Mr. Goodhart didn't look nervous at all. He took another sip of coffee, then picked up the phone. "Okay, Jess," he said. "Who's it going to be—your mother, or your father?"
I was still crying pretty hard. I said, "M-my dad. Oh, please, my dad."
Mr. Goodhart called my dad at Mastriani's, where he was working that morning. Since neither of my parents had ever been called to school on account of me—in spite of all the fights I'd been in—I could hear urgency in my dad's voice as he asked Mr. Goodhart if I was all right. Mr. Goodhart assured him that I was, but that he might want to call his lawyer, if he had one. My dad, God bless him, hung up with a brisk, "We'll be there in five minutes." He never once even asked why.
After Mr. Goodhart hung up, he looked over at me, then reached for some tissues he kept in a box for the losers who sat in his office and cried all day about their unsatisfactory family life, or whatever.
I'm one of those losers now, I thought, as I dejectedly blew my nose.
"Tell me about it," Mr. Goodhart said.
And so, with a nervous glance at the FBI guys, to make sure they couldn't overhear, I did. I told Mr. Goodhart everything, from getting hit by the lightning all the way up until that morning, when Special Agent Davies flashed his badge. The only stuff I left out was the parts about Rob. I didn't figure Mr. Goodhart needed to know that.
By the time I got done telling Mr. Goodhart, my dad had arrived with our lawyer, who also happened to be Ruth's dad, Mr. Abramowitz. Special Agent Davies had recovered himself by then, and he acted like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't tried to grab me, and like I hadn't hit him in the face with a phone receiver.
Oh, no. Nothing of the sort. He was way professional as he told my dad and Mr. Abramowitz about how the FBI was very interested in the person who'd been making calls to the National Organization of Missing Children from the pay phone at which they'd found me. Apparently, at 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU, they had caller-ID phones, so Rosemary had known from the very first day I'd been calling from Indiana. All they needed to do was track down where in Indiana, then actually catch me making the call.
Then, voilà, as my mom would say, they had me.
Of course, the big question was what, now that they had me, were they going to do with me? As far as I knew, I hadn't actually broken any laws—well, except for striking a federal agent, and Special Agent Davies didn't seem all that anxious to bring that up again.
All the excitement—having two FBI agents, a father, and a lawyer in his counseling offices—had dragged out the principal, Mr. Feeney. Mr. Feeney rarely came out of his office, except sometimes during assembly to remind us not to drink and drive. Now he offered us the use of his private conference room, where we sat, the seven of us—me, my dad, Ruth's dad, the two special agents, Mr. Goodhart, and Mr. Feeney—while I repeated the story I'd just told Mr. Goodhart.
I guess you could say that, when I finished, they looked … well, skeptical. And it was kind of hard to believe. I mean, how had it happened? How was it that I just woke up every morning, knowing this totally random stuff about these kids? Yeah, the lightning had probably done it … but how? And why?
Nobody knew. My guess was, nobody would ever know.
But Special Agent Johnson, it turned out, really wanted to. Know, I mean. He asked me a ton of questions. Some of them were really weird, too. Like, had I experienced bleeding from my palms or my feet. I said, "Uh, no," and looked at him like he was crazy.
"If this is true," he began, after I thought he'd exhausted all the questions anyone could possibly ask somebody.
"If this is true?" my dad interrupted. My dad's not the world's most even-tempered guy. Not that he gets mad a lot. He hardly ever gets mad. But when he does, watch out. One time, this guy at the municipal swimming pool was following Douglas around, calling him a retard—this was when Douglas was like eleven or twelve years old. The guy was in his twenties, at least, and probably not too swift upstairs himself. But that didn't matter to my dad. He hauled off and slugged the guy, and then he held his face underwater for a while, until the lifeguard made him stop.
It was way cool.
"If?" my dad repeated. "Are you doubting the word of my little girl here?"
Special Agent Johnson probably hadn't heard the story of the guy at the swimming pool, but he looked scared, just the same. Because you could tell my dad was really proud of me. Not just because I hadn't cried this time while I was telling my side of things, but because, when you think about it, what I had done was pretty nifty. I had found a bunch of missing kids. Granted, one of them had been dead, but, hey, we'd never have known that if it hadn't been for me. And considering that he had one kid who was a schizo, and another who was basically a social leper, even if he had gotten into Harvard, well, I guess my dad was kind of stoked that at least one of his kids was making good, you know?
Special Agent Johnson held up a hand and said, "No, sir. Don't misunderstand me. I believe Miss Mastriani's story wholeheartedly. I'm only saying that, if it's true, well, then she's a very special young lady, and deserves some very special treatment."
I thought he might be talking about a ticker-tape parade in New York City, like the one they had for the Yankees that time they won the World Series. I wouldn't mind riding on a float, if it didn't go too slow.
But my dad right away suspected he was talking about something else.
"Like what kind of treatment?" he said, suspiciously.
"Well, usually, in cases like these—and I will have you know that we at the FBI respect those with extrasensory perception like Miss Mastriani's very highly. In fact, we often seek out advice from psychics when we find ourselves at a dead end in an investigation."
"I bet. What does that have to do with Jess?" My dad still sounded suspicious.
"Well, we'd like to invite Miss Mastriani—with your permission, of course, sir—to one of our research facilities, so that we can learn more about this astonishing ability of hers."
I immediately flashed back on one of my favorite videos when I'd been a kid, Escape to Witch Mountain. If you've seen that movie, you will recall that the kids in it, who have ESP—or extrasensory perception, as Special Agent Johnson called it—get sent to a special "research facility," where, even though they get their own soda fountain in their room—by which I'd been particularly impressed, since my mother wouldn't even let me have an E-Z Bake Oven for fear I'd burn down the house—they were still, basically, held prisoner.
"Um," I said loudly. Since no one had really been talking to me, everyone turned their heads to look at me. "No, thank you."
Mr. Goodhart, who obviously hadn't seen Escape to Witch Mountain, said, "Now, hold on a second, Jess. Let's hear Special Agent Johnson out. It isn't every day that someone with your special ability comes along. It's important that we try to learn as much as possible about what's happened to you, so that we can better understand the extraordinary ways in which the human mind works."
I glared at Mr. Goodhart. What a traitor! I couldn't believe it.
"I am not," I said, in a voice that was still too loud for Mr. Feeney's conference room, "going to any special research facility in Washington, D.C."
Special Agent Johnson said, "Oh, but this one is right here in Indiana. Only an hour away, at Crane Military Base, as a matter of fact. There we can adequately study Miss Mastriani's extraordinary talent. Maybe she could even help us find more missing people. When you were calling the Missing Children's Organization this morning, Miss Mastriani, it was because you had the location of yet another missing child, was it not?"
I scowled at him. "Yes," I said. "Not like I ever got the chance to tell them that, though. You two guys made me completely forget the addresses."