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Informationen zum Autor Meg Cabot is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers All-American Girl and The Princess Diaries books, two of which have been made into major motion pictures by Disney. She is also the author of The Mediator series, the Airhead series, and many books for adults. She currently divides her time between Key West and New York City with her husband and multiple rescue cats. Find out more at MegCabot.com. Klappentext Ever since Jessica Mastriani was struck by lightning, she's had the ability to find missing people. And everyone wants a piece of her powers. This bind up includes Books Three and Four of the Vanished series, originally published as 1-800-Where-R-You. 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 someon...
