I reached out and grabbed a handful of Karen Sue’s shirt, on account of how she was slowly backing farther and farther away from me.
“Who?” I demanded. Even though it was still about seventy-five degrees, in spite of the coming rainstorm, my skin was prickly with goose bumps. “Who went into the lake and didn’t come out of it?”
“That one you were always yelling at,” Karen Sue said. “Shane. Jessica, while you were gone”—she shook her head—“Shane
drowned
.”
C H A P T E R
13
T
hunder rumbled again, much closer this time. Now the hair on my arms was standing up not because I was cold, but because of all the electricity in the air.
I grabbed hold of Karen Sue’s shirt with my other hand as well, and dragged her toward me. “What do you mean,
drowned
?”
“Just what I said.” Karen Sue’s voice was higher than ever. “Jess, he went into the lake and he never came out—”
“Bull,” I said. “That’s bull, Karen. Shane’s a good swimmer.”
“Well, when they blew the whistle for everyone to get out,” Karen Sue said, her tone starting to sound a little hysterical, “Shane never came onto shore.”
“Then he never went into the water in the first place,” I hissed from between gritted teeth.
“Maybe,” Karen Sue said. “And maybe if you’d been here, doing your job, and hadn’t gone off with your boyfriend”—she sneered in Rob’s direction— “you’d know.”
Everything, the trees, the cloudy sky, the path, everything, seemed to be spinning around. It was like that scene in the
Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy wakes up in the tornado. Except that I was the only thing standing still.
“I don’t believe you,” I said again. I shook Karen Sue hard enough to make her pink headband snap off and go flying through the air. “You’re lying. I ought to smash your face in, you—”
“All right.” Suddenly, the world stopped spinning, and Rob was there, prying my fingers off Karen Sue’s shirt. “All right, Mastriani, that’s enough.”
“You’re lying,” I said to Karen Sue. “You’re a liar, and everyone knows it.”
Karen Sue, white-faced and shaking, bent down, picked up her headband, and pushed it shakily back into place. There were some dead leaves stuck to it, but she apparently didn’t notice.
I really wanted to jump her, knock her to the ground, and grind her rat face into the dirt. Only I couldn’t get at her, because Rob had me around the waist, and wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard I struggled to get away. If Mr. Goodhart had been there, he’d have been way disappointed in me. I seemed to have forgotten all the anger-management skills he’d taught me.
“You know what else, Karen Sue?” I shouted. “You can’t play flute for squat! They weren’t even going to let you in here, with your lousy five out of ten on your performance score, except that Andrew Shippinger came down with mono, and they were
desperate
—”
“Okay,” Rob said, lifting me up off my feet. “That’s enough of that.”
“That was supposed to be
my
cabin,” I yelled at her, from over Rob’s shoulder. “The Frangipanis were supposed to be
mine
!”
Rob had turned me around so that I was facing Ruth. She took one look at me and went, “Jess. Cool it.”
I said fiercely, “He’s
not
dead. He’s
not
.”
Ruth blinked, then looked from me to Scott and back again. I looked at them, too, and realized from the way they were staring at me that something weird was going on with my face. I reached up to touch it, and felt wetness.
Great. I was crying. I was crying, and I hadn’t even noticed.
“She’s lying,” I said one last time, but not very loudly.
Rob must have decided the fight had gone out of me, since he put me down—though he kept one hand glued to the back of my neck—and said, “There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?”
He nodded toward the administrative offices. I wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands and said, “Okay.”
Ruth insisted on following Rob and me, and Scott, to my surprise, insisted on coming with her. It sunk into my numbed consciousness that there was something going on there, but I was too worried about Shane to figure it out just then. I’d think about it later. When we stepped into the building, the John Wayne look-alike secretary stood up and said, “Kids, they still don’t know anything yet. I know you’re worried, but if you could just stay with your campers—”
“Shane
is
my camper,” I said.
The woman’s thick eyebrows went up. She stared at me, apparently uncertain as to how best to reply.
I helped her out.
“Where are they?” I demanded, striding past her and down the hall. “Dr. Alistair’s office?”
The secretary, scrambling out from behind her desk, went, “Oh, wait. You can’t go back there—”
But it was too late. I’d already turned the corner and reached the door marked “Camp Director.” I threw it open. Behind a wide desk sat the white-haired, red-faced Dr. Alistair. In various chairs and couches around his office sat Pamela, two state troopers, a sheriff’s deputy, and the sheriff of Wawasee County himself.
“Jess.” Pamela jumped to her feet. “There you are. Oh, thank God. We couldn’t find you anywhere. And Dr. Alistair said you didn’t show up for a meeting with him this afternoon—”
I looked at Pamela. What was she playing at? She, of all people, should have known where I was. Hadn’t Jonathan Herzberg called and told her all about my returning his daughter to him?
I didn’t think this was an appropriate time to bring that up, however. I said, “I was unavoidably detained. Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”
Dr. Alistair stood up. He didn’t look like a world-famous conductor anymore, or even a camp director. Instead, he looked like a frail old man, though he couldn’t have been more than sixty years old.
“What’s going on?” he echoed. “What’s going on? You mean to say you don’t know? Aren’t you the famous psychic? How could you not know, with your special, magic powers? Hmm, Miss Mastriani?”
I glanced from Dr. Alistair to Pamela and back again. Had she told him? I supposed she must have.
But the astonished look on her face implied that she had not.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on, young lady,” Dr. Alistair said, “since your psychic powers seem to be failing you at the moment. One of our campers is missing. Not just any camper, but one of the boys assigned to
your
care. Ostensibly, he’s drowned. For the first time in our fifty-year history, we’ve had a death here at the camp.”
I flinched as if he’d hit me. Not because of what he’d said, though that was bad enough. No, it was what he hadn’t said, the thing that was implied in his tone:
That it was all my fault.
“But I’m surprised you didn’t know that already.” Dr. Alistair’s tone was mocking. “Lightning Girl.”
“Now, Hal,” the sheriff said in a gruff voice. “Why don’t we just calm down here? We don’t know that for sure. We don’t have a body yet.”
“The last time anyone saw him alive, he was on the way to the lake with the rest of his cabin. He isn’t anywhere on the campgrounds. The boy’s dead, I tell you. And it’s entirely our fault! If his
counselor
had been there to keep an eye on him, it wouldn’t have happened.”
My throat was dry. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Outside, lightning flashed, followed almost immediately by a long roll of thunder.
Then the heavens unloosed. Rain beat against the windows behind Dr. Alistair’s desk. One of the state troopers, looking out at the downpour, said, in a morose voice, “Gonna be hard to drag that lake now.”
Drag the lake?
Drag the lake
?
“Wasn’t there a lifeguard?”
Rob. Rob was trying to help. Rob was trying to deflect some of the blame from me. Sweet of him, of course, but a useless effort. It was my fault. If I’d been there, Shane never would have drowned. I wouldn’t have let him.
“It seems to me,” Rob said reasonably, “if the kid was swimming, there ought to have been a lifeguard. Wouldn’t the lifeguard have noticed someone drowning on his watch?”
Dr. Alistair squinted at him through the lenses of his bifocals. “Who,” he demanded, “are you?” Then he spied Ruth and Scott in the doorway. “What is this?” he demanded. “Who are you people? This is my private office. Get out.”
None of them moved, although Ruth looked like she really wanted to run somewhere far away. Somewhere where there weren’t any sheriff deputies or angry camp directors. It was just like the time her brother Skip had been stung by the bee, only instead of someone going into anaphylactic shock, someone—namely me—was dying a slower death … of guilt.
“Well,” Rob said. “Wasn’t there a lifeguard?”
The sheriff said, “There was. He didn’t notice anything unusual.”
“That’s because,” I said, more to myself than anyone else, “Shane never went into the water.” It wasn’t something I knew with any certainty. Just something I suspected.
But that didn’t stop Dr. Alistair from looking at me from behind his wire-rimmed glasses and demanding, “And I suppose, since you weren’t there, you’re able to tell that using your special powers?”
It was at this point that Rob took a step toward Dr. Alistair’s desk. The sheriff put out a hand, however, and said, “Easy, son.” Then, to Dr. Alistair, he said, “Just what are you talking about, Hal?”
“Oh, you don’t recognize her?” Dr. Alistair looked prim. I wondered if maybe losing a camper had sent him around the bend. He’d never been one of the most stable people, anyway, if his erratic behavior during all-camp rehearsal had been any indication: Dr. Alistair frequently became so enraged with the horn section, he threw his conducting baton at them, only missing because they’d learned to duck.
“Jessica Mastriani,” he went on, “the girl with the psychic power to find missing people. Of course it’s a little late for her help now, isn’t it? Considering the fact that the boy’s already dead.”
“Oh, Hal.” Pamela stood up. “We don’t know that. He might just have run away.” She looked at me. “Wasn’t there some altercation earlier today?”
I nodded, remembering the tick incident, and the fact that I had refused to give Lionel a strike for punching Shane.
More than that, however, I remembered the look Shane had given me when I’d lied to him about that photo of Taylor Monroe. He hadn’t believed me. He hadn’t believed a word I’d said.
Was this his way of getting back at me for lying to him?
If only, I thought, I could go to sleep right now. If I went to sleep right now, I’d be able to find out exactly where Shane was. Maybe if I could get Dr. Alistair really mad, he’d clock me with his baton, the way he was always trying to clock the horn players. Could I find missing kids while unconscious? Was that the same as being asleep?
Probably not. And I doubted the sheriff would let Dr. Alistair clock me, anyway. Rob definitely wouldn’t. I wondered if protectiveness was listed as one of the “10 Ways to Tell He Thinks of You as More Than Just a Friend.”
Like it mattered now. Now that it looked as if I might have killed a kid. Well, indirectly, anyway.
“What about the other boys from Birch Tree Cottage?” I asked. “Did anybody talk to them? Ask them if they’d seen Shane?” Dave? Where was Dave? He’d promised to look after them… .
“We’ve got some officers interviewing them now,” the sheriff said to me. “In their cabin. But so far … nothing.”
“He was last seen on his way to the lake with the others,” Dr. Alistair insisted stubbornly.
“Doesn’t mean he drowned,” Rob pointed out.
Dr. Alistair looked at him. “Who,” he wanted to know, “are you? You’re not one of the counselors.” He looked at Pamela. “He’s not one of the counselors, is he, Pamela?”
Pamela reached up to run a hand through her short blond hair. “No, Hal,” she said tiredly. “He’s not.”
“He’s my friend,” I said. I didn’t say Rob was my boyfriend because, well, he’s not. Plus I thought it might look even worse than it already did, me being gone for hours, then showing up with some random guy in tow. “And we were just leaving.”
But my efforts to cover up the truth about my feelings for Rob proved to be for nothing as Dr. Alistair said, pretty nastily, “Leaving? Oh, well, isn’t that special. You seem to have a knack, Miss Mastriani, for being unavailable when you’re needed most.”
My mouth fell open. What
was
this? I wondered. If he was going to fire me, why didn’t he just get it over with? I had to hurry up and get to sleep if we were ever going to find Shane.
“What about those special powers of yours?” Dr. Alistair went on. “Don’t you feel the slightest obligation to help us find this boy?”
Even then, I still didn’t get what was going on. I just thought Dr. Alistair was crazy, or something.
I think Rob must have felt the same thing, because he reached out and grabbed one of my arms, just above the elbow, like he was going to pull me out of the way if Dr. Alistair whipped out that baton and started firing.
I went, “I don’t have special powers anymore, Dr. Alistair.”
“Oh?” Dr. Alistair’s shaggy white eyebrows went up. “Is that so?
Then where were you all afternoon
?”
I felt my stomach drop, as if I’d been on an elevator. Except, of course, that I wasn’t. How had he known?
How had he known
?
“Okay,” Rob said, steering me toward the door—I guess because I was so stunned, I wasn’t moving. “We’re going now.”
“You can’t go anywhere!” Dr. Alistair thumped on his desk with his fist. “You are an employee of Lake Wawasee Camp for Gifted Child Musicians, and you—”
Something finally got through the haze of confusion his question about where I’d been all afternoon had cast around me. And that something was the fact that he was still speaking to me as if I worked for him.
“Not anymore,” I interrupted. “I mean, I’m fired, aren’t I?”
Dr. Alistair looked alarmed. “Fired?” at the same time as Pamela said, “Oh, Jess, of course not. None of this is your fault.”
Not fired?
Not fired
? How could I be not fired? I had taken off for hours, without offering a single explanation as to where I’d been. And while I’d been gone, one of the kids in my charge had disappeared. And I
wasn’t fired
?