"Oh." Mark sat down again. "Okay." He finished all the water in his cup, crumpled it, looked around for a wastebasket, and, not seeing one, left the cup on the magazine-strewn table in front of us.
"So, what are you in for?" he asked me.
"I tried to choke Heather Montrose," I said.
"Really?" He grinned. "I've felt like doing that myself, coupla times."
I wanted to point out to him that this was something he'd be wise to keep from the sheriff, but didn't think I could do so in front of the secretary, who was busy pretending not to listen to our conversation.
"I mean, that Heather," Mark said. "She can be a real …" He politely refrained from swearing. A real Boy Scout, Mark Leskowski. "Well, you know."
"I do know," I said. "Listen. I'm sorry about Amber. She was your girlfriend, right?"
"Yeah." Mark's gaze strayed from my face to the center of the table between us. "Thanks."
The door to Mr. Goodhart's office opened, and he came out and spoke with forced joviality.
"Mark," he said. "Good to see you. Come in here a minute, will you? There are some folks here who want to have a word with you."
Mark nodded and stood up. As he did so, he wiped his hands nervously on the denim covering his thighs. When he took his hands away again, I saw damp spots where they'd been.
He was sweating, even though, with the air conditioning on full blast, I was a little chilly, in spite of my sweater set.
Mark Leskowski was nervous. Very nervous.
He looked down at me as he passed by my couch.
"Well," he said. "See you later."
"Sure," I said. "Later."
He went into Mr. Goodhart's office. Just before following Mark, Mr. Goodhart noticed I was still sitting there.
"Jessica," he said, jerking a thumb toward the door to the central hallway. "Out."
And so I left.
C H A P T E R
3
"I figured it out," Ruth said as we drove home—with the top down—after school let out that day.
I was too distracted to reply, however, as we'd just sailed past the turnoff to Pike's Creek Road.
"Dude," I said. "You missed it."
"Missed what?" Ruth demanded, taking a healthy sip from the Diet Coke she'd picked up from the drive-through. Then she made a face. "Oh, God. You have got to be kidding me."
"It's not that far out of the way," I pointed out to her.
"You," Ruth said, "are never going to learn. Are you?"
"What?" I shrugged innocently. "What is so wrong about driving past his place of work?"
"I'll tell you what's wrong with it," Ruth said. "It is a direct violation of The Rules."
I snorted.
"I'm serious," Ruth said. "Boys don't like to be chased, Jess. They like to do the chasing."
"I am not chasing him," I said. "I am merely suggesting that we drive past the garage where he works."
"That," Ruth said, "is chasing him. As is calling him and hanging up when he answers." Oops. Guilty. "As is haunting the places he normally hangs out in, memorizing his schedule, and pretending to bump into him by mistake."
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
I snapped my seatbelt in irritation. "He'd never know we were swinging by just to see him," I said, "if you pretended like you needed an oil change or something."
"Would you," Ruth said, "get your mind off Rob Wilkins for five minutes and listen to me? I am trying to tell you, I think I figured out why everybody believes you still have psychic powers."
"Oh, yeah?" I was so not interested. It had been an exhausting day. It was bad enough a girl we knew had been murdered. The fact that people were going around blaming me for her death was even harder to take. "You know, Mark Leskowski actually offered me water today in the guidance office. If I were stranded in the desert, I would never have expected him to—"
"Karen Sue," Ruth said as we made the turn by Kroger's.
I looked around. "Where?"
"No. Karen Sue," Ruth said, "is the one going around telling everyone you're still psychic. Suzy Choi told me she overheard Karen Sue telling everyone at the Thirty-one Flavors last Saturday night that, over the summer, you found this kid who'd gone missing inside a cave."
I forgot all about Rob. "I'll kill her," I said.
"I know." Ruth shook her head so that her blonde curls bounced. "And we thought we'd covered our tracks so well."
I couldn't believe it. Karen Sue and I had never exactly been friends, or anything, but that she'd out me so extremely … well, I was shocked.
I shouldn't have been that shocked, however. It was Karen Sue we were talking about, after all. The girl about whom my mother had, for years, asked, "Why can't you be more like her? Karen Sue never gets into fights, and she always wears whatever her mother tells her, and I've never heard that Karen Sue refused to go to church because she wanted to stay home to watch old Battlestar Galactica reruns."
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."