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complete set of Nancy Drew books. He apparently thinks you have a
crime-solving fixation."
Mr. Walden was right about that. But my fixation wasn't on solving crimes.
"Oh, and your stepdad's thinking about buying a Mustang to replace the
Rambler," Gina informed me.
I made a face, then regretted it. It was hard to make expressions of any kind
with my sore lip, not to mention the stitches in my scalp.
"A Mustang?" I shook my head. "How are we all supposed to fit into a
Mustang?"
"Not for you guys. For himself. He's giving you guys the Land Rover."
Well, that, at least, made sense.
"What about & " I wanted to ask her about Jesse. After all, she was sharing a
room with him  alone, thanks to my being held overnight in the hospital for
observation. The thing is, she didn't know it. About Jesse, I mean. I still
hadn't told her about him.
And now, well, there didn't seem to be any reason to. Not now that he wasn't
speaking to me anymore.
"What about Michael?" I asked instead. None of my other visitors  my mother
and stepfather; Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc; Cee Cee and Adam; even Father Dom 
would tell me anything about him. The doctors had advised them that the topic
might be "too painful" for me to discuss.
As if. You want to know what's painful? I'll tell you what's painful. Having
two broken ribs, and knowing that for weeks, you're going to have wear a
one-piece to the beach in order to hide the black and blue marks.
"Michael?" Gina shrugged. "Well, you were right. What you said about him
keeping stuff on his computer. The police got a warrant and confiscated his
PC, and it was all there  journals, emails, the schematics of the Rambler's
brake system. Plus they found the wrench he used. You know, on the bolts that
held the guardrail in place? They matched the metal tracings. And the clippers
he used to snip the Rambler's brake line. They got brake fluid off the blades.
The boy didn't do such a good job cleaning up after himself, it appears."
I'll say.
He was arrested on four counts of first-degree murder  the RLS Angels  and
six counts of attempted murder: five for those of us who'd been in the Rambler
the afternoon the brakes had given out, and one for what the police were
convinced Michael had done to me out at the Point.
I didn't correct them. I mean, it wasn't like I was about to sit there and
go, "Uh, yeah, about my injuries? Yeah, Michael didn't inflict them. No, the
ghosts of his victims did that because I wouldn't let them kill him."
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I figured it was just as well to let them go on thinking it was Michael who
was responsible for my broken ribs and the fourteen stitches in my scalp & not
to mention the two in my lip. I mean, after all, he'd beengoing to kill me.
The Angels had just interrupted him. If you thought about it, they'd actually
saved my life.
Yeah. So they could kill me themselves.
"So listen," Gina was saying. "Your grounding  you know, for sneaking out
and getting into a car with Michael when your mother had told you expressly
not to  isn't supposed to start until after I leave. I say we spend the next
four days at the beach. I mean, there's no way you're going to school. Not
with broken ribs. You wouldn't be able to sit down. But you can certainlylie
down, you know, on a towel. I should be able to talk your mom into letting you
dothat , at least."
"Sounds good to me," I said.
"Ex," Gina said. She apparently meant excellent, only she'd shortened it 
much in the way Sleepy often shortened words because he was too lazy to say
all the syllables. Thus pizza became " 'za," Gina became "G." She had, I
realized, more in common with Sleepy than I'd ever guessed.
"I'm going to get a Diet Coke," she said, climbing down from my bed  careful
not to jostle the mattress since the nurse had already come in twice and
warned her not to. Like I hadn't consumed enough Tylenol with codeine to block
out the pain. Somebody could have dropped a safe on my head and I probably
wouldn't have felt it.
"You want?" Gina asked, pausing by the door.
"Sure," I said. "Just make sure  "
"Yeah, yeah," she said over her shoulder as the door swung slowly shut behind
her. "I'll find a straw somewhere."
Alone in my room, I adjusted the pillows behind me carefully, and then sat
there, staring at nothing. People who are on as many painkillers as I was tend
to do that a lot.
But I wasn't thinking about nothing. I was thinking, actually, about what
Father Dominic had told me when he'd visited a few hours ago. In what could
only be the cruelest of ironies, the morning after Michael's arrest, his
sister, Lila Meducci, had wakened from her coma.
Oh, it wasn't like she'd sat up and asked for a bowl of Cheerios, or
anything. She was still severely messed up. According to Father D, it was
going to take her months, even years, of rehabilitation to get her back to the
way she'd been before the accident  if ever. It would be a long, long time
before she'd be able to walk, talk, even eat on her own again like she used
to.
But she was alive. She was alive and she was conscious. It wasn't much of a
consolation prize for poor Mrs. Meducci, but it was something.
It was as I was reflecting over the vagaries of life that I heard a rustle. I
turned my head just in time to catch Jesse trying to dematerialize.
"Oh, no, you don't," I said, sitting up  and jolting my ribs quite
painfully, I'd like to add. "You come back here right now."
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He came back, a sheepish expression on his face.
"I thought you were asleep," he said. "So I decided to come back later."
"Baloney," I said. "You saw I wasawake , so you decided to come back later
when you were sure I was asleep." I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe
what I'd caught him trying to do. This hurt, I discovered, way more than my [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]