Ever since Jessica Mastriani was struck by lightning, she's had the ability to find missing people. But her amazing new power came at a cost: national fame and a crushing responsibility that Jess never asked for. The only way she knows how to get back her old life is to lie and say she’s lost her gift. But when Jess’s classmates start to disappear, she's accused of being involved. Jess’s only chance to clear her name is to use her powers. But this will only bring back all the old nightmares: the press, the FBI, everyone who seems to want a piece of her . . . including the guy she once gave her heart to. Time is running out, and it seems as if Jess is the only one who can save her friends. But even if she succeeds, will there be anyone to save her? Meg Cabot was born in Bloomington, Indiana. Her more than eighty books for both adults and teens have included multiple #1 New York Times bestsellers, selling over twenty-five million copies worldwide. They have been made into numerous films and television series, the most well-known of which is The Princess Diaries . She currently lives in Key West with her husband and various cats. CHAPTER 1 I didn’t know about the dead girl until the first day of school. It wasn’t my fault. I swear it wasn’t. I mean, how was I supposed to have known? It wasn’t like I’d been home. If I’d been home, of course I would have seen it in the paper, or on the news, or whatever. I would have heard people talking about it. But I hadn’t been home. I’d been stuck four hours north of home, at the Michigan dunes, in my best friend Ruth Abramowitz’s summer house. The Abramowitzes go to the dunes for the last two weeks of August every summer, and this year, they invited me to go along. I wasn’t going to go at first. I mean, who’d want to spend two weeks trapped in a summer house with Ruth’s twin brother Skip? Um, not me. Skip still chews with his mouth open even though he is sixteen and should know better. Plus he is like Grand Dragon Master of our town’s Dungeons & Dragons population, in spite of the Trans Am he bought with his bar mitzvah money. On top of which, Mr. Abramowitz has this thing about cable, and the only telephone he’ll allow in his vacation house is his cell, which is reserved for emergency use only, like if one of his clients gets thrown in the clink or whatever. (He’s a lawyer.) So you can see, of course, why I was like, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to Ruth’s invitation. But then my parents said that they were spending the last two weeks of August driving my brother Mike and all his stuff up to Harvard, where he was going to be starting his freshman year, and that Great-aunt Rose would be coming to stay with me and my other brother, Douglas, while they were gone. Never mind that I am sixteen and Douglas is twenty and that we do not need parental supervision, particularly in the form of a seventy-five-year-old lady who is obsessed with solitaire and my sex life (not that I have one). Great-aunt Rose was coming to stay, and I was informed that I could like it or lump it. I chose neither. Instead of coming home after my stint as a camp counselor at the Lake Wawasee Camp for Gifted Child Musicians, which was how I got to spend my summer vacation, I went with the Abramowitzes to the dunes. Hey. Even watching Skip eat grilled peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches morning, noon, and night for two weeks beat spending five minutes with Great-aunt Rose, who likes to talk about how in her day, only cheap girls wore dungarees. Seriously. Dungarees. That’s what she calls them. You can see why I chose the dunes instead. And truthfully, the two weeks didn’t go so badly. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have a good time or anything. How could I? Because while we’d been slaving away at Camp Wawasee, Ruth had been working very hard on her teen social development, and she’d managed to acquire a boyfriend. That’s right. An actual boyfriend, whose parents—wouldn’t you know it—also had a house on the dunes, like ten minutes away from Ruth’s. I tried to be supportive, because Scott was Ruth’s first real boyfriend—you know, the first guy she’d liked who actually liked her back, and who didn’t seem to mind being seen holding her hand in public, and all of that. But let’s face it, when someone invites you to stay with them for two weeks, and then spends those two weeks basically hanging out with somebody else, it can be a little disappointing. I spent the majority of my daylight hours lying on the beach, reading used paperbacks, and most of my nights trying to beat Skip at Crash Bandicoot on his Sony PlayStation. Oh, yeah. It was a real thrill, my summer vacation. The good part, Ruth kept pointing out to me, was that by being at the dunes, I was not at my house waiting for my boyfriend—or whatever he is—to call. This, Ruth informed me, was an important part of the courtship ritual…you know, the not-being-there-when-he-calls part. Because then, Ruth explained, he’