Since I had just been thinking the same nice thing about her, I did not take offense.

"Let's practice together," I said, "at nine. Okay?" Since we live next door to one another, we frequently open our living room windows and play at the same time, giving the neighborhood a free concert, while also getting in some valuable practice time.

"Okay," Ruth said. "But if you think you can just pop Karen Sue Hankey in the face and never hear about it again, you're the one with another think coming, girlfriend."

I laughed as I hurried up the steps to my house. As if! Karen Sue would probably be so afraid of me from now on, I'd never have to put up with her noxious taunting again. As an added bonus, she probably wasn't going to play so well during her chair audition on Thursday, on account of her swollen nose.

It was with these delicious thoughts that I slipped into the house. I had set only one foot on the stairs leading up to my room when my mother's voice, not sounding too pleased, reached me from the kitchen.

Meekly, I made my way to the back of the house.

"Hi, Mom," I said when I saw her at the kitchen table. To my surprise, my dad was there, too.

But my dad never got home before six on a Tuesday.

"Hey, Dad," I said, noting that neither one of them looked particularly happy. Then my heart started to thump uncomfortably.

"What's the matter?" I asked quickly. "Is Douglas—"

"Douglas," my mother said, her voice so hard it was like ice, "is fine."

"Oh." I looked at the two of them. "It isn't—"

"Michael," my mother said, in that same hard voice, "is also fine."

Relief coursed through me. Well, if it wasn't Douglas, and it wasn't Mike, it couldn't be too bad. Maybe it was even something good. You know, something my parents would think was bad, but I might think was good. Like Great-aunt Rose having dropped dead from a heart attack, for instance.

"So," I said, preparing to look sad. "What's up?"

"We got a call a little while ago," my father said, looking grim.

"You'll never guess who it was," said my mother.

"I give up," I said, thinking, Wow, Great-aunt Rose really is dead. "Who was it?"

"Mrs. Hankey," my mother said. "Karen Sue's mother."

Oops.



C H A P T E R

7

Busted.

I was so busted.

But you know, I really don't think they had any right to be so mad, seeing as how I was defending the family honor and all.

And what a whiny baby, that Karen Sue, ratting me out to her mother. Of course, in Karen Sue's version of the events leading up to my punching her in the face, she hadn't said any of the things we both know she'd really said. In Karen Sue's version of how it all happened, I was trying to sneak out of assembly, and she tried to stop me—for my own good, of course, and because my leaving early was besmirching Amber Mackey's memory—and I hit her for her efforts.

The whole part about how my denying my psychic powers was what making Douglas sick? Yeah, Karen Sue left that part out.

Oh, and the part about how Douglas doesn't attend church or pray often enough? Yeah, left that part out, too.

My mom didn't believe me when I told her about that part. See, Karen Sue has my mom snowed, just like she's got her own mother snowed. All my mom sees when she looks at Karen Sue is the daughter she always wished she had. You know, the sweet compliant daughter who enters her homemade cookies in the county fair bake-off every year, and puts her hair in curlers at night so the ends will flip just the right way in the morning. My mom never counted on having a daughter like me, who is saving up for a Harley and has her hair cut as short as she possibly can so she won't have to mess with it.

And oh, yeah, who gets into fights all the time, and is in love with a guy who is on probation.

My poor mom.

My dad believed me. The part about what Karen Sue said and all. My mom, like I said before, didn't.

I heard them arguing about it after I was banished to my room, to Think About What I Had Done. I was also supposed to think about how I was going to pay back Karen Sue's medical bill (two hundred and forty nine dollars for a trip to the emergency room. She didn't even have to get stitches). Mrs. Hankey was also threatening to sue me for the mental anguish I'd inflicted on her daughter. Karen Sue's mental anguish, according to her mother, was worth about five thousand dollars. I didn't have five thousand dollars. I only had about a thousand dollars left in my bank account, after my Michigan City outlet store shopping spree.

I was supposed to sit in my room and think about how I was going to raise another four thousand, two hundred and forty-nine dollars.

Instead, I went into Douglas's room to see what he was doing.

"Hey, loser," I started to say as I barged in, as is my tradition where Douglas is concerned. "Guess what happened to me to—"

Only I didn't finish, because Douglas wasn't there.

Yeah, that's right. He wasn't in his room. About eight million comic books were lying around his bed, but no Douglas.

Which was kind of weird. Because Douglas, ever since he got sent home from State College for trying to kill himself, never went anywhere. Seriously. He just sat in his room, reading.

Oh, sure, sometimes Dad forced him to go to one of the restaurants and bus tables or whatever, but except for that and when he was at his shrink's office, Douglas was always in his room.

Always.

Maybe, I decided, he'd run out of comic books and gone downtown to get more. That made sense. Because the few times he had strayed from his room in the past six months, that's where he'd gone.

It was no fun sitting in my room, thinking about what I'd done. For one thing, I didn't think what I'd done was so bad. For another, it was August, so it was still pretty nice out, for late afternoon. I sat in the dormer window and gazed down at the street. My room is on the third floor of our house—in the attic, actually, which is the former servants' quarters. Our house is the oldest one on Lumley Lane, built around the turn of the century. The twentieth century. The city even came and put a plaque on it (the house, I mean), saying it was a historic landmark.

From the third floor dormer windows—my bedroom windows—you could see all up and down Lumley Lane. For once there was no white van parked across the street, monitoring my activities. That's because Special Agents Johnson and Smith were back at the school with Mark Leskowski.

Poor Mark. I had no way of knowing how he must be feeling—I mean, if Rob ever turned up dead, God only knew what I'd do, and we'd never even gone out. Well, for more than like five minutes, anyway. And if I got blamed for having done it—you know, killing him—I'd flip out for true.

Still, it looked as if Mark was everyone's lead suspect. His parents had, as Ruth had predicted, hired Mr. Abramowitz as their son's attorney—not that he'd been officially charged with the murder, but it certainly looked as if he would be.

The way I found this out was, my parents yelled up the stairs to me that they were going next door to consult with Ruth's dad about Karen Sue's case against me. Mr. Abramowitz had apparently just got home from a consult he'd been doing over at Ernie Pyle. What else could he have been consulting about over there? The new mascot uniform?

"There's some leftover ziti in the fridge," my mom hollered up the stairs to me. "Heat it up if you get hungry. Did you hear that, Douglas?"

Which was when I realized my mom didn't know Douglas was gone.

"I'll tell him," I called to her. Which wasn't a lie. I would tell him. When he got home.

You wouldn't think it was a big deal, a twenty-year-old guy going out for a while. But really, for Douglas, it was. A big deal, I mean. Mom was totally spastic about him, thinking he was like this delicate flower that would wilt at the slightest exposure to the elements.

Which was such a joke, really, because Douglas was no flower. He was just, you know, figuring things out. Like the rest of us.

Only he was being a little more cautious than the rest of us.

"And don't you," my mother yelled up the stairs, "even think about going anywhere, Jessica. When your father and I get home, the three of us are going to sit down for a nice long chat."

Well. That certainly didn't sound like Dad had convinced her I'd been telling the truth about what Karen Sue had said. Yet, anyway.

From my dormer window, I watched them leave. They crossed our front lawn, then cut through the hedge that separated our property from the Abramowitzes', even though they were always telling me to take the long way, or the hedge would suffer permanent root damage. Whatever. I got up from the window and went downstairs to see what was up with the ziti.

I had just opened the fridge when someone turned the crank to our doorbell. Because our house is so old, it has this antique doorbell with a handle you have to turn, not a button you push.

"Coming," I called, wondering who it could be. Ruth would never ring the doorbell. She'd just walk right in. And everyone else we knew would call first before coming over.

When I got into the foyer, I saw what definitely appeared to be a masculine shape behind the lace curtain that covered the window in the front door. It looked to be about the right size and shape for Rob.

My heart, ridiculously, skipped a beat, even though I knew perfectly well Rob would never just walk up to my front door and ring the bell. Not since I told him how much it would freak out my mom if she ever found out I liked a guy who a) wasn't college-bound and b) had spent time in the Big House.