Meg Cabot - Safe House

He's so used to me barging in, he doesn't even look up anymore.

"Get out," he said, without lifting his gaze from the copy of Starship Troopers he was perusing.

"Douglas," I said. "I have to know. Where were you last night from five o'clock until eight, when you came back to the house?"

He looked up at that. "Why do I have to tell you?" he wanted to know.

"Because," I said.

I wanted to tell him the truth, of course. I wanted to say, Douglas, the Feds think you may have had something to do with Amber Mackey's murder, and Heather Montrose's attack. I need you to tell me you didn't do it. I need you to tell me that you have witnesses who can verify your whereabouts at the time these crimes occurred, and that your alibi is rock solid. Because unless you can tell me these things, I may have to take an after-school job working with some particularly nasty people.

In other words, the FBI.

But I wasn't sure I could say these things to Douglas. I wasn't sure I could say these things to Douglas because it was hard to tell anymore what might set off one of his episodes. Most of the time, he seemed normal to me. But every once in a while, something would upset him—something seemingly stupid, like that we were out of Cheerios—and suddenly the voices—Douglas's voices—were back.

On the other hand, this was something serious. It wasn't about Cheerios or reporters from Good Housekeeping magazine standing in our yard wanting to interview me. Not this time. This time, it was about people dying.

"Douglas," I said. "I mean it. I need to know where you were. There's this rumor going around—I don't believe it or anything—but there's this rumor going around that you killed Amber Mackey, and that last night you kidnapped Heather Montrose and left her to die."

"Whoa." Douglas, who was lying on his bed, put down his comic book. "And how did I do this, supposedly? Using my superpowers?"

"No," I said. "I think the theory is that you snapped."

"I see," Douglas said. "And who is promoting this theory?"

"Well," I said, "Karen Sue Hankey in particular, but also most of the junior class of Ernie Pyle High, along with some of the seniors, and, um, oh, yeah, the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"Hmmm." Douglas considered this. "I find that last part particularly troubling. Does the FBI have proof or something that I killed these girls?"

"It's just one girl that's dead," I said. "The other one just got beat up."

"Well, why can't they ask her who beat her up?" Douglas wanted to know. "I mean, she'll tell them it wasn't me."

"She doesn't know who did it," I said. "She said they wore masks. And I figure even if she did know, she's not going to say. I am assuming whoever did this to her told her he'd finish the job if she talked."

Douglas sat up. "You're serious," he said. "People really do suspect me of doing this?"

"Yeah," I said. "And the thing is, the Feds are saying that unless I, you know, become a junior G-man, they're going to pin this thing on you. So before I sign up for my pension plan, I need to know. Have you got any kind of alibi at all?"

Douglas blinked at me. His eyes, like mine, were brown.

"I thought," he said, "that you'd told them you lost your psychic abilities."

"I did," I said. "I think my finding Heather Montrose in the middle of nowhere last night kind of tipped them off that maybe I hadn't been completely up front with them on that particular subject."

"Oh." Douglas looked uncomfortable. "The thing is, what I was doing last night . . . and the night that other girl disappeared . . . well, I was sort of hoping nobody would find out."

I stared at him. My God! So he had been up to something! But not, surely, lying in wait at that house on the pit road for an innocent cheerleader to go strolling by. . . .

"Douglas," I said. "I don't care what you were doing, so long as it didn't involve anything illegal. I just need something—preferably the truth—to tell Allan and Jill, or my butt is going to have 'Property of the U.S. Government' on it for the foreseeable future. So long as they have something on you, they own me. So I have to know. Do they have something on you?"

"Well," Douglas said, slowly. "Sort of...."

I could feel my world tilting, slowly … so slowly . . . right off its axis. My brother, Douglas. My big brother Douglas, whom all my life, it seemed, I'd been defending from others, people who called him retard, and spaz, and dorkus. People who wouldn't sit near him when we went to the movies as kids because sometimes he shouted things—that usually didn't make sense to everyone else—at the screen. People who wouldn't let their kids swim in the pool near him, because sometimes Douglas simply stopped swimming and just sank to the bottom, until a lifeguard noticed and fished him out. People who, every time a bike, or a dog, or a plaster yard gnome disappeared from the neighborhood, accused Douglas of having been the one who'd taken it, because Douglas . . . well, he wasn't all there, was he?

Only of course they were wrong. Douglas was all there. Just not in the way they considered normal.

But maybe, all this time … maybe they'd been right. Maybe this time Douglas really had done something wrong. Something so wrong, he didn't even want to tell me about it. Me , his kid sister, the one who'd learned how to swing a punch when she turned seven, just so that she could knock the blocks off the kids down the street who were calling him a freakazoid every time he passed by their house on the way to school.

"Douglas," I breathed, finding that my throat had suddenly, and inexplicably, closed. "What did you do?"

"Well," he said, unable to meet my gaze. "The truth is, Jess . . . the truth is . . ." He took a deep breath.

"I got a job."

C H A P T E R

16

The first call came right after dinner.

It was a quiet affair, dinner that night. Quiet because every single person at the table was angry with somebody else.

My mother, of course, was angry at me for having snuck out the night before with Rob Wilkins, a boy of whom she did not approve because a) he was too old for me, b) he had no aspirations for attending college, c) he rode a motorcycle, d) his mother was a waitress, and e) we did not know who Mr. Wilkins was or what he did, if anything, or if there even was a Mr. Wilkins, which Mary Wilkins had never admitted either way, at least in the presence of my father.

And she didn't even know about the whole probation thing.

My father was mad at my mother for being what he called an elitist snob and for not being more grateful that Rob had insisted on accompanying me on another of what he referred to as my idiotic vision quests, and making sure I didn't get myself killed.

I was mad at my dad for calling my psychic visions idiotic, when they had, as a matter of fact, saved a lot of lives and reunited a lot of families. I was also mad at him for thinking that, without some guy to watch over me, I could not take care of myself. And of course I was mad at my mom for not liking Rob.

Meanwhile, Douglas was mad at me because I had told him he had to 'fess up to Mom and Dad about the job thing. I fully understood why he didn't want to—Mom was going to flip out at the idea of her baby boy soiling his fingers at any sort of menial labor. She seemed to be convinced that the slightest provocation—like him maybe lifting a sponge to wipe the milk he'd spilled on the kitchen counter—was going to set him off into another suicidal tailspin.

But Dad was the one who was really going to bust a gut when he found out, and I don't mean from laughing, either. In our family, if you worked, you worked at one of Dad's restaurants, or not at all. That whole thing where they'd let me spend the summer as a camp counselor? Yeah, that had only come about because of the intensive musical training I would be receiving while I was at Wawasee. Otherwise, you can bet I'd have been relegated to the steam table at Joe's.