The Chase Page 0,5

was really speaking to himself, 'Why, how did you get here?'

"To his astonishment, the skull answered, 'I got here through talking, my friend.'"

Tom leaned forward, listening. Audrey stared. She didn't know Aba as well as the rest of them.

Aba went right on. "The hunter was very excited. He ran back to his village and told everyone that he had seen a talking skull. When the chief of the village heard, he asked the hunter to take him to the marvelous skull.

"So the hunter took the chief to the skull. 'Talk,' he said, but the skull just lay there. The chief was so angry at being tricked that he cut off the hunter's head and left it lying on the ground.

"Once the chief was gone, the skull said to the severed head beside it, 'Why, how did you get here?' And the head replied, 'I got here through talking, my friend!'"

In the long silence afterward, Jenny could hear distant telephones ringing and voices outside the room.

"You mean," Michael said finally, "that we've been talking too much?"

"I mean that you don't need to tell everything you know to everyone. There is a time to be silent. Also, you don't have to insist that your view is the only one, even if you honestly believe it. That hunter might have lived if he'd said, 'I think a skull talked to me, but I may have dreamed it.'"

"But we didn't dream it," Jenny whispered.

What Aba said then made all the difference. It made everything easier somehow.

"I believe you," she said quietly and laid a gentle, knotted hand on Jenny's.

When the police came back, everyone was calm. Jenny's group now admitted that while they thought they were telling the truth, it could have been some sort of dream or hallucination. The police now theorized that something really had happened to Summer, something so awful that the kids just couldn't accept what they'd seen, and so had made up a hysterical story to cover the memory. Teenagers were especially prone to mass hallucination, Inspector Somebody explained to Aba. If they could pass a lie detector test, proving they hadn't done anything to Summer ...

They passed.

Then the police released them into the custody of their parents, and Jenny went home and slept for sixteen hours straight. When she woke up, it was Sunday and Summer was still missing. So were Slug and P.C.

That was how the Center got started.

The new idea was that Slug and P.C. had made off with Summer, or that someone else had made off with all three. The local shopping mall donated space for a search center. Hundreds of volunteers went out looking in stormpipes and ditches and Dumpsters.

There was nothing Jenny could do to stop any of it. Every day the volunteers did more, the search got bigger.

She felt awful. But then she realized something.

Summer's body wasn't in a Dumpster-but the paper house might be. It wouldn't do any good searching for Summer, but it might do some good to search for Slug and P.C.

"Because," she pointed out bleakly to Dee and the others, "they got into the paper house, all right. And that means they might get up to the third floor. And that means they might open a certain door and let Julian out. ..."

After that they went out every day with the other volunteers, looking for a clue to where Slug Martell and P.C. Serrani might have taken the Game. It was a race against time, Jenny thought. To get to the house before Slug and P.C. got to Julian. Because after what she had done to Julian, tricking him and locking him behind that door, and after what she had promised him-telling him she'd stay with him forever-and then running away ...

If he ever got out, he would find her. He'd hunt her down. And he'd take his revenge.

On the grassy knoll Michael was still groaning at the thought of finding the Crying Girl.

"She probably doesn't know anything," Zach said, his eyes gray as winter clouds. "She probably just wonders if maybe we did it. Deep down, I think everybody wonders."

Jenny looked around at the group: Dee sprawled lazily on the grass, dark limbs gleaming; Audrey perched on a folder to save her white tuxedo pant-suit; Michael with his teddy-bear body and sarcastic spaniel eyes; and Zach sitting like some kind of Tibetan monk with a ponytail. They didn't look like murderers. But what Zach was saying was true, and it was just like him to say it.

"We've