All the geeks—the backpack patrol, Ruth and I called them, because of their enormous, well, backpacks—turned to look at me. There is nothing, let me tell you, more humiliating than being stared at by a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys.
I had no choice but to call back to Skip, "No, Ruth and I did not get into a fight. I just felt like riding the bus today."
Really, in the history of the bus stop, had anyone ever uttered anything as lame as that?
"Don't be an idiot," Skip said. "Get in the car. I'll drive you."
All the nerds, who'd been staring at Skip while he spoke, turned their heads to look expectantly at me.
"Um," I said, feeling my cheeks heating up and thankful my tan hid my blush. "No, thanks, Skip. Claire and I are talking."
"Claire can come, too." Skip ducked back inside the car, leaned over, and threw open the passenger door. "Come on."
Claire was already gathering up her books.
"Great!" she squealed. "Thanks!"
I followed more reluctantly. This was so not what I'd had in mind.
"Come on, Claire," Skip was saying as I approached the car. "You can get in back—"
I saw Claire, who was a willowy five-foot-nine if she was an inch, hesitate while looking into the cramped recesses of Skip's backseat. With a sigh, I said, "I'll get in back."
When I was wedged into the dark confines of the Trans Am's rear seat, Claire threw the passenger seat back and climbed in.
"This is so sweet of you, Skip," she said, checking out her reflection in his rearview mirror. "Thanks a lot. The bus is okay, and all, but, you know. This is much better."
"Oh," Skip said, fastening his seatbelt. "I know. You all right back there?" he asked me.
"Fine," I said. I had, I knew, to turn the conversation back to the subject of the quarries. But how?
"Great." Skip threw the car into gear and we were off, leaving the geeks in our dust. Actually, that part I sort of enjoyed.
"So," Skip said, "how are you ladies this morning?"
See? This is the problem with Skip. He says things like "So, how are you ladies this morning?" How are you supposed to take a guy who says things like that seriously? Skip's not ugly, or anything—he looks a lot like Ruth, actually: a chubby blond in glasses. Only, of course, Skip doesn't have breasts.
Still, Skip just isn't dream date material, despite the Trans Am.
Too bad he hasn't seemed to figure that out yet.
"I'm fine," Claire said. "How about you, Jess?"
"I'm fine," I said, from the manger-sized backseat. Then I took the plunge. "What were you saying, Claire? About being at the quarry the day Amber disappeared?"
"Oh," Claire said. The wind through the T-top was unstyling her bob, but Claire didn't appear to care. She ran her fingers through it delightedly. You don't get that kind of fresh air on the bus.
"My God, what a nightmare that was. We'd all just been hanging out, you know, all day. No big deal. Some of those guys from the football team, they brought a grill, and they were barbecuing, and everyone was, you know, pretty drunk, even though I warned them they'd get dehydrated, drinking beer in the sun—" For someone whose primary goal was to bake her skin to a crisp, Claire had always been surprisingly health-conscious. One of the reasons it took her so long to achieve the tan she wanted each summer was that she insisted on slathering herself with SPF 15.
"And then the sun went down, and some people started packing up their stuff to, you know, go home. And that's when Mark—Leskowski, you know? He and Amber were going out for, like, ever. Anyway, he was all, 'Has anybody seen Amber?' And we all started looking for her, through the woods, you know, and then, thinking maybe she'd tripped or something, in the water. I mean, we thought maybe she'd fallen in, or something. The drop's pretty steep. When we couldn't find her, we figured, well, she must have gone home with somebody else, or whatever. We didn't say that to Mark, of course, but that's what we were all thinking."
Claire turned to look at me, her pretty blue eyes troubled. "But then she never came home. And the next day, as soon as it was light, we all went back to the quarry, you know, to look for her."
"But you didn't," I said, "find anything."
"Not that day. Her body didn't show up until Sunday morning." Claire went on, "A bunch of people tried to call you, you know. Hoping you could help find her. This one girl, Karen Sue Hankey, she says you found some kid over the summer who'd been lost in a cave, so we thought maybe you still had, you know, that whole psychic thing going—"
That psychic thing. That was one way of putting it, anyway.
I was seriously going to kill Karen Sue Hankey.
"I wasn't exactly reachable last weekend," I said. "I was up at—" I broke off, noticing we were approaching the turnoff to Pike's Creek Road. "Hey, Skip, turn here."
Skip obediently took the turn. "And I'm turning here because?"
"I want, um, a cruller," I said, since there was a Dunkin' Donuts near the garage where Rob worked.
"Ooh," Claire said. "Crullers. Yum. You don't get crullers on the bus."
When we buzzed past Rob's uncle's garage, I sank down real low in the seat, so in case Rob was outside, he wouldn't see me.
Rob was outside, and he didn't see me. He was bent inside the hood of an Audi, his soft dark hair falling forward over his square-jawed face, his jeans looking properly snug and faded in all the right places. It was warm out, even though it wasn't quite eight in the morning yet, and Rob had on a short-sleeved shirt, revealing his nicely pronounced triceps.
It had been nearly three weeks since I'd last seen him. He'd shown up at the Wawasee All-Camp recital, where I'd had a solo. I'd been surprised … I hadn't expected him to come four hours, one way, just to hear me play.
And then, since I had to go out with my parents afterwards—and let's face it, my parents would not approve of Rob, a guy with a criminal record who comes, as they say in books, from the wrong side of the tracks—he just had to get back on his bike afterward and drive four hours home. That's a long way to go, just to hear some girl you aren't even going out with play a nocturne on her flute.
It got me thinking. You know, since he'd driven so far to hear me play. Maybe he liked me after all, in spite of the whole jailbait thing.
Except, of course, that I'd been back two days already, and he still hadn't called.
Anyway, that brief glimpse of Rob, checking that Audi's oil, was all I was probably going to see of him for a while, so I watched until we pulled into the parking lot of the Dunkin' Donuts and I couldn't see him anymore.
Hey, I know it was uncool to be scoping on boys at the same time as I was trying to solve a murder. But Nancy Drew still had time to date Ned Nickerson, didn't she, in between solving all those mysteries?
Except of course, Ned wasn't on probation, and I don't think any of those mysteries Nancy solved involved a dead cheerleader.
While Skip and Claire went to the counter to get crullers, I said I had to make a call. Then I went to the payphone by the door to the rest-room and dialed 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU.
Rosemary was glad to hear from me, even though of course we had to keep the call brief. Rosemary is totally risking her job, doing what she does for me. You know, sending me those photos and reports on missing kids. Those files aren't supposed to leave the office.
But I guess Rosemary thinks it is worth it, if even one kid gets found. And since we've started working together, we've found a lot of kids, between the two of us. We kind of have to cool it, of course, so no one gets too suspicious. We average about a kid a week, which, let me tell you, is way better than 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU was doing before I came along.
The good thing about working with Rosemary, as opposed to like the FBI or the police or something, is that Rosemary is totally discreet and would never, say, call the National Enquirer and have them come to my house to interview me. Having too many reporters around has a tendency to send Douglas into an episode. That is why I lied last spring, and told everyone I didn't have my psychic powers anymore.