anybody was going to come bursting in to rescue me. I didn't see how anybody could – except for

maybe Jesse, who was pretty slick at walking through walls and stuff.

Only Jesse didn't know I needed him. He didn't know I was in trouble. He didn't even know where I was.

And I had no way of letting him know, either.

A shard of glass, I decided, would make an excellent, very threatening weapon, and so I looked for a particularly lethal-looking one amid the rubble I'd made of a few of Mr. Beaumont's windows.

Two minutes.

Holding my shard of glass in my hand – wishing I had my ghost-busting gloves with me so I'd be sure not to cut myself – I scrambled up the bookshelf, no easy feat in three-inch heels.

One and half minutes.

I glanced over at Tad. He lay limp as a rag doll, his bare chest rising and falling in a gentle, rhythmic motion. It was quite a nice-looking chest, actually. Not as nice looking, maybe, as Jesse's. But still, in spite of his uncle being a murderer, and his dad being foreman at the cracker factory – not to mention the whole basketball thing – I wouldn't have minded resting my head against it. His chest, I mean. You know, under other circumstances, Tad actually being conscious being one of them.

But I'd never have the chance if I didn't get us out of this alive.

There was no sound in the room, save Tad's steady breathing and the burbling of the aquarium.

The aquarium.

I looked at the aquarium. It made up most of one whole wall of the office. How, I wondered, did those fish get fed? The tank was built into the wall. I could detect no convenient trapdoor through which

someone might sprinkle food. The tank had to be accessed through the room next door.

The room I couldn't get to because the door to it was locked.

Unless.

Thirty seconds.

I dropped down from the bookshelf and began striding toward the aquarium.

I could hear the elevator begin to hum. Marcus, right on time, was on his way back. Needless to say, I had not put on my swimsuit like a good little girl. Although I did grab it – along with the wheeled swivel chair that had been behind Mr. Beaumont's desk – as I walked toward the fish tank.

The humming of the elevator stopped. I heard the doorknob turn. I kept walking. The chairs' wheels were noisy on the parquet floor.

The door to the elevator opened. Marcus, seeing that I had not done as he asked, shook his head.

"Miss Simon," he said, in a disappointed tone. "Are we being difficult?"

I positioned the swivel chair in front of the aquarium. Then I lifted a foot and balanced it on top of the seat. From one finger, I dangled the bathing suit.

"Sorry," I said, apologetically. "But dead's never been my color."

Then I grabbed that chair, and flung it with all my might at the glass of that giant fish tank.

CHAPTER

20

The next thing I knew there was a tremendous crash.

Then a wall of water, glass, and exotic marine life was coming at me.

It knocked me flat onto my back. A tidal wave hit me with the weight of a freight train, pushing me to the floor, then flattening me against the far wall of the room. The wind knocked out of me, I lay there a

second, soaked, coughing up briny water, some of which I accidentally swallowed.

When I opened my eyes, all I could see were fish. Big fish, little fish, trying to swim through the three inches of water that lay upon the wood floor, opening and closing their mouths in a pathetic attempt to snatch a few more seconds of life. One fish in particular had washed up next to me, and it stared at me with eyes almost as glassy and lifeless as Marcus's had been when he'd been explaining how he intended to kill me.

Then a very familiar voice cut through my dazed musings on the paradoxes of life and death.

"Susannah?"

I lifted my head, and was extremely surprised to see Jesse standing over me, a very worried look on his face.

"Oh," I said. "Hi. How did you get here?"

"You called me," Jesse said.

How could I ever have thought, I wondered as I lay there gazing up at him, that any guy, even Tad, could ever be quite as hot as Jesse? Everything, from the tiny scar in his eyebrow, to the way his dark hair curled against the back of his neck, was perfect, as if Jesse were the original mold for the archetypal hottie.

He was polite, too. Old-world manners were the only ones he knew. He leaned down and offered me his hand . . . his lean, brown, completely poison-oak-free hand.

I reached up. He helped me to my feet.

"Are you all right?" he asked, probably because I wasn't mouthing off as much as usual.

"I'm fine," I said. Drenched, and smelling of fish, but fine. "But I didn't call you."

From the opposite corner of the room came a very low snarl.

Marcus was struggling to get to his feet, but he kept slipping on all the water and fish. "What the hell did you do that for?" he wanted to know.

I couldn't actually remember. I think maybe when the water hit me, I'd banged my head against

something. Wow, I thought. Amnesia. Cool. I'd get out of tomorrow's Geometry quiz for sure.

Then my gaze fell on Tad – still sleeping peacefully on the couch, an exotic-looking fish flopping in death throes on his bare legs – and I remembered.

Oh, yeah. Tad's uncle Marcus was trying to kill us. Would kill us, too, if I didn't stop him.

I'm not sure I was really thinking straight. All I could remember from before the water hit was that it had been important, for some reason, for me to get onto the other side of that fish tank.

And so I waded through all that water – thinking to myself, My boots are so ruined – and climbed up onto what was now just a raised platform, like a stage, looking out across a sea of slapping fishtails. The accent lights, still buried in the colored gravel at the bottom of the tank, shined up on me.

"Susannah," I heard Jesse say. He'd followed me, and now stood looking up at me curiously. "What are you doing?"

I ignored him – and Marcus, too, who was still swearing as he tried to get across the room without getting his Cole-Haans more wet than they already were.

I stood inside the ruined aquarium and looked up. As I'd suspected, the fish were fed from a room behind the tank … a room in which there was nothing except aquarium maintenance equipment. The locked door from Mr. Beaumont's office led into this room. There was no other form of egress.