Well, most of the time, anyway. There'd been a strange incident over the summer when I'd managed to summon up someone's location just by hugging his pillow. . . .

But that, I remained convinced, had been a fluke.

"Oh," Douglas said suddenly, leaning over to pull something out from beneath his bed. "By the way, I was in charge of collecting the Abramowitzes' mail while they were away, and I took the liberty of relieving them of this." He presented me with a large brown envelope that had been addressed to Ruth. "From your friend at 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU, I believe?"

I took the envelope and opened it. Inside—as there was every week, mailed to Ruth, since I suspected the Feds were going through my mail, just waiting for something like this to prove I'd been lying to them when I'd said I was no longer psychic—was a note from my operative at the missing children's organization—Rosemary—and a photo of a kid she had determined was really and truly missing . . . not a runaway, who might be missing by choice, or a kid who'd been stolen by his noncustodial parent, who might be better off where he was. But an actual, genuinely missing kid.

I looked at the picture—of a little Asian girl, with buckteeth and butterfly hair clips—and sighed. Amber Mackey, who'd sat in front of me in homeroom every day for six years, might be dead. But for the rest of us, life goes on.

Yeah. Try telling that to Amber's parents.



C H A P T E R

4

When I woke up the next morning, I knew two things: One, that Courtney Hwang was living on Baker Street in San Francisco. And two, that I was going to take the bus to school that day.

Don't ask me what one had to do with the other. My guess would be a big fat nothing.

But if I took the bus to school, I'd have an opportunity that I wouldn't if I let Ruth drive me to school in her Cabriolet: I'd be able to talk to Claire Lippman, and find out what she knew about the activities at the quarry just before Amber went missing.

I called Ruth first. My call to Rosemary would have to wait until I found a phone that no one could connect me to, if 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU happened to trace the call. Which they did every call they got, actually.

"You want to take the bus," Ruth repeated, incredulously.

"It's nothing against the Cabriolet," I assured her. "It's just that I want to have a word with Claire."

"You want to take the bus," Ruth said again.

"Seriously, Ruth," I said. "It's just a one-time thing. I just want to ask Claire a few questions about what was up at the quarry the night Amber disappeared."

"Fine," Ruth said. "Take the bus. See if I care. What have you got on?"

"What?"

"On your body. What are you wearing on your body?"

I looked down at myself. "Olive khaki mini, beige crocheted tank with matching three-quarter-sleeve cardigan, and beige espadrilles."

"The platforms?"

"Yes."

"Good," Ruth said, and hung up.

Fashion is hard. I don't know how those popular girls do it. At least my hair, being extremely short and sort of spiky, didn't have to be blow-dried and styled. That would just about kill me, I think.

Claire was sitting on the stoop of the house where the bus picked up the kids in our neighborhood. I live in the kind of neighborhood where people don't mind if you do this. Sit on their stoop, I mean, while waiting for the bus.

Claire was eating an apple and reading what looked to be a script. Claire, a senior, was the reigning leading lady of Ernie Pyle High's drama club. In the bright morning sunlight, her red bob shined. She had definitely blow-dried and styled just minutes before.

Ignoring all the freshmen geeks and car-less rejects that were gathered on the sidewalk, I said, "Hi, Claire."

She looked up, squinting in the sun. Then she swallowed what she'd been chewing and said, "Oh, hi, there, Jess. What are you doing here?"

"Oh, nothing," I said, sitting down on the step beneath the one she'd appropriated. "Ruth had to leave early, is all." I prayed Ruth wouldn't drive by as I said this, and that if she did, she wouldn't tootle the horn, as she was prone to when we passed what we've always considered the rejects at the bus stop.

"Huh," Claire said. She glanced admiringly down at my bare leg. "You've got a great tan. How'd you get it?"

Claire Lippman has always been obsessed with tanning. It was because of this obsession, actually, that my brother Mike had become obsessed with her. She spent almost every waking hour of the summer months on the roof of her house, sunbathing … except when she could get someone to drive her to the quarries. Swimming in the quarries was, of course, against the law, which was why everyone did it, Claire Lippman more than anyone. Though, as a redhead, her hobby must have been a particularly frustrating one for her, since it took almost a whole summer of exposure to turn her skin even the slightest shade darker. Sitting beside her, I felt a little like Pocahontas. Pocahontas hanging out with The Little Mermaid.

"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?