The Amanda Project Book 2: Revealed

Chapter 2

The lights were out in Thornhill’s office, but there was an entire wall of windows that let in enough sun for me to see just fine. Contrary to my CSI-inspired fantasies, the room looked much the way it had when we’d broken into it a little over a week ago. There was no shattered glass, no overturned chairs. The only sign of the crime that had been committed was a dark spot on the rug in front of the desk that I told myself could just as easily be spilled coffee as blood (though it was hard to explain why the police would have put a square of yellow “Crime Scene: Do Not Cross” tape around a coffee splotch).

The need I’d had to get into the office had grown stronger as I crossed the threshold, but looking around me, I started to feel a little insane. What had I hoped to find, anyway? The police had probably been swarming the room all weekend—surely if there was any clue to be found, they’d already unearthed it.

The desk was as pristine as it had been the day he’d called me, Callie, and Nia in to ask us about the graffiti on his car and Amanda’s disappearance—nothing on its surface but the blotter, a phone, a laptop, and a notepad with Endeavor Unified

Middle and High School printed at the top. I flipped through the pages, but they were blank. Glancing over at an ancient computer on its stand, I saw an empty coffee cup and a plastic spoon in the metal garbage can beside it. Did they belong to

the criminal? To Thornhill? To the police who’d searched the room looking for clues? Maybe I should take them. They were probably dripping with DNA samples.

Oh, yes, Hal, that’s an excellent idea. You can use your DNA-removal kit to separate the genetic material from the plastic and then run the results through your crime lab’s computer.

Not.

Okay, okay, the DNA thing was a little ridiculous. A scream, the sound of something (a cell phone?) hitting linoleum. “What if the person comes back? What if we’re being targeted?!” Despite my terror, I couldn’t help smiling at Callie’s performance and loving her for it. Amanda may have gotten cast as Rosalind in As You Like It and Heidi may have taken the role when Amanda turned it down, but clearly Callie was a girl with her own hidden talents.

Still, as good an actress as Callie was, how much longer could she hold Officer Marciano out there? Sooner or later—probably sooner—he’d calm her down or send her home. I’d been in Thornhill’s office for almost a minute and I’d

discovered nothing. As my eyes swept the desktop for a second time, the tiny

glow of the laptop’s power light caught my eye. Wait a minute—since when did Thornhill have a laptop?

Endeavor wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of the technologi- cal revolution—my little sister, Cornelia, who’s basically a computer genius, had recently been home sick with strep, and my mother had called to ask her history teacher if Cornelia could scan and e-mail him the homework she’d been doing while she was absent. His response had been, and I quote, That is not what computers are for, Mrs. Bennett.

Gotta love an institution with both feet firmly in the twentieth century.

Casually, like someone was watching me and I had to make it look accidental, I made my way around the desk, then flipped open Thornhill’s laptop keeping the sleeve of my rugby shirt between my fingertips and the computer. Maybe I didn’t know how to dust for fingerprints, but surely the Orion Police Department did.

The screen immediately hummed to life, a document opening up before my eyes. But it was just a memo to the teachers about a new system for getting classroom supplies for next year: . . .will be available as of April and can be retrieved either by

filing a request with Mrs. Leong in the main office or by . . .What was I doing? I probably had about ten seconds before Officer Marciano burst through the door with his gun drawn, and I was reading a memo about Post-its.

My T-shirt-covered finger couldn’t move the arrow up to task bar, so I used the edge of my pinky to get there and click on FILE. Did the sides of your fingers leave prints? No doubt. My eyes raced down the list of files Thornhill had recently opened. Cell phone policy changes; Letter of Rec. Dr. Thomas; Minutes, March Board Meeting; Cast list—Much Ado About Nothing; Spring events—tentative (no athletics); Spring events—definite (athletics).

Well, what had I expected—Thornhill’s possible attackers (definite)? I scanned the list one more time, the pointlessness of the whole enterprise overwhelming. There was nothing here. There was nothing anywhere. How many times had we checked the Web site for clues about Amanda’s disappearance, only to discover everyone who knew her was as mystified (and misled) as we were?

Why should Thornhill’s attack be any different? I stood up and put my hand on the computer to shut it when my eyes caught the name of a file one last time.

Cast list—Much Ado About Nothing.

Much Ado About Nothing.

But Much Ado About Nothing wasn’t the play being put on at Endeavor this year. The play being put on at Endeavor this year was As You Like It.

Could Thornhill have made a mistake? Or could he have the cast list from a previous year’s play? For a second I tried to remember what play the high school had put on last year, and then I was sliding the arrow back up to the file menu and clicking open the cast list (misnamed or otherwise) for Much Ado About Nothing.

The document that opened before my eyes was nothing like any cast list I’d ever seen. It looked more like the files my dad sometimes brings home from his work as an accounting consultant, columns of data that made absolutely no sense—words that seemed to morph into numbers, numbers that stretched on forever. C-33528, F-514, M-229, beta file-4421(a). Dem_94.

At first, I was so overwhelmed by the meaningless information that swam in front of me I could barely make sense of the rows and columns, much less the data they contained. And then the senseless mass began to make sense. The font was tiny, so small I had to squint to read it, but the left-hand column of the chart was definitely a list of names in no particular order that I could discern. At first, they meant nothing.

There was a Reeve, Cecile and Hayes, Gracie. But as my eyes slid down the column, they landed on a name that did mean something to me. In fact, it meant a great deal to me. Because it was mine.