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the man’s head. “I’d better keep it, miss. We intend to follow up on this, I promise you that.” Opening his desk drawer, he dropped the note into a jumble of papers.
    She’d have to leave. Without her note.
    “It’s not that I don’t believe there was a note, Tess,” Gina said half an hour later, as they shared a booth at Kim’s, an ice-cream shop not far from Gina’s house. “I do. You wouldn’t make up something like that.” Wearing the red silk dress she’d worn earlier to church, she sat opposite Tess, who was toying with the straw sticking up out of her vanilla milkshake. “It’s just that it has to be a joke. A really mean one, but a joke. I hate to see you get all upset over it.”
    Tess began tapping her long-handled spoon on the Formica table. “I told you exactly what it said. Doesn’t it sound to you like it means the crash was no accident?”
    But she knew it was hopeless. Gina’s cheerful, uncomplicated way of looking at things didn’t include deliberate acts of terror or threatening notes. That was just the way she was. Which, Tess decided in all fairness, was probably why she smiled more than most people. There weren’t any scary demons or ghosts running around in her head.
    “Let’s wait and see what the police say, okay?” Gina urged. “And by the way, I did ask my dad about any other accidents at The Boardwalk,” she added in an obvious effort to make peace. “He hates talking about stuff like that, so it didn’t make him very happy.”
    Like father, like daughter, Tess thought drily.
    “But he did say some guy committed suicide in the Funhouse a long time ago. Hung himself.”
    “Yuck! No kidding? No wonder I was never crazy about that place. Who was it?”
    Gina stirred her Coke with her straw. “Daddy wouldn’t say. And Mom made us change the subject.”
    “I wonder why we never heard about it before?”
    Gina shrugged. “It happened a long time ago. Before we were born. I guess it’s not the kind of thing people like to talk about.”
    As they left the restaurant, Gina tried one more time to cheer up Tess. “Let’s just wait and see what Chief Chalmers comes up with before you start running around town like Henny-Penny, shouting that the sky is falling. Okay?”
    “Just don’t be surprised,” Tess said darkly, “if it turns out that I’m right. And I am going to say I told you so.”
    Gina laughed. “Of course you are. Anyway, we probably won’t hear anything about it until tomorrow. So, since you’re so jittery, why not stay at my house tonight? No school tomorrow, did you know that?”
    Tess hadn’t known. She was relieved to hear it. The atmosphere in school would have been grim.
    “The school board gave everyone the day off out of respect for Dade,” Gina continued. “We could see a movie this afternoon. Something really funny, to take your mind off all this stuff.”
    More relief. Tess had been reluctant to invite herself to stay at Gina’s, even for just one night. The Giambone house was already packed to the rafters with kids and toys and bicycles and pets. She usually stayed overnight only when at least one Giambone was doing the same at someone else’s house. “Thanks,” she said gratefully, “that’d be fun.”
    It almost was. The movie was funny, and she felt perfectly safe in a theater full of people.
    And what could hurt her at the Giambones’? The house, messy and cluttered, noisy and busy, shouldn’t have been relaxing, but it always was. Gina’s parents welcomed her warmly, the smaller children gave her hugs and begged her to read to them, which she did. And The Devil’s Elbow crash wasn’t mentioned once.
    So Tess should have felt blissfully safe. She should have slept like a baby all night in the big, crowded house.
    But she didn’t. Because vivid purple words kept dancing in front of her eyes. Who will be next? It could be you … it could be you … it could be you …

Chapter 9
    S HE WENT TO THE police with my poem. I