"Excuse me?"

"What makes you think I'm here to see you?"

"Maybe the fact that you tried to grab me the other night?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea what you are talking about."

"Whatever," I say. "I want my stuff back, by the way."

He raises his eyebrows again, as if he really doesn't have any idea of what I'm referring to. Like he's not the one who took my tote from the grove.

"So we're still playing that game?" I ask.

I don't break eye contact with him until he holds out his hand and asks, "Will you dance with me?" I am so startled by this proposition, I don't know how to respond. Luckily, the screech of a microphone as the music stops saves me from having to do so. I turn toward the sound.

"Can I have your attention?" A woman in a red gown calls into the microphone from the bandstand on the patio. The crowd of students and parents quiet down and turn their attention to her. Tobin and a very dapper-looking j.a.panese man, who I a.s.sume is Tobin's father, stand by her side. "I am happy to welcome you all to our home today," the woman who must be Mayor Winters says. "You've all worked so hard to get here, and I am as proud of you as I am of my own son. However, I do think Tobin deserves a round of applause for landing the lead in this year's play." She starts the applause and everyone in the crowd-except Haden, who has retreated behind the magnolia tree, I notice-joins in. Next, the mayor leads the crowd in a rollicking welcome for Joe, who seems to be enjoying the company of several women in short c.o.c.ktail-length dresses near the bar.

"And where is your costar, Toby?" she asks. "I hear she's quite lovely." Even from where I stand, I can see the blush in Tobin's cheeks. He finds me in the crowd and points me out to his mother. The mayor attempts to start a round of applause for me, but I am not surprised that it sounds much more feeble than for Tobin.

"I hope you will enjoy the party," Mayor Winters says. "We will be sending the floral arrangements to Pear Perkins's hospital room, so please be sure to sign the get-well card that is circulating the party. We want to do everything we can to take care of our own here in Olympus Hills." She smiles, showing gleaming white teeth behind her ruby red lipstick. "Oh, and do be sure to help yourselves to the spider rolls; they're an Oshiro family specialty."

And with another round of applause, Mayor Winters and her husband head down the patio steps, shaking hands with party guests as they go. The orchestra strikes up again and couples head out on to the dance floor. I slip past them and head for Tobin, who is accepting the congratulations of a man wearing a pale yellow scarf. Tobin smiles when he sees me approach and excuses himself from the conversation.

"Yowza, Daphne," he says, looking me over. "I take it back. I was asking you to be my date tonight."

"Too late," I say with a smile.

He looks even more Frank Sinatraaesque in a black suit, bow tie, and a black fedora sitting on his head at a rakish angle. With my heels on, I tower over him even more than usual, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"Wanna dance?" he says.

"No," I say. "I want to hear about this big secret of yours." He takes my hand and gestures me toward the house. "Like I said, it's something I need to show you." chapter twenty-seven haden To my utter astonishment, Dax's plan to get Daphne to come to me seems to be working. Daphne moves closer and closer as the party progresses. She's standing only a few feet away now.

Between trying to dodge the disgusting-smelling food at the buffet, warding off the attention of some short girl named Lexie, and pretending to be overly fascinated by the tree that grows near the pool, I've done a rather decent impression of being aloof. I don't follow her, and I don't look at her unless I am sure she isn't watching. Which is an experiment in self-control, considering how she looks in that dress.

I had already been fascinated by the curves of her body, but the way that dress hugs and emphasizes them makes me wonder how anyone at this party isn't staring at her. I am astonished that people are actually turning away from her. She reminds me of the paintings of our G.o.ddess that adorn the walls of the palace. The blue of her dress brings out the color of her eyes and complements the tanned skin on her exposed shoulders. . . .

I glance away quickly, realizing I've been caught looking. I take a sip of the dark, bubbling liquid in my gla.s.s. It burns my throat as I swallow. When I look up, Daphne is standing right in front of me. She says something snide.

And I ruin everything when I open my big dung spout of a mouth to reply. I'm not even sure what I've said that annoys her so much, but she's staring me down like she'd rather punch me in the face than speak to me again. I can't think of what to do next. The music and smells cloud my judgment. Not to mention that dress . . .

Her stare intensifies. I say the first thing that comes to mind. "Will you dance with me?" I hold out my hand. I don't know how to dance but I hope I will pick it up as quickly as driving. That is, if she'll accept my offer.

I don't get to find out.

The music stops, and the woman I saw in the vice princ.i.p.al's office, the mayor, I realize, calls for everyone's attention. She starts talking and I see her son standing beside her.

Kopros. I am at the home of the boy who tried to attack me in the cafeteria.

I duck behind the tree until after the woman is done talking. I want to try to strike up another conversation with Daphne, but before I have the chance, she heads in Tobin's direction. They speak for a moment and then she takes his hand and they enter the house. Together.

I'm not going to follow her. That would be against Dax's advice, and the last thing I want is to be accused of stalking her again. I'm INTO THE DARK 223.

not going to go into the house to see what they're doing. But I don't see the harm in watching through the windows. . . .

The lights are on in the house and the shutters open. I walk around the side of the mansion until I am near the gate that leads into the front yard. I see Tobin and Daphne enter an empty room together.

Tobin leans down and pulls something from a drawer. I am tempted to climb the trellis next to the window to see what he is showing her.

But I bristle when I hear a familiar, chipper voice speaking to the doorman out front.

"It doesn't matter if the mayor is having a party. She will be delighted to meet with me."

"She'll be delighted to meet with you," the doorman responds mechanically, and invites Simon into the house.

I climb the gate that separates the backyard from the front yard, trying to get a better view into the windows of the foyer. My attention already torn between trying to ascertain what Daphne and Tobin are up to, and trying to figure out why Simon would be meeting with the mayor in the middle of her party, when something else pulls at me. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle, and I suddenly feel as though I am being watched.

I scan the backyard, but it seems as though none of the partygoers have noticed me perched on top of the gate. I look behind me into the front yard, and then beyond to the road. The light from one of the street lamps glints off the visor of the helmet of a man sitting on an idling black motorcycle. His face is completely covered by the helmet, but I can tell by the way his head is angled that he is either watching me, or he has a strange fascination with cedar-wood fences. A catering van pulls up to the curb, blocking him from my view-and me from his.

I tell myself that he is probably just waiting to rendezvous with a party guest and noticed a teenager sitting on the gate in the middle of the mayor's yard, and I turn my attention back to the windows of the room Daphne had entered. Only now she and Tobin are gone, and Simon and the mayor have replaced them in the room, seemingly locked in an intense conversation.

chapter twenty-eight.

daphne

Tobin leads me down a long hall toward the front of the mansion. He stops and waits until one of the waiters pa.s.ses, with a silver tray of tempura shrimp, before we duck through a set of French doors into a room I a.s.sume is his mother's office. There are gla.s.s cases showcasing various vases and artifacts lined up along the edges of the room. Some look Asian in origin, but most of them look like relics from ancient Greece or Rome.

"Is your mom a collector or something?"

Tobin puts a finger to his lips to quiet me. "Yeah," he whispers. "But none of this is what I wanted to show you." He leads me away from the display cases to a large mahogany desk and opens one of the drawers.

"What are you doing?"

From the way he's acting, I almost think he's planning on pulling a heist in his mother's office-and using me as his accomplice-but what he pulls from the drawer is hardly something valuable. In terms of money, that is. It looks like an old family photo.

"Notice anything weird about this picture?"

There are a lot of weird things about this photo. It's at least seven years old, based on how old Tobin looks in the picture, but I wouldn't have guessed it was his family from appearance. The woman in the photo has long, naturally curly, auburn hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, and the j.a.panese man in the photo has hair almost to his shoulders, and wears a beaded necklace and a T-shirt with a windmill design on the front. Besides their faces, they barely resemble the dapper power couple of the mayor and her husband. There's another boy in the photo who looks to be a few years older than Tobin.

"Who's that?"

"My brother, Sage," Tobin says. "He went off to MIT a couple of years ago."

"MIT. I'm guessing he wasn't as into singing as you are?"

"No. He's a mechanical genius, just like my parents."

"Your parents?" Then I recognize the windmill design on his father's T-shirt. "Wait. I've heard your last name before. OshiroWinters Wind Energy. Your parents own one of the largest alternative energy companies in the west. They built a wind farm a few miles outside Ellis a few of years ago."

"Owned," he corrects me. "They went public and sold out just before we moved to Olympus Hills.

They retired at forty, except for my mom going into local politics and all. They were total hippies, and now they're the ultimate yuppies."

"I'll say." I point at the picture. "Your mom looks like she could have been on the cover of a Simon and Garfunkel alb.u.m."

"But that's not the weirdest thing about this picture. Do you see it?" He points out the way his brother Sage's hand seems to float in the air, as if it were resting on an invisible person's shoulder.

"Is there someone missing from this picture?"

"My sister, Abbie."

I think back to the only other time Tobin had mentioned his sister-in the grove. "Your sister. The one you said liked to go to the grove with her friends. . . . Before she ran away?" Tobin nods. "It happened six months after my parents got rich and moved to Olympus Hills. They were so upset when she went missing. But not like worried upset, like angry upset."

"Is that why they Photoshopped her out of this picture?"

"Not just this picture. All of our pictures. I can barely remember what she looks like sometimes. They say she dishonored the family. They won't even speak her name these days. But the thing is, Daphne, sometimes, I don't think she ran away. Sometimes, I think . . . that she was taken."

"Taken. Like kidnapped? What do your parents think?"

"They think I'm nuts. She left a note on her computer, and my dad says the PI he hired to check it out couldn't find anything to suggest there was foul play involved. But that note didn't sound like the Abbie I knew. It was more like someone else had written it for her."

"That's insane. I mean, not that I think you're insane. That's just some pretty intense stuff. I mean, you were what, like, ten years old when this happened?"

He nods. "I was the last person to see her, you know. I was out riding my bike around the lake and I saw her crossing that bridge that leads into the grove only a couple of hours before she didn't show up for dinner. She wasn't alone."

I raise my eyebrows, asking the question I can't quite put to words.

"He was a new friend of hers from school-a visiting student from the East Coast. His last name was Lord and he looked an awful lot like this Haden guy."

"What?" I say, completely confused.

"That's why I flipped out at school on Monday. After hearing your description of Haden and hearing his last name . . . Something just came over me and I thought . . ."

"That he was the guy you saw with your sister? But that was what, six years ago? Haden would have been, like, ten or eleven. It couldn't have been him."

"I'm not saying it was him. They just share the same look, you know? Maybe he was, like, a brother or a cousin. All I know is that someone from this Lord family was with my sister just before she disappeared." Tobin pulls a small key from his pocket. "But here's where things start to get really weird, Daphne. I think there have been others."

"Other what?"

Tobin crouches next to his mother's desk and starts to unlock a large file drawer. "Other girls who've been taken from this place."

"Tobin!" a stern voice interrupts us. Tobin stops what he's doing and slips the key back into his pocket and shoves the family photo under the desk as Mayor Winters appears in the doorway. "What are you doing in here? I have a meeting."

There's a man with her, but he's obviously not Tobin's father. He's wearing bike shorts and an Under Armour tee, and there's a bike helmet covering most of his head. What kind of meeting was the mayor having with him in the middle of a party?

"Sorry," Tobin says, quickly stepping away from her desk.

"Your father has been looking for you. It is impolite to neglect your other party guests for so long." The man in the bike shorts grins merrily. "Now, now, Rosemary. Don't be so hard on the boy. Kids will be kids," he says, with a little bit too much twinkle in his tone.

Tobin clears his throat. "Again, my apologies, Mother," he says with a slight bow, and leaves the room.

I follow after him, wondering if I should bow also. The mayor stops me just before I exit the office.

She taps my shoulder with one of her long, manicured, red fingernails. "I hear you're the one who told security you thought the Perkins girl was attacked. You know it's a crime to give a false report, don't you?"

I shake my head. "I didn't lie." I almost add that the guy I suspected of doing Pear harm is currently in her backyard, but I don't like the way she's staring at me. Like she could have me locked up with only a single phone call.

"Tobin is a good boy," she says. "I wouldn't want him to make friends with anyone who might encourage him to behave otherwise." She glances at the desk drawer that Tobin had been about to unlock. Is she insinuating that he was poking around in her stuff under my influence? "Thank you for inviting me to your party," I say, not knowing how else to respond, and leave the room.

By the time I make it back outside, Tobin has been entrapped by his father into greeting their various guests, so I decide it's time for me to make my exit.

I'm already tired of this so-called party.

I don't see Joe anywhere-he's probably off somewhere with that gaggle of women and a bottle of champagne-so I decide to walk home, despite how dark it's gotten. I keep snagging the train of my dress with my heels, so I remove my shoes and leave them on the hood of Joe's Porsche, which is parked along the road.

I set off barefoot on one of the lonely lake paths, only to find myself not quite so alone after all. A very short girl in a very tight purple dress is hunched over a trash bin at the edge of a fork in the path -in the process of losing her dinner. She heaves one last time and stumbles in her ridiculously high heels.

"Lexie?"

She steadies herself with the rim of the trash can and looks up at me, wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. "What are you looking at?"

"Are you okay?" I ask. "Bad sushi?" More like too much drinky, but whatever.

She narrows her eyes at me. "Why do you care?"

I shrug, not sure why, either. "Do you need help getting home?"

"Why would I need help from you? You don't even exist," she says, turning her back on me.

"This stonewalling thing is stupid, you know. You can't pretend I don't exist when I'm the lead of the play." I am so burned out from Joe, the party, trying to process Tobin's revelation, and my encounter with his cranky mother that I'm ready to just lay into Lexie and tell her what I really think of her and her elitist little mafia. Do they really think they're so much better than everyone else?

Lexie reels around, nearly toppling over in her shoes. "You think you're so much better than me, don't you?"

"What?"

"You think you're so great because your dad is some middle-aged rock star." She points a finger at me. "You think you can come waltzing in here with your long neck and your long legs and steal the part that should be mine. I've been working on Mr. Morgan for the last two years to get to be the star, and now it's like he's lost his mind. I mean, you're a contralto or whatever you are. Contraltos never get the lead. And you'd look ridiculous onstage with Tobin. Look at you, you're like a . . . like a . . .