Meg Cabot - Safe House

"Let me go," Mark screamed. "Lemme freaking go!"

Only he didn't say "freaking."

I turned the key, and the BMW's trunk popped open.

And that's how Special Agents Johnson and Smith found us, a minute or so later. With the entire in crowd of Ernest Pyle High School crowded around Mark Leskowski's BMW, while Rob Wilkins hung onto Mark, and Todd Mintz hung onto Jeff Day (who'd also tried to get away at the last minute).

And me half-in, half-out of Mark Leskowski's trunk, trying to get Claire Lippman to start breathing again.

C H A P T E R

20

"Well, that certainly sucked," Claire said, later that evening.

"Tell me about it," I said.

"No, I mean, really. Like, I was sure I was going to die."

"You looked dead," Ruth pointed out.

"Really?" Claire seemed very interested in this piece of information. "How, exactly, did I look?"

Ruth, sitting on the windowsill across from Claire Lippman's hospital bed, glanced at me, as if unsure whether or not to answer the question.

"No, really," Claire said. "I want to know. So in case I ever have to do a death scene, I'll know how to look."

"Well," Ruth said, hesitantly. "You were really pale, and your eyes were closed, and you weren't breathing. But that was on account of the tape over your mouth."

"And the heat," Skip pointed out. "Don't forget the heat."

"It was a hundred and ten inside that trunk," Claire said cheerfully. "That's what the EMTs said, anyway. I would have died of dehydration way before Mark got around to killing me."

"Uh," Ruth said. "Yeah. About that. That's the part I'm not real clear on. Why did Mark want to kill you, again?"

Claire rolled her pretty blue eyes. "Duh," she said. "Because he saw me talking to Jess."

Ruth looked over at me, where I was sitting between the dozens of huge floral arrangements people had been sending to Claire ever since she'd been admitted. She was due to be released in the morning, so long as the results of her CAT scan confirmed she had not, in fact, suffered a concussion. But still the flowers kept coming.

Claire Lippman was actually a lot more popular than I had ever realized.

"Explanation, please," Ruth said.

"It's really very simple," I said. "Amber Mackey got pregnant—"

"Pregnant!" Ruth cried.

"Pregnant!" her twin brother echoed.

"Pregnant," I said. "And she told Mark she wanted to keep the baby. In fact, Amber wanted him to marry her, so they could raise their child together, be a little happy family. That's what they were talking about that day at the quarry, when Claire said she saw Amber and Mark keep going off together, alone. Amber's pregnancy."

"Right," Claire said. "Only a pregnant girlfriend was not part of Mark's plan for the future."

"Far from it," I said. "Getting married, or even paying child support, was going to totally mess up Mark's football career. It was, in his book, 'unacceptable,' So, near as we can figure it out—and he hasn't confessed, mind you—Mark beat Amber up, in the hopes that she'd change her mind, and left her somewhere—probably in his trunk. They're checking it for fibers now. When that didn't manage to convince Amber to see things his way, he killed her and tossed her body into the quarry."

"Okay," Ruth said. "I can see all that, I guess. But what about Heather? Wasn't Mark with you when Heather disappeared?"

"Yes," I said. "He was. That was the point of Heather's attack. Mark was starting to feel the heat, you know, with the Feds breathing down his neck, so he figured if another girl got attacked at a time during which he had a rock-solid alibi, he'd be in the clear."

"And what's more rock-solid," Skip said, "than the fact that he was with the FBI's friend, Lightning Girl."

"Right," I said. "Well, more or less. And you know, it worked. When Heather disappeared, no one suspected Mark."

"Except you," Claire pointed out.

"Well," I said, a little guiltily. "I didn't exactly suspect Mark." Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd been convinced no one as hot as he was could be a criminal. Stupid me. "But that house … I knew there was something up with that house. So when I started asking around about it, Mark got scared again and had Jeff Day—the same guy who'd kidnapped, and then later beat up, Heather—make some threatening phone calls. And then, when that didn't seem to be working, Mark and Jeff broke into Mastriani's, poured gasoline all over the place, then lit a match and burned the place down."

At least according to Jeff Day, who'd started crying like a baby the minute the cops arrived, then spilled his guts like a squashed caterpillar.

"Mark's biggest mistake," I went on, "was enlisting the help of someone like Jeff Day in getting him out of his little jam. I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense, since Jeff is used to taking direction from Mark, on account of Mark being the team quarterback and all. But Jeff needs a lot of direction. He was always coming up to Mark and asking him what to do … especially right before the first class of the day, homeroom."

"Where Mark sat in front of me," Claire said. She was taking her role as victim very seriously, and waved her arm, the one with the IV in it, as much as possible, to bring attention to her infirmity. "So of course this morning, when he and Jeff were whispering before the bell rang, something about the way they looked … so sneaky . . . triggered something. I just knew. I can't say how I knew. I just put two and two together. But you can't go to the police, you know, with a hunch. But I figured I could go to Jess—"

"But when she tried," I said, "Mark caught her. And she was so startled—"

"I ran," Claire said gravely. "Like a startled fawn."

I wasn't so sure about the fawn part. Claire was kind of tall for a fawn. A gazelle, maybe.

"But Mark went around the side of the building," I said, "and caught up with her, and—"

"—hit me right back here," Claire said, touching the back of her head, "with something heavy. And when I woke up again, I was in his trunk."

"My guess is he was going to take her to the house on the pit road," I said, "and do to her what he'd done to Amber...."

"So what," Ruth asked, "is going to happen? To Mark, I mean?"

"Well," I said. "With the help of Jeff's testimony—which I'm sure he'll give in exchange for a reduced sentence for his part in the whole thing—Mark's going to prison. For a long time."

Which was really going to mess up his plan for getting drafted right out of college by the NFL.

Before anyone could say anything in reply to this, Claire's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Lippman, came back into the room.

"Oh, thanks, kids," Mrs. Lippman said, "for keeping our baby entertained while we were gone. Here, Claire, a mint-chocolate-chip shake, just like you asked."

Claire immediately lost all of the animation she'd had when talking to Ruth and Skip and me. Instead, she fell back against the pillows, and let her head loll a little.

She was really milking this for all she was worth. Well, she was in the drama club, after all.

"Thanks, Mom," she said weakly.

"Well, uh," I said. "We better go."

"Yeah," Ruth said, slipping off the windowsill. "Visiting hours are up anyway. Bye, Claire. Bye, Dr. and Mrs. Lippman."

"Bye, kids," Dr. Lippman said.

But Mrs. Lippman couldn't let it go with a simple good-bye. No, she had to come over and give me a big hug and call me her little girl's savior and tell me that if there was anything—anything at all—she or her husband could do for me, I needed only to ask. The Lippmans—along with, surprise, surprise, Heather's parents—were starting a Restore Mastriani's Fund. I wished that instead they were starting a Pay Off Karen Sue Hankey's Medical Bills Fund, so that Mrs. Hankey would drop her suit against me.