Meg Cabot - Safe House

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?"

I looked down at myself in surprise. "Oh," I said. "School."

"School?" Douglas seemed shocked. "Since when have you ever bothered dressing up for school?"

"I'm turning over a new leaf," I informed him. "No more jeans, no more T-shirts, no more fighting, no more detention."

"Interesting corollary," Douglas said. "Equating jeans with fighting and detention. But I'll bite. Did it work?"

"Not exactly," I said, and told him about my day, leaving out the part about what Heather had said concerning him.

When I was through, Doug whistled, low and long.

"So they're blaming you," he said. "Even though you couldn't possibly have known anything about it?"

"Hey," I said with a shrug. "Amber was in with the popular crowd, and popular kids are not popular for their ability to objectively reason. Just for their looks, mainly. Or maybe their ability to suck up."

"Jeez," Douglas said. "What are you going to do?"

"What can I do?" I asked with a shrug. "I mean, she's dead."

"Couldn't you—I don't know. Couldn't you summon up a picture of her killer? Like in your mind's eye? Like if you really concentrated?"

"Sorry," I said in a flat voice. "It doesn't work like that."

Unfortunately. My psychic ability does not extend itself toward anything other than addresses. Seriously. Show me a picture of anyone, and that night, I'll dream up the person's most current location. But precognitive indications of the lottery numbers? No. Visions of plane crashes, or impending national doom? Nothing. All I can do is locate missing people. And I can only do that in my sleep.

Well, most of the time, anyway. There'd been a strange incident over the summer when I'd managed to summon up someone's location just by hugging his pillow. . . .

But that, I remained convinced, had been a fluke.

"Oh," Douglas said suddenly, leaning over to pull something out from beneath his bed. "By the way, I was in charge of collecting the Abramowitzes' mail while they were away, and I took the liberty of relieving them of this." He presented me with a large brown envelope that had been addressed to Ruth. "From your friend at 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU, I believe?"

I took the envelope and opened it. Inside—as there was every week, mailed to Ruth, since I suspected the Feds were going through my mail, just waiting for something like this to prove I'd been lying to them when I'd said I was no longer psychic—was a note from my operative at the missing children's organization—Rosemary—and a photo of a kid she had determined was really and truly missing . . . not a runaway, who might be missing by choice, or a kid who'd been stolen by his noncustodial parent, who might be better off where he was. But an actual, genuinely missing kid.

I looked at the picture—of a little Asian girl, with buckteeth and butterfly hair clips—and sighed. Amber Mackey, who'd sat in front of me in homeroom every day for six years, might be dead. But for the rest of us, life goes on.

Yeah. Try telling that to Amber's parents.

C H A P T E R

4

When I woke up the next morning, I knew two things: One, that Courtney Hwang was living on Baker Street in San Francisco. And two, that I was going to take the bus to school that day.

Don't ask me what one had to do with the other. My guess would be a big fat nothing.

But if I took the bus to school, I'd have an opportunity that I wouldn't if I let Ruth drive me to school in her Cabriolet: I'd be able to talk to Claire Lippman, and find out what she knew about the activities at the quarry just before Amber went missing.

I called Ruth first. My call to Rosemary would have to wait until I found a phone that no one could connect me to, if 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU happened to trace the call. Which they did every call they got, actually.

"You want to take the bus," Ruth repeated, incredulously.

"It's nothing against the Cabriolet," I assured her. "It's just that I want to have a word with Claire."

"You want to take the bus," Ruth said again.

"Seriously, Ruth," I said. "It's just a one-time thing. I just want to ask Claire a few questions about what was up at the quarry the night Amber disappeared."

"Fine," Ruth said. "Take the bus. See if I care. What have you got on?"

"What?"

"On your body. What are you wearing on your body?"

I looked down at myself. "Olive khaki mini, beige crocheted tank with matching three-quarter-sleeve cardigan, and beige espadrilles."

"The platforms?"

"Yes."

"Good," Ruth said, and hung up.

Fashion is hard . I don't know how those popular girls do it. At least my hair, being extremely short and sort of spiky, didn't have to be blow-dried and styled. That would just about kill me, I think.

Claire was sitting on the stoop of the house where the bus picked up the kids in our neighborhood. I live in the kind of neighborhood where people don't mind if you do this. Sit on their stoop, I mean, while waiting for the bus.

Claire was eating an apple and reading what looked to be a script. Claire, a senior, was the reigning leading lady of Ernie Pyle High's drama club. In the bright morning sunlight, her red bob shined. She had definitely blow-dried and styled just minutes before.

Ignoring all the freshmen geeks and car-less rejects that were gathered on the sidewalk, I said, "Hi, Claire."

She looked up, squinting in the sun. Then she swallowed what she'd been chewing and said, "Oh, hi, there, Jess. What are you doing here?"

"Oh, nothing," I said, sitting down on the step beneath the one she'd appropriated. "Ruth had to leave early, is all." I prayed Ruth wouldn't drive by as I said this, and that if she did, she wouldn't tootle the horn, as she was prone to when we passed what we've always considered the rejects at the bus stop.

"Huh," Claire said. She glanced admiringly down at my bare leg. "You've got a great tan. How'd you get it?"

Claire Lippman has always been obsessed with tanning. It was because of this obsession, actually, that my brother Mike had become obsessed with her. She spent almost every waking hour of the summer months on the roof of her house, sunbathing … except when she could get someone to drive her to the quarries. Swimming in the quarries was, of course, against the law, which was why everyone did it, Claire Lippman more than anyone. Though, as a redhead, her hobby must have been a particularly frustrating one for her, since it took almost a whole summer of exposure to turn her skin even the slightest shade darker. Sitting beside her, I felt a little like Pocahontas. Pocahontas hanging out with The Little Mermaid.