And up until recently, everyone believed it.
Everyone except Karen Sue Hankey, apparently.
Anyway, after Rosemary and I were through chatting, I hung up, and walked out to find Skip telling Claire about the time in third grade when he and I shot his GI Joe into space using a lead pipe and gunpowder extracted from about three hundred Blackcats. I noticed that he left out the part about putting a Roman candle inside my Barbie's head, an act about which I had not been consulted and which had not been part of our space shuttle program as I'd understood it. Also the part where we nearly blew ourselves up.
"Wow," Claire said as she licked sugar off her fingertips. "I always saw you two hanging out together, but I never knew you did cool stuff like that."
"Oh, yeah," I overheard Skip say. "Jess and I go way back. Way back."
Hello. What was this all about? Just because I'd spent two weeks hanging out with the guy at his parents' lakehouse did not mean I wanted to renew a relationship that had been formed due to a mutual love of explosives and which had disintegrated as soon as our parents discovered our illicit hobby and took away all our firecrackers. Skip and I had nothing in common. Nothing except our past.
"Ready to go?" Skip asked brightly as I came up to their table. "We better get a move on, or we'll be late for homeroom."
Homeroom. I forgot all about my annoyance with Skip.
"Hey, Claire," I asked her as we headed back toward the car. "That Friday Amber disappeared. Did she and Mark Leskowski hang out with the rest of you the whole day, or did they ever go off by themselves?"
"Are you kidding?" Claire tossed her copper-colored curls, which, in spite of having become windblown, still looked fresh and pretty. Claire was that kind of girl. "Those two were inseparable. I mean, Mark sits in front of me first period, and let me tell you, it was like he had to pry himself out of that girl's arms...."
I raised my eyebrows. No wonder Amber had never made it into her seat before the first bell.
"What about the day she disappeared?" I asked. "Were they still … inseparable."
Claire nodded. "Oh, yeah. They were all over each other. We were joking about how they were going to come down with some serious poison ivy, what with the number of trips they took into the woods with each other in order to 'be alone.'"
I climbed into the backseat. "And that last time they went off together, to be alone—was that how Mark came back?"
Claire plopped down into the passenger seat. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, did he come back alone?"
Claire tilted her head to one side as she thought about it. Beside her, Skip started up the car. I wondered what Rob, back at the garage, would think if he'd known I'd driven right by him and hadn't even said hi.
"You know," Claire said, "I can't imagine that he did. Come back alone, I mean. I wasn't paying that close attention—those guys aren't really my crowd, you know? I mean, that whole cheerleading, football thing. That is so not my scene. I mean, if they gave just half the amount of money to support the drama department as they do the athletics department, we could put on a lot better shows. We could have rented costumes, instead of making them ourselves, and we could get mikes so we don't have to scream to be heard in the back row—"
I could see that Claire was slipping off track. To steer her back to the subject at hand, I said, "You're right. It isn't fair. Somebody should do something. So you didn't see Mark come back alone from any of his and Amber's trips into the woods together?"
"No," Claire said. "I don't think so. I mean, somebody would have said something if Mark had come back alone. Don't you think? Don't you think somebody would have said 'Hey, Mark, where's Amber?'"
"You'd think so," Skip said.
"Yes," I said, thoughtfully. "Wouldn't you?"
C H A P T E R
5
They held Amber Mackey's memorial service later that day. Instead of having it in a church or a funeral home or whatever, they had it in the gym.
That's right. The gym of Ernest Pyle High School.
And they had it during seventh period. Attendance was mandatory. The only person who was not there, actually, was Amber. I guess Principal Feeney drew the line at letting Amber's parents drag her coffin out in front of all two thousand of their daughter's peers.
The band played a slowed-down rendition of the school song, I guess so it would sound sad. Then Principal Feeney got up and talked about what a great person Amber had been. I doubt he had ever even met her, but whatever. He looked good in the dark gray suit he'd donned for the occasion.
When the principal was done talking, Coach Albright came out and said a few words. Coach Albright is not known for his eloquence as a speaker, so fortunately he didn't say much. He just announced that his players would be wearing black armbands on their uniforms for the season in honor of Amber. Never having been to a sporting event at my school, I had no idea what he was talking about until Ruth explained it to me.
Then Mrs. Tidd, the cheerleading coach, got up and said a bunch of stuff about how much they were going to miss Amber, especially when it came to her ability to do standing back tucks. Then she said that, in honor of Amber, both the varsity and junior varsity cheerleading squads had put together an interpretive dance.
Then—and I kid you not—the cheerleaders and Pompettes did this dance, in the middle of the gym floor, to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," from Titanic.
And people cried during it. I swear. I looked around, and people were totally crying.
It was a good dance and all. You could tell they'd worked totally hard on it. And they'd only had like two days or something to memorize it.
Still, it didn't make me feel like crying. Seriously. And I don't think I'm like a hardened person or anything. I just hope that when I die, nobody does an interpretive dance at my memorial service. I can't stand that kind of thing.
I can tell you what did make me feel like crying, though. The fact that, as the dance was going on, some people walked into the gym. I was sitting midway up the bleachers—Ruth wanted to make sure we could see everything, and she hadn't even known, at the time, that there was going to be an interpretive dance—but I could still make out their features. Well enough to know they weren't high-school students.
They weren't high-school teachers, either.
What they were was Feds.
Seriously. And not just any Feds, either, but my old friends Special Agents Johnson and Smith.
You would think that, by now, they'd have given up. I mean, they've been following me around since May, and they still don't have anything solid to pin on me. Not like what I'm doing is even wrong. I mean, okay, yeah, I help reunite missing kids with their families. Oooh, lock me up. I'm a dangerous criminal.
Except of course they don't want to lock me up. They want me to work for them.
But I have a real problem with working for an institution that routinely railroads people who might conceivably be innocent of the crimes with which they've been accused, just like The Fugitive....
And apparently it wasn't enough, my telling them I no longer had the power to find missing people. Oh, no. They have to tap my phone, and read my mail, and follow me all the way to Lake Wawasee.
And now they have the nerve to show up at a memorial service for one of my dead friends....
And yeah, okay, Amber wasn't really my friend, but I sat behind her for like half an hour every single weekday for six years. That has to count for something, right?