Code Name Cassandra Read Online Free PDF Page B

anybody to incarcerate serial killers and all, I just figured I’d stick to finding missing kids … specifically, kids who actually want to be found.
    Only the people at Crane had turned out to be surprisingly unhappy to hear this.
    But after some friends of mine and I had broken some windows and cut through some fencing and, oh, yeah, blown up a helicopter, they came around. Well, sort of. It helped, I guess, that I called the press and told them I couldn’t do it anymore. Find missing people, I mean. That little special talent of mine just dried up and blew away.
Poof
.
    That’s what I told them, anyway.
    But you could totally see where Pamela was coming from. On account of the fireball caused by the exploding helicopter and all. It
had
made a lot of papers. You don’t get fireballs every day. At least, not in Indiana.
    Pamela frowned a little. “The thing is, Jess,” she said, “even though, as you say, you no longer have, um, any psychic powers, I have heard … well, I’ve heard missing kids across the country are still sort of, um, turning up. A lot more kids than ever turned up before … well, before your little weather-related accident. And thanks to some”—she cleared her throat—“anonymous tips.”
    My winning smile didn’t waver.
    “If that’s true,” I said, “it sure isn’t because of me. No, ma’am. I am officially retired from the kid-finding business.”
    Pamela didn’t exactly look relieved. She looked sort of like someone who wanted—really, really wanted—to believe something, but didn’t think she should. Kind of like a kid whose friends had told her Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but whose parents were still trying to maintain the myth.
    Still, what could she do? She couldn’t sit there and call me a liar to my face. What proof did she have?
    Plenty, as it turned out. She just didn’t know it.
    “Well,” she said. Her smile was as stiff as the Welcome to Camp Wawasee sign had been, in the places it hadn’t been eaten away. “All right, then. I guess … I guess that’s that.”
    I got up to go, feeling a little shaky. Well, you would have felt shaky, too, if you’d have come as close as I had to spending the rest of the summer stirring steaming platters of rigatoni bolognese.
    “Oh,” Pamela said, as if remembering something. “I almost forgot. You’re friends with Ruth Abramowitz, aren’t you? This came for her the other day. It didn’t fit into her mailbox. Could you hand it to her? I saw you sitting with her at dinner just now… .”
    Pamela took a large padded envelope out from behind her desk and handed it to me. I stood there, looking down at it, my throat dry.
    “Urn,” I said. “Sure. Sure, I’ll give it to her.”
    My voice sounded unusually hoarse. Well, and why not? Pamela didn’t know it, of course, but what she’d just given me—its contents, anyway—could prove that every single thing I’d just told her was an out-and-out lie.
    “Thanks,” Pamela said with a tired smile. “Things have just been so hectic …”
    The corners of my mouth started to ache on account of how hard I was still smiling, pretending like I wasn’t upset or anything. I should, I knew, have taken that envelope and run. That’s what I should have done. But something made me stay and go, still in that hoarse voice, “Can I ask you a question, Pamela?”
    She looked surprised. “Of course you can, Jess.”
    I cleared my throat, and kept my gaze on the strong, loopy handwriting on the front of the envelope. “Who told you?”
    Pamela knit her eyebrows. “Told me what?”
    “You know. About’me being the lightning girl.” I looked up at her. “And that stuff about how kids are still being found, even though I’m retired.”
    Pamela didn’t answer right away. But that was okay. I knew. And I hadn’t needed any psychic powers to tell me, either. Karen Sue Hanky was dead meat.
    It was right then there was a knock on Pamela’s office door. She yelled, “Come in,”