The Amanda Project Book 2: Revealed

Chapter 3

Bennett, Henry.

Bennett, Cornelia.

Bennett, Katharine.

Bennett, Edmund.

Cornelia? What did my sister have to do with this? And my parents? What were my parents doing on Thornhill’s list? My heart began to pound so fast I almost couldn’t breathe. There was Callie’s name and Nia’s, Callie’s mom’s and Nia’s parents’ names. I made my way down the list, my eyes moving too fast to read more than a few of the names I was racing through. Was Amanda’s name there? I scrolled to the bottom, but there seemed to be no bottom, just hundreds and hundreds of names. I needed to write them all down. I need to print the list up. I needed—

“For the last time, get a hold of yourself, Callista!”

!"#$%&'()Print. I needed to print. Hands shaking, I hit Apple, P, and

as I did, the computer gave a strange sound, almost a sigh, and the screen went blank. A second later, the computer turned itself off.

“What?” Forgetting the need to be silent, forgetting everything except that I had to get that list, I hit the power key.

Nothing happened.

“No,” I whispered, frantically hitting the key again and again.

Nothing.

“. . . so when I come back out, I want you gone. I want you on your way to the nurse, do you understand me, young lady?” And as surely as I’d known I had to get into Thornhill’s office, I knew now that I had to get out.

Officer Marciano opened the door to the conference room less than a second after I had literally jumped into my seat, the metal watch in my pocket digging into my leg hard enough to make me wince. Instead of taking my leg’s being slung over one

arm of the chair as an indication that I’d been on the move, he interpreted it as more evidence of my bad attitude.

Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice that I was panting as hardas if I’d just run the fifty-yard dash—which, basically, I had.

“I’ll thank you to sit respectably when you’re in the presence of the law, young man,” he said. Despite the bark in his voice, he looked a little less sure of himself than he had before he’d confronted Callie’s hysteria. I remembered the time about a month ago when my mom had cooked this big dinner to welcome my dad back from a weeks’-long business trip. My mom’s not exactly Martha Stewart, and she must have overcooked the roast, which we learned when smoke began pouring out of the oven and all the smoke detectors on the first floor started going off at once. She’s usually pretty calm, but as soon as she realized the dinner she’d been planning and preparing for days had just caught on fire, she completely lost it.

Right about now, Officer Marciano looked kind of like my dad had on the way to the restaurant we went to that night, and when the cop’s phone rang, he answered it with an enthusiasm that made me think he wanted nothing more than for it to be the news that some other violent crime had occurred and required his presence far, far from the world of hysterical high school girls.

“Marciano here,” he barked. “Oh, hey, Jack . . . No, I’m talking to the Bennett kid now.”

I tried not to visibly shudder. Why was Chief Jack Bragg, Heidi’s father, asking about my interrogation?

“You sure? We only . . . right. Sorry, Jack. Will do.” He snapped his phone shut and gave me a look of intense irritation. “We’ll have to pick up this little conversation later.”

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. “So, I’m free to go then?”

Officer Marciano gave me a long look. “You’re free,” he acknowledged. “But not to go. Not far anyway.”

He stood up and so did I. But when he went over to the door, he just stood there. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I realized he wanted me to know that he didn’t have to open that door.

“Have a good day, Henry.” Still he stood there, like he was just daring me to ask him to move. What I needed was to get somewhere quiet, somewhere I could sit and try to remember the names that had been on that list. What I didn’t need was to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to explain to my mother why I’d been arrested by the

Orion police.

“Thank you. You too, sir.” And with that, I slid around Officer Marciano and opened the door, slightly disappointed but not surprised to find that neither Callie nor Nia was waiting for me when I came out.

If there had been a quiz in either of my last two classes, I’d have failed it. For the ninety minutes between the end of my interview with Officer Marciano and the end of the school day, all I did was try and recreate the list I’d found on Thornhill’s computer.

Callie, Nia, and I had definitely been on it. I was pretty sure there had been a Zoe on it, and the approaching end of the school day—with its promise of after-school munchies to feed my hunger—made me think of pasta, which made me think Zoe had an Italian last name . . . Costello? Wasn’t there a Zoe in our grade? I was pretty sure there was, but I couldn’t think of her last name.

Trying to remember even a dozen of the names on the list was giving me a colossal headache. Had Amanda’s name been there? I’d been so sure I hadn’t seen it. But could I have missed it? That seemed impossible—all I’d been doing lately was looking for clues as to where Amanda Valentino had disappeared.

There was no way I could have missed seeing her name in black and white right in front of me. Still, there had been so many names. Could I have skipped it somehow?

And what was my name doing there? And my sister’s? And my parents? Mrs. Kimble wrote “beatitude” on the board and as I stared at the word it morphed and became something else.

Bea. Beatrice. Had Beatrice Rossiter’s name been on the list? Picturing her lying in a Johns Hopkins hospital bed and recovering from her plastic surgery, I wrote her name down, then crossed it out, then wrote it down again. While Mrs. Kimble

droned on and on, I put my hands over my ears and hummed quietly to myself, trying to create a bubble of white noise to sound my memory.

When the bell rang at the end of the day, I literally sprinted to the door of the building, like Mr. Richards was standing there with his stopwatch. I needed to text Callie and Nia, to find out where they were and to tell them what I’d seen. I couldn’t afford to get my phone confiscated, not now, so I made sure I had at least one foot out the door before I flipped open my cell. To my surprise, there was a text from

Callie waiting for me.

!"##$%&$'()*

I’d barely started dialing her number when there was a hand on my shoulder. I spun around and found myself looking into her green eyes, so wide it seemed there was nothing they couldn’t see.

“I was just calling you.” I held my phone out toward her as if to prove what I was saying.

“Nia’s at Play It Again, Sam.” Callie’s voice was thick, like she was having trouble speaking. “She has bio last period and it was cancelled and she got a text or something and she skipped last period and ran over there.”

Play It Again, Sam was the vintage clothing store we’d gone to last week when we were looking for Amanda. I didn’t mean to sound annoyed, but was this really the time for a shopping spree?

“Nia went to buy clothes?”

“Hal, she found . . .” Callie swallowed hard, then pulled me over to the lawn, away from the throngs of people who were spilling out the front door into the freedom of afternoon. “She found everything there.”

My brain was full of lists and names and numbers, and it was hard for me to focus on what Callie was saying. “She found what ‘everything’?”

Callie put her hands on my shoulders, whether to steady me or herself, I wasn’t sure. “Amanda’s stuff. All of it. Her clothes, her costumes, her wigs—it’s all there, at Play It Again, Sam.”