, it was because you had the location of yet another missing child, was it not?"
I scowled at him. "Yes," I said. "Not like I ever got the chance to tell them that, though. You two guys made me completely forget the addresses."
This was a complete and utter lie, but I was feeling grumpy. I didn't want to go to Crane Military Base. I didn't want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay where I was. I wanted to go to detention after school today and sit by Rob. When else was I ever going to get to see him?
And what about Karen Sue Hanky? She had challenged me again. I had to kick her butt one more time. I needed to kick her butt one more time. That was my special ability. Not this freaky thing that had been happening lately. . . .
"There are many, many more people missing in the world, Miss Mastriani," Special Agent Johnson said, "than are pictured on the back of milk cartons. With your help, we could find missing prisoners of war, for whose safe return their families have been praying for twenty, even thirty years. We could locate deadbeat dads, and make them pay back the money their children so badly need. We could track down vicious serial killers, catch them before they can kill again. The FBI does offer significant cash rewards for information leading to the arrest of individuals for whom it has issued warrants of arrest."
I could tell my dad was totally falling for this. I even caught myself falling for it, a little. I mean, it would be totally cool to reunite families with their missing loved ones, or to catch bad guys, and see that they got what they deserved.
But why did I have to go and do it from an army base?
So I asked him that. And I added, "I mean, it might not even work. What if I can only find these people from my own bed, in my own house? Why would I have to do it from Crane Military Base? Why couldn't you just let me do it from Lumley Lane?"
Special Agent Johnson and Special Agent Davies looked at one another. Everyone else looked at them, too, with Yeah, why couldn't she? expressions on their faces.
Finally, Special Agent Johnson said, "Well, you could, Jessica." I noticed he wasn't calling me Miss Mastriani anymore. "Of course you could. But our researchers would dearly love to run some tests. And the fact that all of this seems to have stemmed from being struck by lightning—well, I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but I would think you would welcome those tests. Because we have found in the past that, in cases like yours, there has sometimes been damage to vital internal organs that goes undetected for months, and then …"
My dad leaned forward. "And then what?"
"Well, often the individual simply drops dead, Mr. Mastriani, from a heart attack—being struck by lightning puts an incredible strain on the heart. Or of an embolism, aneurism—any number of complications can and often do arise. A thorough medical exam—"
"Which I could have right here," I said, not liking the sound of this. "In Dr. Hinkle's office." Dr. Hinkle had been our family doctor my whole life. He had, of course, misdiagnosed Douglas's schizophrenia as ADD, but hey, we can't all be perfect.
"Certainly," Special Agent Johnson said. "Certainly. Although the general practitioner is not often trained to detect the subtle changes that occur in a system that has been violated in the manner yours has."
"About these cash rewards," Mr. Feeney said suddenly.
I glared at him. What an asshole. I could tell he was totally trying to think up some angle whereby he could get his hands on the reward money, and design a new trophy cabinet for the main hallway, so he could display all of our stupid state championship cups, or whatever. God, I hated school.
That was it. I had had enough. I stood up, pushing back my chair—which was way nicer than any chair in any of the classrooms: it had wheels on it, and was made of some plush, squishy material that surely couldn't have been real leather, or Mr. Feeney would have gotten in trouble with the school board for overspending—and said, "Well, okay, if you're not going to arrest me, I think I'd like to go home now."
Special Agent Johnson said, "We're not through here, Jess."
Then an extraordinary thing happened. My lower lip started to jut out a little—I think I was still feeling a little emotional from that whole they're-gonna-arrest-me scare—and my dad, who noticed, stood up and said, "No."
No. Just like that. No.
"You've intimidated my daughter enough for one day. I'm taking her home to her mother."
Special Agents Johnson and Davies exchanged glances. They did not want to let me go. But my dad was already walking over to me, picking up my backpack and flute, and laying a hand on my shoulder.
"Come on, Jess," he said. "We're going."
Ruth's dad, meanwhile, was reaching into his pocket. He took out some business cards and dropped them on Mr. Feeney's conference table.
"If you gentlemen need to contact the Mastrianis," he said to the agents, "you can do so through my offices. Have a nice day."
Special Agent Johnson looked disappointed, but all he said was that I should call him the minute I changed my mind about Crane Military Base. Then he gave me his card. Special Agent Davies, as he was leaving the conference room, made a gun out of his index finger and thumb and shot me. I thought this was a little alarming, considering the fact that his nostrils were all crusted over with blood, and a purply bruise was starting to show across the bridge of his nose. . . .
Mr. Feeney was pretty nice about giving me the re
st of the day off from class. He never even mentioned a thing about me making up detention, and then I realized that was because he didn't even know I had detention from now until the end of school in May. Mr. Feeney doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to the students.
But Mr. Goodhart, who does, didn't mention making up the detention day either. That's because I had begged him a long time ago not to pester my parents about anything, what with Douglas and all. He'stuck to his word, though he did say he wished I would rethink the Crane Military Base thing. I said I would, even though I hadn't the slightest intention of doing so.
My dad drove me home. On the way home, we stopped at a Wendy's, and he bought me a Frosty. This was sort of a joke, because he used to buy me a Frosty every day on our way home from the county hospital, back when I'd had out-patient treatments for a third-degree burn I'd gotten on my calf from the exhaust pipe of our neighbor's Harley. Dr. Feingold, the neurologist, had bought a completely cherried-out mint-green Harley-Davidson for his fiftieth birthday, and when I was a little kid, I used to beg him for rides, and he'd take me, more often than not, probably just to shut me up. He warned me about the exhaust pipe a million times, but I forgot one day, and wham! Third-degree burn the size of a fist. I still had the scar, though the burn ward had worked diligently, every day for three months, to remove all the infected skin.
The way they removed it was worse than the burn itself, though. With tweezers. I used to pass out every time. Then, to cheer me up, my dad would take me to Wendy's for a Frosty. So, you can see that this gesture of his was deeply moving, even though it may not sound like much to you guys. It was all about sharing this bonding moment from our past. Mr. Goodhart would have eaten it up.
Anyway, on the way home, my dad agreed to break the news to Mom, but not tell anybody else—I made him swear—and I agreed not to keep any more secrets from him. I still didn't tell him about Rob, though, because that was a secret I strongly suspected the FBI didn't have a lead on, so I probably wasn't going to almost get arrested for it.
Plus I was way more worried about my mom's reaction to finding out about Rob than the story of me and the milk-carton kids.
C H A P T E R
11
In the end, of course, it turned out that my dad wasn't the one I ought to have sworn to secrecy.
It was Mr. Feeney.
I don't know if he thought he could get his hands on that reward money somehow, or if he'd decided that spilling the beans would make his school district stand out from all the others in Indiana—like, since it was his school's bleachers I'd gotten electrocuted under, that somehow made Ernest Pyle High School special—or what.
But anyway, when the town paper hit our front porch that afternoon—the town paper came out at three in the afternoon every day, instead of seven in the morning, so the reporters and everybody don't have to get up too early—there was this giant picture of me on the front of it: my very flattering sophomore yearbook picture, in fact, the one in which my mom had made me wear one of her hideous homemade dresses, under a headline that read, TOUCHED BY THE FINGER OF GOD.
Have I pointed out that there are more churches in our town than there are fast-food restaurants? Southern Indiana is way religious.
Anyway, the article went on to describe how I had saved all these kids after being touched by the finger of God, or lightning, as it is called by the secular community. It went on to say that I was just an average student who played third-chair flute in the school orchestra, and that on weekends I helped my dad out in his restaurants, which they listed. I knew all this stuff couldn't have come from Mr. Feeney, since he didn't know me all that well. I figured Mr. Goodhart must have had something to do with it.
And let me tell you, that kind of hurt, you know? I mean, even though he hadn't mentioned anything about the trouble with Douglas, or my detentions, he sure had mentioned everything else he knew. Isn't there some sort of confidentiality thing with school counselors? I mean, can't they get in trouble for that?
But when my dad called Mr. Abramowitz and asked him, he was like, "You can't prove the information came from the counselor. It came from someone at the school, most definitely. But you can't prove it was the counselor."
Still, Ruth's dad started putting together a lawsuit, aimed at hitting Ernest Pyle High School for slipping the town paper my school photo. That, Mr. Abramowitz said, was an invasion of privacy. He sounded really happy about it. Ruth's dad doesn't get that many interesting cases. Mostly, he just does divorces.
My mother was happy about it, too. Don't ask me why, but the whole story totally delighted her. She was in hog heaven. She wanted me to have a press conference in the main dining room at Mastriani's. She kept going on about how much money it would bring in to the restaurant, feeding all those out-of-town reporters. She even started picking out dress patterns, right then and there, for what she wanted me to wear at this press conference. I'm telling you, she went mental. I had kind of thought she'd be all weird about it, you know? I mean, considering her I just want us to be a normal family mentality. But that went right out the window when she heard about the rewards.
"How much?" she wanted to know. "How much per child?"
We were eating dinner at that point—fettucine with a mushroom cream sauce. My dad went, "Toni, the rewards are not the point. The point is, Jessica is a young girl, and I do not want her exposed to the media at such a young—"
"But is it ten thousand dollars per child?" my mother wanted to know. "Or just for that one child?"
"Toni—"
"Joe, I'm just saying, ten thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at. It could buy a new steam table and then some over at Joe Junior's—"
"We will raise the money for a new steam table over at Joe Junior's the old-fashioned way," my father said. "We will take out a loan for it."
"Not when we're already going to have to take out a loan for Michael's tuition." Michael—whose sole reaction to the news about my newfound psychic ability had been to ask me if I knew where the man in the blue turban, whom Nostradamus had predicted would start World War III, was hanging out these days—rolled his eyes.
"Don't you roll your eyes at me, young man," my mother said. "Harvard was very generous with the scholarship money, but it's still not enough—"
"Especially not," my dad said, dipping his semolina into the cream sauce left on his plate, "if Dougie's going back to State."
That did it. My mom dropped her fork with a clatter. "Douglas," she said, "is not going back to that school. Not ever."
My dad looked tired. "Toni," he said. "The boy's going to have to get an education. He can't sit in that room up there and read comic books for the rest of his life. People are already starting to call him Boo Radley."
Boo Radley, I remembered from freshman English, was the guy in To Kill a Mockingbird who never left his house, just sat around cutting up newspapers all day, which is what people did before there was TV. It was a good thing Douglas had refused to come downstairs for dinner, or he might have heard that and been offended. For a guy who tried to kill himself, Douglas is very sensitive about being called strange.
"Why not?" my mother demanded. "Why can't he sit in his room for the rest of his life? If that's what he wants to do, why can't you just let him?"
"Because nobody gets to do what they want to do, Toni. I want to lie in the backyard in a hammock all day," my dad said, jerking a thumb at his chest. "Jess over there wants to cruise the countryside on the back of a hog. And Mikey—" He looked at Michael, who was busy chewing. "Well, I don't know what the hell Mikey wants to do—"
"Screw Claire Lippman," I suggested, causing Michael to kick me very hard beneath the table.
My dad shot me a warning look, and continued. "But whatever it is, Toni, he doesn't get to do it. Nobody gets to do what they want to do, Toni. What they get to do is what they should do, and what Dougie should do is go back to college."
Relieved to have some of the heat off me, I excused myself and cleared my place at
the table. I hadn't talked to Ruth all day. I was eager to see what she thought of this whole thing. I mean, it isn't every day your best friend ends up on the front page of the local rag.
But I never got to find out what Ruth thought of the whole thing. Because when I stepped outside onto the porch, preparing to jump over the hedge that separated our two houses, I was confronted by what looked like an army of reporters, all of them parked in front of our house and waving cameras and microphones.
"There she is!" One of them, a newscaster I recognized from Channel Four, came stumbling across my lawn, her high heels sinking into the grass. "Jessica! Jessica! How does it feel to be a national heroine?"
I stared down at the fuzzy microphone blankly. Then about a million other microphones appeared in my face. Everyone started asking questions at once. It was my mother's press conference, only all I had on was jeans and a T-shirt. I hadn't even thought to comb my hair.
"Um," I said into the microphones.
Then my dad was there, yanking me back into the house, and yelling at all the reporters to get off his property. No one listened—at least, not until the cops came. Then we got to see how all those free lunches my dad had given the guys on the force paid off. You never saw people as mad as those cops were when they turned down Lumley Lane and couldn't even find a place to park, there were so many news vans blocking the way. There are so few crimes in our neck of the woods that when one did happen, our boys in blue go to town on the offender.
When they saw all the reporters on our lawn, they went mental, only in a different way than my mom had. They called back to the station, and, next thing you knew, they had brought out all their fanciest equipment, riot gear and drug-sniffing dogs and flash grenades. You name it, they brought it over, and looked pretty intent on using it on the reporters, some of whom were from pretty big networks.
