ALSO BY WENDELIN VAN DRAANEN
Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief
Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man
Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy
Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf
Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy
Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes
Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception
Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen
&
How I Survived Being a Girl
Flipped
Swear to Howdy
&
Shredderman: Secret Identity
Shredderman: Attack of the Tagger
Shredderman: Meet the Gecko
Shredderman: Enemy Spy
This book is dedicated to my parents, Peter and Mieske
Van Draanen, who had the courage to pioneer wide waters
and foreign soil in search of a better life.
Also to my husband's great-great-grandfather, Lyman
Lysander Huntley, whose journal of crossing the plains in
1850 is a historic treasure.
Grateful thanks to Nancy Siscoe for the fifteen pages of
editorial wisdom, and to my husband, Mark Parsons,
for fifteen years of spirited adventuring.
Thanks, too, to the following for research consultation:
Ann Parsons, forensic toxicologist; Eric Parsons,
supervising criminalist; Ed Smith, fire cause consultant;
Ilona Dobbe, All Seasons Nursery.
And finally, thanks to Jason Tamura and Jason Graham for
the brainstorming sessions; to Nicholas May—I've still got
your magazines; and to Mary-Mary Kuczkowski, Leslie
Kuo, and Susan Cavaletto for reviving my school-fried
brain at powwow lunches in the Cave.
PROLOGUE
You'd think I could spend the night at a friend's house without finding myself knee-deep in pig poop. But no. I couldn't even make it there without practically breaking every bone in my body, and by the time the clock was gonging in the New Year, well, I was in so deep it was going to take a backhoe to get me out.
ONE
Marissa McKenze is the last person on earth you should ever accept a ride from. And I knew that. Trouble is, she had a bike, Holly had a bike, and all I had were my high-tops and the distant memory of a skateboard that had disappeared while I was playing video games at the mall.
And maybe I should have wobbled around on Holly's handlebars instead, but Holly wasn't offering. Marissa was. And since Dot's new house was clear out in Sisquane and I didn't want to spend all morning getting there, what choice did I have?
Actually, things were going pretty well. Our duffel bags were in back, bungeed tight and balanced right, and it was real foggy out, so Marissa was driving kind of carefully for once. We'd made it three whole blocks down Broadway and another three whole blocks down Cook Street without so much as a serious wobble. But then, just as I was starting to relax a little, these guys come barreling down a cross street on skateboards.
Holly stopped. Just locked up her brakes and slid to a halt. Marissa, on the other hand, started to stop, but then changed her mind and decided to go. And as we're heading for the collision of the century, she lets go of the handlebars and cries, “Timber!”
She goes down sideways, and I sail through the air, straight for this guy who's ducking and weaving on his skateboard, trying to avoid me. But I'm flying at him like a human cannonball, and he doesn't have a chance. Not a prayer. I nail him, smack! right to the asphalt.
His skateboard goes flipping off, and his mouth does, too, letting loose with a string of four-letter synonyms for Ouch!
I untangle myself from him and hold on to my arm, because it hurts pretty bad and blood's already seeping through my sweatshirt. He's still swearing away, kind of dancing around flicking a wrist, but he interrupts himself long enough to say, “Stupid females!”
I sit there in the middle of the street holding my arm, trying to contain the pain. “I'm sorry. I…I…”
“You what?” he snaps. “You thought you could ride around town like a circus act and people would stop and cheer?”
Blood's starting to ooze through the right knee of my jeans, and since my whole body's pretty sore from having had an asphalt adjustment, I don't feel like arguing or explaining. I just sit there with my eyes closed and say, “Look, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry.”
Then I hear someone laughing. So I look up from my private little spot in the middle of the street and what do I see? A guy with brown hair and baggy pants on his way to becoming hysterical about bruised-up bodies in the street. And I'm about to tell Baggy Boy to shut up when I hear someone else laughing behind me. I turn around, and there's Marissa and the guy she'd crashed into, dusting off, laughing. And then there's Holly, straddling her bike with her hand in front of her mouth, about to bust up, too.
Well. Obviously they're all just fine. And I suppose I was, too, only I wasn't ready to admit it yet. I was too mad. Mad at Marissa for being such a bad driver. Mad at my mother for buying me a pink angora sweater for Christmas instead of something I wanted—like a new skateboard or a bike. And the more I sat there, the madder I got, and the more I wanted to kill the guy who'd stolen my skateboard in the first place. I mean, if I still had it, I wouldn't be sitting there in the middle of the street all banged up from riding around town like a circus act.
Then I hear Marissa's victim say, “You don't remember me, do you?”
Marissa looks at him a little closer, then says, “Oh, yeah…you're…”
He helps her out. “Taylor. You asked me for directions the first day of school, remember?”
Well, I recognize him. He's Taylor Briggs, slick-andslimy eighth grader. Good friends with Heather Acosta, red-and-rotten seventh grader. Taylor's older brother is best friends with Marissa's cousin Brandon; Taylor's the one who told Heather about Marissa being rich, and Taylor's the one who told Heather that I looked like a fourth grader.
Now, Heather may be cat hair in my craw, and there's probably not a kid at William Rose Junior High who doesn't know that truth to her is a foreign language—one she's not about to learn. But that first day of seventh grade, when she told me that Taylor thought I looked like a fourth grader, you could tell—there was truth behind it.
So I'm sitting there, mad at the world, mad at Marissa for laughing with a guy who's friends with Heather and thinks I look like a fourth grader, when Baggy Boy comes up to the guy I'd bombed and hands him back his skateboard. “Here you go, Snake. You all right?”
He says, “Yeah, dude. Thanks,” and gives me one last glare.
I'm sitting there thinking, Snake? What kind of stupid name is Snake? when I notice the bottom of his skateboard. It's a metal-gray color, but it's been spray-painted that way. And I can tell, because underneath, where the gray's been scraped away jumping curbs, it's purple. A light purple with dark veins running through it. Like it had been dipped in molten amethyst. And there's only one other board I've ever seen that looks like that.
Mine.
I get up and say, “Hey, wait a second!”
He turns around.
“Where'd you get that skateboard?”
He sneers at me. “Oh, now you want to learn to ride?
Don't even go there.” He looks over at Baggy for a laugh. “Walkin's more your speed.”
He turns to go, so I say, “No really. Wait a minute. Where'd you get it?” I run up for a better look, and when I see the foot grip, it's like my heart hits rapids.
Along the back of the foot grip, there's a three-inch strip missing. A t
hree-inch strip completely gone except for a little piece sticking out like Florida in a States puzzle.
So between Florida on the top and amethyst on the bottom, there's no doubt in my mind: That skateboard's mine. And suddenly I'm not feeling my banged-up bones or the blood trickling down my leg. I'm feeling mad. Branding-hot mad.
I close in on the guy, saying, “Where did you get it?”
He's looking at me like I've got something contagious. “I bought it off a friend, okay?”
I get right in his face. “Well, where did your friend get it, then?”
“Hey, back off, psycho!” He looks over at Taylor, then back at me. “At a garage sale, all right? Like it's any of your business.”
“It is my business!” I twist the board and point to the band of purple. “This is my skateboard and I can prove it. I wrote my initials right up here.”
He snickers. “I don't see no initials.”
“Scrape off the paint.”
He backs away from me, so I lunge for the skateboard. “I said, scrape off the paint!”
He wrestles it out of my hands. “You are psycho!”
I can't just let him walk away. That's my skateboard. And somehow I can't find it in me to reason with the guy or have a nice little chat about how the right thing for him to do would be to give it back. No, watching him walk off with my skateboard, there's only one thing left to do.
Jump him.
I go flying through the air to tackle him again, but this time he doesn't go down. He spins and bucks and finally just throws me off. “Dude! Get a grip!”
Marissa helps me up and whispers, “It isn't worth it, Sammy. It's only a skateboard.”
“But it's my skateboard, and he knows it!”
Holly calls, “Yeah! Hey—that thing's pretty beat-up anyway. Why don't you scrape the paint off and settle this?” She shrugs. “Unless you're lying and you stole it.”
Snake takes a step toward us. “Who you callin' a liar? You think I'd want to steal this thing?”
Taylor plants himself between us like a road-wrestling referee. “He is telling the truth. He bought it off me.” He shrugs. “I got it at a garage sale for five bucks.”
Well, that buttons my beak. Finally I choke out, “But it's mine.” Taylor gives me a sad little shake of the head. “If it was, it's not anymore.”
Just then a primer-gray pickup truck with wide tires and huge sideview mirrors comes rumbling down the street. And the minute Taylor sees it, he practically stomps his foot. “Oh, maaaan…”
The driver cranks down the window and calls, “Get in. Mom and Dad want you back home.”
There's also a guy in the back of the pickup, and he leans out and calls to Taylor, “Hop into the paddy wagon, bro. The gestapo's out in force.”
Marissa whispers, “Is that Karl?”
I whisper back, “Who's Karl?”
“Brandon's best friend, remember?”
Now maybe it was, but the guy in the back of the truck wasn't anyone I recognized as being any kind of friend of Brandon's. I mean, I'd been to pool parties at Brandon's before, and this guy sure didn't look like anyone I'd ever seen him with.
Marissa whispers, “God, that is Karl. His hair's gotten long, and he looks…I don't know, older, but that's him.”
Baggy Boy goes over and asks for a ride, and pretty soon Snake's on board, too, only none of them are in the cab. They're piled up like a load of cattle in the back, settling in as Big Brother grinds into gear and lets out the clutch.
So off they go into the fog with my skateboard. And all of a sudden my body's aching and I can feel the blood crusting my jeans to my knee, and all I want is to sit down and cry.
Marissa sees the sleeve of my sweatshirt and says, “Maybe we should take you to a doctor.”
“I don't need a doctor!”
Holly comes over and says, “Let me see,” and makes me pull my arm out of the sleeve. Marissa about faints when she sees the scrape, but Holly turns my arm back and forth and says, “You just need some gauze and tape. A doctor can't do anything for that.”
I don't happen to have a box of gauze and a roll of tape handy, and I sure didn't want to go home to dig some up. But then Marissa asks, “Do you think Hudson will have some?”
Hudson! Of course! We were only a few blocks from his house, and if anyone in Santa Martina could patch me up, it was Hudson Graham.
Not that Hudson's a doctor or anything. He's seventy-two and retired—from what, I'm not real sure—but what I do know is that he's a friend I can count on, and he's got the tools to fix anything. Including a scraped arm and a banged-up knee.
So off we went to Cypress Street to find Hudson. And I was expecting him to be in a chair on his big porch, sipping tea like he always is, but when we turned up the walkway, no Hudson.
I tried the bell, then peeked in the living room window. No Hudson. And I'm just about to give up when a jogger in gray sweats and white Nikes appears on Hudson's walkway.
He might have been able to fool me altogether if it weren't for those bushy white eyebrows sticking out like fog lights from beneath his sweatshirt hood. And even after I knew it was Hudson, it still felt strange. Like discovering that the jacket you've been wearing all year is reversible.
I mean, Hudson drinks iced tea, reads books, and spends his days on his porch watching the world go by. Hudson does not wear sweats. Hudson does not jog. And Hudson Graham does not wear tennis shoes. He wears boots. Cowboy boots. Red ones, green ones, furry ones, ones that look like the hide of a Tyrannosaurus rex— boots.
So seeing him appear out of the fog in tennis shoes and sweats spooked me.
He pulls back his hood and ruffles his beacon of white hair. “Sammy, are you all right? You look pale.” Then he notices the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “Here. Come up here and sit down.”
He gets me onto his porch and parks me in a chair, then asks, “What happened?”
I glance over at Marissa, who starts fidgeting around, doing the McKenze dance. “They came out of nowhere. And they were going so fast!” She looks up at me. “I couldn't help it!”
Hudson sizes up the number of wheels on his walkway and the number of people on his porch and says, “You riding tandem again?”
I scowl and nod, and pull my arm out of my sweatshirt. After he inspects it, he whispers, “I thought you swore off,” and heads for the house.
I call after him, “I did! But Dot's moved out to Sisquane, and I can't exactly walk that far.”
A minute later Hudson's back with a first aid kit, and while he's cleaning me up, I tell him about our little crash-dummy convention and how I wouldn't have to be riding on Marissa's handlebars if my skateboard hadn't been stolen.
When I'm all done, he says, “This whole situation could also have been avoided if you'd asked me for a ride.” I keep twitching away from him, because he's scrubbing pretty good and it stings. But he pins my arm down and says, “I'm surprised your grandmother didn't insist.” He eyes me. “She does know what you're doing, doesn't she?”
“She knows I'm spending the weekend at Dot's…”
One bushy white eyebrow arches up.
“And I told her Marissa was giving me a ride…”
His eyebrow arches up even higher. “But…?”
I look down and confess, “But I never told her that the ride Marissa was giving me was on her handlebars.”
He studies me with a frown, then pops open some disinfectant and smears it all over my arm. “A vital piece of information conveniently omitted?”
“I didn't lie. I just didn't tell her.”
Hudson doesn't say a word. He just puts gauze on my arm, wraps it up, and starts working on my knee. And I'm feeling bad, like I did lie. “Hudson, it was either go with Grams to visit Lady Lana or spend New Year's at Dot's. What would you have done?”
“Rita's gone to Hollywood?”
“Uh-huh. And she was really pushing for me to go with her.” I scowl at him and mutter, “Like I want to start my New Y
ear with a tour of the set they used for Lady Lana's GasAway commercial.”
“Could've been interesting to see your mother's work environment.”
“It would've been torture! Besides, seeing her for two days at Christmas was enough to last me for another year.”
Hudson sighs and says, “I heard about your angora sweater.”
“It's pink.”
“I know.” He tries to stifle a grin. “I guess I'd have cho sen Dot's, too.”
“Exactly.”
Hudson snaps his first aid kit closed. “So let's get you there in one piece, shall we? I'd give you a ride, but I sense that being chauffeured is not what you had in mind.”
“It's really nice of you, but I…”
“But you don't want a lift when your friends are riding.”
I shrug. “Yeah.”
Marissa and Holly have been kind of standing around, keeping quiet, but when Marissa hears that, she says, “Maybe our bikes would fit in the trunk?”
Hudson smiles. “I have a better idea.”
He disappears down the side steps, and when he comes back, about ten minutes later, he's pushing a bike alongside him. Now this bike is old, but it's old like his car, Jester. Shiny old. Tons-of-chrome old. Whitewall-tires old. Way-too-cool-to-ride old.
I take one look at it and say, “You're kidding, right?”
“Not at all. What am I saving it for? It's just collecting dust.”
“But what if I wreck it?”
He throws his head back and laughs. “Then you wreck it. It's seen a few adventures in its lifetime. A few more won't hurt.”
So we divvied up the duffels and started off again, and let me tell you, I couldn't stop smiling. Hudson's bike was smooth and fast, and the wind in my face felt like something I hadn't known in ages. It felt like freedom.
But if I'd had any idea what we were riding toward, I'd have turned right around, returned the bike, and jumped the next train to Hollywood.
TWO
The last time I'd been to Sisquane was on a field trip in the fourth grade. In my mind it was kind of a hick town with a lot of weeds, sagging barns, and crooked trailers. But as we coasted down the road into Sisquane, I realized that a lot can change in three years. Instead of weeds and trailers, there were condos. And estates. And a sign for a golf course, coming soon.