"Shush, y'all!" she said. "Listen out!"

We all shut up and listened, little thrills of anxiety gnawing at us all. We heard nothing. Union Grove, home of the Blue and White Lions, stood in the middle of a cow pasture, surrounded by a small football stadium and an Olympic-sized pool that served in the summer as the community swimming hole.

We ran the truck up around back of the school, then up over the curve to the northeast corner of the old brick building, right under the principal's window. Evella killed the engine and handed me a roll of masking tape.

"Knock it out, big girl!" she cried softly.

I taped the window, and then, just like in the I Spy TV show, I knocked the pane out with a gloved fist and pulled the taped pieces out of the frame. No jagged edges. No clinking sounds. No mess. In a few moments the six of us were inside Mr. Slovenick's office, painting away and drinking our sweet summer wine.

We painted his floor, his desk, his chair, his phone, his papers, even his flag, bright Lion blue. We covered the walls and the ceiling and when at last we were finished, we had almost as much paint on ourselves as we did the room.

"I know what let's do," I said. "Let's go swimming! Naked!"

That was our mistake.

We ran old Evella's truck right down to the chain-link fence and used the roof of the cab as our ladder to scale over. We didn't plan how we'd get back out from behind the fence. We didn't consider that the swim team would meet on Saturday. We just knew the pleasure of swimming alone and naked in the school pool. The untouchables.

The water turned bright blue from the paint, just like the pictures you see of the Carribean. The sun began to slowly edge its way up over the southern Virginia hills, and there we were, on top of the world. We were laying out on top of the concrete, drying off, when we heard the car in the distance and knew it was headed for the school. After all, where else would a car be going at six A.M. on a late spring Saturday, down the one road that led only to the high school?

"I told y'all!" Lacy shrieked. "I told you!"

We jumped up, the naked six of us, all running in different directions, all panicked except for Evella, who calmly started to scale the fence, butt naked, her fingers and toes grabbing hold of the mesh as she worked her way up and over the fence. By the time we'd come to our senses enough to start climbing, she'd crawled into the car and cranked the engine. We dropped down into the cab like fat, overripe apples hitting the ground, and in an instant Evella had popped the clutch and was skidding her way across the pasture.

There was only one way out. We were going to pass the car and sure as shooting, we'd be recognized.

"Hide, y'all," Evella screamed. "Lie flat in the bed!"

We squished ourselves flat against the bedliner of the old truck, huddling in one blue-tinged mass of naked girl flesh. Evella was gonna take the fall. She couldn't drive and hunch down under the windshield. So, she went out like Evella.

"It's Dickie!" she screamed back through the cab window. Dickie was the president of Beta Club, the smart kid club, and manager of the swim team. Towel Boy, they called him.

Evella pushed the accelerator to the floor and sat up straight, blue and naked, her big breasts pushed up against the steering wheel. As she passed Dickie, Evella let out a mighty Indian war whoop and kept on going. Evella really wasn't afraid of nothing or nobody.

We hightailed it back to Evella's, borrowed her clothes and took showers, hoping to clean up before the cops came to arrest us. For surely they were hot on our tails. But the cops didn't come that day. Or the next. It wasn't that our crime went unnoticed. It was more the way little Dickie related it to the police and the press.

"Oh, my gawd! Oh, Lord," he moaned to the reporter who wrote up the big front page story, "Union Grove High School Mauled By Blue Man."

"It was the biggest, meanest-looking man I ever did see!"

"Man!" Evella raved after school on Monday. "I ain't no man!" But of course she couldn't say it out loud.

"We were robbed!" I said. "They think a man did it!"

"But what about our clothes, back at the pool?" asked Lacy, who I believe trembled the rest of her senior year.

The clothes were never mentioned. Not in the paper. Not around the school. Nowhere. However, a few years later, the most peculiar thing did happen. Evella married Dickie. Little shrimpy Dickie and big old Evella. The rest of us always wondered if somehow he'd found out, taken our clothes and decided to cover for us, or realized later that the "man" he'd seen was really Evella. We never knew, but rumors circulated as always. Dickie and Evella live in a blue house, drive blue cars, and mostly wear blue clothing. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with the year the Union Grove Blue Man struck.

If Weathers had gotten to the bottom of that story, what other distorted ideas did he have about me? How would I ever convince him that I could be trusted, believed to tell the truth? How could I convince him that I wasn't a murderer? And how would I ever make him believe that someone was coming after me? And maybe not just me. I felt my stomach seize up and a wave of nausea swept over me. What about Sheila? Was she safe? What if the killer had been after us and only happened on Jimmy?

I had to get to my baby. I had to find some answers before we found ourselves in real danger.

Chapter Twelve

I sat out in my car for a minute and watched Sheila through the glass front of the bagel shop. This was not the Sheila I knew, the headstrong teenager who stomped out of my house and all over my heart a mere eleven months ago. Sheila had evolved into someone else.

The girl I watched had straightened her curly red hair and now wore it slicked back in a ponytail, just like the other girls in the upscale Irving Park shop. She'd toned down her makeup so she'd look "natural" like the others, not like a vampire runaway. I had to admit it was a positive physical improvement, but at what cost to my little rebel's freethinking spirit?

The Bun and Bagel was no redneck, lard-cake bakery. There wasn't a bun in the place that smacked of squishy white bread and Vienna sausages. It was wholesome, a quality I much dislike in my baked goods. Give me a hunk of greasy yellow cornbread with bacon drippings any day of the week.

Sheila saw me coming and seemed to cringe.

"Pretty uptown little shop," I said, stepping up to the counter in front of her.

"Hey, Mama." She smiled weakly. But like every child with something to hide, she didn't meet my eyes. This was made all the easier by her bagel cap. Designed to look like a bagel, it slid down lopsidedly onto her forehead, giving Sheila the appearence of a drunken angel.

"I need to talk to you, honey. Tell your boss you need to take a little break."

Sheila looked frightened. "Now?" she asked. "I can't right now, Mama. I'm working and we're swamped."

I looked around. There was one customer in the store, a woman in a fur coat, being waited on by another girl. I looked back at Sheila, raising my Mama-don't-buy-that eyebrow.

"All right." She sighed. "Mary Catherine, I'm taking a break for a second." She used a chatty little tone I'd never heard before, and pitched her voice an octave lower than usual. It was her version of an upper-crust accent, and it cut me to the quick. What was happening to my baby?

Sheila flung her cap down onto a stool and brushed past me, headed for the door. She walked past the storefront and around to the side of the tiny brick building where the girls inside couldn't see her. She was fumbling in the pocket of her bagel apron, her hand closing around a telltale rectangle.