K aren didn’t know what had happened between her mother and Lauren that afternoon. She didn’t know because neither of them would tell her, despite the fact that Karen had called her mother and demanded to know what hadcaused her daughter to leave her bike in the backyard instead of putting it away properly and then run upstairs and lock the door of her bedroom.Karen called her mother and Mom had only said, “It’s between me and Lauren,” which left Karen with the same wrenched-stomach feeling that she always had when the two of them put their heads together and left her out.It was ridiculous that she should feel this way, feel like a high school girl who wasn’t allowed to join the cool-girls club, but she always had. Karen had never been close to her mother. She&rsq

 L auren knew she shouldn’t have yelled at her mother like that. Mom was the revenging type. She was probably downstairs thinking up every possible thing she could take away from Lauren—her allowance, her telephone privileges,her television time.No more meetings under the ghost tree. No more riding her bike wherever she wanted to go.But Lauren had been biting her tongue for days, suppressing her irritation at Mom’s constant nagging. When they were sitting there at the table and she asked Mom about magic, Mom had given her that slightly superior look that she always gave when she thought Lauren asked a stupid question.And it had just been the last straw.But it wouldn’t have happened at all if Mom had just left her alone the way she’d asked her to.

 A lex really was not in the mood for the fair. The captain decided that Alex and Miller would rotate shifts with Hendricks and Pantaleo and that there would be at least one pair patrolling at the fair at all times from open to close—which wasfrom eleven to eight every day, and until ten p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The chief tried to soften the blow with the promise of overtime pay (“already authorized by the mayor, who’s grateful for our presence”), but Alex didn’t care about the money.He cared about the hours he was going to spend walking in the heat, dealing with out-of-towners who lost their kids in the crowd or got their pockets picked by teenagers. And when he wasn’t dealing with petty theft and children distracted by the sight of balloon vendors, he’d be gi

J esus, I think one of my eardrums is bleeding,” Jake said, holding his hand to his right ear. “What are you doing here?” Lauren asked.Her voice sounded shrill to her own ears. Her hands shook and she’d dropped the duffel bag when she’d spun around.She felt ready to dash away at the slightest provocation, a trembling little rabbit in sight of a fox.Jake reached back and rubbed the back of his head in a sheepish gesture. He’d gotten his hair cut, Lauren noticed now.It was short in the back and a little longer on top.Kind of like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders, she thought, and wondered if Miranda would agree.But Jake’s new haircut was not the point. The point was that he was standing there in her woods (my woods???) very close to a m

A lex found his opportunity to sneak down to the archives late in the afternoon. Hendricks and Pantaleo were out patrolling. Christie was in a meeting with the mayor about the security preparations for the fair. About two hours afterlunch Miller fell asleep in his chair, his head lolling forward onto his chest. Miller had his legs up on his desk at the time. Alex wondered if he would stay in that position or if the rolling wheels of Miller’s chair would slowly creep away until his feet crashed to the ground.Would he wake up if that happened? Possibly not.Once Alex and Miller had been out on the county road with the speed gun and Miller had conked out in the passenger seat. When an out-of-towner in a yellow Mustang went by doing a cool eighty-five miles per hour Alex had flipped on the lights and sirens and