Safe House Read online

  Karen Sue Hankey. My mortal enemy.

  "I'll kill her," I said, again.

  "Well," Ruth said as she pulled into the driveway to my house, "I wouldn't suggest going to that extreme. But a firm lecture might be in order."

  Right. I'd firm lecture her to death.

  "Now," Ruth said. "What's this about Mark Leskowski?"

  I told her about seeing Mark in the guidance office.

  "That's awful," Ruth said when I was done. "Mark and Amber were always so cute together. He loved her so much. How can the police possibly suspect that he had anything to do with her death?"

  "I don't know," I said, remembering his sweaty palms. I'd left that part out when I'd repeated the story to Ruth. "Maybe he was the last person to see her or something."

  "Maybe," Ruth said. "Hey, maybe his parents will hire my dad to represent Mark. You know, if the cops do charge with him anything."

  "Yeah," I said. Ruth's dad was the best lawyer in town. "Maybe. Well. I better go." We'd gotten home so late the night before, I'd barely had a chance to say a word to my family. Another reason, I might add, I hadn't heard about Amber. "See you later."

  "Later," Ruth said as I started to get out of the car. "Hey, what was that with Todd Mintz in the caf today, coming to your defense against Jeff Day?"

  I looked at her blankly. "I don't know," I said. I hadn't actually realized that's what Todd had been doing, but now that I thought about it …

  "I guess he hates Jeff as much as we do," I said, with a shrug.

  Ruth laughed as she backed out of my driveway. "Yeah," she said. "That's probably why. And that miniskirt had nothing to do with it. I told you a makeover would do wonders for your social life."

  She honked as she drove away, but she wasn't going far. The Abramowitzes lived right next door.

  Which was how, as I was going up the steps to the front door of my own house, I was able to hear Ruth's twin brother Skip call from his own front porch, "Hey, Mastriani. Want to come over later and let me beat you at Bandicoot?"

  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 we
eks 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?"

  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?"r />
  "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.