Sighing, Elizabeth leaned back against her headboard and closed her eyes. The last thing she was in the mood for was listening to her twin babbling on and on about her fabulous romance. Not that Elizabeth wasn't happy her sister was in love, but Jessica's monologues could get pretty tedious.
She shook her head and opened her journal, then reread her last entry.
I really feel confused about tonight. I know we had to report the break-in, but I can't stop thinking about Jennifer Mitchell. I feel like we betrayed her, even though she would have gotten in a lot of trouble with Rick Andover. I don't think John is completely objective about it either. He just wanted to keep her from running away, but I don't think he realizes how upset she's going to be. If Rick is arrested, she loses her boyfriend and her big plans all at the same time. I hope John realizes this whole thing isn't over yet.
Elizabeth chewed on the end of her pen, deep in thought. If Luke Lander had called the police the way he said he would, then Jennifer Mitchell was in for the shock of her life.
Jennifer flicked on the overhead light and checked her watch again: ten after twelve. Biting her lip, she shut the light off and shifted uncomfortably on the front seat of her mother's car. She drew a deep, shaky breath and then another to steady her frazzled nerves.
"Rick, where are you?" she whispered. Her voice was edged with panic. There had to be a reason why he was forty minutes late. There had to be. Or maybe she was early, she thought frantically. Maybe she had misunderstood his directions. For the hundredth time she went over their telephone conversation in her head.
"Are you all ready?" Rick had said when she answered the phone earlier in the evening.
"Yes—I've got everything I need," Jennifer assured him. Her heart was hammering with excitement and eagerness. Tonight would be the start of a whole new life. "I'm all packed and everything."
"Great. That's really good. Now, here's what we're going to do. I want you to meet me at the corner of Madison and LaBrea."
"OK. I'll leave a note for my mother to say where I left her car."
"Great. I've got some things to do first, some people to see, OK? So meet me at eleven-thirty sharp. Have you got that?"
Jennifer could hardly contain her elation. "Yes. Eleven-thirty, corner of Madison and LaBrea. Rick, this is so great. I know we'll make it."
"Sure we will, Jen. I gotta go, so I'll see you later, right?"
"Eleven-thirty. I'll be there." She squeezed her eyes shut as she added, "I love you."
Rick hung up before he heard her last sentence, but she didn't care. There would be plenty of time ahead to tell him how she felt about him.
She looked around her room triumphantly, glad it was the last time she would be in it for a long time, maybe even forever. When she came back to Sweet Valley, she would be a star. And everyone—especially her father—would have to eat their words about Rick. So all she had to do was wait until eleven-thirty, and her new life would start. . . .
But now it was past midnight, and there was no doubt in Jennifer's mind she had gotten the time right. She was in the right place at the right time, but Rick wasn't. In an agony of worry she looked through the back window again, checking the dark, empty streets for any sign of him. In the backseat her suitcase and her keyboard were a painful reminder of the cross-country trip that was supposed to have started that evening.
"What happened?" she pleaded in the darkness. "Where are you?"
Her heart lurched as a police car drove past her down the street. Quickly slumping down behind the steering wheel, she watched the police car disappear from view. For a few more minutes she resisted the urge to check the time again, but finally she couldn't stand it anymore. With trembling fingers she switched on the light and looked at her watch. She felt numb with worry and disbelief. Rick was over an hour late.
For the first time she began to wonder what would happen if he didn't show up at all. She couldn't sit in the car at an intersection all night, especially if the squad car passed her again and began to get suspicious. And if she and Rick had to leave on a different night, Jennifer didn't want to risk alerting her parents to the plan by staying out until dawn. If she lost the advantage of getting away secretly, she would never be able to leave.
"Rick, what should I do?" Jennifer could feel the chill night air seeping into the car. She shivered and hugged herself while she debated all the options. Sitting alone, waiting, not knowing—it was becoming a nightmare. She didn't know what to do, what to think.
At two o'clock in the morning she started the car and slowly drove home.
Six
Jennifer woke up with a jolt and lay staring at the ceiling while she tried to figure out what was wrong. Something terrible had happened, but her groggy mind couldn't grasp what it was. Then she remembered.
Rick.
With a muffled groan, she rolled over onto her side and pulled the pillow down over her head. Maybe it would all turn out to be a bad dream. Maybe—
"Jen? You up yet? I'm making pancakes!" Her mother's voice drifted into her room.
Jennifer pushed herself up and stared bleakly around her bedroom. "I shouldn't have left," she whispered. "He could have come after I left and thought I never showed up."
"Jen?"
"I'm coming!" she managed to call back. She got up and checked to make sure she had completely pushed her suitcase under her bed the night before. If there was any chance the plan would still go through, she didn't want to blow it by letting her parents see her packed luggage or the note about the car, which she had ripped to shreds.
"I thought you were going to sleep all day," Mrs. Mitchell said as Jennifer plodded into the kitchen. She turned from the stove with a wry look. "You were out awfully late last night."
"Mmm." Too worried and tired and depressed to bother with conversation, Jennifer slumped at the table and let out a heavy sigh. Across the room, her father was talking on the telephone.
"No kidding, Jack? Can't say I'm surprised, though." Mr. Mitchell looked over at Jennifer. Jack was Jack Parker, Jennifer knew, a lawyer at the district attorney's office and a friend of her father's. They frequently played tennis together on weekends.
"Have some juice, honey? Fresh-squeezed." Mrs. Mitchell held up a glass invitingly.
Jennifer gave her mother a blank stare. She couldn't believe the world was still droning along so obliviously. It didn't feel right. "What?"
"I said do you want some juice? Really, Jen. I don't think you should stay out so late if you're going to be this tired," her mother said.
For a moment all Jennifer could do was stare at her mother. It seemed impossible that her parents still treated her like a child, especially when she had almost run away from home the night before. She still loved her parents, but she knew things would never be the same between her and them. She drew a deep breath, then said, "I don't want anything, Mom. I'm not hungry."
"You have to have something, dear," Mrs. Mitchell insisted. "Come on, how about some pan—"
"I don't want any!" Covering her eyes with her hand, Jennifer slumped further in her chair and tried to concentrate. There had to be a reason why Rick hadn't shown up—and a reason why he hadn't tried getting in touch with her. At the moment she didn't feel like noticing the hurt look she knew would be on her mother's face, or apologizing. She just wanted—needed—to know what had happened.
"I don't want anything," she repeated in a tightly controlled voice. "I'm not hungry. I'll eat later."
"OK, Jack. Meet you at the courts at three. Bye." Mr. Mitchell hung up the phone and sat down across from Jennifer.
"That was Jack Parker, Jen," he announced, picking up his coffee cup. "He had some interesting news."
Jennifer didn't look up. She didn't care what Jack Parker had told her father.
"Jen?" Her father paused. "Your friend Rick Andover was arrested last night for burglary."
At the sound of Rick's name, Jennifer became rigid. And the news caused her mind to go blank for a moment. It cou
ldn't be true.
"He broke into a music store and stole a very expensive guitar and some cash," Mr. Mitchell continued. His voice was sad, and his gaze rested on her pityingly.
Mrs. Mitchell exclaimed, "Oh, no! I knew he was a troublemaker, but this!" Turning to Jennifer, she added, "That's it for you, young lady. You're not seeing that boy ever again."
Jennifer's mind was a whirl of conflicting thoughts and emotions. On the one hand she felt a crazy sense of relief that Rick hadn't deliberately stood her up. But the next moment she was screaming at herself for being so selfish. The boy she loved had been arrested for burglary, and all she knew was that it had to be some kind of stupid mistake. Rick might have his problems, she told herself, but he would never break into a store.
"Jen? I said I don't want you to see that boy any more, do you understand?" Her mother broke into Jennifer's anguished reverie. "He's a criminal!"
"No, he's not!" Jennifer found her voice suddenly and shook her head. "He would never do that," she insisted, pushing her chair back abruptly. "It's a mistake."
Mr. Mitchell cleared his throat and gave her a warning glance. "It's no mistake, Jennifer. I told you he was heading for trouble, and now he's in it up to his neck."
"No!" Wide-eyed with indignation, Jennifer glared at her father. "I know he wouldn't. Someone set him up. He must have been framed!"
"Oh, come on, Jen! Be sensible!" Mr. Mitchell scoffed. "Who would bother to do that?" Shaking his head, he stood up arid stalked to the stove to pour himself some more coffee. With his back to her, he added, "Nobody needed to frame Rick Andover, he did it all by himself."
Something in her father's tone made Jennifer suspicious. She was convinced someone had framed Rick, and a glimmer of an idea had just occurred to her. If her father had eavesdropped on her phone call with Rick the night before—if he knew they were planning to run away together—he could have set Rick up in order to throw a wrench into their plans. Mr. Mitchell had never made a secret of how much he despised Rick. Putting him in jail was just the sort of thing her father would do, Jennifer decided with growing certainty.
As the idea took shape in her mind, Jennifer thought she remembered the faint click of another phone extension being replaced before she had hung up the phone. In an instant she was absolutely sure that her father had listened in. It was all her father's fault that Rick had been arrested. A feeling of cold, bitter anger filled Jennifer as she watched her father sit down again across from her and pick up the newspaper.
"You ruined my life," she said in a low, intense voice. She stood up unsteadily and grabbed the edge of the table. She had never been so furious and upset in her life. The cruelty and unfairness of what her father had done almost blinded her for a moment. Her mind was reeling.
Mr. Mitchell lowered the paper, a look of bafflement on his face. "What?"
"You know what I mean," Jennifer said. Her voice tightened in her throat as she continued. "I'll never forget this. I hate you! I hate you!" Bursting into tears, she turned and raced out of the kitchen.
Elizabeth sat up on her blanket and looked around. As usual for a Saturday afternoon, the Sweet Valley beach was mobbed. It made her smile to see so many familiar faces. Almost the entire student population of Sweet Valley High was there, lying on the sand or frolicking in the water.
"What are you grinning about?" Jeffrey asked.
She turned to him with arched eyebrows. "Was I smiling? I was just thinking—nothing in particular."
Jeffrey scooped up a handful of sand and trickled it through his fingers onto her toes. "OK, be secretive and mysterious," he said in a lofty tone.
"That's my sister's department," Elizabeth returned. Their eyes met, and Elizabeth grinned. Then she rolled over onto her stomach to survey the beach again. Her twin was sitting with A.J. and Lila just a few feet away, and a group of juniors and seniors were playing volleyball. As Elizabeth squinted against the glare, she caught sight of Amy Sutton hurrying across the sand toward Jessica.
"You'll never believe what I heard!" Amy called out in a voice shrill with excitement. Some of the volleyball players called it quits and walked over as Amy arrived.
She knelt on Jessica's blanket and announced loudly, "Rick Andover was arrested for burglary last night! Isn't that unbelievable?"
"You're kidding!" Jessica exclaimed and scrambled onto her knees. "How do you know?"
"Yeah," Lila seconded, "how do you know?"
A small group of curious students had gathered around, waiting avidly for the rest of Amy's news bulletin. Elizabeth, lying with Jeffrey, followed the conversation without watching. A faint blush colored her cheeks as she listened, and when she saw John Pfeifer on the fringes of the crowd, she saw that he was looking self-conscious, too.
"My mom heard it in the newsroom," Amy explained with an air of importance. Mrs. Sutton worked at a nearby television station, a fact that Amy managed to work into a lot of conversations. "He ripped off the Mello Music Shop downtown for a Fender Stratocaster guitar and a whole lot of money."
"He's the guy you were telling me about, right?" A.J. said to Jessica. She nodded, and he turned back to Amy. "Did they catch him doing it?"
Amy shook her head. "No—the police received an anonymous tip."
"Anonymous tip!" Lila repeated. She looked delighted.
Against her will, Elizabeth met John's eyes again. She felt somewhat uncomfortable about her role in Rick Andover's arrest, even though she knew she had done the right thing. But she hadn't told anyone about it, not even Jeffrey. John looked away.
"I'm not surprised." Bruce Patman picked up his Frisbee and bounced it on the heel of his hand. As a senior, a varsity tennis team star, and a member of one the richest families in Sweet Valley, Bruce had an ego the size of California. "I always said that guy would end up on a chain gang. Now it looks like he's on his way," he drawled. He tossed back his thick black hair and smiled scornfully.
An excited buzz of conversation started up, and everyone began speculating about the burglary and arrest. Old stories about Rick Andover's recklessness were tossed out again, and new ones circulated at the same time.
Elizabeth stood up suddenly. She didn't want to hear any more. Deep in thought, she wandered off down the beach, kicking the sand.
"Hi," came a voice from behind her.
She looked up suddenly but relaxed when she saw it was John. "Hi. I guess Mr. Lander did call the police. He said he would."
"Yeah. I guess so." John shrugged. "So the trip's off," he added with a sigh of relief.
Nodding, Elizabeth walked on a few more steps. Then she stopped and looked back at him. "Have you talked to her—Jennifer? She must be pretty upset."
"Well . . ." John hesitated for a moment. Then, with a sheepish look, he admitted, "I called her house this morning, but Mrs. Mitchell said Jennifer wouldn't come to the phone for anyone."
Elizabeth nodded, not meeting his eyes. "Oh—I guess you can understand how she feels."
"Right."
"It's all for the best," Elizabeth went on hurriedly. She looked at John again, meeting his gaze evenly. "It would have been a disaster. . . ."
He nodded. "Right. A disaster." With a matter-of-fact smile, he added, "Well, thanks for helping out and everything, Liz. See you later."
"Sure." Elizabeth returned his smile absently and watched him stride down to the water's edge. She knew they had done the right thing, but she still felt uncomfortable.
It's all over with, she told herself sternly. And now it's up to John to straighten things out with Jennifer if he wants to.
She strolled back to Jeffrey and the others.
"The perfect vacation is going somewhere like L.A. or New York City to go shopping, and then partying till dawn," Jessica was saying. "I mean, what's the point of a vacation if you can't get away from your same old boring routine?"
Elizabeth turned to Jeffrey, an amused look in her blue-green eyes. Shopping and partying was the same old routine for Jessica. Jeffrey just smiled
slightly and shrugged. When Jessica presented her opinions, it was usually best to stay out of the conversation.
But it was obvious A.J. wasn't about to keep quiet. As he swept his thick red hair out of his eyes, he said, "Yeah, but with your kind of vacation, you get totally wiped out and you need another vacation just to rest." He grinned. "The best vacation would be something like going up to the mountains—doing a little climbing, a little fishing, reading some good books . . ."
"Oh, come on, A.J." Jessica groaned. She scrambled onto her knees and shook a fist in his face. "You never want to do anything really fun."
He laughed. "OK. We'll see. Who here would rather spend a vacation shopping and partying and who would rather go up to the mountains?" He appealed to Elizabeth and Jeffrey. "Jeffrey? Bloomingdale's or the Sierras?"
"The Sierras, definitely," Jeffrey replied instantly. "If Liz goes, too."
Jessica sent Elizabeth a threatening look. Even though the argument was obviously for fun, Elizabeth could still recognize the determination in her twin's face. Jessica hated to be contradicted.
"Liz?" Jessica said. "Would you rather go to fabulous, exciting New York City or go break your leg and get mosquito bites in the mountains?"
"Hmm . . ." Grinning, Elizabeth looked from Jessica to A.J. and back again. "I don't think I want to get roped into this," she said. Her eyes danced with amusement as Jessica pretended to strangle A.J. "Are you trying to eliminate the competition?" Elizabeth asked lightly.
Jessica looked over at her, an innocent expression on her face. "That's right." She went back to strangling A.J., and he made mock choking noises.
"OK, Jess. I agree with you," Elizabeth spoke up.
Jessica let go of A.J.'s neck and smiled. "Thank you."
"I change my vote, too," Jeffrey said. Looking at A.J., he explained, "Only because I don't want to see you murdered."
A.J. flopped backward onto the sand and let out a gasp. "I give up. I'd rather shop."
"That's what I thought you meant," Jessica said. She sent Elizabeth a triumphant look before lounging on the sand beside her boyfriend.
White Lies (Sweet Valley High Book 52) Page 4