I leaned over and peered at Skip through the tall hedge that separated our two houses. Good God. It was bad enough I'd had to spend two weeks of my summer practically incarcerated with him. If he thought I was going to willingly extend my sentence, he had to be nuts.

"Uh," I called. "Can I take a rain check on that?"

"No problem," Skip hollered back.

Shuddering, I went inside.

And was greeted by someone even more frightening than Skip.

"Jessica," Great-aunt Rose said, intercepting me in the foyer before I had a chance to make a break for the stairs up to my room. "There you are. I was beginning to think I wouldn't get a chance to see you this trip." I had managed to elude her last night by getting home so late, and then again that morning, before school, by darting out of the house before breakfast. I had thought she'd be gone by the time I got home from school.

"Your father's driving me back to the airport," Great-aunt Rose went on, "in half an hour, you know."

Half an hour! If Ruth had just driven by the garage where Rob worked, like I asked, I might have been able to avoid Great-aunt Rose altogether this trip!

"Hi, Auntie," I said, bending down to give her a kiss on the cheek. Great-aunt Rose is the only member of my family I can honestly say I tower over. But that's only because osteoporosis has shrunk her down to about four foot eleven, an inch shorter than me.

"Well, let me look at you," Great-aunt Rose said, pushing me away. Her watery brown-eyed gaze ran over me critically from head to toe.

"Hmph," she said. "Nice to see you in a skirt for once. But don't you think it's a little short? They let girls go to school in skirts that short these days? Why, in my day, if I'd shown up in a skirt like that, I'd have been sent home to change!"

Poor Douglas. For two weeks he'd been sentenced to undiluted Great-aunt Rose. No wonder he'd feigned sleep the night before when I'd gotten home. I wouldn't have wanted to talk to a traitor like me, either.

"Toni!" Rose called, to my mother. "Come out here and look at what your daughter has got on. Is that how you're letting her dress these days?"

My mom, still looking sunburned and happy from her trip out east, from which she and my dad had only returned the day before, came into the foyer.

"Why, I think she looks fine," Mom said, taking in my ensemble with approval. "Far better than she used to dress last year, when I couldn't peel her out of jeans and a T-shirt."

"Um," I said, uncomfortably. I'd gotten as far as the landing, but didn't see how I was going to be able to sneak any farther upstairs without them noticing. "It was great to see you, Aunt Rose. Sorry you have to leave so soon. But I have a lot of homework—"

"Homework?" my mother said. "On the first day of school? Oh, I don't think so."

She'd seen through me, of course. My mom knew good and well how I felt about Great-aunt Rose. She just didn't want to be stuck with the old biddy herself. And she'd left Douglas alone with her for two weeks! Two weeks!

Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

Then again, if she'd been counting on Great-aunt Rose keeping an eagle eye on him, she couldn't have found anyone better. Nothing got past Great-aunt Rose.

"Is that lipstick you're wearing, Jessica?" Great-aunt Rose demanded when we got out of the darkness of the foyer and into the brightly lit kitchen.

"Um," I said. "No. Cherry Chap Stick."

"Lipstick!" Great-aunt Rose cried in disgust. "Lipstick and miniskirts! No wonder all of those boys kept calling while you were away. They probably think you're easy."

I raised my eyebrows at this. "Really? Boys called me?" I'd known, of course, that girls had called—Heather Montrose, among others. But I hadn't known any boys had phoned. "Were any of them named Rob?"

"I didn't ask their names," Great-aunt Rose said. "I told them never to call here again. I explained that you weren't that kind of girl."

I said an expletive that caused my mother to throw me a warning look. Fortunately, Great-aunt Rose didn't hear it, as she was still too busy talking.

"An emergency, they kept calling it," she said. "Had to get in touch with you right away, because of some emergency. Ridiculous. You know what kind of emergencies teenagers have, of course. They'd probably run out of Cherry Coke down at the local soda shop."

I looked at Great-aunt Rose very hard as I said, "Actually, a girl from my class got kidnapped. One of the cheerleaders. They found her yesterday, floating in one of the quarries. She'd been strangled."

My mother looked startled. "Oh, my God," she said. "That girl? The one I read about in the paper this morning? You knew her?"

Parents. I swear.

"I've only sat behind her," I said, "in homeroom every year since the sixth grade."

"Oh, no." My mom had her hands on her face. "Her poor parents. They must be devastated. We'd better send over a platter."

Restauranteurs. That's how they think. Any crisis, and it's always, "Let's send over a platter." Last spring, when half our town's police force had been camped out in our front yard, holding off the hordes of reporters who wanted to score an interview with Lightning Girl, all my mom had been able to think about was making sure we had enough biscotti to go around.

Great-aunt Rose wasn't nearly as upset as my mom. She went, "Cheerleader? Serves her right. Prancing around in those little short skirts. You better watch out, Jessica, or you'll be next."

"Aunt Rose!" my mom cried.

"Well," Great-aunt Rose said, with a sniff. "It could happen. Particularly if you let her continue to wear outfits like that." She nodded at my ensemble.

I decided I had had enough visiting. I got up and said, "It's been swell seeing you again, Auntie, but I think I'll go up and say hi to Douglas. He was asleep when I got home last night, so—"

"Douglas," Great-aunt Rose said with a roll of her rheumy eyes. "When isn't he asleep?"

Which gave me a clue as to how Douglas had borne Great-aunt Rose's company for the two weeks he'd been alone with her. Feigning sleep.

He was still at it when I burst into his room a minute later.

"Douglas," I said, looking down at him from the side of his bed. "Give it up. I know you're not really asleep."

He opened one eye. "Is she gone?" he asked.

"Almost," I said. "Dad's coming to pick her up and take her to the airport in a few minutes. Mom wants you to come down and say goodbye."

Douglas moaned and pulled a pillow over his head.

"Just kidding," I said, sinking down onto the bed beside him. "I think Mom's getting a dose of what you must have had to put up with this whole time. I don't believe Great-aunt Rose will be invited back any time soon."

"The horror," Douglas said from beneath the pillow. "The horror."

"Yeah," I said. "But hey, it's over now. How are you doing?"

Douglas said, his voice still muffled by the pillow, "Well, I didn't slash my wrists this time, did I? So I must be doing okay."

I digested this. The reason Douglas, at twenty years of age, could not be trusted to stay in the house alone for two weeks is because of his tendency to hear voices inside his head. The voices are held pretty much at bay with the help of medication, but occasionally Douglas still has episodes. That's what his doctors call it when he listens to the voices, and then does what they tell him to do, which is generally something bad, like, oh, I don't know, kill himself.

Episodes.

"I'll tell you what," he said from beneath the pillow. "I almost episoded Great-aunt Rose, is what I almost did."

"Really?" Too bad he hadn't. I might have gotten the message about Amber being missing in time to have saved her. "What about the Feds? Any sign of them?"

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, like my classmates, refuses to believe I am no longer psychic. They were mightily taken with me last spring, when word got out about my "special ability." They were so taken with me, in fact, that they decided to enlist my aid in locating some unsavory individuals on their most wanted list. They forgot one slight detail, however: to ask me if I wanted to work for them.

Which of course I did not. It took all sorts of unpleasantness—including lying that I no longer have any psychic powers—to extricate myself from their clutches. Since then, they had taken to following me around, waiting for me to slip up, at which point I suppose they will point their finger and yell, "Liar, liar, pants on fire."

At least, that's all I hope they'll do.

Douglas pushed the pillow away and sat up. "No white vans mysteriously parked across the street since you took off for camp," he said. "Except for Rose, it's been downright restful around here. I mean, with both you and Mike gone."

We were quiet for a minute, thinking about Mike. Across the hall, his bedroom door stood open, and I could see that his computer, all of his books, and his telescope were gone. They were sitting in some dorm room at Harvard now. Mike would be torturing his new roommate, instead of Douglas and me, with his obsession over Claire Lippman, the cute redhead into whose bedroom window Mike had spent so many hours peering.

"It's going to be weird with him gone," Douglas said.

"Yeah," I said. But actually, I wasn't thinking about Mike. I was thinking about Amber. Claire Lippman, the girl Mike had loved from afar for a few years now, spent almost all of her free time in the summer tanning herself at the quarries. Had she, I wondered, seen Amber there, before the crime that had taken her life?

"What," Douglas asked a second later, "are you so dressed up for, anyway?"