Meg Cabot - Safe House

"Let me see if I have this straight," I said. "You think a deranged hillbilly, who lives out by Pike's Quarry, has kidnapped Heather and stuffed her down his toilet."

"I've heard of that kinda thing happening," Jeff Day said.

But instead of supporting his fellow team member, Mark snapped, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard."

Jeff Day was the kind of guy who, if anybody else had called him stupid, would have slammed his fist into the speaker's face. But not, evidently, if it happened to be Mark Leskowski. Mark, it appeared, was next to godlike in Jeff's book.

"Sorry, dude," he murmured, looking shamefaced.

Mark ignored his teammate.

"Have any of you," he wanted to know, "called the police?"

"Course we did," another player, Roy Hicks, said indignantly, not wanting to look bad, the way his teammate Jeff had, in front of the QB.

"A bunch of sheriff's deputies came up to the quarry," Tisha chimed in, "and they're helping everyone look for her. They even brought some of those sniffer dogs. We only left"—she turned mascara-smudged eyes toward me—"to look for her ." Tisha could not seem to remember my name. And why should she? I was so far out of her social sphere as to be invisible....

Except when it came to rescuing her friends from psychotic hillbillies, apparently.

"You've got to find her," Tisha said, her damp eyes aglow with the last rays of the setting sun. " Please . Before … it's too late."

This blew. I mean it. How was I supposed to convince the Federal Bureau of Investigation that I don't have psychic powers anymore, when I can't even convince my own peers of it?

"Look, Tisha," I said, aware that not just Tisha was gazing at me hopefully, but also Mark, Jeff Day, Todd Mintz, Roy Hicks, and a veritable Whitman's Sampler of cheerleaders. "I don't … I mean, I can't . . ."

"Please," Tisha whispered. "She's my best friend. How would you like it if your best friend got kidnapped?"

Damn.

Look, it wasn't like I harbored ill feelings toward Heather Montrose. I did, of course, but that wasn't the point. The point was, I was trying to keep a low profile with the whole psychic thing.

But if Tisha was right, then there was a serial killer loose. He might very well have Heather in his clutches, the same way that, a few days earlier, he'd had Amber in his clutches. Could I really sit around and let a girl—even a girl like Heather Montrose, who, after Karen Sue Hankey, was one of my least favorite people—die?

No. No, I could not.

"I don't have ESP anymore," I said, just so that later on, no one would be able to say I'd agreed to any of this. "But I'll give it a try."

Tisha exhaled gustily, as if she'd been holding her breath until I gave my answer.

"Oh, thank you," she cried. "Thank you!"

"Yeah," I said. "Whatever. But look, I need something of hers."

"Something of whose?" Tisha cocked her head, making her look a lot like a bird. A sparrow, maybe, eyeing a worm.

Yeah. That'd be me. I'd be the worm.

"Something of Heather's," I explained, slowly, so she'd be sure to understand. "Do you have a sweater of hers, or something?"

"I have her pompons," Tisha said, and she bounced back toward the car she'd arrived in.

Todd Mintz looked perplexed. "That's really how you find them?" he asked. "By touching something that belongs to the missing person?"

"Yeah," I said. "Well. Sort of."

It wasn't, of course. Because here's the thing: since that day last spring, when I was hit by lightning, I'd found a lot of people, all right. But I'd only found one of them while I'd been awake. Seriously. Everybody else, it had taken sleep to summon their location to, as Douglas had put it, my mind's eye. That's how my particular psychic ability worked. While I slept.

Which meant that, as a future career option, I was going to have to rule out fortune-telling. You were never going to catch me sitting in a tent with a crystal ball and a big old turban on my head. I could no sooner predict the future than I could fly. All I can do—all I've ever been able to do, since the day of that storm—is find missing people.

And I can only do that in my sleep.

Except once. One time, when one of the campers I'd been assigned to watch had run away, I'd hugged his pillow and gotten this weird flash. Really. It was just like a picture inside my head, of exactly where the kid was, and what he was doing.

Whether or not this would happen with the help of Heather's pompons, I had no way of knowing. But I knew that if the same person who'd killed Amber had gotten hold of Heather, we couldn't afford to wait until morning to find her.

"Here." Tisha rushed up to me and shoved two big balls of shimmery silver and white streamers into my hands. "Now find her, quick."

I looked down at the pompons. They were surprisingly heavy. No wonder all the girls on the squad had such cut arm muscles. I'd thought it was from all those cartwheels, but really, it was from hauling these things around.

"Uh, Tisha," I said, aware that every single patron of the Chocolate Moose was looking down at me. "I can't, um … I think maybe I need to go home and try it. How about if I come up with anything, I'll call you and let you know?"

Tisha didn't seem particularly enthused by this idea, but what else could I say? I wasn't going to stand there and inhale the scent of Heather Montrose's pompons. (Which was how I'd found Shane. By smelling his pillow, though, not his pompons.)

Fortunately, Mark, at least, seemed to understand, and, taking me by the elbow, said, "I should be getting you home, anyway."

And so, under the watchful gazes of most of Ernie Pyle High's elite, Mark Leskowski escorted me back to his BMW, tucked me gently into the passenger seat, and then got behind the wheel and drove me slowly home.

Slowly not because he didn't want our evening together to end, but because he was so busy talking, I guess it was hard for him to accelerate at the same time.

"You get what this means, don't you?" he asked as we inched down Second Street. "If Heather really is missing—if the same person who killed Amber really has done the same thing to Heather—well, they can't keep on suspecting me, can they? Because I was with you the whole time. Right? I mean, right? Those FBI people can't say I had anything to do with it."

"Right," I said, looking down at Heather's pompons. Was this going to work? I wondered. I mean, would a lapful of pompons really lead me to a missing girl? It didn't seem very likely, but I closed my eyes, dug my fingers into the feathery strands, and tried to concentrate.

"And before I was with you," Mark was saying, "I was with them. Seriously. I came straight to your house from my interview with them. The FBI guys, I mean. So I never had an opportunity to do anything to Heather. She was all the way out at the quarry, with everybody else. And that waitress. She saw me with you, too."

"Right." It was really hard to concentrate, what with Mark talking so much.

Oh, well, I thought. I'll just wait until I get home, and try it there, in the privacy of my own bedroom. I'll have plenty of opportunity, once I get home.

Only of course I didn't. Because my parents had gotten home before I had, and were waiting for me on the front porch, their expressions on the grim side.

Busted again!

Mark, as he pulled into our driveway, went, "Are those your parents?"

"Yes," I said, gulping. I was so dead.

"They look nice." Mark waved at them as he got out of his car and walked around it to open my door. One thing you had to say about Mark Leskowski: he was a gentleman and all.

"Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Mastriani," he called to them. "I hope you don't mind my taking your daughter out for a quick bite to eat. I tried to have her home promptly, as it's a school night."