Code Name Cassandra (8 page)

“They are little monsters,” Karen muttered, under her breath. “Won’t do a thing I say, and the mouths on them! I never heard such language in all my life! And all night long, it was giggle, giggle, giggle.”

“Me, too,” Ruth said tiredly. “They didn’t nod off until around five, I think.”

“Five-thirty for me,” Scott said. He looked at me. “I can’t believe that Shane of yours just slipped off to Slumber land without a fight.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. “What’s your secret?”

I honestly didn’t know any better. I said, cheerfully, “Oh, I just told them all this really long story, and they nodded off right away. We all slept like stones. Didn’t wake up until reveille.”

Ruth, astonished, said, “Really?”

“What was the story about?” Dave wanted to know.

Laughingly, I told them. Not about Rob, of course, but about the killer car, and the appropriating of some of Mr. King’s works.

They listened in stunned silence. Then Karen said vehemently, “I don’t believe in frightening children with ghost stories.”

I snorted. Karen, of course, didn’t know what she was talking about. What kid didn’t love a ghost story? Ghost stories weren’t the problem. But the fact that a three-year-old could be kidnapped from a mall and not be found until two years later?

Now
that
was scary.

Which was why, instead of joining my fellow Birch Trees for breakfast that morning—even though I was starving, of course, after my swim and my Fiddle Faddle dinner of the night before—I snuck back into the camp’s administrative offices, in the hopes of finding a phone I could use.

I scored one without a lot of trouble. The secretary with the NASCAR-driving boyfriend wasn’t in yet. I slipped into her chair and, dialing nine first to get out, dialed the number to the National Organization for Missing Children.

Rosemary didn’t pick up. Some other lady did.

“1-800-WHERE-R-YOU,” she said. “How may I direct your call?”

I had to whisper, of course, so I wouldn’t be overheard. I also assumed my best Spanish accent, just in case the line was being monitored. “Rosemary,
por favor
.”

The lady went, “Excuse me?”

I whispered, “
Rosemary
.”

“Oh,” the lady said. “Um. One moment.”

Jeez! I didn’t have a moment! I could be busted any
second
. All I needed was for Pamela to walk in and find that not only had I abandoned my charges, but I was also making personal use of camp property… .

“This is Rosemary,” a voice said, cautiously, into my ear.

“Hey,” I said, dropping the Spanish accent. There was no need to say who was calling. Rosemary knew my voice. “Taylor Monroe. Gainesville, Florida.” I rattled off the street address. Because that’s how it comes. The information, I mean. It’s like there’s a search engine inside of my brain: insert name and photo image of missing child, and out comes full address, often with zip code attached, of where child can be located.

Seriously. It’s
bizarre
, especially considering I’ve never even heard of most of these places.

“Thank you,” Rosemary said, careful not to say my name within hearing of her supervisor, who’d sicced the Feds on me once before. “They’re going to be so happy. You don’t know—”

It was at this point that Pamela, looking troubled, came striding down the hall, heading straight toward the secretary’s desk.

I whispered, “Sorry, Rosemary, gotta go,” and hung up the phone. Then I ducked beneath the desk.

It didn’t do any good, though. I was busted. Way busted.

Pamela went, “Jess?”

I curled into a tight ball underneath the secretary’s desk. Maybe, if I didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, Pamela would think she had seen a mirage or something, and go away.

“Jessica,” Pamela said, in the kind of voice you probably wouldn’t use if you were talking to a mirage. “Come out. I saw you.”

Sheepishly, I crawled out from beneath the desk.

“Look,” I said. “I can explain. It’s my grandma’s ninetieth birthday today, and if I didn’t call first thing, well, there’d be H to pay—”

I thought I’d get brownie points for saying H instead of hell, but it didn’t work out that way. For one thing, Pamela had looked as if she’d already been in a bad mood before she saw me. Now she was even more upset.

“Jess,” she said in a weird voice. “You know you aren’t supposed to be using camp property—”

“—for personal calls,” I finished for her. “Yes, I know. And I’m really sorry. Like I said, it was an emergency.”

Pamela looked way more upset than the situation warranted. I knew something else was up. But I figured it was some kind of orchestra camp emergency or something. You know, like they’d run out of clarinet reeds.

But of course that wasn’t it. Of course it turned out to have something to do with me after all.

“Jess,” Pamela said. “I was just going to look for you.”

“You were?” I blinked at her. There was only one reason for Pamela to have been looking for me, and that was that I was in trouble. Again.

And the only thing I’d done recently—besides make a personal call from a camp phone—was the whole ghost story thing. Had Karen Sue ratted me out for that? If so, it had to be a record. I had left her barely five minutes ago. What did the girl have, bionic feet?

It was clear that Pamela was on Karen Sue’s side about the whole not frightening little children thing. I could see I was going to have to do some fast talking.

“Look,” I said. “I can explain. Shane was completely out of control last night, and the only way I could get him to stop picking on the littler kids was to—”

“Jessica,” Pamela interrupted, sort of sharply. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s … there’s actually someone here to see you.”

I shut up and just stared at her. “Someone here?” I echoed lamely. “To see
me
?”

A thousand things went through my head. The first thing I thought was … Douglas. Douglas’s phone call the night before. He hadn’t just been calling to say he missed me. He’d been calling to say good-bye. He’d finally done it. The voices had told him to, and so he had. Douglas had killed himself, and my dad—my mother—my other brother—one of them was here to break the news to me.

A roaring sound started in my ears. I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of my stomach.

“Where?” I asked, through lips that felt like they were made of ice.

Pamela nodded, her expression grave, toward her office door. I moved toward it slowly, with Pamela following close behind. Let it be Michael, I prayed. Let them have sent Mikey to break the news to me. Michael I could take. If it was my mother, or even my father, I was bound to start crying. And I didn’t want to cry in front of Pamela.

It wasn’t Mikey, though. It wasn’t my father, either, or even my mother. It was a man I’d never seen before.

He was older than me, but younger than my parents. He looked to be about Pamela’s age. Still, he was definitely Do-able. He may have even qualified for Hottie. Clean-shaven, with dark, slightly longish hair, he had on a tie and sports coat. When my gaze fell upon him, he climbed hastily to his feet, and I saw that he was quite tall—well, everyone is, to me—and not very graceful.

“M-Miss Mastriani?” he asked in a shy voice.

Social worker? I wondered, taking in the fact that his shoes were well-worn, and the cuffs of his sports coat a bit frayed. Definitely not a Fed. He was too good-looking to be a Fed. He’d have drawn too much attention.

Schoolteacher, maybe. Yeah. Math or science. But why on earth would a math or science teacher be here to break the news about my brother Douglas’s suicide?

“I’m Jonathan Herzberg,” the man said, thrusting his right hand toward me. “I really hope you won’t resent the intrusion. I understand that it is highly unusual, and a gross infringement on your rights to personal privacy and all of that … but the fact is, Miss Mastriani, I’m desperate.” His brown-eyed gaze bore into mine. “Really, really desperate.”

I took a step backward, away from the hand. I moved back so fast, I ended up with my butt against the edge of Pamela’s desk.

A reporter. I should have known. The tie should have been a dead giveaway.

“Look,” I said.

The icy feeling had left my lips. The roaring in my ears had stopped. The feeling that the bottom of my stomach had dropped out? Yeah, that had disappeared. Instead, I just felt anger.

Cold, hard anger.

“I don’t know what paper you’re from,” I said stonily. “Or magazine or news show or whatever. But I have had just about enough of you guys. You all practically ruined my life this past spring, following me around, bugging my family. Well, it’s over, okay? Get it through your heads: lightning girl has hung up her bolts. I am not in the missing person business anymore.”

Jonathan Herzberg looked more than a little taken aback. He glanced from me to Pamela and then back again.

“M-Miss Mastriani,” he stammered. “I’m not … I mean, I don’t—”

“Mr. Herzberg isn’t a reporter, Jess.” Pamela’s voice was, for her, uncharacteristically soft. That, more than anything, got my attention. “We never allow reporters—and we have had our share of illustrious guests in the past—onto our properly. Surely you know that.”

I suppose I did know that, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind. Lake Wawasee was private property. You had to be on a list of invited guests even to be let through the gates. They took security very seriously at Camp Wawasee, due to the number of expensive instruments lying around. Oh, and the kids, and all.

I looked from Pamela to Mr. Herzberg and then back again. They both looked … well, flushed. There was no other way to put it.

“Do you two know each other or something?” I asked.

Pamela, who was by no means what you’d call a shrinking violet kind of gal, actually blushed.

“No, no,” she said. “I mean … well, we just met. Mr. Herzberg … well, Jess, Mr. Herzberg—”

I could see I was going to get nothing rational out of Miss J Crew. I decided to tackle Mr. L.L. Bean, instead.

“All right,” I said, eyeing him. “I’ll bite. If you’re not a reporter, what do you want with me?”

Jonathan Herzberg wiped his hands on his khaki pants. He must have been sweating a lot or something, since he left damp spots on the cotton.

“I was hoping,” he said softly, “that you could help me find my little girl.”

C H A P T E R
6

I
looked quickly at Pamela. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Jonathan Herzberg.

Great. Just great. Mary Ann was in love with the Professor.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time,” I said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

A lie, of course. But he didn’t know that.

Or maybe he did.

Mr. Herzberg said, “I know that’s what you told everyone. Last spring, I mean. But I … well, I was hoping you only said that because the press and everything … well, it got a little intense.”

I just looked at him.
Intense
? He called being chased by government goons with guns
intense
?

I’d show him intense.

“Hello?” I said. “What part of ‘I can’t help you’ don’t you understand? It doesn’t work anymore. The psychic thing is played out. The batteries have run dry—”

As I’d been speaking, Mr. Herzberg had been digging around in his briefcase. When he stood up again, he was holding a photograph.

“This is her,” he said, thrusting the photo into my hands. “This is Keely. She’s only five—”

I backed away with about as much horror as if he’d put a snake, and not a photo of a little girl, into my fingers.

“I’m not looking at this,” I said, practically heaving the photo back at him. “I
won’t
look at this.”

“Jess!” Pamela sounded a little horrified herself. “Jess, please, just listen—”

“No,” I said. “No, I won’t. You can’t do this. I’m out of here.”

Look, I know how it sounds. I mean, here was this guy, and he seemed sincere. He seemed like a genuinely distraught father. How could I be so cold, so unfeeling, not to want to help him?

Try looking at it from my point of view: It is one thing to get a package in the mail with all the details of a missing child’s case laid neatly out in front of one … to wake the next morning and make a single phone call, the origins of which the person on the receiving end of that call has promised to erase. Easy.

More than just easy, though: Anonymous.

But it is another thing entirely to have the missing kid’s parent in front of one, desperately begging for help. There is nothing easy about that.

And nothing in the least anonymous.

And I have to maintain my anonymity. I have to.

I turned and headed for the door. I was going to say, I staggered blindly for the door, because that sounds all dramatic and stuff, but it isn’t true, exactly. I mean, I wasn’t exactly staggering—I was walking just fine. And I could see and all. The way I know I could see just fine was that the photo, which I thought I’d gotten rid of, came fluttering down from the air where I’d thrown it. Just fluttered right down, and landed at my feet. Landed at my feet, right in front of the door, like a leaf or a feather or something that had fallen from the sky, and just randomly picked me to land in front of.

And I looked. It landed faceup. How could I help but look?

I’m not going to say anything dorky like she was the cutest kid I’d ever seen or something like that. That wasn’t it. It was just that, until I saw the photo, she wasn’t a real kid. Not to me. She was just something somebody was using to try to get me to admit something I didn’t want to.

Then I saw her.

Look, I was not trying to be a bitch with this whole not-wanting-to-help-this-guy thing. Really. You just have to understand that since that day, that day I’d been struck by lightning, a lot of things had gotten very screwed up. I mean, really, really screwed up. My brother Douglas had had to be hospitalized again on account of me. I had practically ruined this other kid’s life, just because I’d found him.
He hadn’t wanted to be found
. I had had to do a lot of really tricky stuff to make everything right again.